012-014 » even the air itself was grey

[villagemod]

WHO: Everyone.
WHERE: Eastern/Central Mathias.
WHEN: Days 012-014
WHAT: The weather is behaving strangely. Again.
WARNINGS: Will update as necessary. PM this account to have a warning added!
NOTES: Plotting post over here!

RECOMMENDED ♫ Michael Andrews "Liquid Spear Waltz"

DAYS 012-014
“The overcast skies had the colour of deadened stones, and seemed closer than usual, as though they were phlegmatically observing my every movement with their apathetic emptily blue-less eyes.”
—Simona Panova, “Nightmarish Sacrifice”

Rain has returned to Mathias. While those who remember the storms from nearly two weeks ago may fear reprisal of such tumultuous weather, this rain is far tamer. The cloudy grey skies let loose a steady drizzle that remains constant from start to finish, which is in itself, perhaps, a bit unusual. The patter of droplets against windows, small streams forming in the roads and on grass as the ground becomes saturated, all of it may seem normal to some, but a little too normal to others.

What is without question abnormal, however, is the sun. Though it cannot be seen distinctly behind the thick grey clouds, its light remains as constant as the rain throughout these three days. Hour after hour, regardless of the time of day, there is light in the sky. Unchanging, an inescapable reminder that Mathias is not home, and none who are brought here have any control over what will occur in this place.


NEW ARRIVALS
Once again, more unfortunate souls have been brought to Mathias by unknown means, deposited at the edge of the forest near the empty houses that tell of those who once lived in this strange little town. They may find themselves wandering through the trees until they encounter the strange fog that envelops the town, or stumbling upon the rotting remains of houses that have felt the passage of time more than others.

---

LOCATIONS
LIGHTHOUSE Residents will notice the lighthouse to the north of Mathias, situated on a cliff that is above the town level. Even the most observant individuals will not have noticed it before now, which might be quite unsettling to some. There is no path available to reach the lighthouse at this time, though residents are welcome to try — they will be blocked by fog in the forest and a sense of unease that becomes debilitating if they walk too far along the beach.

NO NEW LOCATIONS are available for exploration at this time. Residents are welcome to further explore available locations, including utilizing AP rewards at locations they may have previously explored.

CONDITIONS UPDATES

— CLOCKS continue to be unreliable. Some may keep irregular time at different rates, while others have ceased to work at all, each having stopped at a different time.

— VOICES are not openly haunting our residents, though they may still be occasionally encountered in the more heavily decayed buildings where some rooms seem to almost swallow whatever light tries to enter them.

— WEATHER conditions are both typical and atypical for late fall. Temperatures consist of chilly "sweater weather" days and nights that can dip below freezing — you don't want to be outside without a coat when the sun goes down. A constant light rain continues for all three days, only stopping on the night of the third day. And for all three days, there is constant cloudy grey sunlight, with the sun unable to be seen and tracked from behind the cloud cover. Darkness will return to Mathias on the third night when the rain stops.

— FOG continues to block the way of those wishing to travel further than the Town Hall, and all who venture into the forest will be met by its impenetrable wall after a few hundred yards. The fog will allow none to pass; those who try will find themselves overcome by fear and panic so intense, they can physically do nothing but flee back the way they came.

OOC UPDATES

— HOUSING LISTINGS now have a permanent home! A few of these may have been missed or information might have changed, so please do submit updates as needed, including if your character moves into a new location or if there are rooms still available at said location.

— NEW PLAYERS are still arriving with each new log, so make sure to keep an eye on our ooc intro post. (An easy way to do this is to track the post — click the bell icon, select More Options, and track when someone makes a new top-level.)

— INFORMATION may publicly be shared between characters at the bulletin board in the town hall. This is meant to be a permanent place for pieces of the Mathias puzzle to be shared and archived to both help information be shared ICly and to allow new players to easily dive into the mystery.

— THE CALENDAR has been updated through the end of the year. With the approaching holiday season, we will continue a lighter log schedule, but as always, players are welcome to create their own logs, conduct intensive investigators, and make more terrible decisions. (The mod is always happy to enable these shenanigans, never hesitate to reach out with ideas.)

QUESTIONS ABOUT THE LOG?

HOUSING DESIGN/EXPLORATION

PING THE MOD

navigation | faq | setting | mod contact

Comments

[unwilt]

"Ah. Yes." Thomas's good hand tightens on the doorframe; his left, freshly bandaged, is behind his back. The man doesn't seem to be holding anything, which doesn't bode well. Perhaps there's something in his pocket.

