Trial of Hearts

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At a Swiss prestigious BLUE IVY UNIVERSITY, where ambition calcifies into power, thirteen alumni are handpicked by a Secret Society each year to partake in the Trial of Hearts — a grande spectacle of a game of persuasion, betrayal, and an unforgettable high. The greatest honor, the sweetest absolution and fulfillment of desire, and the cruelest sentence. Lose and you're exposed, exiled, ruined beyond repair. It is told the thirteen receive six months to sharpen their knives until the game begins. This year's batch, however, bears different teeth. The alumnus whom everyone thought would win —the golden prodigy, the untouchable destiny— is found dead on a Sunday on chapel stone, throat opened like a second mouth, body arranged in perfect repose. A renaissance painting rendered in flesh and finale. No note. Only elegant violence, a statement written in absence, a rupture in the grand design. Now twelve remain, and the music has already changed its tune, for no one here is innocent.

THE MESSAGE IS CLEAR: SOMEONE HAS ALREADY PLAYED THEIR HAND.

THE TRIAL OF HEARTS is an original 21+ game-theory skeleton-based rp, featuring twelve of the university’s most brilliant and ambitious that are taking part in a Secret Society game. Inspired by The Secret History , The Atlas Six and Gossip Girl, the game’s limited run will unravel the obsessions, betrayals, and secrets of its players, and beg the question: Who will win this year's game?

THE TRIAL OF HEARTS is finally COMPLETE.

The candlelight was unkind to LACHLAN. It deepened the hollows beneath his eyes. Sorrow, it seemed, was the most faithful of his tenants. "I haven't slept in weeks." His voice fractured as he spoke. Time, that great promised mercy, had kept none of its promises at all. His brother's, COLIN's, face remained where it had always been: Precisely behind his eyes, permanent and irreplaceable. "It's my fault," he sighed at last. "All of it."

"You never told me." VINCENT stood mere steps away. He had always been cursed with too much curiosity. The particular, restless kind that transformed him into something of a bloodhound the moment he caught the scent of something buried. "You called, and said nothing. You knew I would find out eventually. Still, you said nothing."

"Is that why you abandoned me?" LACHLAN rasped, his love and resentment for VINCENT tightly intertwined. Betrayal laced every word, a beast that grew with abandonment. "You think I murdered my own brother?"

VINCENT narrowed his gaze. "You would not be here," he countered quietly, his words like two hands closing around the throat, "if you had nothing to hide."

LACHLAN's lungs seized. His vision blurred, and in the space where VINCENT had stood, his brother materialized. Pale, accusing, lips moving without sound: You killed me. You were too much of a coward to even warn me. He did not hear whatever VINCENT said next. He had stopped being in the room.

"Stop—" LACHLAN choked out, sudden tears cutting bright tracks down his face. "Please—"

Without a word, VINCENT drew a dagger. A leather bracelet coiled around the hilt, stamped with their initials, a memory of some former life in which they had both still believed in the word forever. He watched his closest friend unravel like worn rope. Slowly at first, and then all at once.

"Would you kill me too?" He held the dagger out, grip first. "If it came to it, if it helped you prove whatever it is you're so desperately trying to prove, would you?"

"No." LACHLAN's whole body trembled with the word. "I can't—I would never—this isn't—" You killed me. His brother returned, one finger raised and pointing. How can you live with yourself?

How could he? Even VINCENT had already decided who he was. Perhaps death was truly the last debt left. In one fluid motion, LACHLAN seized the dagger and reversed his grip. The blade pressed against his own throat, and the steel was foreign and terrible, and for one long and devastating breath—

"No!" VINCENT lunged, seized by the sudden, visceral terror of going too far. The dagger, slick with sweat and tears and the salt of grief, twisted between their grasps in a struggle both as brief as it was violent. The blade arced wild, a motion neither of them controlled, and opened VINCENT's throat in one clean slash. Crimson bloomed across his collar, spilling down the front of his uniform.

THE MIMIC — EXPOSED / THE SECRET

THE MIMIC didn't mean for them to die. But in that moment of panic, THE MIMIC made a choice and they didn't just dispose of the body. They became the missing person, adopting their identity, their connections, their entire life. THE MIMIC became a better version of them, and the original soul was swallowed whole, vanishing without a trace.

What began as desperate survival evolved into compulsion. Since then, THE MIMIC has "absorbed" multiple identities, each time their performance grew stale, each time the applause began to fade. They leave only mysterious disappearances in their wake. Every new identity brings fresh acclaim, fresh connections, fueling an addictive cycle of reinvention through elimination. Jealousy, perhaps, at the root of it all.

Somewhere in their home, a trail to their victims lies hidden: A ticking time bomb of evidence that could unravel everything. But the deepest terror isn't discovery. It's the quiet, creeping realization that after years of becoming other people, THE MIMIC sometimes can't remember who they were to begin with.

It was for this very reason that THE MIMIC confided in THE TRAGEDY, looking up to him the way a believer looks up to a God. He could see right through them, as he did with all the others. He could see the faces they wore, hear the voices they borrowed, read the mimicry threaded through their every movement. Unlike most, he appreciated their gift for camouflage and their hunger for gossip. And so he extended his hand, drawing them into THE TRIAL OF HEARTS, inviting them to his side in weaving the plot together.