Bucky Barnes ☆ adorable trainwreck manpain (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
soldieronwards) wrote2014-10-10 12:40 pm
soldieronwards) wrote2014-10-10 12:40 pm
heart game writeup.
The ground falls out beneath you. You're in midair, you're surrounded by swirling clouds, and there's nowhere stable to put your feet. The space between your body and the turbulence around you feels poorly defined as well; where do you end and your surroundings begin? Is there a stable you in the first place?
This was a hint to a few things.
But eventually--
The essential premise of this heart was that some things are shown and others are concealed. It had running themes of instability, masks, locks, and showmanship.
The literal premise was that you arrived in the middle of an airship to find that it had been infiltrated by the Winter Soldier, who had planted a bomb. You had to work together to find the device to deactivate the bomb and four passwords to input with it.
The scored run was here. The unscored run that followed it was here.
It's important to note here that everything was symbolic; there were no more than hints of literal memories. The heart took place on an airship not because Bucky has experience with airships, but because "a ship flying in midair" is an unstable thing with no sane grounding, and that's how Bucky himself feels. There was a theater not because Bucky actually cares much about movies or plays, but because he feels like a lot of the good things he does are an act.
START
You land hard on a metal floor that rattles faintly all around you. The noise of an engine far below masks the sound of your fall. It's dark here, save for light filtering in through a nearby grating.
Don't move yet. Shadows flicker past that grate, the shadows of booted feet walking heavily on metal. With them comes the voice of the host of this whole place, of this entire heart, but it's different. Gone is his usual warmth and spirit. He's all business.
"Yes, sir. I'm the only one who has the device to defuse it, and they'd need the passwords too." A pause; you feel heavy, frozen in place by the need to hear this out. "Intruders, sir?" The footsteps stop, and when they resume again a second later they're lighter, more cautious. "I'll take care of that..." Another pause in the one-sided conversation, and he starts walking away. But when he speaks next, it's still perfectly clear. "No, you don't need to worry, sir. Feelings won't come into it. I follow orders, sir. I'll deal with them."
And the footsteps recede, then fade. It's impossible to tell where he went, but you're safe now--for the moment.
This set the stage for the heart and what you were basically supposed to do in it--that is, explore the airship in order to find the passwords and the deactivation device for the bomb.
The Winter Soldier here is not literally the Winter Soldier, of course--since that's not actually a part of Bucky but programming imposed on him from outside--but a representation of Bucky's semi-repressed guilt, under the command of his self-destructive impulses. That's why he set a bomb in the heart. This is a pretty obvious metaphor for what all the emotional baggage associated with Bucky's time as a brainwashed assassin does to him.
Now, at this point I expected everybody to start by looking around the starting room and investigating it. I got my first lesson in not relying too much on expectations here, because a lot of people just went right through the grate without checking their surroundings first. If you did look around, though, you'd find the bomb itself, some pamphlets, and decks of playing cards which turned out to contain keycards in the shape of the King of Hearts (which looked like Steve Rogers) and the Queen of Hearts (which looked like Natasha Romanoff). Bucky's heart was never meant to be subtle.
As for the pamphlets...
They're a set of how-to manuals. "How to Kill a Person in Six Ways with Your Bare Hands" is one; "How to Smile When You're Feeling Scared and Angry" is another. Both of those have seen more use than the remaining one, which is, "How to Talk to Girls."
...they were just flavor text to get a laugh or two while summing up some of Bucky's issues. But some people did check them out. Van and Karigan wrote tips in the last one when they realized it was mostly blank to begin with.
⇒ CHANGE! ⇒ This improves Bucky's conversational skills a little, or it would have, if not for some stuff that happened elsewhere in the heart.
Moving on...
CORRIDOR
A plain hallway, well lit from above, stretches out to either side of you. The sense of motion is a little more muted here. There's nothing to be found here except two exits: a clearly-marked ladder leading up at one end of the hall, and a closed hatch leading down at the other.
This was where the heart divided into its two halves. Going up took you on a tour of the masks Bucky wears, or feels he wears, for the benefit of others and gave you the opportunity to boost his confidence in them and suggest that maybe they aren't just masks. It concerned Bucky's interactions with other people rather than the things he keeps inside, and as such, it contained a lot of NPC interaction rather than exploration.
Going down took you through the things Bucky tries to hide from the world, especially in Aather. This didn't just mean bad things, as we will see later. Unsurprisingly, it was harder to go down than to go up, but I figured most people would easily find the keycards and unlock the hatch (using the King of Hearts keycard) without trouble. I was so very wrong.
Nothing particularly notable happened here in the scored run. Dick (the elder), Thorn, and eventually Eruption went down, using the keycards. Maitimo, Karigan, Dean, Natasha, and initially Eruption went up.
In the unscored run, Nagisa jammed a mini-lightsaber made of hope, love, and song into the card reader while singing, while Clear and Pinocchio provided backup and hauled the hatch open with robot strength.
⇒ CHANGE! ⇒ As a result of that travesty, for the next few IC days, Bucky has essentially lost his ability to filter himself and hide things. The obvious joke is something about how he didn't have a brain-to-mouth filter in the first place, but while he has always been impulsive and inclined to put his foot in his mouth, to a certain extent the persona of "dorky loser who says dumb things and makes bad jokes" was and is an act he deliberately cultivated so that the people of Aather wouldn't see the violent, damaged man underneath. He'll have a lot of trouble now keeping himself from blurting out the bad thoughts and worries he has and staying out of fights; in general, he'll be more of an aggressive, cynical, gloomy asshole. But also a more honest one. Some other changes that Nagisa, Clear, and Pinocchio made temper this; I'll get to them later.
First, let's talk about what you saw when you went up.
THE HALL OF MASKS
Where the corridor before was fairly narrow and plain, this one is broad and lavish. The soft carpet beneath your feet is blue and white, and the walls shine with reddish wooden paneling. That's when you can see the walls, anyway--because there's other stuff here diverting your attention.
On the left side of the hallway, a series of white marble statues stand. All six of them wear masks of some kind. On the right side of the hallway, opposite the statues, hang cloth wall-scrolls as if they were flags or tapestries.
At the far side of the hall, an elegant-looking wooden double door stands.
I conceived of this part of the heart early on--a passageway lined with masks through which you had to travel before reaching the upper levels. Unsurprisingly, it represents Bucky's ability to fake things and hide himself and project an image, as well as his desire to do so.
This runs really deep in him--the series of Captain America flashback issues that recounts his life story opens with the words, "Everyone thinks my story begins with a mask...and they're right, but it isn't the mask they think." What he means is that people assume his story begins with donning the mask of Captain America's sidekick, but in truth, it begins with wearing a mask of stoic bravery for his father and sister after his mother's death. He was nine. He's been fronting since then.
There are no actual puzzles in the Hall of Masks, and little pre-planned interaction. It's mostly a showcase of Bucky's tendency to hide behind, well, masks.
From the start of the hall to the end by the doors, the six statues follow a progression. They start with a young boy holding up a full mask over his face; next is a smiling teenager in a domino mask; next a blank-faced young man in a mask like a muzzle; next a man whose face is mostly obscured by something that might be a mask or might be bandages; next a man standing proudly with a full cowl over his features; and next a man in knightly armor, save for the smiling full mask he holds up over his face.
For the most part, the statues are a single piece, but the masks are not a part of that piece--they are actually made of plastic or porcelain or cloth, and their colors stand out incongruously against the white marble.
Obviously, the young boy with the full mask was Bucky as a child struggling to hide his feelings for the sake of his surviving family; the smiling teenager in the domino mask was him as a sidekick, when he may well have been happiest; the next one is him as the Winter Soldier (with regards to the movie and its goddamn muzzle); the bandaged man is him after he first breaks free of that and struggles to recover; the man in the cowl is him as Captain America; and the final statue is him in Aather, as a knight, putting on a happy face for the rest of the realm.
You could try to take off a mask, but inevitably, the face of the statue beneath it would break. Bucky needs his masks. He doesn't know how to interact with most people without them. There are a few people in Aather he sometimes approaches without masks--Naha, Leto, occasionally the older Dick Grayson. But they're the exception rather than the rule.
Most people didn't bother examining the statues after they took the mask off and broke them, but if you did:
Behind the cracked marble, something indefinable and vague swirls, a kind of bubbling, fiery protoplasm with no clear shape of its own. Just looking at it makes you faintly uncomfortable.
One of the reasons Bucky wears these masks is because he doesn't trust the self that lies beneath them. He senses his own instability and is afraid of it. As was implied in the text of the post at the very beginning, Bucky feels at sea with his own true self, unstable and poorly defined.
You could also check out the tapestries:
Half of them are roughly in the design of American flags, but you barely need to glance twice to notice that where there should be stars, there are instead fifty little masks. The other half feature a tall black tree, not unlike the one Onyx takes residence in, but where it should have leaves, it instead grows little masks.
That should be obvious enough. In alcoves behind them were the materials for more masks: costumes, actual domino masks, an Onyx version of the cloak that heroes and knights are given in the Black Woods. Roles to fill.
There wasn't a lot you could do here other than take off the masks and therefore crack the statues beneath them, damaging Bucky's ability to front and hide himself. A number of people did that, some without meaning to (Eruption, for example), some very deliberately and with a great sense of exasperation (Thorn thought Bucky was being overdramatic).
Karigan took the clothes from the alcoves and tried to dress up the statues with them. This alleviated some of the negative effects from the cracks, giving Bucky a bit of confidence in himself and his roles despite the damaged ability to front.
⇒ CHANGE! ⇒ For a few days, Bucky will have a lot of trouble fronting as he usually does--making jokes when he's worried or upset, putting on a show. He'll tend to actually say what he's thinking instead in a straightforward fashion.
Eliot and younger Dick (heretofore known as Robin) took a slightly different approach, since they handled the whole heart as if it were a mission: Eliot disguised himself in Bucky's sidekick clothes from the alcoves and claimed he was taking Robin as a prisoner.
⇒ CHANGE! ⇒ Bucky sees Eliot a bit more as a kindred spirit.
THE UPPER DECK
You're in the sky.
More accurately, you're on a ship flying in the sky. A polished wooden deck spreads out beneath your feet, with golden railings off to the sides. Incongruously, in front of you a large building rises out of the deck: a golden-accented theater with a glittering marquee and a ticket-taker's booth out in front.
Aside from the theater and the hall behind you, there doesn't seem to be anything else on this ship.
Until not long before the game itself, my plans called for the Hall of Masks to connect directly to the theater; however, I decided that there wasn't enough content in the upper half of the heart compared to the lower half, and therefore I had to add in a little more.
There wasn't anything you could do here other than get your bearings and talk to the ticket-taker, represented by Namor. He personified Bucky's ability to meet new people and make friends, which is kind of hilariously inappropriate considering what an aloof jackass Namor is in canon. However, the first memory Bucky regained involved proving himself to his former teammates in general and Namor in particular, so that's stuck.
When you tried to go into the theater, Namor would ask you for your ticket. You could, at this point or any point ensuing in the conversation, just walk right past him. He wouldn't stop you physically, because Bucky is ultimately a fairly warm person who likes and cares for other people, despite his layers of trauma and guilt separating him from them in canon.
When you asked how you were to pay for a ticket, Namor would demand to know, "What did you pay to become yourself?"
In Aather, Bucky has been thinking a lot about the difference between "who you are when you're trapped in a role" and "who you are when you're really yourself." He's also been noticing that a lot of his friends have bad memories and sad lives. This question is a reflection of that: is the process of becoming "yourself" a struggle? What do you pay for it? How people answered could nudge his own perceptions of selfhood and identity a little.
Most people answered ambiguously or sparely. Natasha answered, "In installments," suggesting that it's not something you do all at once. Dean and Maitimo both gave answers in alignment with what Bucky already thought: that it was something you paid for in pain and blood, specifically the blood of others. Laura took an unusual tack here in not actually giving an answer but instead turning the question back on Namor.
⇒ CHANGE! ⇒ Thanks to Laura's interactions here, Bucky is a little more self-aware about the process of changing and becoming yourself.
One thing worth noting: if asked, Namor would explain that he hadn't always needed to be in this position of ticket-taker, that he'd only come back to it since "this ship" was in Aather. That's a hint that Bucky has made a lot more friends in Aather than he had back home. This is a result of a few things, but the major one is that when he started out here in Aather, he lacked the thick layers of numbing trauma and guilt that wrapped him up and isolated him from most people in present-day canon.
If you took the time to check the marquee, you could see which shows were playing.
Bucky Barnes stars as "The Steadfast Soldier"
Bucky Barnes stars as "The Supportive Friend"
Steve Rogers stars as "The Good Knight and Superhero"
Most people didn't do that, so what came next was a bit of a surprise.
THE THEATER LOBBY
An open space sprawls out around you, carpeted lushly in red, white, and blue. The ceiling is high but flat and painted with some kind of mural, and the walls sport flashy posters for upcoming shows. A few potted plants stand in the corners, and along one wall is a bank of arcade games and vending machines.
Beyond all of this, three hallways disappear into the back.
You could examine everything here--the mural was of Steve Rogers, the arcade games had the top high score by "SR" and all the ones beneath it by "JBB"--but none of that was really important.
What was important was that after a few comments of examining stuff, you'd be approached by the Falcon, manager of the theater. Sam represented your average friend of Bucky's--someone he likes who also likes him and wants to help him, but who doesn't have the added emotional weight that Steve or Natasha might. He would mention that "the Captain" was coming and needed to be prepared for, then direct the characters to go talk to "the kid" in one of the theaters, claiming that the kid in question was "antsy" or needed reassurance.
"The kid," of course, is Bucky. This is something out of canon--even though Bucky is in his late twenties by the time he snaps out of being the Winter Soldier, Sam and Nick Fury both refer to him as "kid." At one point, Logan opines that everyone thinks of him as a kid because that's how he became famous--as the bright-eyed kid who fought next to Captain America back in the '40s. It's a part of his image that he's "the kid." You may have noticed, from his preexisting threads, that he often refers to younger characters as "kid" in Aather. This is just him trying to shake his own image...
Anyway, you could pick which show to go see. Even though one of them was labeled with Steve as the star, all of them actually led you to Bucky.
THEATER WEST
Despite the lack of a concession stand, the faint smell of popcorn lingers in the air here as you make your way down the aisle. Yet the further you go towards the screen, the more that scent turns to gunpowder…
The screen seems oddly flimsy. Shadows move behind it.
Check it out.
The lower right corner of it is loose and looks like it could easily be pushed aside to allow you entrance to whatever is behind it.
Go past the screen.
There's a small room here, cluttered with bright cardboard props. Some of them are bright spiky yellow explosions, while others are dusty-looking brown tents. In the center of the room is a table with a plastic gun and blunted combat knife on it. At a chair at that table sits Bucky, frowning down at his props.
Welcome to "The Steadfast Soldier," starring Bucky Barnes. This is Bucky's attempts to present himself as a tough, dependable war hero. He masqueraded as a seasoned actor who once would have had no trouble with the role, but after a series of bad roles, he doubts himself.
The only character who got this room was Laura Kinney (Eruption of Turquoise). While most people responded to the insecure, doubting actors by reassuring them in general, Laura was too practical for that and instead opted to provide actual advice on how to deal with worries and insecurity--stop trying to do things you don't want to do, ask for help if you need it, work hard, rely on others when they're willing to help you.
⇒ CHANGE! ⇒ Bucky is a little more willing to look to others for help and partnership in fights.
THEATER EAST
Despite the lack of a concession stand, the faint smell of popcorn lingers in the air here as you make your way down the aisle. The seats around you look very plush and comfortable, but it's hard to take your attention away from the screen for some reason...
Yet the screen seems oddly flimsy. Shadows move behind it.
This worked the same way as the previous room--you could go behind the screen and find a room there with Bucky in it.
There's a small room here, cluttered with bright cardboard red and pink hearts and two-person sofas. In the center of the room is a table with a scattering of photographs upon it, appearing to depict scenes of Bucky and his friends in Aather--or, more occasionally, before it. At a chair at that table sits Bucky himself, frowning down at the photographs.
Here you could encourage the lead actor of "The Supportive Friend." This Bucky was a veteran actor of action films who worried that he was incapable of pulling off a more emotional role like this. In the scored run, Dean and Natasha got this room; in the unscored run, Eliot, Robin, and Thor got it. Most people here assured Bucky that he was already capable of this role, that it wasn't too far off what he'd already done. Eliot, in particular, told him that it wasn't difficult here in Aather--that most people just wanted you to listen, since their actual problems were memories, things that had already happened.
⇒ CHANGE! ⇒ Bucky is a bit more confident in himself as a friend and willing to reach out to others in that guise; he also may let go of his past a little, at least for the time being.
THEATER CENTRAL
Despite the lack of a concession stand, the faint smell of popcorn lingers in the air here as you make your way down the aisle. A projection of a red, white, and blue shield flickers repeatedly but faintly on the screen in front of you, which is framed by a vine growing leaves.
Still, the screen seems oddly flimsy. Shadows move behind it.
Third verse, same as the first.
There's a small room here, cluttered with bright cardboard standees draped with various superhero costumes, keys looped around their necks on thin chains. In the center of the room is a table with that same round red, white, and blue shield laid down upon it, only it's plastic rather than metal. Bucky himself sits at a chair at that table, staring worriedly down at the shield.
So, when Bucky first arrived in Aather, Steve had just been dropped. As sad as it was that I never got to interact with him, this was a particularly amazing stroke of luck for his character development. It meant that Bucky felt that as a knight in Aather, he had to fill Steve's shoes, just as he had in canon as Captain America--not that he remembered that yet.
The sense that he had to live up to Steve's legacy and fill his shoes therefore followed him throughout his development in Aather, especially as he regained his memories.
This room was "The Good Knight and Superhero," supposedly starring Steve Rogers, but it turns out that Bucky as the understudy was filling in for him. Visitors to the room had to convince him that he could do it. Karigan and Maitimo were the ones who visited this theater, and they did a particularly stellar job of boosting his confidence, especially Karigan.
⇒ CHANGE! ⇒ For a while, Bucky will be more confident in himself as a knight and superhero.
AFTERWARDS...
After everyone in the theaters convinced the actors that they could handle their roles, each actor disappeared, leaving behind props that looked slightly more real than before, along with a scrap of paper containing passwords #2 through #4. Incidentally: it was possible to just beat the crap out of the actors and take their passwords that way. Fortunately for Bucky's self-esteem, nobody took that option.
Anyway, after that the heart-goers could return to the theater...
As you make your way back through the lobby, a thrill of anticipation courses through the entire broad room, rippling through you and everyone else--
The Captain is coming.
Sure enough, a moment later, a tall, muscular man identical to the one in the painting on the ceiling steps into the lobby. He holds a bright red, white, and blue shield in front of him.
Strange, though. His smile is wan. He looks a little pale…
...and as he lowers the shield, the reason becomes clear: over his heart is a bloody bullet wound.
Steve Rogers represents authority from whom Bucky craves approval and validation; zombie Steve Rogers represents a hero whom Bucky has failed. He was a last-minute addition to the heart when I realized that the upper half had less content than the lower half, and as such, he kind of isn't very well-thought-out. He was supposed to be a boss fight, but I had trouble actually making him attack people--which he was supposed to do if they continued verbally defending Bucky after he explained that Bucky was responsible for his injury.
Essentially, though, zombie Cap represents Bucky's sense of failure, his belief that everything he does isn't enough for his heroes, exacerbated by his vague and confusing memories of Steve's death back home. The "correct" way to deal with him is to accept his remonstrations while standing up for Bucky, and everyone who faced him (Karigan and Maitimo, Natasha and Dean) did just that.
Actually fighting back against him was a bad move; further injuring zombie Steve would have made the theater start to shake and crumble around you, and killing him would have made it all collapse, killing you as well. This was one of only two ways to die in this heart. As for the other...we'll get to that later. It's kind of the reverse.
