A rock comes sailing through the open window
From Create Your Own Story
Your reminiscing is interrupted as a rock lands with a loud thud on the floor, inches from your head. The kids are playing their second favourite game, kill the weird girl upstairs. You rise with a growl from your straw mattress and stomp crankily to the window to shout something down about respect and dangerous games in the mix of Istrian and Venetian that is your mother tongue, and which you know the children don't understand a word of. They only shriek and laugh at your disheveled appearance until their mother comes out and chases them into the house, brandishing a cast-iron pan.
"She's a fine woman," you mumble to yourself as you absentmindedly reach under your ragged nightgown to scratch your bedbug bites and, having blown your hair back out of your eyes, stare out the window for a few moments. The docks may be full of immigrants and drunken sailors, and the houses may all be infested with insects, rats and worse, but the view is admittedly quite nice. At this early hour the sun has just begun to rise behind you, casting a glow across the water, and the docks are still quiet and peaceful. On clear days you tell yourself you can almost see across the Adriatic (your understanding of geography is quite poor), to the distant coast where you think you'll find the clue you need to unravel the mystery that has consumed you for the past 13 years of your life. Whether you'll ever get there, or even out of your squalid room in this dank old hovel you call home, where the ratio of vermin to humans is staggering, depends on the choices you make from this point onward.
You decide to:
