The Smile Room

The following is a Room of Renunciation that appeared in my current Unknown Armies campaign.

 

 

 

Agenda

The world is full of upsetting things. Every day, far too many upsetting, awful, unfair things go on for a sane mind to handle. Most people adapt to this through ignorance. They rationalize what they can and ignore the rest. Who has the energy to worry about climate change and sweat shops and sickness and war? We're all too busy with work, family obligations, and eking out what little pleasure we can.

 

Well, not all of us. There are those who keep as clear an eye on the big picture as possible. People who keep score, even though it's unpleasant, because someone has to hold the wrongdoers accountable. These vigilant types are the target of the Smile Room.

 

The people who care, who really care about all the world's injustices, are most often miserable. They sacrifice their blissful ignorance and ability to fit in with their peers, and what does it really get them? A higher blood pressure and a cynical worldview? The Smile Room exists to take that load off.

 

But what's just as important (as far as the Smile Room is concerned) as the bleeding heart is the standoffish loneliness that comes with it. The angst is intertwined with the compassion. To calm people down, you need to bring them in among the flock. To sand down the rough edges, you need to douse the fire in their hearts.

 

Among the Smile Room's targets are a range of individuals, from radicalized conspiracy theorists who scream at the sheeple to wake up, to religious fanatics who see nonbelievers as irredeemable heathens, to activists who are sick to death of their anticapitalist warnings falling on deaf ears. Through the workings of the Smile Room, all these and more can be rendered happy and docile.

 

 

Appearance

The Smile Room can manifest behind any door, so long as a potential victim opens it. It most often does so while they are alone, especially if they are fatigued or have a lot on their mind. Its interior resembles a dingy basement crossed with a dentist's office, with a weird clown motif thrown in for good measure.

 

Grime and dust coat the walls and all the surfaces between them. Beneath that coating are decorations - paintings of grinning clowns and brightly colored phrases such as "BIG SMILES EVERYONE!" and "TURN THAT FROWN UPSIDE DOWN!"

 

The room is fairly small, about fifteen by twenty feet. The floor has a slight, uneven slant, but  it's impossible to pinpoint exactly which way that slant is angled, which is quite disorienting. At the center of the room is a grotty dentist's chair. The chair has ten mechanical arms folded up on its back, and a variety of dentist's tools and equipment built into its armrests and laden on the shelves of a large, steel cabinet against the back wall.

 

There is a round, 10-inch tall mirror hanging from the ceiling by an angled metal pole, facing the chair. Its surface is so filthy that it doesn't reflect anything. The mirror's frame resembles a clown's face; the mirror itself is set between the clown's gnashing teeth.

 

From some unseen speaker, upbeat, juvenile music fills the room. It's off-key, echoey, and incessant. It sounds like someone mixed the soundtrack of a TV show aimed at toddlers with some truly awful EDM. There are about a dozen different tracks that play on a loop.

 

Each corner of the room has a putrid-smelling drain in the floor. Those who've been subjected to the Smile Room's renunciation have used them as latrines in the past. They seem to be bottomless. Each one is about three inches in diameter.

 

 

Abilities

The Smile Room has the following tools to aid it in its mission of turning burnt-out loners who care too much for their own good into placid, smiling sycophants. Note that the Smile Room makes no accommodation for its victims' biological needs; hunger and thirst will pose a problem for the stubborn ones.

 

Earworm. Every time the Smile Room cycles through its bouncy little playlist, it gets a little less noticeable and a little less insipid. Each run through takes about 45 minutes. After somewhere between eight and twelve listens (depending on the taste of the victim), it fades into the background completely, though the victim may find themselves involuntarily nodding or tapping their feet to the beat. Realizing you've come to like this absolute dreck might be cause for a Self (1-3) check. Additionally, once a victim becomes comfortable with the music, they get a 10% penalty on any rolls relating to resisting or escaping the Smile Room.

 

Numbing Agent. If a victim sits in the chair, they're immediately injected with a magickal anesthetic by two of its mechanical arms. This concoction (which the chair has an unlimited supply of) works very gradually. After a minute, a victim will feel tingly at the extremities. After half an hour, it will have the same effects as a dose of anesthetic that one might receive before oral surgery. This keeps building up, however, both physically and psychologically. After three hours, a victim will feel nothing, physically or emotionally.

 

Dental Torture. Once a victim has been injected with the anesthetic, four more of the chair's arms pin them in place: one by the throat, two by the wrists, and one by the waist. Then the last four arms get to work. They pick up dentist's instruments seemingly at random and go to town on the inside of the victim's mouth. The victim can struggle against this, but that's ultimately just going to get their face torn to shreds. This initial stage of torture calls for a Violence (4-5) check.

 

The torture is calibrated to maximize pain while minimizing lasting harm. Teeth might be pried out only to be agonizingly reattached, perhaps even switching sides of the mouth in the process. Nothing the arms do will leave permanent, visible damage. That said, when all is said and done, the character will have suffered 1d10 wounds, and their gums will be a mess for weeks. An odd side effect of the process is that the victim will end up with a perfectly healthy and clean set of teeth, regardless of what their dental hygiene and tooth count was like beforehand.

 

The anesthetic and hostile dentistry work together to create a desensitizing effect. At first, the pain will be unbearable, but by the time the arms stop flying in and out of the victim's mouth, they won't feel a thing, despite the blood dripping down their chin.