⇒ CHANGE! ⇒ Bucky has a bit less of a sense of failure, and his guilt over Steve's supposed death is eased.
That about wraps it up for the top half of the heart. At this point, people were supposed to regroup back at the start with the passwords and meet the people from the lower half of the heart who'd gotten the remaining password and the deactivation device. I overestimated people's ability to stay in sync, so this didn't happen and I had to do some handwaving. Useful information for the next time I try to run a heart: don't rely too much on groups being able to coordinate. It doesn't happen that often in roleplay.
Let's get to the bottom half.
IN THE DARKNESS
No lights come on when you make your way through the hatch and land on the floor not far below it. You're left in the smothering darkness. It feels heavy, and every time you try to take a step, there's the faintest pressure back towards the hatch. A short ladder hangs down from it if you reach up, allowing you an easy escape back to the hallway if you wish to take it.
This part, like most of the heart, wasn't subtle: it was Bucky's heart trying to push you out of going into the areas it wanted to hide.
The key was to realize that the floor was actually paper overlaying a wire mesh and peel it off, revealing that there was a hole in the wire mesh in one corner where you could descend a ladder further down.
The floor peels away beneath your grasp like it's paper--perhaps because it is. Dim red light starts to filter into the room from below. There's a wire mesh supporting the paper floor, but in one corner it opens up into a person-sized hole. Within that hole, a ladder leads down.
If you looked at the paper when there was light...
It's brightly done in four colors, like an old comic book, and covered with explosive shapes and sound effects. BAM! POW! WHACK!
This was partially a fourth-wall joke and partially a reference to the fact that a lot of the stuff Bucky tries to repress and hide deals with violence and anger.
Anyone who solved the puzzle of how to get through this room got some points for doing so, as it opened up Bucky's subconscious a little bit.
BELOW DECKS
You're in a large circular room with a faintly rattling metal floor. Despite the red lights high above around the ladder, it's still dim and dark here for now. Much of what little light there is comes from three large portholes on one side of the room. They offer a view onto a shifting, turbulent landscape of grey clouds. The light that filters in through them is just as mercurial and flickering as the clouds beyond, and it somehow fills the room with a deep unease full of mingled bad feelings: fear and shame, regret and loneliness, rage and guilt.
Opposite each window on the other side of the room is a door.
This was the nexus from which all of Bucky's hidden issues and angst branched off. It represented, in general, all of his repressed bad feelings and negative energy. And he has a lot of that. Bucky is honestly a rather depressive person; he's always had a lot of overwhelming negative feelings and difficulty processing and coping with them. His narration tends to be self-deprecating and stressed out. Canon strongly implies (and at one point states) there was a time he was borderline suicidal. As a whole, he copes poorly with the inside of his head.
More on how this changed in a minute.
Back to the room. Each window loosely corresponded to the door opposite it in the feelings it dealt with, and you could examine, touch, or break the windows to experience and affect the emotions in question. Van was the only character to examine the windows; nobody touched or broke them.
If you examined the window opposite the left door, which led to the armory--
The clouds outside it swirl almost vengefully, seething with angry motion.
It's warmer than it should be, almost hot. As you touch the glass, the heat courses up your fingers and arm. It doesn't seem like you're touching a window for a second. It's more like you're throwing a punch, your fist connecting with another body, teeth breaking beneath the blow. Guilt assails you; you shouldn't have done that--
The window opposite the central door, which led to the living quarters--
The storm outside this porthole is oddly desolate. The clouds look disparate, alone, weighed down by their own solitude and sadness. Even the lightning looks lonely.
The natural cold of the glass jumps too easily into your fingers and up your arm. It doesn't seem like you're touching a window for a second. It's more like you're grasping into the cold and the dark for some human contact that never comes. Images of empty hotel rooms and solitary hallways flash behind your eyes, bringing with them a powerful sense of regret and isolation.
The window opposite the right door, which led to the engine room--
Frightening shapes loom out of the clouds beyond this porthole. It's almost as if the clouds themselves are judging you, finding you wanting.
Fear leaps out of the glass to run up your fingers and your arm, right into your body where it settles in your gut. Something or someone murmurs disapprovingly in your ear, a deep voice like that of a father, and shame wells up inside you.
As I said, you could also break each window, which would free up the associated feelings a bit from repression.
Poking around the doors and windows was all I planned for characters doing in this room. Most people didn't even do that. However, Nagisa, Clear, and Pinocchio joined hands and sang in this room to push back the bad feelings.
⇒ CHANGE! ⇒ Bucky has essentially received a dose of antidepressant. His bad feelings are less intense for a few IC days to a week, and he can cope with them better. On a permanent basis, he's going to develop an appreciation for music, and find that it helps him cope.
Anyway, from here you could go to three different rooms. Let's start with...
THE LIVING QUARTERS
For a room labeled "the living quarters," this place is rather small. It's very inviting, though--quite the change from the uneasy, roiling atmosphere in the room outside. The air is faintly perfumed with a mix of scents--roses, chocolate, fresh dew…
It's sweet. It's very nice in here.
The lighting is soft and golden-white; it comes from a plain glass chandelier hanging from the ceiling, since the windows (normal square windows, not portholes) are heavily curtained with deep red brocade. There's also a king-sized bed with white and pink blankets and pillows on it, a plain nightstand next to the bed, a rack with some clothing draped over it, and a closet with the door closed.
This was the only room that you had to use the Queen of Hearts keycard to get into. Or you were supposed to, anyway.
While most of the stuff down below in the heart was at least somewhat negative, this was different. Bucky doesn't just hide things because they're bad in Aather--he also simply hides them because he feels they're inappropriate or unsuited to his mask. In the case of this room, which represents his capacity for romance and tenderness, he hides it for a couple of reasons. One is that he has decidedly romantic memories of a Natasha Romanoff who isn't the one who exists in Aather, and that leaves him confused and uncertain. The other is that he still struggles with the idea of himself as someone who even deserves love and romance in the first place a lot of the time; he's not sure he's capable of sustained feelings like that.
For the most part, this room just had objects representing the various people Bucky has sexual or romantic feelings for in Aather.
On the rack was a black shawl: It glitters in your hands as if there are stars woven into the fabric. What fabric is it, anyway? Somehow it's unfathomably dark, and faintly cold even in this warm room. Just holding it makes everything around you seem darker and deeper and richer somehow. This is Naha, who was Bucky's first love in Aather. He still has a lot of feelings for her, but he's also aware that she can't ever fully be what he wants in a romantic partner, since he tends to want an equal.
On the nightstand was a scrap of white cloth. On closer examination, it's a bandage. Touching it brings to mind a sudden memory of physical blows exchanged--but there's no anger or actual pain there, only pride and satisfaction. This is Panther/Cara, who Bucky finds charming and attractive--but a lot of that is tied up in her resemblance to the Natasha he remembers and the fact that he first met her right after getting the memory of his love affair with that Natasha. That's a part of why it's a bandage--he was, in some ways, essentially using Cara to patch up his pain and confusion over the Natasha issue, and he's not entirely comfortable with that.
Hiding in the apparently empty closet (where else?) was a mask. On closer examination, there's a black scrap of cloth blending into the darkness in the far corner of the closet. It's a black domino mask. It shifts in your hands, though, becoming a larger black cowl for a few seconds, before shrinking back to the domino mask again. This was Dick Grayson, who gives Bucky confusing feelings. The thing about Dick is that his relationship with Bucky doesn't really fit into Bucky's usual model of a platonic male friend; he's too sensitive and he tends to push too much. Bucky also admires him in a way he usually reserves for his girlfriend...so as it is, his feelings are kind of wavering towards romantic despite his being by and large heterosexual. Thus contains a proud tradition of Dick Grayson giving fanboys confusing feelings.
On the bed, tucked under a pillow, was a note from the Natasha of his memories.
James,
I haven't forgotten either.
--N.
A distant memory of a kiss tugs at your awareness as you touch the paper for just a moment, and then it's gone.
The other side of it had the first password: a drawing of a flower.
Although nobody tried it, you could also check out the chandelier in this room.
It's not fancy, but it is a little odd. At the center is a single frosted glass bell covering a large bulb, but a metal ring around its base branches out into three smaller clear glass bells, more flower-shaped, with smaller bulbs inside them. The materials and style of the two parts are very different, as if the three smaller lights were added later.
The whole thing looks a bit unbalanced, and occasionally the lights flicker and dim just a little.
This was a nod to the way Aather has changed Bucky's tendencies toward monogamy and how that's affecting him.
In the scored run, Dick went into this room, promptly checked out the closet, and freaked out a bit at the unintended invasion of privacy when he realized what was in there. After that he went off to fight the Winter Soldier (see below), leaving the closet door open in the meanwhile. That doesn't compare to what Nagisa did in the unscored run--she took the mask out of the closet and left it on the bed. And that was after Clear broke the lock on the door into here in the first place.
There wasn't a whole lot you could do here to make changes other than move the objects around. You could also have broken things to damage Bucky's capacity for romance, but fortunately nobody did that.
⇒ CHANGE! ⇒ Bucky is a little more able to acknowledge his romantic feelings, especially the nebulous potential ones he has for Dick Grayson.
THE ENGINE ROOM
The noise here hits you the moment you step in. This is where it's all been coming from: that mechanical rumbling that's permeated the whole place. But the muted nature of it is gone, because right before you, taking up most of the room, is a great contraption of gears and pulleys constantly turning, clattering, cranking, rumbling. The energy from it heats up the entire room--it's not intolerable, but it is vaguely uncomfortable, and gets more so the closer you get to the machinery.
Aside from the engine itself, there is little to be seen here. A sign hangs from the ceiling with letters emblazoned on it in red, "WARNING: MOTIVATION IN PROGRESS." The floor shakes beneath you.
You had to use the King of Hearts keycard to get in here, which is a hint to what it was. It's probably the most obscure bit of symbolism in the heart, but the engine room represents Bucky's drive to seek approval and validation from his heroes and authority figures, because it's such a big source of fundamental motivation for him.
Most people checked out the machinery first.
