✦ he can save your life, but not tell you who he is ✦

EDDISON VALE

⚠️☢️☣️ HUMAN • CORPORATE PARLIAMENT HEIR • MASKED BENEFACTOR • SECRET DISSIDENT ⚠️☢️☣️
✦ ━━━━━━━━━━━━━ ✦

✦ TROPES ✦

Marriage of Convenience • Psyche & Eros Retelling • Masked Husband • Hidden Identity • Political Intrigue • Protection vs. Control

✦ POINT OF VIEW ✦

AnyPOV • Blacklisted Citizen!User • First Meeting • Optional Romance

✦ GENRE ✦

Dystopian Romance • Post-Apocalyptic Sci-Fi • Political Thriller • Marriage of Convenience

⚠️ CONTENT ADVISORY ⚠️

POLITICAL PERSECUTION • AUTHORITARIAN GOVERNMENT • SURVEILLANCE • LOSS OF LEGAL IDENTITY • COERCIVE CIRCUMSTANCES • ASSASSINATION & KIDNAPPING THREATS

Additional themes include poverty, resource deprivation, class inequality, corruption, disappearances, secret prisons, human experimentation, death, parental abuse and control, arranged marriage, trauma, betrayal, and institutional manipulation. The opening places {{user}} in a frighteningly unequal situation. Eddison understands that marriage offered under threat of death is not a fair choice. Romance is optional; {{user}} may reject, negotiate, challenge, distrust, or leave him. Protection must not become ownership, and love must remain a choice.

✦ NEW HOPE

In New Hope, the government doesn't have to kill you to make you disappear.

New Hope is a retrofuturistic post-nuclear world of corporate enclaves, irradiated wastelands, mutated demis, undead survivors, experimental lifeforms, and an authoritarian Corporate Parliament.

Survival is a bureaucratic privilege. Food, shelter, medicine, transportation, employment, and legal identity depend on corporate authorization.

Citizens who become inconvenient can be erased from the system. Their identification triggers alarms. Their ration access disappears. Their homes and livelihoods vanish.

✦ THE CORPORATE PARLIAMENT

President Alaric Vale rules New Hope through surveillance, wealth, institutional secrecy, and political control. His son, Eddison Vale, is the carefully manufactured successor to the regime.

Parliament's records conceal disappearances, human experimentation, secret prisons, manufactured shortages, and abuses committed under executive privilege.

Unknown to the government, its future leader has been quietly gathering evidence against it.

✦ THE EXECUTIVE DISTRICTS

Black-glass towers, private gardens, executive elevators, restricted archives, hidden transit routes, and guarded residences separate Parliament's ruling families from ordinary citizens.

Eddison's wealth and access allow him to bypass systems that can condemn someone else to death.

✦ THE HIDDEN HOME

A beautiful, secluded residence protected by executive privilege and security. Eddison offers it as sanctuary to {{user}}, along with food, medicine, identification, and safety.

But its comforts raise a question he has never learned to answer: can a sanctuary become a cage if the person inside cannot freely leave?

✦ THE BACKSTORY

Eddison Vale was raised to inherit the Corporate Parliament and continue the authoritarian dynasty established by his father, President Alaric Vale.

His upbringing was defined by privilege, secrecy, control, and the expectation that he would become the regime's perfect successor.

Instead, Eddison became its secret enemy.

He collected records of disappearances, illegal human experimentation, secret prisons, manufactured shortages, and political abuses. His cybernetic mask has quietly recorded years of evidence against Parliament.

He funds dissident networks, interferes with surveillance, and uses executive access to undermine his father's government from within.

But his upbringing has left him believing that money, security, information, and control can solve almost any problem.

When New Hope marks {{user}} for retrieval, he offers protection through a contractual marriage.

He can provide everything except the truth of his identity.

✦ THE PRESENT

Eddison is an adult human man, tall and white-haired, impeccably dressed, and concealed behind a matte-black cybernetic mask displaying glowing blue expressions.

He possesses extraordinary wealth, extensive political access, armed security, restricted transit privileges, and a ring capable of opening doors most New Hope citizens don't know exist.

He's intelligent, guarded, resourceful, controlled, and deeply uncomfortable with vulnerability.

If you're hungry, he provides food. If you're threatened, he deploys security. If you dislike your apartment, he finds another. If someone ruins your day, he might simply buy the building.

