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weirderthanthouBut it’s all a lie. Something to distract us from the truth. They’re lying to us. We’re lying to ourselves. The room’s not the world, the world is much bigger and much stranger. There’s a hole hidden behind that poster that leads to the real world. We all feel safe in that room. But sometimes, sometimes, something crawls out from behind the poster.
< the canon/stock/foundation >
Control is a video game by Finnish developer Remedy Entertainment, a company known for its weird, unsettling games.
Control is a weirder, more unsettling game.
It starts like this: a redheaded woman in her late twenties steps into a government office, guided by an unseen force she doesn’t understand. Her name is Jesse. The force is Polaris. They are family, or they are friends, or they are nothing. A nice, strange Finnish janitor points her to a job interview. She goes, and finds a mind-controlled mob that floats and bends and breaks.
It starts like this: two children cycle to the old dump outside of their home of Ordinary, Wisconsin. They find a slide projector. Ordinary descends into chaos. Dylan and his sister run; he isn’t fast enough.
It starts like this: A man is made Director of the Federal Bureau of Control, but he cannot control anything. It drives him mad. So he searches far and wide for a successor, and if he must trap a powerful child and mold him to do it, he will. But Director Trench grows paranoid. He opens the door. He loses control.
It starts like this: Jesse steps into the Director's office. A Director dies by a gun. Jesse picks up the gun.
The government office is the Oldest House, a Place of Power, turned strange by decades (centuries? millennia?) of mythmaking. Sixty years ago, the Federal Bureau of Control found it and made it its home, but in sixty years it's still failed to categorize and study all of the weirdness inside.
The walls shift. Bathrooms disappear for months at a time. Sometimes you take a wrong turn and find yourself on a different planet. Sometimes you turn on a light and find yourself in the Oceanview Motel, stuck between different universes.
And that was before the Bureau started bringing in, imprisoning and studying Altered Objects, objects that gain strange properties - also through mythmaking. If the myth becomes strong enough, it finds a connection to the Astral Plane and becomes an Object of Power with vast abilities, that can only be contained through effort, or through being bound to a Parautilitarian, a human with great psychic potential.
(You know what's got a lot of mythmaking power? Brand names. Yes, every food item you can get from a vending machine in the Oldest House has been carefully repackaged, thank you.)
Ruling the Oldest House - and the Bureau - is the mysterious Board, an inverted pyramid made of multiple consciousnesses, out in the Astral Plane. They speak < like this/that/undetermined > , clumsy translations of a language no human can grasp. They decide who gets the Service Weapon.
That's the gun.
The gun makes the Director.
< the woman/not-esseJ >
Seventeen years ago, Jesse Faden (played by soap opera actress Courtney Hope) and her brother Dylan found an old slide projector in a landfill outside of their hometown of Ordinary, Wisconsin. They quickly discover that the various slides that come with the projector lead to different worlds. They play with it for a while; in a slide that will come to be known as Slide-36, they meet a large polyhedron creature that puts (or awakens?) a psychic friend in Jesse's head. Jesse's studying the stars at the time, so she decides to call it Polaris.
They decide to lend the projector to their friend Neil, but Neil's bullies find it. Through it, they find a strange creature called the Not-Mother, who turns them into 'Dung Monkeys' with her milk. And Neil? Neil is a dog now.
Jesse runs back home to tell everyone in town what happened, but no one believes her. The next morning, all the adults have disappeared - and soon, strange Federal agents descend on the town. With Polaris's help, Jesse manages to close the portal and burn most of the slides but Slide-36 - but she's too late to save Dylan from the Bureau. She searches for him for seventeen years. Then Polaris brings her to the doorstep of the Oldest House.
No, she doesn't know it's supposed to be in lockdown because of an alien bodysnatcher invasion. She walks right in. Fifteen minutes later, she is Director.
Fifteen minutes later, she's the only thing standing between the world and said alien invasion.
An hour later, she finds that years of imprisonment, 'training to prepare him for the position of Director', and an open-arms approach to the alien invasion has left Dylan a gibbering creepy mess.
So who is your new mayor? Well, she's the first in a long line of Directors of the Federal Bureau of Control who isn't a white straight man with control issues, for a start. Not that she'll be sharing that with anyone: nobody on the island would like to know that the woman in charge is also in charge of a federal organisation tasked with tracking down and locking up anything strange in the world.
She hasn't exactly had time to set new policy, has she?
All of her predecessors were control freaks. Jesse, though, is a woman who never felt like she was in control of her life to begin with. Eskewing all responsibility for anything other than the search for her brother, she drifted for years, working shifts by night and tracking Dylan by day.
What she didn't know was that the Bureau was keeping methodical track of her as one of their back-up 'Prime Candidates', meant to step in if Dylan wasn't equipped to take on the job of Director. She could feel it, though, and it made her paranoid and cautious, a woman who lives in her head much of the time. She's blunt when she speaks. You can't tell it took her five minutes of overthinking to get there.
But the search wasn't all about Dylan. It was also because Jesse got a taste of the weird. She never felt quite at home in her small town, and that little peek at something completely different she got through the Slide Projector never managed to let her go. She craves the strange. Embraces it. Doesn't mean she's so jaded that she can't recognize it for what it is, but god: does she want nothing more but to tear down that poster.
That was her then.
This is her now.
She is Director.
She is in control.
(She thinks. She hopes. She better not screw this up.)
(Jesse is a tall redhead, her hair always in a ponytail, with a strong jaw and a predilection for thrift store clothing. She wears a cool jacket.)
You called me, so here I am. I know I shut you out sometimes. I’m always glad to hear from you. It’s just that I get my hopes up.
< power/bureaucracy >
Is it the brush with the Slide Projector that gave her psychic power, or was it always in Jesse? She doesn't know. She wonders. But ever since Polaris found a home in Jesse's mind, she's been able to move things with it. Just a little bit, for the longest time. A shove that sent pebbles raining down on her targets.
Then she picked up the Service Weapon. It's bound to her now, as she's bound other Objects of Power in the Oldest House to herself. The Service Weapon picks the Director, and it can only be wielded by whoever the Director is at that time. It will kill anyone else who touches it until Jesse is dead, and then it will kill whoever it deems unworthy to touch it. It can change shapes, achieve different types of weapon functions. It refills itself by will alone.
A floppy disk strengthened Jesse's telekinetic abilities incredibly; she can rip chunks of concrete out of the wall and hurl it at you if she wants to. An old cathode ray TV gave her the power to levitate. A Merry-Go-Round, the capacity to move in bursts of incredible speed. There's a light box that granted her the ability to control minds for a short period of time, and a safe that taught her how to build walls of debris to protect herself with.
Oh, and she's got a rotary phone astrally attached to her brain that lets her receive messages from things in the astral plane. Which is... nice?
Look, the Oldest House is an extremely weird place.
FORMER: < Neither @#$@#$ Both @#$@ Hungry?>
JESSE: Hungry? I mean yeah, actually, I'd love a sandwich or something. ...That's not what you meant, was it?
FORMER: < Right @#$@#@$ Panini @#$@# Former @#$ Board @#$* Abalone>
< now what/where >
Jesse will be arriving on the island sometime this week, coming hot off the end of the base game of Control. Those bodysnatching aliens, the Hiss? Yeah, they're still active in the Oldest House. In an attempt to find a way to cleanse them for good, she takes a wrong turn, winds up in the Oceanview Hotel, and two doors later... well. There's a chipper young person informing her she is now mayor.
This is not the first time this has happened to Jesse, so... sure?
Until she can figure out how to get back, anyway.