It's quite the complicated thing.
On closer examination, the gears are not just ordinary dull metal; they're painted red, white, and blue, with a star in the center--not unlike a shield you might once have seen. Some turn unimpeded, but others grind up against obstructions in the mechanics of some kind.
There's a bank of controls on the far side of the engine, along with a large drawer labeled, "FUEL SOURCE."
You could also take a look at the controls.
They're not nearly as complicated as they really should be for such a behemoth of a machine. There's an ON/OFF lever and a large dial, which is currently turned to level eight out of eleven. Next to them are two buttons: a large one, a shield painted in the same fashion as the gears, and a small one, a black rose. The former is currently only dimly lit, while the latter is bright.
As you get closer, the rumbling and clattering of the turning gears takes on a strange character…
The ON/OFF lever was stuck in place at ON, of course.
Note the two buttons. The large one represents his devotion to making Steve proud, of course, and it can't ever be turned off entirely. But it is a bit dim right now just because it's been a while and Steve still hasn't come (back) to Aather. Meanwhile, he's also picked up Maleficent as an authority figure he wants to impress, so that's the meaning of the smaller black rose button.
So, about that rumbling and clattering of the turning gears.
It doesn't just sound like metal on metal anymore. Somewhere in the grinding, there's a faint but persistent voice humming along. "Did I--did I--did I do right? Are you--are you--are you proud--?"
This was the biggest hint to what the engine was, and most people seemed to get it at this point.
But then there was the fuel drawer.
It slides open, and a blast of furnace heat hits you. It's hard to see with your eyes watering from fumes, but are those photographs burning inside? The smoke that rises from them into the gears seems to take on strange shapes, playing out the scenes on the pictures themselves. Some of them are foreign, strange superhero antics; others might be familiar, Bucky acting as a knight in games or elsewhere.
This was supposed to indicate that Bucky uses his entire life as fuel for his need to impress his heroes. When Nagisa found it, though, she was quite distressed to see all these nice pictures burning and tried to remove them all. Of course, removing the fuel source from the engine that drives an airship while it's in midair is a bad idea, and I hadn't expected anyone to try it.
So I invented a security system in the form of a hologram of Nick Fury to stop her. He represented Bucky's basic survival instincts--in part because Fury is a fairly morally neutral figure, and in part because Bucky has memories associating his work for Fury with simple survival after he stopped being the Winter Soldier.
There was one of the few actual puzzles in the heart in this room as well, albeit a very simple one. Remember the obstructions in the gears?
Here and there amidst the chains and gears, something clogs up the smooth progress of the engine and its strange, hopeful hum: a bloodied knife, a smoking gun, a spent piece from an explosive.
You couldn't remove them immediately without hurting yourself in the gears (although Pinocchio did it anyway and scuffed up his robot hands). But if you turned down the dial on the controls...
It resists more the further you try to dial it down, but with enough effort you can turn it back as far as two out of eleven. It starts slowly turning back towards a higher setting as soon as you let go of it, though.
...you could quickly remove each obstruction one at a time. The dial, which represents the intensity of Bucky's approval-seeking, would eventually settle on six out of eleven.
The obstructions, of course, represented how his guilty past got in the way of his desire to be someone his heroes could be proud of. Multiple people removed them from the engine.
⇒ CHANGE! ⇒ Bucky feels more capable of being the person he really wants to be and living up to his heroes' expectations for a while. Also, his drive to seek approval from authority figures is a bit less intense.
Now we're getting somewhere...
THE ARMORY
The deep chill in this room hits you as soon as you step through the door; it's almost like a walk-in refrigerator of some kind. Food is not what's stored here, though. Hanging on the shining metal walls are weapons, weapons, and more weapons, gleaming under the sterile glow of the bare lights above. Only a handful of shelves seem to contain anything other than weapons.
The room continues on, longer than it is wide, for quite a ways, but towards the far end, a cold mist springs up, obscuring the rest of the room from view.
Of the three rooms branching off the lower level nexus, this was the only one that wasn't locked--the door was ajar. It represented Bucky's capacity for violence and his fears that he is nothing but a weapon.
Let's look at the weapons...
Some of them are a variety of knives, and other a number of different guns, but all are perfectly clean and ready to be used.
From the smallest shiv to the largest combat knife, every possibility seems to be accounted for. Some have their blades bare, but most are sheathed.
You can find every kind of gun here, ranging in technology level from World War II-era machine guns to sleek, modern-looking handguns. Some appear to be loaded and ready to fire, but the majority are not.
...and the shelves.
They're stocked with a number of different kinds of bullets, as well as tightly-capped containers of poison and some ingredients for explosives.
There wasn't a lot you could do here, although a number of people took knives for their own purposes.
⇒ CHANGE! ⇒ Bucky feels a bit more free to admit to his violent capacities and inclined to use them to defend others.
The main point of the room was to lead you to the next part of the heart. So, as you head to the back of the armory...
It quickly grows cold enough that you can see your breath. The mist around you feels dry somehow, weighted more with a nebulous apprehension than with actual water vapor.
In this direction, the contents of the room grow grimmer--the knives have twisted blades, and the shelves are stocked with hollow-point bullets and vicious poisons.
You can make out the dim shape of a metal door on the far wall.
Wonder what that door is?
Once you push through the fog some more, you can make out a few details. There's no label on this door, only a large red hammer and sickle:
☭
Something dark and reddish stains the bottom of the door and seeps out a bit through the small crack there.
Thorn was the first person to find this door, so naturally, as a vampire, he could immediately tell it was blood leaking out from underneath. Then he, Dick, and Eruption regrouped here before going into the door. Fortunately, Dick knew about Bucky's past and could explain what the symbol meant and what was likely behind the door.
THE TORTURE CHAMBER
Despite the chill, the air in this room feels musty and heavy with dread. Maybe all the blood has something to do with that.
Bodies hang from chains on the wall, cut open and mutilated; none of them seem to be alive, yet they still drip a steady stream of blood onto the hard floor. Tables dot the room--some have more bodies laid open upon them, trickling yet more blood down, and others are strewn with nasty metal implements. At the center of the room, the blood drains into a large metal grating set in the floor.
Where the armory behind it was only as large as it needed to be in order to store weapons, this room is tall and spacious, yet still feels cramped with bad energy. Red light spills over it from above, making the already crimson-stained scene even redder.
Narrow metal catwalks circle the room above, thin flights of stairs leading up to them. Atop one, calmly checking a rifle, stands a familiar-looking man. He looks exactly like the owner of this heart, save that his hair is longer, and the star on his left shoulder is plain red.
Nobody could have expected this room at all! I'm just kidding. This room was totally one of the earliest-planned parts of the heart. It doesn't so much represent what the Winter Soldier actually was as it does all of Bucky's guilt and emotional baggage over that.
Upon entering this room, heart-goers were faced with a boss fight with the Winter Soldier. He would first offer them a chance to survive if they handed over the keycards--this represented Bucky's self-destructive guilt attempting to gain access to the best parts of him, and if anyone had handed over the keycards, that would have been bad for Bucky. Fortunately, nobody did.
Thorn, Dick, and Eruption straight-up fought him, which was pretty much what you were supposed to do (insofar as you're supposed to do anything in particular in a heart game). Thorn also told him, at the end of the fight, that Bucky was worth defending, which was a good move.
⇒ CHANGE! ⇒ Bucky is less overwhelmed by his misplaced guilt and trauma over it. It all still exists, of course, but he can cope with it better than before--at least for a time.
Van pretended to be willing to give him the keycards, then used an arte to put him to sleep. This was an interesting choice.
⇒ CHANGE! ⇒ Bucky is more in control of his guilt and emotional baggage while awake, but plagued by more nightmares when he sleeps.
This was the only other place in the heart you could actually die. If you refused to fight the Winter Soldier--if you insisted he wouldn't really hurt you--he would kill you. Bucky's guilt and self-destructiveness is intense and driving and takes down everything in its path. However, if he did kill or seriously wound someone, the Winter Soldier would disappear, his mission completed--I considered that a way for a group to defeat him. However, "defeating" him in that way would worsen Bucky's guilt.
In any case, after successfully fighting the Winter Soldier, you'd get a deactivation device for the bomb.
There was a lot in this room that nobody got to; people tended to get distracted by the boss fight and its drop. In retrospect, I can see how that would happen. But here's a rundown of some of the stuff everyone missed.
In theory, if you played your cards right here, you could talk to the Winter Soldier's handler on his outdated cellphone and get creepy messages about death and destruction from a staticky voice that sounded a lot like Bucky. I didn't have anything prewritten for that, but it was an option.
I did have prewriting for what happened when you examined various things in the room. The bodies, for instance, would all turn out to be Steve Rogers--implying that Bucky feels that his time as the Winter Soldier has utterly mutilated the ideals Steve passed on to him.
The most important thing here after the boss fight was the grating in the floor. You could take it out and climb down to reach a dark room that blood drained into. The room represented Bucky's repressed awareness of himself as a traumatized victim rather than a guilty aggressor, and finding a way to light it up would have given you the chance to bring that awareness into his conscious thoughts. Since nobody touched this room, that's going to be something he has to develop more organically in Aather in the future.
At this point, we've looked at all of the heart except...
THE TRUE HEART
Light envelops you as you step through the door, and as you stand there blinded, a feeling of touching down rattles through your feet and legs. Somewhere in the distance, the everpresent engine of the airship shifts into a lower gear.
The light subsides, and you step forward again, and down; there is solid ground at last beneath your feet.
Around you a field of dirt stretches, with a scattering of distant cabins and brown tents in the background. Much closer to you, a flagpole rises out of the ground, with the American flag flying high in the air at its top.
Bucky stands at the base of the flagpole, leaning on it a little, holding a domino mask in his right hand, but not wearing it.
Notice that you land for this. You finally find stable ground.
In his true heart, Bucky is calmer, less repressed, more self-assured, but he's still a little self-deprecating, as even at his best, the things he values most in life are in other people. Here he's beyond all his guilt, though, and just plain appreciative of his friends.
IN SUMMATION...
