321 - The Deadline

Unnatural Phenomenon: The Deadline

One of the last remaining payphones in the city where it is located, the Deadline lurks at the back of a graffiti-covered parking garage like the bones of a corroded chrome dinosaur. To the uninitiated it’s a wonder it hasn’t been torn out, not just because it’s an outmoded relic but because it’s not functional. There’s no dial tone when you pick up the receiver.

Still it stubbornly continues to exist. Attempts to contact the company that owns it lead in circles as though they're no longer running and the city doesn’t seem to have any records or real inclination to check up on it. The one person to take removing it into his own hands quickly found out that there are others with an interest in the Deadline. People who’d do just about anything to keep it right where it is.

The Deadline only works with quarters minted in 1943, a couple of those in the slot will get you a dial tone and a minute and a half of call time. Everyone who uses it has their own method of dialling. Some use the first phone number the person they’re trying to reach ever had, others stab randomly at the keypad while focusing on them. The Deadline can contact anyone in the world, if they’re no longer alive.

After the minute and a half is up an operator cuts in, they let you know what you need to do for more time. Having been an urbanomancer in life the demon that powers the Deadline wants you to be her hands in the city. She sees herself as a lone bastion against the inevitability of change and you and her other callers are the tools she uses. Defy property developments, trash new tech that promises to change the face of her city, keep the various groups that populate it right where they are - like insects pinned behind glass.

You don’t have to, so long as you never want to speak to whoever you contacted again. Or use a landline. Declining users who try the latter find they can’t hear whoever they’re speaking to over the dead person they called incoherently begging them to do as she wants. They’re trapped in the phone lines, whatever force that controls the Deadline abandoning them in a place they say rends the fibres of their very souls. For some callers that's the reason they sought out the Deadline in the first place.