{ "name": "CH 7 — BADGE HEAT", "enter_text": "A precinct in permanent teal. Everything is wet for no reason, everybody is shouting, and somewhere a captain is turning in his own badge about something.", "music": 4, "strokes": [ { "Rect": { "x": 0, "y": 0, "w": 160, "h": 168, "color": 8, "meaning": "Floor" } }, { "Rect": { "x": 0, "y": 0, "w": 160, "h": 58, "color": 3, "meaning": "Wall" } }, { "Rect": { "x": 0, "y": 56, "w": 160, "h": 3, "color": 11, "meaning": "None" } }, { "Rect": { "x": 0, "y": 59, "w": 160, "h": 109, "color": 8, "meaning": "Floor" } }, { "Rect": { "x": 10, "y": 10, "w": 44, "h": 38, "color": 1, "meaning": "None" } }, { "Rect": { "x": 14, "y": 14, "w": 36, "h": 30, "color": 0, "meaning": "None" } }, { "Rect": { "x": 110, "y": 10, "w": 42, "h": 38, "color": 1, "meaning": "None" } }, { "Rect": { "x": 114, "y": 14, "w": 34, "h": 30, "color": 0, "meaning": "None" } }, { "Rect": { "x": 0, "y": 164, "w": 160, "h": 4, "color": 0, "meaning": "Wall" } } ], "spawn": [ 18, 146 ], "exits": [ null, 4, null, 2 ], "exit_flags": [ "", "partner_alive", "", "" ], "exit_blocked": [ "", "This channel has decided somebody in this room is going to die and it will not move on until it gets what it wants.", "", "" ], "objects": [ { "name": "precinctdesk", "sprite": "precinctdesk", "x": 44, "y": 120, "look": "A desk buried in case files, donuts, and two coffees. Taped to the monitor is the duty roster, and pinned above it a countdown: DAYS TO RETIREMENT: 1. Nobody in this channel is ever two days from retirement. It is always one. It has been one for eleven years.", "synonyms": "desk files donuts coffee roster board", "use_text": "You go through the case files. Every single one is the same case: a loose cannon, a captain who has had it up to here, and a partner who was one day from retirement and showed somebody a photograph of his family. There are forty-one of them. The channel has been running this story since 1984 and has never once noticed." }, { "name": "buddycop", "sprite": "buddycop", "x": 118, "y": 126, "look": "The channel's own detective — mullet, leather over a Hawaiian shirt, badge on a chain — who has been assigned to you and is thrilled about it. He plays by his own rules. He has been suspended four times this season. He has never filled in a form.", "synonyms": "cop mullet loose cannon partner detective", "use_text": "He asks how you do it in your precinct. You tell him: forms, mostly. He laughs for a long time, and then stops, and asks whether that works, and you tell him it has a ninety-four per cent clearance rate over three generations, and he goes very quiet and writes 'FORMS?' on his hand." }, { "name": "grandpa", "sprite": "drebin58", "x": 78, "y": 132, "look": "Your grandfather, in monochrome, in a teal precinct, two weeks from a retirement he took sixty years ago. The channel has scanned him, found DAYS TO RETIREMENT and a photograph of a family in his coat, and has begun to swing the lighting round onto him. Every genre convention this channel possesses is now pointing at your grandfather like a compass needle.", "synonyms": "grandfather sergeant fedora old", "points": 15, "sets_flag": "partner_alive", "use_text": "It comes for him in the parking structure, the way it always does, and it does it correctly: the rain, the slow walk to the car, the photograph, the line about his daughter's wedding on Saturday. He does not have a daughter. He says so. The channel provides one anyway. So you do the only thing available to a family of literalists: you take it away from the channel by doing the paperwork first. Your father files a REQUEST FOR REASSIGNMENT (FORM 14) removing the retiring officer from active duty effective immediately. You countersign as the ranking officer present. Your grandfather, being neither retiring nor active nor, strictly, alive in this decade, signs as the witness. A man who has been reassigned cannot be killed in the line of duty. There is no line of duty. The channel checks the roster twice, and the roster is correct, and the rain stops in the middle of the parking structure with nowhere to fall. The loose cannon watches all three of you file a form to defeat a genre, and takes his hand out of his jacket, and looks at the word he wrote on it. (+20)" }, { "name": "dad", "sprite": "drebin82", "x": 138, "y": 140, "look": "Your father, who this channel has cast as the by-the-book superior who does not understand the streets. He understands the streets. He has been the streets since 1982. The channel simply cannot read a man whose subtext is identical to his text.", "synonyms": "father lieutenant trench colour", "use_text": "The channel gives him a scene where he must shout that he is getting too old for this. He declines, sincerely, on the grounds that he is not, and that a man who says he is too old for a thing while continuing to do it is lying twice." } ] }