I put too much content into this heart and relied too much on unlikely coordination. I think that despite that, it still worked out all right.
Most of the changes to Bucky via the heart game will be temporary, as I'd rather play him developing more organically for the most part.
Feel free to ask here if you have any questions about the heart!
This was a hint to a few things.
But eventually--
The essential premise of this heart was that some things are shown and others are concealed. It had running themes of instability, masks, locks, and showmanship.
The literal premise was that you arrived in the middle of an airship to find that it had been infiltrated by the Winter Soldier, who had planted a bomb. You had to work together to find the device to deactivate the bomb and four passwords to input with it.
The scored run was here. The unscored run that followed it was here.
It's important to note here that everything was symbolic; there were no more than hints of literal memories. The heart took place on an airship not because Bucky has experience with airships, but because "a ship flying in midair" is an unstable thing with no sane grounding, and that's how Bucky himself feels. There was a theater not because Bucky actually cares much about movies or plays, but because he feels like a lot of the good things he does are an act.
START
You land hard on a metal floor that rattles faintly all around you. The noise of an engine far below masks the sound of your fall. It's dark here, save for light filtering in through a nearby grating.
Don't move yet. Shadows flicker past that grate, the shadows of booted feet walking heavily on metal. With them comes the voice of the host of this whole place, of this entire heart, but it's different. Gone is his usual warmth and spirit. He's all business.
"Yes, sir. I'm the only one who has the device to defuse it, and they'd need the passwords too." A pause; you feel heavy, frozen in place by the need to hear this out. "Intruders, sir?" The footsteps stop, and when they resume again a second later they're lighter, more cautious. "I'll take care of that..." Another pause in the one-sided conversation, and he starts walking away. But when he speaks next, it's still perfectly clear. "No, you don't need to worry, sir. Feelings won't come into it. I follow orders, sir. I'll deal with them."
And the footsteps recede, then fade. It's impossible to tell where he went, but you're safe now--for the moment.
This set the stage for the heart and what you were basically supposed to do in it--that is, explore the airship in order to find the passwords and the deactivation device for the bomb.
The Winter Soldier here is not literally the Winter Soldier, of course--since that's not actually a part of Bucky but programming imposed on him from outside--but a representation of Bucky's semi-repressed guilt, under the command of his self-destructive impulses. That's why he set a bomb in the heart. This is a pretty obvious metaphor for what all the emotional baggage associated with Bucky's time as a brainwashed assassin does to him.
Now, at this point I expected everybody to start by looking around the starting room and investigating it. I got my first lesson in not relying too much on expectations here, because a lot of people just went right through the grate without checking their surroundings first. If you did look around, though, you'd find the bomb itself, some pamphlets, and decks of playing cards which turned out to contain keycards in the shape of the King of Hearts (which looked like Steve Rogers) and the Queen of Hearts (which looked like Natasha Romanoff). Bucky's heart was never meant to be subtle.
As for the pamphlets...
They're a set of how-to manuals. "How to Kill a Person in Six Ways with Your Bare Hands" is one; "How to Smile When You're Feeling Scared and Angry" is another. Both of those have seen more use than the remaining one, which is, "How to Talk to Girls."
...they were just flavor text to get a laugh or two while summing up some of Bucky's issues. But some people did check them out. Van and Karigan wrote tips in the last one when they realized it was mostly blank to begin with.
⇒ CHANGE! ⇒ This improves Bucky's conversational skills a little, or it would have, if not for some stuff that happened elsewhere in the heart.
Moving on...
CORRIDOR
A plain hallway, well lit from above, stretches out to either side of you. The sense of motion is a little more muted here. There's nothing to be found here except two exits: a clearly-marked ladder leading up at one end of the hall, and a closed hatch leading down at the other.
This was where the heart divided into its two halves. Going up took you on a tour of the masks Bucky wears, or feels he wears, for the benefit of others and gave you the opportunity to boost his confidence in them and suggest that maybe they aren't just masks. It concerned Bucky's interactions with other people rather than the things he keeps inside, and as such, it contained a lot of NPC interaction rather than exploration.
Going down took you through the things Bucky tries to hide from the world, especially in Aather. This didn't just mean bad things, as we will see later. Unsurprisingly, it was harder to go down than to go up, but I figured most people would easily find the keycards and unlock the hatch (using the King of Hearts keycard) without trouble. I was so very wrong.
Nothing particularly notable happened here in the scored run. Dick (the elder), Thorn, and eventually Eruption went down, using the keycards. Maitimo, Karigan, Dean, Natasha, and initially Eruption went up.
In the unscored run, Nagisa jammed a mini-lightsaber made of hope, love, and song into the card reader while singing, while Clear and Pinocchio provided backup and hauled the hatch open with robot strength.
⇒ CHANGE! ⇒ As a result of that travesty, for the next few IC days, Bucky has essentially lost his ability to filter himself and hide things. The obvious joke is something about how he didn't have a brain-to-mouth filter in the first place, but while he has always been impulsive and inclined to put his foot in his mouth, to a certain extent the persona of "dorky loser who says dumb things and makes bad jokes" was and is an act he deliberately cultivated so that the people of Aather wouldn't see the violent, damaged man underneath. He'll have a lot of trouble now keeping himself from blurting out the bad thoughts and worries he has and staying out of fights; in general, he'll be more of an aggressive, cynical, gloomy asshole. But also a more honest one. Some other changes that Nagisa, Clear, and Pinocchio made temper this; I'll get to them later.
First, let's talk about what you saw when you went up.
THE HALL OF MASKS
Where the corridor before was fairly narrow and plain, this one is broad and lavish. The soft carpet beneath your feet is blue and white, and the walls shine with reddish wooden paneling. That's when you can see the walls, anyway--because there's other stuff here diverting your attention.
On the left side of the hallway, a series of white marble statues stand. All six of them wear masks of some kind. On the right side of the hallway, opposite the statues, hang cloth wall-scrolls as if they were flags or tapestries.
At the far side of the hall, an elegant-looking wooden double door stands.
I conceived of this part of the heart early on--a passageway lined with masks through which you had to travel before reaching the upper levels. Unsurprisingly, it represents Bucky's ability to fake things and hide himself and project an image, as well as his desire to do so.
This runs really deep in him--the series of Captain America flashback issues that recounts his life story opens with the words, "Everyone thinks my story begins with a mask...and they're right, but it isn't the mask they think." What he means is that people assume his story begins with donning the mask of Captain America's sidekick, but in truth, it begins with wearing a mask of stoic bravery for his father and sister after his mother's death. He was nine. He's been fronting since then.
There are no actual puzzles in the Hall of Masks, and little pre-planned interaction. It's mostly a showcase of Bucky's tendency to hide behind, well, masks.
From the start of the hall to the end by the doors, the six statues follow a progression. They start with a young boy holding up a full mask over his face; next is a smiling teenager in a domino mask; next a blank-faced young man in a mask like a muzzle; next a man whose face is mostly obscured by something that might be a mask or might be bandages; next a man standing proudly with a full cowl over his features; and next a man in knightly armor, save for the smiling full mask he holds up over his face.
For the most part, the statues are a single piece, but the masks are not a part of that piece--they are actually made of plastic or porcelain or cloth, and their colors stand out incongruously against the white marble.
Obviously, the young boy with the full mask was Bucky as a child struggling to hide his feelings for the sake of his surviving family; the smiling teenager in the domino mask was him as a sidekick, when he may well have been happiest; the next one is him as the Winter Soldier (with regards to the movie and its goddamn muzzle); the bandaged man is him after he first breaks free of that and struggles to recover; the man in the cowl is him as Captain America; and the final statue is him in Aather, as a knight, putting on a happy face for the rest of the realm.
You could try to take off a mask, but inevitably, the face of the statue beneath it would break. Bucky needs his masks. He doesn't know how to interact with most people without them. There are a few people in Aather he sometimes approaches without masks--Naha, Leto, occasionally the older Dick Grayson. But they're the exception rather than the rule.
Most people didn't bother examining the statues after they took the mask off and broke them, but if you did:
Behind the cracked marble, something indefinable and vague swirls, a kind of bubbling, fiery protoplasm with no clear shape of its own. Just looking at it makes you faintly uncomfortable.
One of the reasons Bucky wears these masks is because he doesn't trust the self that lies beneath them. He senses his own instability and is afraid of it. As was implied in the text of the post at the very beginning, Bucky feels at sea with his own true self, unstable and poorly defined.
You could also check out the tapestries:
Half of them are roughly in the design of American flags, but you barely need to glance twice to notice that where there should be stars, there are instead fifty little masks. The other half feature a tall black tree, not unlike the one Onyx takes residence in, but where it should have leaves, it instead grows little masks.
That should be obvious enough. In alcoves behind them were the materials for more masks: costumes, actual domino masks, an Onyx version of the cloak that heroes and knights are given in the Black Woods. Roles to fill.
There wasn't a lot you could do here other than take off the masks and therefore crack the statues beneath them, damaging Bucky's ability to front and hide himself. A number of people did that, some without meaning to (Eruption, for example), some very deliberately and with a great sense of exasperation (Thorn thought Bucky was being overdramatic).
Karigan took the clothes from the alcoves and tried to dress up the statues with them. This alleviated some of the negative effects from the cracks, giving Bucky a bit of confidence in himself and his roles despite the damaged ability to front.
⇒ CHANGE! ⇒ For a few days, Bucky will have a lot of trouble fronting as he usually does--making jokes when he's worried or upset, putting on a show. He'll tend to actually say what he's thinking instead in a straightforward fashion.
Eliot and younger Dick (heretofore known as Robin) took a slightly different approach, since they handled the whole heart as if it were a mission: Eliot disguised himself in Bucky's sidekick clothes from the alcoves and claimed he was taking Robin as a prisoner.
⇒ CHANGE! ⇒ Bucky sees Eliot a bit more as a kindred spirit.
THE UPPER DECK
You're in the sky.
More accurately, you're on a ship flying in the sky. A polished wooden deck spreads out beneath your feet, with golden railings off to the sides. Incongruously, in front of you a large building rises out of the deck: a golden-accented theater with a glittering marquee and a ticket-taker's booth out in front.
