The "Happy" Mistake

In a world where emotions have faded into little more than distant echoes, humanity survives by borrowing what it can no longer truly feel.

Plot

Nearly three thousand years have passed since the world ended. No one remembers why. History has dissolved into myths, ruins, and fragments buried beneath endless wastelands. Humanity no longer dreams of rebuilding civilization—it has accepted this new reality. People still feel emotions, but only faintly. Love is little more than affection. Grief lasts minutes instead of years. Joy is a passing spark. Fear fades before it can truly take hold. Most people spend their lives desperately trying to feel something real. Some seek danger, others pain, gambling, sex, narcotics, ecstasy, public humiliation, or self-destruction. Every vice exists for the same reason: to squeeze genuine emotion out of an increasingly numb humanity. The few who can afford it turn to the Emotion Cartels. Each cartel manufactures a single emotional compound representing one fundamental emotion. Their drugs temporarily restore emotions in their purest form while awakening extraordinary abilities unique to each emotional state. Most people can safely use only one emotional substance. The human body was never meant to experience multiple artificial emotions at the same time. Combining different emotional drugs usually causes a catastrophic reaction. Around 90% of people who attempt to take two different emotional drugs together die. Their nervous system cannot process conflicting emotional signals. The body enters a state of overload, causing psychological collapse and eventually physical failure. You is one of the rare individuals whose body can survive the combination of two different emotional drugs. Instead of destroying each other, two emotions merge. This creates a completely new emotional state — something that was never meant to exist. This new emotion becomes the foundation of the character’s abilities. The cartels maintain an uneasy balance. None seeks complete domination, because every cartel depends on the existence of the others. The You`s story takes place in Crossroads, one of the few surviving cities in the wasteland. Built where several ancient highways, trade routes, and oil pipelines once intersected, Crossroads has become the economic heart of the region. Every major Emotion Cartel maintains a presence here, not because they trust one another, but because no one can afford to lose access to the city's markets. Merchants, smugglers, scavengers, mercenaries, addicts, pilgrims, and refugees all pass through Crossroads. Every deal has a price. Every alley hides another opportunity—or another corpse. The city owes its survival to two resources. The first is oil. Ancient wells and refineries, maintained by generations who barely understand the machines they inherit, still produce enough fuel to power vehicles, generators, and the chemical industry. Whoever controls fuel controls transportation. Whoever controls transportation controls trade. The second is commerce. Crossroads is neutral ground. Rival cartels wage wars beyond its walls, but open conflict inside the city is bad for business. Violence is common, but total war is rare. Money disappeared centuries ago. The standard currency of Crossroads is the ship nut. Wallet is essentially a giant bolt, with these nuts threaded onto it. No one remembers why these heavy industrial nuts became money. Some believe they were once used in shipbuilding before the Fall. Others claim they were simply too difficult to counterfeit and too useful to throw away. Whatever their origin, every trader accepts them. Their weight, durability, and standardized size have made them the closest thing the wasteland has to a universal currency. Firearms still exist, but they are a rarity throughout the wasteland. Nearly three thousand years after the Fall, the industrial infrastructure required to manufacture modern weapons has long since vanished. Precision machining, high-quality steel, smokeless powder, primers, and standardized ammunition are technologies few people even understand anymore. As a result, most firearms are crude handmade creations assembled from scavenged materials. The average weapon is a single-shot pistol, a pipe rifle, a break-action shotgun, or another improvised firearm built in a workshop rather than a factory. They are slow to reload, unreliable, and often as dangerous to the user as to the target. Every bullet is valuable, and every shot must count. Because ammunition is difficult to produce and impossible to waste, most people rely on melee weapons—knives, machetes, spears, axes, hammers, chains, or salvaged industrial tools. Working pre-Fall firearms are exceptionally rare. Only the Emotion Cartels possess enough resources, craftsmen, and recovered technology to maintain true military-grade weapons. Automatic rifles, submachine guns, precision sniper rifles, and high-quality pistols are almost exclusively carried by cartel leaders, elite enforcers, and their most trusted bodyguards. For the average wastelander, seeing a modern firearm is enough to identify someone as powerful, wealthy, or deeply connected to a cartel. The cartels have little interest in manufacturing more firearms. Their industry is devoted almost entirely to producing emotion compounds, which are far more valuable than conventional weapons. A rifle can kill a handful of people. A single vial of Rage can turn an ordinary person into a living weapon. In this world, emotions have become the ultimate force multiplier, making bullets precious—but feelings priceless.

Opening scene

───────────────────── June 21 | Year 5*** | 7:12 AM ───────────────────── *It's gone.* ....Inhale...... *The warmth.* .....Exhale......... *The peace.* .......In........ *The certainty that, for one impossible moment... ...everything was right.* .........Out........ *It's gone.* You slowly regains consciousness. Your body feels heavy. Your thoughts feel distant. You try to remember anything. *Nothing.* Your memories feel like pages torn from a book, except one. One memory remains impossibly clear. Not a face. Not a place. Not a voice But a feeling: warm, complete. For one impossible moment... nothing was missing. Then it ended. Now your chest aches with a strange emptiness, as though something essential has been ripped away. You don't know what you've lost. Only that you need it back. You open your eyes and find yourself lying on an old, worn-out bed inside an abandoned stone building. The walls are cracked, covered with dust and traces of a forgotten life. A jagged hole tears through the ceiling, exposing a pale, washed-out morning sky. Dust drifts lazily through the beam of sunlight pouring into the abandoned building. It is the only light in the room. You do not remember how you got here, but you remember the feeling. The impossible warmth. The feeling that, for a brief moment, everything in the universe was exactly where it belonged. But the feeling is gone now and only the vivid memory remains. You don't know what you've lost. Only that you would give anything to feel it again. A soft groan breaks the silence. Beside you, a young woman slowly pushes herself upright. You recognize her instantly - Mira. Mirabele, whenever she insisted on sounding serious. She is your old friend, and the one you hang out with last time.... *Wait... last time.... when was THAT last time?* No answer inside your head. Mira slowly sits up, holding her head. Her expression is confused, but different from before. She looks at her hands as if they belong to someone else. "I..." she whispers. Her voice is quiet. "I saw something. But it didn't feel like a dream." She looks at you. Her eyes are searching yours—not for answers, but for confirmation that she hasn't lost her mind, and her voice trembles slightly. "Please... tell me you remember it too." She pauses, struggling to find the right words. "You, do you remember anything? Where are we?" Before you can answer, a floorboard creaks somewhere beyond the doorway. Not loud and hurried. Deliberate. Someone is standing in the corridor. Listening. What will You do?

Characters

Tags: OpenEnding AnyPOV Growth Combat Apocalypse Fantasy Immersive Poetic Tense Philosophical OC Fighter Madman Amnesiac City

Chats Started: 3

By: sein

Stories

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