 

Mirror, Mirror. Once the dentistry is complete and the victim has a sparkling smile and the emotional capacity of a toaster, the anesthetic wears off and the chair's arms wipe the mirror clean. However, it doesn't reflect the victim's image as normal. It shows them a sequence of every time in their life they've been ostracized, dismissed, mocked, and so on. This prompts an Isolation (6-8) check. After that, they see another, longer slideshow of every time they've been socially accepted and included, padded for hours with images of possible futures if they comply with the vision of the Smile Room.

 

Goodie Bag. Once the second slideshow finishes, the chair releases the victim and gives them a plastic baggie containing floss picks, mini toothpaste tubes, a cheap, clown-themed plastic toy, twelve syringes, and a bottle of the special anesthetic the chair administers. The syringes are magickal, and will only inject the designated victim, and the anesthetic evaporates if removed from the bottle by any other means.

 

The anesthetic can negate an Isolation or Self check if a dose is administered within 30 seconds of the check's occurrence. However, it also drains the user of all emotions and cares for 1d10 hours.

 

 

Agents

The Smile Room's Agent is its persona in the real world, its beaming face to the general public. There is only one, who serves for as long as they can. Once an Agent gets too notorious to be effective, or gets too infirm or addled to carry on, they quietly retire and the room finds a replacement.

 

The Agent of the Smile Room gets the following powers:

Welcoming Entrance. The Smile Room's Ritual of Renunciation works on any door to a public or communal place, so long as the Agent is holding it open to usher someone else through first. They could use it on the front door or elevator of an apartment building, but not a specific person's apartment.

Net Empathy. By rolling their Agent identity, the Smile Room's servant can magickally sense the average mood of any group of five or more people, as well as detect any extreme outliers. This allows them to easily locate spiteful misanthropes at parties before they start breaking things, or single out the attendees at corporate meetings who are still riding the high from the really good sex they had the night before. 

 

Adaptive Irritation. The Agent can alter themself to draw the ire of a prospective victim. This lets them change physically, including age, clothing, posture, odor, and ethnicity. It also temporarily gives them an identity rated equally to the identity they had renounced by the Smile Room. With this identity comes appropriate beliefs, knowledge, and capabilities. The Agent's loyalty to the Smile Room remains, and they can remove the temporary identity at will. Otherwise, it lasts for a number of hours equal to the roll of their Agent identity when they activate it.

 

Patrick Branham, Agent of the Smile Room

Lots of people hate kids. Many grow out of it as they age, even having children of their own in a lot of cases. The others just learn to avoid them and roll their eyes at all the "precious" baby photos. Patrick was different. When he was a child himself, he was always told he was "mature for his age", an "old soul" who kept the company of his elders rather than his peers whenever he could.  He was bullied a lot at school.

 

As a young adult, he was often enraged by people his own age throwing the best part of their lives away to raise families. When his own brother, Nathan, had his first daughter at age 22, Patrick wanted to disown him. However, the family bond won out, and Patrick found himself spending an uncomfortable amount of time with the newborn Emily.

 

This had a toxic effect on his development. Patrick switched specializations in medical school to pediatric dentistry, and before he was thirty he had his own practice. At the same time, he was tormenting little Emily behind her parents' backs whenever he could, gradually shaping her to hate adults as much as he hated children.

 

This wasn't enough for Patrick, however. He took his decidedly unhealthy anger out on his patients as well. He became obsessed with inflicting maximal suffering on kids without being found out. He learned a lot about the enemy, decorating his practice with the superheroes and princesses in vogue at the time, luring them in with a surprisingly deep understanding of Minecraft and Tiktok. He became obsessed with youth culture as a weapon against those very same youths.

 

Eventually, some of his handiwork was traced back to him, and the allegations flew like fireworks on the fourth of July. Patrick wound up in prison, narrowly dodging some false accusations of sexual assault that had been thrown in for good measure. While there, a dopey man named Charlie who was in for kidnapping (though he claimed he was innocent) offered Patrick a way out. The rest is history.

 

As an Agent of Renunciation, Patrick is pleasantly neutral on kids. He doesn't want to have any of his own, but long car rides with Emily are uneventful (he's on thin ice with his family, but they're serious about that familial bond! Besides, he's proven really easy to rehabilitate since his "release" from prison). 

 

Patrick has really upped the dental torture aspect of the Smile Room, making modifications to the chair in much of his free time. His targets tend to be adults most of the time, if only to avoid suspicion from the law. 

 

Outside of his weird hatred of kids, Patrick was able to fit into society pretty well before he was put through the Smile Room. He didn't have any other outstanding quirks or bad habits to reform. There is an odd void where all his anger used to be, but so far his role as Agent has helped fill that for the most part. He currently works as a waiter at an upscale Italian restaurant, where his Agent powers help him find new victims.

 

Stats:

Personality: Generically affable and perpetually agreeable. Maybe a little awkward around kids, but in that way lonely bachelors sometimes are. 

Obsession: Smoothing out antipathy. So many people are needlessly upset at others; can't we all just get along?

Wound Threshold: 50.

Rage Stimulus: When people lash out for no good reason.

Noble Stimulus: World peace. Let's make it happen, people!

Fear Stimulus: People who hate him for what "the Old Patrick" did.

Smiling Agent 65%: Casts rituals, casts gutter magick, allows the use of Net Empathy and Adaptive Irritation (see above).

Bland 50%: Substitutes for Connect, Protects Self, Protects Isolation.

Reformed Dentist 55%: Substitutes for Knowledge, Coerces Helplessness, Medical.

 

Possessions:

A black waiter's uniform, a supply of lidocaine recovered from his old practice, a couple hundred dollars in accumulated tips, and a mix of dentist's and mechanic's equipment for working on the chair in the Smile Room.