Aside from the theater and the hall behind you, there doesn't seem to be anything else on this ship.
Until not long before the game itself, my plans called for the Hall of Masks to connect directly to the theater; however, I decided that there wasn't enough content in the upper half of the heart compared to the lower half, and therefore I had to add in a little more.
There wasn't anything you could do here other than get your bearings and talk to the ticket-taker, represented by Namor. He personified Bucky's ability to meet new people and make friends, which is kind of hilariously inappropriate considering what an aloof jackass Namor is in canon. However, the first memory Bucky regained involved proving himself to his former teammates in general and Namor in particular, so that's stuck.
When you tried to go into the theater, Namor would ask you for your ticket. You could, at this point or any point ensuing in the conversation, just walk right past him. He wouldn't stop you physically, because Bucky is ultimately a fairly warm person who likes and cares for other people, despite his layers of trauma and guilt separating him from them in canon.
When you asked how you were to pay for a ticket, Namor would demand to know, "What did you pay to become yourself?"
In Aather, Bucky has been thinking a lot about the difference between "who you are when you're trapped in a role" and "who you are when you're really yourself." He's also been noticing that a lot of his friends have bad memories and sad lives. This question is a reflection of that: is the process of becoming "yourself" a struggle? What do you pay for it? How people answered could nudge his own perceptions of selfhood and identity a little.
Most people answered ambiguously or sparely. Natasha answered, "In installments," suggesting that it's not something you do all at once. Dean and Maitimo both gave answers in alignment with what Bucky already thought: that it was something you paid for in pain and blood, specifically the blood of others. Laura took an unusual tack here in not actually giving an answer but instead turning the question back on Namor.
⇒ CHANGE! ⇒ Thanks to Laura's interactions here, Bucky is a little more self-aware about the process of changing and becoming yourself.
One thing worth noting: if asked, Namor would explain that he hadn't always needed to be in this position of ticket-taker, that he'd only come back to it since "this ship" was in Aather. That's a hint that Bucky has made a lot more friends in Aather than he had back home. This is a result of a few things, but the major one is that when he started out here in Aather, he lacked the thick layers of numbing trauma and guilt that wrapped him up and isolated him from most people in present-day canon.
If you took the time to check the marquee, you could see which shows were playing.
Bucky Barnes stars as "The Supportive Friend"
Steve Rogers stars as "The Good Knight and Superhero"
Most people didn't do that, so what came next was a bit of a surprise.
THE THEATER LOBBY
An open space sprawls out around you, carpeted lushly in red, white, and blue. The ceiling is high but flat and painted with some kind of mural, and the walls sport flashy posters for upcoming shows. A few potted plants stand in the corners, and along one wall is a bank of arcade games and vending machines.
Beyond all of this, three hallways disappear into the back.
You could examine everything here--the mural was of Steve Rogers, the arcade games had the top high score by "SR" and all the ones beneath it by "JBB"--but none of that was really important.
What was important was that after a few comments of examining stuff, you'd be approached by the Falcon, manager of the theater. Sam represented your average friend of Bucky's--someone he likes who also likes him and wants to help him, but who doesn't have the added emotional weight that Steve or Natasha might. He would mention that "the Captain" was coming and needed to be prepared for, then direct the characters to go talk to "the kid" in one of the theaters, claiming that the kid in question was "antsy" or needed reassurance.
"The kid," of course, is Bucky. This is something out of canon--even though Bucky is in his late twenties by the time he snaps out of being the Winter Soldier, Sam and Nick Fury both refer to him as "kid." At one point, Logan opines that everyone thinks of him as a kid because that's how he became famous--as the bright-eyed kid who fought next to Captain America back in the '40s. It's a part of his image that he's "the kid." You may have noticed, from his preexisting threads, that he often refers to younger characters as "kid" in Aather. This is just him trying to shake his own image...
Anyway, you could pick which show to go see. Even though one of them was labeled with Steve as the star, all of them actually led you to Bucky.
THEATER WEST
Despite the lack of a concession stand, the faint smell of popcorn lingers in the air here as you make your way down the aisle. Yet the further you go towards the screen, the more that scent turns to gunpowder…
The screen seems oddly flimsy. Shadows move behind it.
Check it out.
The lower right corner of it is loose and looks like it could easily be pushed aside to allow you entrance to whatever is behind it.
Go past the screen.
There's a small room here, cluttered with bright cardboard props. Some of them are bright spiky yellow explosions, while others are dusty-looking brown tents. In the center of the room is a table with a plastic gun and blunted combat knife on it. At a chair at that table sits Bucky, frowning down at his props.
Welcome to "The Steadfast Soldier," starring Bucky Barnes. This is Bucky's attempts to present himself as a tough, dependable war hero. He masqueraded as a seasoned actor who once would have had no trouble with the role, but after a series of bad roles, he doubts himself.
The only character who got this room was Laura Kinney (Eruption of Turquoise). While most people responded to the insecure, doubting actors by reassuring them in general, Laura was too practical for that and instead opted to provide actual advice on how to deal with worries and insecurity--stop trying to do things you don't want to do, ask for help if you need it, work hard, rely on others when they're willing to help you.
⇒ CHANGE! ⇒ Bucky is a little more willing to look to others for help and partnership in fights.
THEATER EAST
Despite the lack of a concession stand, the faint smell of popcorn lingers in the air here as you make your way down the aisle. The seats around you look very plush and comfortable, but it's hard to take your attention away from the screen for some reason...
Yet the screen seems oddly flimsy. Shadows move behind it.
This worked the same way as the previous room--you could go behind the screen and find a room there with Bucky in it.
There's a small room here, cluttered with bright cardboard red and pink hearts and two-person sofas. In the center of the room is a table with a scattering of photographs upon it, appearing to depict scenes of Bucky and his friends in Aather--or, more occasionally, before it. At a chair at that table sits Bucky himself, frowning down at the photographs.
Here you could encourage the lead actor of "The Supportive Friend." This Bucky was a veteran actor of action films who worried that he was incapable of pulling off a more emotional role like this. In the scored run, Dean and Natasha got this room; in the unscored run, Eliot, Robin, and Thor got it. Most people here assured Bucky that he was already capable of this role, that it wasn't too far off what he'd already done. Eliot, in particular, told him that it wasn't difficult here in Aather--that most people just wanted you to listen, since their actual problems were memories, things that had already happened.
⇒ CHANGE! ⇒ Bucky is a bit more confident in himself as a friend and willing to reach out to others in that guise; he also may let go of his past a little, at least for the time being.
THEATER CENTRAL
Despite the lack of a concession stand, the faint smell of popcorn lingers in the air here as you make your way down the aisle. A projection of a red, white, and blue shield flickers repeatedly but faintly on the screen in front of you, which is framed by a vine growing leaves.
Still, the screen seems oddly flimsy. Shadows move behind it.
Third verse, same as the first.
There's a small room here, cluttered with bright cardboard standees draped with various superhero costumes, keys looped around their necks on thin chains. In the center of the room is a table with that same round red, white, and blue shield laid down upon it, only it's plastic rather than metal. Bucky himself sits at a chair at that table, staring worriedly down at the shield.
So, when Bucky first arrived in Aather, Steve had just been dropped. As sad as it was that I never got to interact with him, this was a particularly amazing stroke of luck for his character development. It meant that Bucky felt that as a knight in Aather, he had to fill Steve's shoes, just as he had in canon as Captain America--not that he remembered that yet.
The sense that he had to live up to Steve's legacy and fill his shoes therefore followed him throughout his development in Aather, especially as he regained his memories.
This room was "The Good Knight and Superhero," supposedly starring Steve Rogers, but it turns out that Bucky as the understudy was filling in for him. Visitors to the room had to convince him that he could do it. Karigan and Maitimo were the ones who visited this theater, and they did a particularly stellar job of boosting his confidence, especially Karigan.
⇒ CHANGE! ⇒ For a while, Bucky will be more confident in himself as a knight and superhero.
AFTERWARDS...
After everyone in the theaters convinced the actors that they could handle their roles, each actor disappeared, leaving behind props that looked slightly more real than before, along with a scrap of paper containing passwords #2 through #4. Incidentally: it was possible to just beat the crap out of the actors and take their passwords that way. Fortunately for Bucky's self-esteem, nobody took that option.
Anyway, after that the heart-goers could return to the theater...
As you make your way back through the lobby, a thrill of anticipation courses through the entire broad room, rippling through you and everyone else--
The Captain is coming.
Sure enough, a moment later, a tall, muscular man identical to the one in the painting on the ceiling steps into the lobby. He holds a bright red, white, and blue shield in front of him.
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Strange, though. His smile is wan. He looks a little pale…
...and as he lowers the shield, the reason becomes clear: over his heart is a bloody bullet wound.
Steve Rogers represents authority from whom Bucky craves approval and validation; zombie Steve Rogers represents a hero whom Bucky has failed. He was a last-minute addition to the heart when I realized that the upper half had less content than the lower half, and as such, he kind of isn't very well-thought-out. He was supposed to be a boss fight, but I had trouble actually making him attack people--which he was supposed to do if they continued verbally defending Bucky after he explained that Bucky was responsible for his injury.
Essentially, though, zombie Cap represents Bucky's sense of failure, his belief that everything he does isn't enough for his heroes, exacerbated by his vague and confusing memories of Steve's death back home. The "correct" way to deal with him is to accept his remonstrations while standing up for Bucky, and everyone who faced him (Karigan and Maitimo, Natasha and Dean) did just that.
Actually fighting back against him was a bad move; further injuring zombie Steve would have made the theater start to shake and crumble around you, and killing him would have made it all collapse, killing you as well. This was one of only two ways to die in this heart. As for the other...we'll get to that later. It's kind of the reverse.
⇒ CHANGE! ⇒ Bucky has a bit less of a sense of failure, and his guilt over Steve's supposed death is eased.