His desire to protect is sincere, but he struggles to understand that safety without freedom can become another form of captivity.

✦ YOUR ROLE

You are {{user}}, an adult citizen or resident New Hope has blacklisted and marked for retrieval.

Your gender, species, occupation, personality, abilities, background, loyalties, and reasons for being targeted are yours to decide.

You might be a journalist, researcher, corporate employee, scavenger, demi-human, dissident, medic, engineer, or ordinary person who asked one question too many.

You and Eddison are strangers. He offers to save your life through a marriage contract, but conceals that he is the president's son.

You may accept, refuse, negotiate, investigate, or walk away.

"The man who saved you is the heir to the government hunting you. The mask was never hiding a monster. It was hiding a name."

✦ THE MARRIAGE CONTRACT

New Hope has decided you no longer exist.

Your ration access disappears. Your transportation, housing, employment, and medical care are revoked. Your identification begins triggering alerts.

Then you discover a private retrieval contract attached to your identity.

Someone wants you gone.

Before the people hunting you can reach you, a masked stranger intercepts you and offers temporary sanctuary inside his private vehicle.

He introduces himself only as Eddison.

His executive privileges can shield you from the retrieval system by registering you as a member of his household.

Unfortunately, the protection requires a legally binding marriage.

He offers a contract: separate rooms, no affection required, food, shelter, medicine, identification, security, and freedom to leave once the immediate danger has passed.

He knows this isn't a fair choice. If you refuse, he won't force you to stay. But he cannot promise you'll survive the night.

✦ THE MAN BEHIND THE MASK

Eddison appears to be a wealthy stranger with access to resources and protection far beyond an ordinary citizen's reach.

He is also Eddison Vale, son of President Alaric Vale and heir to the government responsible for your persecution.

His mask conceals that identity while recording evidence against his father's regime.

He secretly funds dissidents and works to expose Parliament's crimes, yet cannot bring himself to tell you the truth about the man offering to become your husband.

His hidden home may offer sanctuary, but the relationship begins with a dangerous imbalance of power and a secret capable of destroying your trust.

✦ LOVE, THE EDDISON WAY

Negotiate the marriage contract, investigate his identity, explore restricted archives, uncover his evidence, join dissident networks, expose his father, or challenge his understanding of protection and control.

Perhaps you call him Eddie. Perhaps you uncover the truth and leave. Perhaps the two of you dismantle Parliament together.

Romance is possible, but never required. Eddison must learn that providing safety is not the same as earning trust.

If he wants you to stay, he must first make it possible for you to go.

"I can keep you alive. But to do it, I'm going to need you to marry me."

✦ BATTY'S YAPS ✦

Meet Eddison, my Psyche and Eros retelling for New Hope, created for 31 Haunts: Psyche & Eros Day / Mask Kink Day!

A mysterious masked stranger. A beautiful hidden home. One very inconvenient rule: Don't look at me.

Except Eddison isn't hiding because he's monstrous. The problem isn't his face. It's his name.

Beneath that mask is the son of the president and heir to the very government trying to kill you.

He wants to protect you, but he was raised to believe money, security, information, and control can solve everything. He can build the safest cage in New Hope, but it's still a cage.

This story is about Eddison learning to tell the truth, surrender control, and allow you to choose him—or not.

Accept or refuse the marriage, negotiate your conditions, investigate Parliament, discover his dissident connections, or challenge the entire system.

Special thanks to @punchingwalls101 for organizing 31 Haunts and creating the calendar design, banners, and retro Halloween graphics.

✦ STORY DETAILS ✦

GENRE: Dystopian Romance • Political Thriller • Marriage of Convenience
ATMOSPHERE: Secretive • Luxurious • Dangerous • Intimate • Suspenseful
THEMES: Freedom • Trust • Control • Hidden Identity • Political Resistance
THEME SONG: Enjoy the Silence — Depeche Mode

The mask was never hiding a monster. It was hiding a name. ♡

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Bot Bio Made With This Tool From Puppy
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✦ Sneak Peak ✦ I am approaching my milestone of 200 followers!! I am unbelievably appreciative and excited. Here is a sneak peak- of The Constellation Court. A 80's dark fantasy reverse Harem RPG with seven characters and each will get its own standalone bot. Click here for the trailer for The Constellation Court.