284 - The Island of Independence

Room of Renunciation: The Island of Independence

“No man is an island”
- John Donne

Shipwrecked. Stranded alone on an island in the middle of the ocean with no warning or expectation of rescue. Worse, you’re completely unprepared for anything like this. You’re the kind of person who’s lucky if you know what end of a TV dinner is up. You’re hungry, tired and exhausted, at a complete loss. Wait, what was that noise over in the bushes?

Agenda
Plenty of people can’t do the things our ancestors needed to in order to survive. Most of them don’t have to. They don’t know how to hunt, they don’t know how to set broken bones or build a house. Some of them can’t even cook for themselves. In a modern society where narrow specialization is a fact of life this can be excused. You can always call a plumber or an ambulance or go to the grocery store. However for some this goes so far that they’re completely reliant on others for their most basic needs, the room targets these worst offenders.

The Island of Independence is a room that pits the unprepared and dependant against their own laziness in a fight for survival. It puts them in a position where they need to rapidly develop the skills needed to survive in an inhospitable environment. It gives them the tools to do it but won’t hold their hand through the trial.

Appearance
A small, rocky island in the middle of the ocean. It’s about 4 miles to walk around the entire edge, shaped like a shallow crescent oriented with the outer edge facing northwest. There’s an outcropping of coral about 300 yards away from the smaller, inner edge and the occasional piece of wreckage from a ship or a plane washes ashore. Vegetation is sparse at the shoreline but dense towards the centre, mostly prickly brownish bushes with a few spindly palm trees thrown in. At the southwestern tip there are the remains of an old camp destroyed by the elements, a handful of sparse supplies and a diary in a foreign language are all that remains. A handful of spindly grey crabs play in rock pools on the beach.

Renunciation
The room snatches up anyone who travels by some form of public transportation: plane, ship, bus, train, etc. If you only walk, never leave the house or drive your own car then congratulations, you’ve got one less thing to worry about in life. A moment nodding off and suddenly you’re awoken by the screech of twisting metal and people screaming, rudely swamped in turbulent brine and forced to swim for safety in the panicked frenzy. It’s especially harrowing if you weren’t anywhere near the ocean.

No one else from the crash makes it to the island, which makes sense as they weren’t actually in it. To everyone else they looked away for a moment and then you weren’t there anymore, maybe you went to the bathroom? Disappearing mid-flight has caused consternation in a couple of instances but since there’s nothing to prove it just ends up in the pile of unverifiable occurrences and forgotten about next news cycle except for a couple of clips on YouTube.

The Journal: In the wrecked camp on the island is the remains of a handwritten journal. If the stranded has limited command of a particular language that’s the one it’s written in. Otherwise it’s in Dutch unless they can read Dutch or Mandarin Chinese unless they can read that or something bizarre and geometric that looks like no Earthly language.

The journal documents a previous survivor’s successes and failures on the island, fending for themselves and staving off madness. It can be a great help and a comfort, if the stranded can translate it. There’s no help to begin with, so other than the sketches every few pages, but eventually somewhere in the wreckage a translation dictionary will wash up allowing them to painstakingly work their way through the unusual grammar and syntax of an unfamiliar language.

The Wreckage: Bits and pieces of whatever the stranded was travelling in wash up occasionally, providing tools and reminders of the outside world. Wheels and bits of fuselage along with luggage, food and first aid kits, the most compelling are the reminders: photographs and letters from their old life. Curios that never existed, in some cases that never could have existed, that dredge up memories that drive and harass the stranded to overcome their circumstances. Any successful stress check made as a result of examining one confers the result as a hunch roll.

The Trial: Often an heretofore unseen predator or a debilitating illness or injury, the Island demands the stranded overcome a major trial before it will let them go. Foreshadowed for days or weeks the final confrontation is life threatening and unless they can prove change by survival, ultimately fatal. None of the powers of the island or its agents work against the trial, it’s all on the stranded.

Unlike most rooms the island does not enforce change. Surviving the trial seems to satisfy whatever requirements it operates on. Rescue arrives, a ship or plane passing by close enough to notice a signal, and they’re spirited home. Only to wake aboard whatever transportation they disappeared from, ragged, sunburnt and traumatised despite the fact that no time has passed at all.

Agents
The stranded that live to see rescue but avoid it, maniacally obsessed with their newfound independence, become agents of the room. There is only ever one agent at a time. Most of them end up as avatars of The Survivor. They gain the following abilities.

Chekov’s Parable: Before you disappear to the island an agent might take a seat next to you and with little preamble start to tell you a story about something that happened to them, some time they overcame adversity. This plants a seed that the stranded can choose to harvest by performing a symbolic equivalent to that story on the island. Doing so allows them to roll on one of the agent’s identities, once.

Lost Again: Agents can visit the Island again at any time by stranding themselves deliberately. Drunken night time swimming, aimless wandering in the desert, all paths to nowhere lead back to the island so long as they’re doing it on purpose. Getting off it again is another story but at least this time they can come prepared.