That about wraps it up for the top half of the heart. At this point, people were supposed to regroup back at the start with the passwords and meet the people from the lower half of the heart who'd gotten the remaining password and the deactivation device. I overestimated people's ability to stay in sync, so this didn't happen and I had to do some handwaving. Useful information for the next time I try to run a heart: don't rely too much on groups being able to coordinate. It doesn't happen that often in roleplay.
Let's get to the bottom half.
IN THE DARKNESS
No lights come on when you make your way through the hatch and land on the floor not far below it. You're left in the smothering darkness. It feels heavy, and every time you try to take a step, there's the faintest pressure back towards the hatch. A short ladder hangs down from it if you reach up, allowing you an easy escape back to the hallway if you wish to take it.
This part, like most of the heart, wasn't subtle: it was Bucky's heart trying to push you out of going into the areas it wanted to hide.
The key was to realize that the floor was actually paper overlaying a wire mesh and peel it off, revealing that there was a hole in the wire mesh in one corner where you could descend a ladder further down.
The floor peels away beneath your grasp like it's paper--perhaps because it is. Dim red light starts to filter into the room from below. There's a wire mesh supporting the paper floor, but in one corner it opens up into a person-sized hole. Within that hole, a ladder leads down.
If you looked at the paper when there was light...
It's brightly done in four colors, like an old comic book, and covered with explosive shapes and sound effects. BAM! POW! WHACK!
This was partially a fourth-wall joke and partially a reference to the fact that a lot of the stuff Bucky tries to repress and hide deals with violence and anger.
Anyone who solved the puzzle of how to get through this room got some points for doing so, as it opened up Bucky's subconscious a little bit.
BELOW DECKS
You're in a large circular room with a faintly rattling metal floor. Despite the red lights high above around the ladder, it's still dim and dark here for now. Much of what little light there is comes from three large portholes on one side of the room. They offer a view onto a shifting, turbulent landscape of grey clouds. The light that filters in through them is just as mercurial and flickering as the clouds beyond, and it somehow fills the room with a deep unease full of mingled bad feelings: fear and shame, regret and loneliness, rage and guilt.
Opposite each window on the other side of the room is a door.
This was the nexus from which all of Bucky's hidden issues and angst branched off. It represented, in general, all of his repressed bad feelings and negative energy. And he has a lot of that. Bucky is honestly a rather depressive person; he's always had a lot of overwhelming negative feelings and difficulty processing and coping with them. His narration tends to be self-deprecating and stressed out. Canon strongly implies (and at one point states) there was a time he was borderline suicidal. As a whole, he copes poorly with the inside of his head.
More on how this changed in a minute.
Back to the room. Each window loosely corresponded to the door opposite it in the feelings it dealt with, and you could examine, touch, or break the windows to experience and affect the emotions in question. Van was the only character to examine the windows; nobody touched or broke them.
If you examined the window opposite the left door, which led to the armory--
The clouds outside it swirl almost vengefully, seething with angry motion.
It's warmer than it should be, almost hot. As you touch the glass, the heat courses up your fingers and arm. It doesn't seem like you're touching a window for a second. It's more like you're throwing a punch, your fist connecting with another body, teeth breaking beneath the blow. Guilt assails you; you shouldn't have done that--
The window opposite the central door, which led to the living quarters--
The storm outside this porthole is oddly desolate. The clouds look disparate, alone, weighed down by their own solitude and sadness. Even the lightning looks lonely.
The natural cold of the glass jumps too easily into your fingers and up your arm. It doesn't seem like you're touching a window for a second. It's more like you're grasping into the cold and the dark for some human contact that never comes. Images of empty hotel rooms and solitary hallways flash behind your eyes, bringing with them a powerful sense of regret and isolation.
The window opposite the right door, which led to the engine room--
Frightening shapes loom out of the clouds beyond this porthole. It's almost as if the clouds themselves are judging you, finding you wanting.
Fear leaps out of the glass to run up your fingers and your arm, right into your body where it settles in your gut. Something or someone murmurs disapprovingly in your ear, a deep voice like that of a father, and shame wells up inside you.
As I said, you could also break each window, which would free up the associated feelings a bit from repression.
Poking around the doors and windows was all I planned for characters doing in this room. Most people didn't even do that. However, Nagisa, Clear, and Pinocchio joined hands and sang in this room to push back the bad feelings.
⇒ CHANGE! ⇒ Bucky has essentially received a dose of antidepressant. His bad feelings are less intense for a few IC days to a week, and he can cope with them better. On a permanent basis, he's going to develop an appreciation for music, and find that it helps him cope.
Anyway, from here you could go to three different rooms. Let's start with...
THE LIVING QUARTERS
For a room labeled "the living quarters," this place is rather small. It's very inviting, though--quite the change from the uneasy, roiling atmosphere in the room outside. The air is faintly perfumed with a mix of scents--roses, chocolate, fresh dew…
It's sweet. It's very nice in here.
The lighting is soft and golden-white; it comes from a plain glass chandelier hanging from the ceiling, since the windows (normal square windows, not portholes) are heavily curtained with deep red brocade. There's also a king-sized bed with white and pink blankets and pillows on it, a plain nightstand next to the bed, a rack with some clothing draped over it, and a closet with the door closed.
This was the only room that you had to use the Queen of Hearts keycard to get into. Or you were supposed to, anyway.
While most of the stuff down below in the heart was at least somewhat negative, this was different. Bucky doesn't just hide things because they're bad in Aather--he also simply hides them because he feels they're inappropriate or unsuited to his mask. In the case of this room, which represents his capacity for romance and tenderness, he hides it for a couple of reasons. One is that he has decidedly romantic memories of a Natasha Romanoff who isn't the one who exists in Aather, and that leaves him confused and uncertain. The other is that he still struggles with the idea of himself as someone who even deserves love and romance in the first place a lot of the time; he's not sure he's capable of sustained feelings like that.
For the most part, this room just had objects representing the various people Bucky has sexual or romantic feelings for in Aather.
On the rack was a black shawl: It glitters in your hands as if there are stars woven into the fabric. What fabric is it, anyway? Somehow it's unfathomably dark, and faintly cold even in this warm room. Just holding it makes everything around you seem darker and deeper and richer somehow. This is Naha, who was Bucky's first love in Aather. He still has a lot of feelings for her, but he's also aware that she can't ever fully be what he wants in a romantic partner, since he tends to want an equal.
On the nightstand was a scrap of white cloth. On closer examination, it's a bandage. Touching it brings to mind a sudden memory of physical blows exchanged--but there's no anger or actual pain there, only pride and satisfaction. This is Panther/Cara, who Bucky finds charming and attractive--but a lot of that is tied up in her resemblance to the Natasha he remembers and the fact that he first met her right after getting the memory of his love affair with that Natasha. That's a part of why it's a bandage--he was, in some ways, essentially using Cara to patch up his pain and confusion over the Natasha issue, and he's not entirely comfortable with that.
Hiding in the apparently empty closet (where else?) was a mask. On closer examination, there's a black scrap of cloth blending into the darkness in the far corner of the closet. It's a black domino mask. It shifts in your hands, though, becoming a larger black cowl for a few seconds, before shrinking back to the domino mask again. This was Dick Grayson, who gives Bucky confusing feelings. The thing about Dick is that his relationship with Bucky doesn't really fit into Bucky's usual model of a platonic male friend; he's too sensitive and he tends to push too much. Bucky also admires him in a way he usually reserves for his girlfriend...so as it is, his feelings are kind of wavering towards romantic despite his being by and large heterosexual. Thus contains a proud tradition of Dick Grayson giving fanboys confusing feelings.
On the bed, tucked under a pillow, was a note from the Natasha of his memories.
James,
I haven't forgotten either.
--N.
A distant memory of a kiss tugs at your awareness as you touch the paper for just a moment, and then it's gone.
The other side of it had the first password: a drawing of a flower.
Although nobody tried it, you could also check out the chandelier in this room.
It's not fancy, but it is a little odd. At the center is a single frosted glass bell covering a large bulb, but a metal ring around its base branches out into three smaller clear glass bells, more flower-shaped, with smaller bulbs inside them. The materials and style of the two parts are very different, as if the three smaller lights were added later.
The whole thing looks a bit unbalanced, and occasionally the lights flicker and dim just a little.
This was a nod to the way Aather has changed Bucky's tendencies toward monogamy and how that's affecting him.
In the scored run, Dick went into this room, promptly checked out the closet, and freaked out a bit at the unintended invasion of privacy when he realized what was in there. After that he went off to fight the Winter Soldier (see below), leaving the closet door open in the meanwhile. That doesn't compare to what Nagisa did in the unscored run--she took the mask out of the closet and left it on the bed. And that was after Clear broke the lock on the door into here in the first place.
There wasn't a whole lot you could do here to make changes other than move the objects around. You could also have broken things to damage Bucky's capacity for romance, but fortunately nobody did that.
⇒ CHANGE! ⇒ Bucky is a little more able to acknowledge his romantic feelings, especially the nebulous potential ones he has for Dick Grayson.
THE ENGINE ROOM
The noise here hits you the moment you step in. This is where it's all been coming from: that mechanical rumbling that's permeated the whole place. But the muted nature of it is gone, because right before you, taking up most of the room, is a great contraption of gears and pulleys constantly turning, clattering, cranking, rumbling. The energy from it heats up the entire room--it's not intolerable, but it is vaguely uncomfortable, and gets more so the closer you get to the machinery.
Aside from the engine itself, there is little to be seen here. A sign hangs from the ceiling with letters emblazoned on it in red, "WARNING: MOTIVATION IN PROGRESS." The floor shakes beneath you.
You had to use the King of Hearts keycard to get in here, which is a hint to what it was. It's probably the most obscure bit of symbolism in the heart, but the engine room represents Bucky's drive to seek approval and validation from his heroes and authority figures, because it's such a big source of fundamental motivation for him.
Most people checked out the machinery first.
It's quite the complicated thing.
On closer examination, the gears are not just ordinary dull metal; they're painted red, white, and blue, with a star in the center--not unlike a shield you might once have seen. Some turn unimpeded, but others grind up against obstructions in the mechanics of some kind.
