Marbletown, Florida

>>784090
>Check pockets

>>784125
You rifle through your pockets, ending up with a small handful of items; A stick of gum, an unidentifiable vehicle key, a small bronze key, pocket lint, $0.53 in assorted coinage, and a crumpled note. You can drop or use these items at any time, putting them back into your pockets.

Carefully opening the crumpled note, it reads the following: "Call ###-###-#### for more information ~Karl". You spot a payphone near the bowling alley entrance, but question if you have enough money to make a worthwhile call.

As you search your pockets, a lone black sedan rolls slowly down the road, the headlights casting an eerie glow as they gloss over the environment in its path.

>Go to payphone
>Go into bowling alley
>Investigate truck
>Investigate billboard
>Walk to road
>Chase after car

>>784137
May we have some backstory for our character?

>>784137
I second the backstory request. Can our character recall his past?

>>784138
>>784142
Faint memories drift through your head, but nothing specific comes to mind. You recall your "landmark" memory, as you named it, of wandering around a wooded area near your house as a kid. The sights, the smells, the bright sun slicing through the tree branches in the early morning come rushing back to you. This is the memory you always fall back to when thinking of your childhood, a fond yet simple one embedded forever inside you.

"It's like a hash check, but for humans!" You remember your friend saying, when you told him about your landmark. "It's a good memory integrity check. I think everyone has one. Anyways, you heard about the recent..." The memory drifted off as the situation became less important, and wasn't saved. What was his name, anyways? Gerard? Gerald? The computer guy.

Focusing on remembering, your last memory before appearing here was slowly coming to you. Ever so slightly, scenes drifted into your head one by one, pieces to a larger puzzle. Eating dinner with everyone. Getting ready for bed. And...

Just as you started to get a grip, it all slipped away. It'll probably come back to you, you do feel pretty hazy right now.

>Go to payphone
>Go into bowling alley
>Investigate truck
>Investigate billboard
>Walk to road

Woohoo, diethanol trimene!

>>784160
>Go to payphone
We probably don't have enough money on us to make a decent call right now, but better to check and find that we're right than to assume we're right and feel stupid when it turns out we were wrong.

>>784160
>Investegate mysterious and seemingly abandoned truck.

I don't know about you but I can't see any way this could go wrong.

>>784179
The key in our pocket probably goes to that truck. That's probably our truck.

>>784160
>Investigate truck

Candy time

>>784169
Walking to the payphone, your steps echo around against the building the closer you get. Stepping into the booth, you can tell it's a very run-down payphone with more than a decade of abuse in its lifetime. Despite this, the indicator light still begrudgingly displays "BE L S UTH", name of the apparent provider of the landline service.

You can make a call, attempt to make a free call using a trick you once heard, or pick up the handset simply to see if the booth is functioning as intended.

Standing inside the booth, the doors to the bowling alley are only a few feet away. Thick metal doors separate you from the inside, but do not appear to be locked in any way to prevent entry. You can now see through the small porthole windows at their tops too, although only vaguely without approaching them closer.

>>784179
Stepping out of the phone booth, you walk back across the parking lot to the small sunset-red colored truck situated quietly in the dark, away from any streetlight. Getting closer and closer, it becomes apparent that there's a large amount of blood on the front bumper and grille on the otherwise pristine exterior.

Reaching the driver side door, you pull on the handle and find it's locked, but that the key you found earlier slides right in and unlocks the cab. The interior light springs to life, revealing the contents of the inside as following; Truck owner's manual on the passenger side seat, assorted papers scattered throughout, an out of shape clothing hangar behind the seats, napkins and a snub nose .38 with one bullet in the glove box. You can access these items at any time, but can only carry one at a time unless you acquire a bag of any type.

>Try to crank truck with key
>Investigate billboard
>Go to payphone booth again
>Go into bowling alley
>Walk to road

>>784427
>Go into bowling alley

>>784427
>Go to payphone booth again
We can try the coin return maybe we'll get lucky.

>>784621
Pushing through the two sets of glass doors, you stroll into the warmly lit bowling alley. Dirty vaguely-purplish carpeting extends from the entrance to the seating area, where a wooden floor begins.

