The count down

Count Down

Lucy has always seen the numbers. floating over their heads, counting down to the day they die. She never asked for it and she has never understood it. She only learned, sometimes, that the numbers can be moved.

The plane is at altitude and the man across the aisle has five minutes left. So does everyone else in this cabin. Lucy sits with nothing over her own head and remembers backwards: three rooms, three people who loved her, and everything she moved a few feet to the left.

How it plays

You walk around a room and put things on other things. That's the whole verb. A gas can belongs on a stove; a wooden wedge under a window that should have opened; an ashtray on the table where she always lights one the moment she sits down. Each object you place is a link in a chain of ordinary causes — and the number over your victim's head drops, hard, the instant the chain tightens.

Nothing is on a timer. Nothing can be failed. Every object goes back where it came from as easily as it left, and the number climbs right back up when it does — moving a person's death around feels like turning a knob, not committing a murder. There is exactly one irreversible act in each room, and it's the one you take with your feet: walking out the door.

Each room has two different chains hidden in it. Only one of them can be the thing you did.

About 15 minutes. No combat, no inventory, no undo needed.