There's a bank of controls on the far side of the engine, along with a large drawer labeled, "FUEL SOURCE."
You could also take a look at the controls.
They're not nearly as complicated as they really should be for such a behemoth of a machine. There's an ON/OFF lever and a large dial, which is currently turned to level eight out of eleven. Next to them are two buttons: a large one, a shield painted in the same fashion as the gears, and a small one, a black rose. The former is currently only dimly lit, while the latter is bright.
As you get closer, the rumbling and clattering of the turning gears takes on a strange character…
The ON/OFF lever was stuck in place at ON, of course.
Note the two buttons. The large one represents his devotion to making Steve proud, of course, and it can't ever be turned off entirely. But it is a bit dim right now just because it's been a while and Steve still hasn't come (back) to Aather. Meanwhile, he's also picked up Maleficent as an authority figure he wants to impress, so that's the meaning of the smaller black rose button.
So, about that rumbling and clattering of the turning gears.
It doesn't just sound like metal on metal anymore. Somewhere in the grinding, there's a faint but persistent voice humming along. "Did I--did I--did I do right? Are you--are you--are you proud--?"
This was the biggest hint to what the engine was, and most people seemed to get it at this point.
But then there was the fuel drawer.
It slides open, and a blast of furnace heat hits you. It's hard to see with your eyes watering from fumes, but are those photographs burning inside? The smoke that rises from them into the gears seems to take on strange shapes, playing out the scenes on the pictures themselves. Some of them are foreign, strange superhero antics; others might be familiar, Bucky acting as a knight in games or elsewhere.
This was supposed to indicate that Bucky uses his entire life as fuel for his need to impress his heroes. When Nagisa found it, though, she was quite distressed to see all these nice pictures burning and tried to remove them all. Of course, removing the fuel source from the engine that drives an airship while it's in midair is a bad idea, and I hadn't expected anyone to try it.
So I invented a security system in the form of a hologram of Nick Fury to stop her. He represented Bucky's basic survival instincts--in part because Fury is a fairly morally neutral figure, and in part because Bucky has memories associating his work for Fury with simple survival after he stopped being the Winter Soldier.
There was one of the few actual puzzles in the heart in this room as well, albeit a very simple one. Remember the obstructions in the gears?
Here and there amidst the chains and gears, something clogs up the smooth progress of the engine and its strange, hopeful hum: a bloodied knife, a smoking gun, a spent piece from an explosive.
You couldn't remove them immediately without hurting yourself in the gears (although Pinocchio did it anyway and scuffed up his robot hands). But if you turned down the dial on the controls...
It resists more the further you try to dial it down, but with enough effort you can turn it back as far as two out of eleven. It starts slowly turning back towards a higher setting as soon as you let go of it, though.
...you could quickly remove each obstruction one at a time. The dial, which represents the intensity of Bucky's approval-seeking, would eventually settle on six out of eleven.
The obstructions, of course, represented how his guilty past got in the way of his desire to be someone his heroes could be proud of. Multiple people removed them from the engine.
⇒ CHANGE! ⇒ Bucky feels more capable of being the person he really wants to be and living up to his heroes' expectations for a while. Also, his drive to seek approval from authority figures is a bit less intense.
Now we're getting somewhere...
THE ARMORY
The deep chill in this room hits you as soon as you step through the door; it's almost like a walk-in refrigerator of some kind. Food is not what's stored here, though. Hanging on the shining metal walls are weapons, weapons, and more weapons, gleaming under the sterile glow of the bare lights above. Only a handful of shelves seem to contain anything other than weapons.
The room continues on, longer than it is wide, for quite a ways, but towards the far end, a cold mist springs up, obscuring the rest of the room from view.
Of the three rooms branching off the lower level nexus, this was the only one that wasn't locked--the door was ajar. It represented Bucky's capacity for violence and his fears that he is nothing but a weapon.
Let's look at the weapons...
Some of them are a variety of knives, and other a number of different guns, but all are perfectly clean and ready to be used.
From the smallest shiv to the largest combat knife, every possibility seems to be accounted for. Some have their blades bare, but most are sheathed.
You can find every kind of gun here, ranging in technology level from World War II-era machine guns to sleek, modern-looking handguns. Some appear to be loaded and ready to fire, but the majority are not.
...and the shelves.
They're stocked with a number of different kinds of bullets, as well as tightly-capped containers of poison and some ingredients for explosives.
There wasn't a lot you could do here, although a number of people took knives for their own purposes.
⇒ CHANGE! ⇒ Bucky feels a bit more free to admit to his violent capacities and inclined to use them to defend others.
The main point of the room was to lead you to the next part of the heart. So, as you head to the back of the armory...
It quickly grows cold enough that you can see your breath. The mist around you feels dry somehow, weighted more with a nebulous apprehension than with actual water vapor.
In this direction, the contents of the room grow grimmer--the knives have twisted blades, and the shelves are stocked with hollow-point bullets and vicious poisons.
You can make out the dim shape of a metal door on the far wall.
Wonder what that door is?
Once you push through the fog some more, you can make out a few details. There's no label on this door, only a large red hammer and sickle:
☭
Something dark and reddish stains the bottom of the door and seeps out a bit through the small crack there.
Thorn was the first person to find this door, so naturally, as a vampire, he could immediately tell it was blood leaking out from underneath. Then he, Dick, and Eruption regrouped here before going into the door. Fortunately, Dick knew about Bucky's past and could explain what the symbol meant and what was likely behind the door.
THE TORTURE CHAMBER
Despite the chill, the air in this room feels musty and heavy with dread. Maybe all the blood has something to do with that.
Bodies hang from chains on the wall, cut open and mutilated; none of them seem to be alive, yet they still drip a steady stream of blood onto the hard floor. Tables dot the room--some have more bodies laid open upon them, trickling yet more blood down, and others are strewn with nasty metal implements. At the center of the room, the blood drains into a large metal grating set in the floor.
Where the armory behind it was only as large as it needed to be in order to store weapons, this room is tall and spacious, yet still feels cramped with bad energy. Red light spills over it from above, making the already crimson-stained scene even redder.
Narrow metal catwalks circle the room above, thin flights of stairs leading up to them. Atop one, calmly checking a rifle, stands a familiar-looking man. He looks exactly like the owner of this heart, save that his hair is longer, and the star on his left shoulder is plain red.
Nobody could have expected this room at all! I'm just kidding. This room was totally one of the earliest-planned parts of the heart. It doesn't so much represent what the Winter Soldier actually was as it does all of Bucky's guilt and emotional baggage over that.
Upon entering this room, heart-goers were faced with a boss fight with the Winter Soldier. He would first offer them a chance to survive if they handed over the keycards--this represented Bucky's self-destructive guilt attempting to gain access to the best parts of him, and if anyone had handed over the keycards, that would have been bad for Bucky. Fortunately, nobody did.
Thorn, Dick, and Eruption straight-up fought him, which was pretty much what you were supposed to do (insofar as you're supposed to do anything in particular in a heart game). Thorn also told him, at the end of the fight, that Bucky was worth defending, which was a good move.
⇒ CHANGE! ⇒ Bucky is less overwhelmed by his misplaced guilt and trauma over it. It all still exists, of course, but he can cope with it better than before--at least for a time.
Van pretended to be willing to give him the keycards, then used an arte to put him to sleep. This was an interesting choice.
⇒ CHANGE! ⇒ Bucky is more in control of his guilt and emotional baggage while awake, but plagued by more nightmares when he sleeps.
This was the only other place in the heart you could actually die. If you refused to fight the Winter Soldier--if you insisted he wouldn't really hurt you--he would kill you. Bucky's guilt and self-destructiveness is intense and driving and takes down everything in its path. However, if he did kill or seriously wound someone, the Winter Soldier would disappear, his mission completed--I considered that a way for a group to defeat him. However, "defeating" him in that way would worsen Bucky's guilt.
In any case, after successfully fighting the Winter Soldier, you'd get a deactivation device for the bomb.
There was a lot in this room that nobody got to; people tended to get distracted by the boss fight and its drop. In retrospect, I can see how that would happen. But here's a rundown of some of the stuff everyone missed.
In theory, if you played your cards right here, you could talk to the Winter Soldier's handler on his outdated cellphone and get creepy messages about death and destruction from a staticky voice that sounded a lot like Bucky. I didn't have anything prewritten for that, but it was an option.
I did have prewriting for what happened when you examined various things in the room. The bodies, for instance, would all turn out to be Steve Rogers--implying that Bucky feels that his time as the Winter Soldier has utterly mutilated the ideals Steve passed on to him.
The most important thing here after the boss fight was the grating in the floor. You could take it out and climb down to reach a dark room that blood drained into. The room represented Bucky's repressed awareness of himself as a traumatized victim rather than a guilty aggressor, and finding a way to light it up would have given you the chance to bring that awareness into his conscious thoughts. Since nobody touched this room, that's going to be something he has to develop more organically in Aather in the future.
At this point, we've looked at all of the heart except...
THE TRUE HEART
Light envelops you as you step through the door, and as you stand there blinded, a feeling of touching down rattles through your feet and legs. Somewhere in the distance, the everpresent engine of the airship shifts into a lower gear.
The light subsides, and you step forward again, and down; there is solid ground at last beneath your feet.
Around you a field of dirt stretches, with a scattering of distant cabins and brown tents in the background. Much closer to you, a flagpole rises out of the ground, with the American flag flying high in the air at its top.
Bucky stands at the base of the flagpole, leaning on it a little, holding a domino mask in his right hand, but not wearing it.
Notice that you land for this. You finally find stable ground.
In his true heart, Bucky is calmer, less repressed, more self-assured, but he's still a little self-deprecating, as even at his best, the things he values most in life are in other people. Here he's beyond all his guilt, though, and just plain appreciative of his friends.
IN SUMMATION...
I put too much content into this heart and relied too much on unlikely coordination. I think that despite that, it still worked out all right.
Most of the changes to Bucky via the heart game will be temporary, as I'd rather play him developing more organically for the most part.
Feel free to ask here if you have any questions about the heart!