[UA] The Boy in the Box

[Daniel Solis]

What if the players are working with the department of
human services as social workers. Maybe they've just
been hired by other social workers as private
investigators to gather evidence about the level of
abuse the kid's been taking. Hmm... it's an
interesting premise.

--- Stuart Anderson <stuartanderson at qwest.net> wrote:
>     I've got a thing I want to bounce around. I
> fairly
> recently got a new job after having been between
> gigs for a
> while. This situation has been kicking my ass and if
> I've
> committed to something on or off the list that
> hasn't been
> done, sorry, but that's why. But my first gig in my
> role as
> an Advocate for the Arc was to represent the
> interest of
> this young man from out in the Colorado outback. He
> has some
> profound cognitive and physical disabilities. He'd
> been in a
> foster home for a long time, and had some pretty
> challenging
> self-abusive behaviors--head-banging, biting, that
> sort of
> thing. His foster parents, through ignorance,
> ineptitude,
> and the cruelty bred from that, had developed ways
> to deal
> with the self-abuse that culminated in some of the
> most
> dreadful abuse I've ever been exposed to. When he
> was
> removed from the foster home, his teeth had been
> removed, he
> lived in wrist-to-waist shackles, he slept in a
> plywood box
> with a video camera in the top to "ensure
> supervision." the
> list goes on, but it's ugly and beside the point.
> The point
> is that I was in court, attempting to make sure that
> the boy
> didn't *return* to the home. As obvious as it might
> seem,
> legally, his placement away from that home was not a
> done
> deal.
>     The thing I kept coming back to in court was:
> why do
> these people want him back? Why *this* kid? If they
> are pure
> evil, as I had originally suspected, there is
> certainly no
> shortage of children to abuse. They could get their
> ya-yas
> on some other kid under less scrutiny. Was it a
> power thing
> with the Dept. of Human Services? Maybe. The Dept
> had done a
> pretty crappy job by this kid and maybe the foster
> parents
> wanted to tear them down a few pegs, out of pure
> spite and
> malice. But I could never get a read on them. There
> was just
> nothing there. I finally had to acknowledge that
> they had
> some twisted love for the boy. They were crazy as
> bedbugs
> and should never be around children in any way, but
> their
> motives weren't evil. The boy won't be going back
> there,
> btw.
>     Anyway--as with any profound paradox I
> encounter, when I
> give it enough time, it eventually trickles down
> into my
> UAverse. I kind of have this idea about a kid with
> more soul
> than his disabled body can contain. I guess I'd
> write him up
> more as a demon or a spirit form, with some
> limitations
> around having a still living body. He can
> communicate
> spiritually, if not cognitively. He can partially
> possess,
> observing through the other and exerting influence,
> if not
> control. He's a generally affable and good-natured
> soul,
> maybe a little mischievous. But over the years he
> realizes
> that his spirit is stronger when less connected to
> his body.
> He begins to assume more control over his largely
> ignorant
> foster parents. Like the old flagellants or sensory
> deprivation explorers, he finds strength in things
> most of
> us would find abusive. So he makes that happen,
> without
> really realizing what he's turning his foster
> parents into
> (soulless monsters.)
>     I want to do a kind of coming of age story with
> this,
> like Huck Finn or Catcher in the Rye. Partly to
> purge some
> of the evil I got on me during this case, and partly
> cause I
> think it's cool. But I need a loose thread for the
> PCs to
> tug on, some way to get them involved. I think I
> want to
> have the foster parents have become very bad, and
> the boy
> can't quite reign them back in. He wants to keep
> them at his
> side, but they have to stop some intolerable
> behavior--most
> likely similar abuse to a different kid. He needs
> the PCs to
> help, but can't effectively communicate. If it were
> a
> one-shot, I think I'd set it in a farmhouse where
> some
> convicts (the PCs) have hidden out. Kind of
> Jailbreaky. I
> need a better campaign hook, though.
>     There're plenty of X-files hooks where the boy's
> abilities are manifesting as fortean phenomena and
> the
> players investigate. That's cheap, though, and I
> want to
> stay away from it. But I've committed the ultimate
> GM faux
> pas of coming up with a story that isn't really
> about the
> characters. Maybe that's what I want. What can the
> PCs gain
> from the resolution of this story, other than
> observing a
> bizarre coming of age? Any ideas? Do I have anything
> here
> other than an icky and disturbing premise? You
> fellas are
> usually pretty good at this.
> 
> _________________________________________________
> --Stu
> "He belonged to that particular race of men who
> were their adversaries' greatest champions." Eco
> http://www.users.qwest.net/~stuartanderson
> 
> 
> 
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> UA at lists.uchicago.edu
> http://lists.uchicago.edu/mailman/listinfo/ua


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