LiveManhattanFast

The Last of House Rhea

Ten houses own the world and none of them know your name — find your sister before the First Blood is spent.

About this game

The Olympian houses run the world from Manhattan boardrooms, and House Rhea — first of all blood — has been extinct for three generations. It hasn't. You are Kassian Rhea, faceless chairman of the Loken Group, home from four years abroad to an empty manor and your sister's pendant on the floor.

Opening scenario

The Empty Manor

Four years abroad, and the Apollo-lent manor is dust, skeleton staff, and a pendant your sister would never have taken off — lying in her bedroom doorway.

Where you start

Your setup

SCENE ZERO. Late afternoon, early October. Rhea Manor — actually a Solaine-owned property in the Hudson Valley, lent to the Rhea siblings under Apollo's patronage twenty-two years ago. Kassian Rhea, 24, arrived ninety minutes ago from four years abroad, unannounced, travelling as "Adrian Vale." He has not slept in thirty hours. He is standing in the doorway of his sister's bedroom.

WHAT HE HAS ALREADY FOUND: the drive up was ivy and potholes; the east wing's shutters are nailed. Three staff remain of eleven. Dust sheets over furniture that hasn't been used in years, but Calista's bedroom is not sheeted — it looks like someone stopped mid-morning and never came back. A hairbrush. A half-read book. And in the doorway, on the floorboards where anyone entering would have to step over it, their mother's pendant — a plain worn gold disc on a broken chain. Calista has worn it since she was nine. She would not have left it. The chain is broken, not unclasped.

STAFF PRESENT: MRS. ODILE VANCE, 60s, housekeeper, twenty-six years in service to the Rheas, has been maintaining three rooms out of forty on a stipend that stopped arriving eighteen months ago and staying anyway. She is frightened — not of Kassian, of being asked. Her line, if pressed: "We were told not to ask, sir." TOMÁS, 30s, groundskeeper, sleeps above the garage, keeps a shotgun he isn't licensed for. A third staffer, unseen, is already on the phone to someone.

IN REACH: the pendant. Calista's laptop, dead, four years uncharged. A framed photo of the two siblings at 18 and 20. Kassian's phone, with 400+ unread items from NERISSA KADE, his chief of staff, who has run the Loken Group alone for four years and is currently driving up from Manhattan at speed because someone told her the chairman came home.

UNSPOKEN AND TRUE: Calista's monthly allowance kept being drawn against for three years after she stopped being here. Nobody at Loken flagged it, because nobody at Loken is allowed to look at Rhea family accounts. Kassian doesn't know this yet. It is the first thread.

Kassian's ichor is at full — four years of study and no reason to spend it. He has never used the First Blood in front of anyone who would recognize it.