A strange silence fills the area, not a single person in sight. Only the faint hum of a heater is heard around the corner, a drink cooler whirring slowly nearby. A chill shoots down your spine, despite the warmer temperature inside this building.

>>789163
Instinct kicking in, you turn to leave and grab to pull open the first glass door to exit.

As the seal breaks and cold air rushes at your body from the outside, you hear the sounds of a bowling ball rolling down a lane, and striking pins in closure.

You snap your head around instantly, the jarring sounds catching you off-guard in the presumed empty alley. Ducking behind the bowling alley's register counter to your right, you creep along its edge to the other end in attempt to see whoever, or whatever, just bowled a strike.

Coming to the other edge, able to see around both corners now at all of the lanes in the alley, you see at the very first lane all the way to the left of the building from the entrance, is a man in cowboy attire waking away from Lane 1 patting his hands as a bowling ball is heard coming through the ball return under the lane.

He looks directly at you, despite being well-hidden behind the unlit counter area.

"Maybe you shouldn't be here. Just a thought, is all."

He tips his hat at you from afar, and walks through a doorway off to the side, leaving your line of sight.

>Follow the strange guy
>Investigate elsewhere in the alley
>Exit back to the phone booth
>Go back to the truck

>>790040
Definitely go back to truck

>>790040
This is spooky as fuck actually.

>>790601
Waiting for a few moments in tense silence, you stay ducked and nearly smash into the glass doors on your way out. Disoriented, and unnerved to the bone, you sprint back out to the truck and fumble with the key once more.

Unlocking it, you keep an eye on the doors of the bowling alley the whole time. Right now would be an absolutely great time to ensure you have a working vehicle, so you jam the key into the ignition and crank it all the way.

The truck comes to life, the gas indicator landing right in the middle of the dial. Turning on the headlights, they flick on and shine brightly onto the stretch of empty pavement in the parking lot.

>Turn truck off and exit the vehicle
>Drive truck on the road (take a left)
>Drive truck on the road (take a right)

>>791470
>Turn truck off and exit the vehicle
>Go back to the payphone booth again
I'm not about to let someone in shitkickers spook me into leaving a place without legitimately demonstrating why I shouldn't be there. Now we have a number to call; I say we focus on that and stop constantly trying to go in two different directions every time we move to do anything.

>>791561
Reaching to turn the truck back off, the radio springs to life at a blaring volume. Channel static booms through the speakers, a level causing pain to your ears almost instantly.

Scrambling your hands to the volume dial, you desperately turn it both ways, the rotations you make with it having no affect on the volume from the radio. Opting to try and turn the truck off as originally planned, you turn the key all the way off.

It doesn't turn the truck off.

Trying again, you falsely imitate "cranking" the vehicle and switching the keys off again. No change, the truck persists with the painfully loud static and refuses to shut off. The truck cab light overhead flickers, worsening the already chaotic situation.

Thinking quick on trying to defuse the situation, you assume an electrical fault in the vehicle has occurred, and opt to pop the hood and attempt to disconnect the battery. Grasping for the hood lever underneath the steering wheel, your hand finds purchase and pulls, the hood popping up in response.

Moving to open the door, your eyes return back to the entrance of the bowling alley.

The shadowy figure of the cowboy is seen underneath the canopy overhang, the light that illuminated the tiny driveway underneath it no longer shining. He stands, hands on hips, staring and motionless at the truck, presumably at you yourself.

Despite being inside a mostly soundproof vehicle, no doors or windows ajar, and being nowhere near the strange man, his voice speaks to you as if he was right beside you.

"Now that just wasn't very nice, was it?"

The light over the canopy flickers once, like a flash of lightning shining on the cowboy in the darkness that filled the area.

>Run away in the opposite direction
>Open the door and continue with disconnecting the battery
>Grab the gun, try to fire at the man
>Try to drive the truck into the man, and unavoidably, the building consequently

>>797519
>Open the door and continue with disconnecting the battery
Great, evidently he's psychokinetic and telepathic.