#i really wanna write a modern!au binggeyuan post with this premise

[inaconstantstateofchange]

Meet-Ugly Writing Prompt: Interminable Intercom

okay so this is based not-so-loosely on real life events, and has been banging around my brain as a fun little writing prompt ever since. i might make a character-specific post with it at some point, but wanted to get the general concept out there.

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Character A lives in an old af apartment building that has no on-site staff, where all the apartment entrances are in the building's interior, which you can only access through the locked main entrance doors. Each resident gets one key.

The entrance doors have an ancient intercom next to them. This intercom technically works, but the process of getting your phone number set up with it is so inconvenient that many residents do not bother.

If you lose your entrance key after hours, you are kind of SOL until business hours, when you'll have to pay a hefty fee for the management company to bring you a new key.

One evening, late, Character A gets a call from the intercom. They can't hear very well - again, ancient - but didn't have anything scheduled for delivery, and manage to catch that someone got locked out. They decide to be a good neighbor and press the button on their phone to open the main entrance door, then hang up, thinking nothing else of it.

However... it keeps happening. This Character B motherfucker must be the most forgetful or unlucky idiot to walk the earth, because they are constantly losing their key, and calling the one number on the intercom that always picks up. Maybe Character A is a homebody, maybe they work from home, but whatever it is, they're reliable. And no matter how annoyed they get about it, they can't bring themself to just leave someone stranded out there. And also, how could they make them stop? Neither of them knows what the other looks like, and Character A doesn't even know what apartment Character B is in!

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anyway, what happens next is of course totally up to the writer. are there fun identity shenanigans when they bump into each other in the laundry room or by the mailboxes and don't know it? does character a finally put their foot down? does character b find a way to stop losing their damn key?