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Prompt 4: The mail is always bad this time of year, but it seems like something's gone a little extra wrong. An old letter arrives shows up with no return address, no name on it; it's impossible to tell who it is from or how it got there, given that it might have arrived in your mailbox, your front door, or maybe it even just showed up inside your house. If you open it, the letter is dated from decades ago and contains some surprising information; it is a letter lost to time and contains some secret. The content of the letter are up to the player; it might contain a confession of love, an admission of guilt, the secret of some crime--no matter what the letter contains, it leaves you with news to reflect on. Do you try to seek out anyone mentioned in the letter? Do you investigate or try to hand the letter over to someone else? Does the content of the letter reflect your life in some way? ...Do you have to worry about someone breaking into your house to leave strangely coded messages?
'I killed him', the letter began, and as soon as he'd read it, Leander was hooked.
The letter had appeared on his doorstep, and while that was odd enough, the fact that it had no name, no address, no postage stamp, only added to the mystery. He couldn't just leave it there. He didn't know how to ignore something like that. It was impossible that someone had left it there on accident--they'd had to walk up to the doorstep of the apartment and laid it down, perfectly centered.
He'd asked his sister if it was hers before opening, but when she had declined there was nothing he could do but tear it open.
Everything about this letter was aged, like someone had pulled it out of a time capsule, or out of their grandmother's memory box.
The ink on the paper was smeared with droplets, like maybe someone had been crying while they wrote it. The hand writing was shaky and erratic, and there were more than a few lines that he could barely make out.
It felt oddly personal, and too frantic and disjointed for it to have been a joke. But, if it had been someone's idea of a trick, he'd completely fallen for it.
There was only one page, but when Leander finished reading it, he draped himself over the couch in the center of the living room and reread it, and read it again after that.
There were some loose dates. He could barely make out who the letter was addressed to, and after much struggling he realized that the signature looked like 'Agatha'.
She had murdered her brother, according to the letter.
He had found out she was seeing 'him'--whoever the letter was addressed to, it seemed. He figured her brother must have been her caretaker, given how much control he had over her life. He had forbidden her from seeing him, and threatened to have him fired.
She had pushed him down the stairs. She had taken him to the river. She had thrown him in, and she had declared that she was leaving town, that she was afraid to return until this all sorted out.
Leander scratched at his chin, because now he had a mystery on his hands and he had to know.
Who was he, the brother she had offed? Who was she, and what had happened to her? Or her unfortunate beau?
...He had to know.
He carried the letter like it was a delicate, priceless treasure, and flipped open his laptop eagerly, typing in the information that he had plucked from the letter. It didn't help that he didn't know last names, or where the letter was supposed to be going, or where it had come from. It hadn't been opened, so he wondered if the letter had ever, at any point in time, reached its destination.
...Or, he wondered if this was some elaborate prank by his sister to teach him to let her have her own relationships without him intruding.
She didn't seem the type to push him down the stairs because he objected to her significant other, but...
'Agatha' apparently didn't seem the sort, either.
