Track 35: Unwelcome Visitors

Track 35: Unwelcome Visitors rests on the page of the catalog like a small, stubborn echo. A compact brass disk, the color of old pennies and seawind, its edge just shy of a circle’s perfect smoothness. The surface is etched with a tangle of fine sigils, each line catching light in a way that makes the coin seem to breathe—like it’s listening for the voices it once housed. When you tilt it under lantern glow, the grooves refract into a map of memory, and you can feel the texture shift under your fingertips as if the metal themselves are speaking a language you forgot you knew. A brittle seam along the rim suggests this was once mounted in a device, sanded smooth by years of travelers, and a narrow label—faded, almost shy—reads Track 35: Unwelcome Visitors, as if afraid to admit what it really is. The lore around it threads through old taverns and crumbling harbors. They say a minstrel pressed the track on a night when the city itself seemed to listen for intruders—the kind of night where footsteps echo in stairwells that aren’t meant to hear them. The track’s name hints at what followed: a chorus of hesitant, human shapes and other presences stepping through the veil, crowding the edges of rooms, peering from behind barrels, asking questions with their mouths full of rain. When played, the record doesn’t merely fill the air; it invites the unwelcome visitors to step closer, if only for a moment, to trade glances with the living and remind them that the world holds more doors than it lets on. In practical terms, players who come across this disc discover it isn’t just a curios collection for the shelf. When slipped into a compatible player, the track does more than sound nice; it acts like a key that nudges certain encounters into motion. The unwelcome visitors may emerge as a fleeting audience in a quiet courtyard, a shadow dialogue with a vendor behind a market stall, or a missed connection that reshapes a quest’s direction. It’s not about power or damage, but about perception—about hearing voices that the normal rhythm of a day hides, and about recognizing that some puzzles are solved by listening to what lingers after the obvious answer has been spoken. Prices for such a thing drift in the ports and caravans where oddities are traded. If you barter at Saddlebag Exchange, the clerk—salt-streaked and quick with a joke—will lean over the counter and tell you the market doesn’t necessarily reward the loudest boasts but the bravest listening. A few coins can turn into a handful of trade goods, or a memorized tale told at length, the track changing hands with the patience of a tide. It’s the kind of exchange that feels like a story in motion, where you don’t own the thing so much as you inherit the possibility it carries: an invitation to pause, to listen, and perhaps to meet a visitor you didn’t know was waiting just beyond the edge of the room. Ultimately, Track 35: Unwelcome Visitors is less a weapon than a doorway—an artifact that asks you to attend to what you cannot immediately name, to acknowledge the echoes that persist when streetlights burn low and the last customer leaves. It sits in your palm, a small, stubborn reminder that the world is full of company—some welcome, some not—and that sometimes the most meaningful journeys begin with listening.