It doesn't occur to him to let him in, not yet at least. They can have this conversation in the hallway for all he cares. "As I said in my letter... there's not much I can offer you in return just yet, but I'm happy to owe you something in exchange in future."

[abrightboy]

It's Malcolm's right hand that's bandaged, wrapped in gauze. It shakes slightly, but he's not hiding it.

"I don't have any morphine or heroine for you. They don't have any of that here," he explained grimly. "I've been having a similar problem since I arrived 6 days ago."

[unwilt]

"Ah," Thomas says again, but there's less efficiency to his tone now. His eyebrows crank down heavily in marked disappointment. "Not even a bottle of heroin? I hear it's quite efficient."

[abrightboy]

"There's no hospital. No pharmacy. And the rest of the town seems to have been almost meticulously cleared of anything stronger than an aspirin," Malcolm told him evenly. "You'd think you could find a Valium in a place abandoned since the early 90's but I've scoured the whole town and there isn't a single one."

[unwilt]

Thomas has no idea what Valium is, but he can guess well enough. The mention of aspirin gives him at least a little hope, though. It won't give him exactly what he needs, but it might help in a pinch, if he can find some. "Perhaps there's a hospital somewhere in all that fog."

[abrightboy]

"There might be," Malcolm conceded, "but we can't move through the fog. It's impenetrable. It induces a sort of... primal fear in anyone that tries to pass through it."

[unwilt]

"Yes," Thomas says shortly. He got lost in the fog of the forest yesterday, and it wasn't a particularly pleasant experience. He'd rather not repeat it. "I suppose all we can do is hope that it recedes." His brow furrows again, lips pressing to a flat line, and he watches the man in thoughtful silence, taking in the tremor in his own bandaged hand. It's a tremor that Thomas is starting to become quite familiar with, and he wonders if there's something here they might have in common; more than the surface details, at least.

"Were you... reliant on something? Before you came here?"

[abrightboy]

Malcolm huffed a breath at the floor.

“I was on a heavy course of several medications,” he admitted. “And some of them are highly habit forming.”

[unwilt]

That sounds like a prescription, doctor-ordered, which is more than Thomas can say for himself. "Several," he repeats. "Which?"

[abrightboy]

They are certainly prescription.

"Alprazolam, lorazepam, sertraline and risperidone. I don't know if you know them. Apparently everyone here isn't from the same time."

[unwilt]

Thomas has no idea what any of those are, at all. Not even a little bit. He nods politely.

"Yes. I've been told." He clears his throat, and asks after a moment of indecision on the phrasing, "When are you from?"

[abrightboy]

"Spring 2020. You?" he asked.

He feels like it will not be even close to the same.

[unwilt]

Thomas blinks. Over a hundred years between them, and yet here they are. Strange that this is barely enough to shock him any more.

"1905," he says. "Autumn, I suppose, if that matters." And for some reason, it's this that reminds him they're having a conversation half in the hallway. Thomas takes a step back from the door and makes a loose sort of gesture to invite him in.

[abrightboy]

Malcolm stepped inside, turning that over in his head as he glanced around.

1905. The man had never heard of a world war. Or a television. Of course he was looking for morphine.

"I'm not sure whether a few months matter in the span of a hundred years," he conceded.

[unwilt]

"No," Thomas agrees. His room is small and he's barely done anything with it – there were clothes in here when he found it, belonging to a man about the same size as him, but he hasn't yet the heart to start wearing them, even though he's still wearing the clothes he arrived in. He sits down on the edge of his bed, his hands clasped loosely. "This place must seem very familiar to you. The technology is like nothing I've ever seen."

[abrightboy]

“It’s actually about thirty years behind me,” Malcolm told him. He huffed a small wry smile. “Interesting how people’s problems don’t change much, huh?”

[unwilt]

That just makes this all infinitely more confusing. Thomas puts his good hand on his knee, his bandaged and mangled hand still cradled loosely in his lap. "Interesting is a positive word I'm not sure I would use. Disheartening, if I was being charitable."

A pause, where Thomas looks down, fidgeting intently for a moment with some pilling in the fabric of his trouser leg, and then he says, "How are you... coping? Without your medication?"

[abrightboy]

“Not super well,” Malcolm admitted. “The headache is almost constant, the nausea comes in waves, I’m hearing and seeing things more than usual... I considered falling off the lighthouse stairs the other day. So about how one might expect, I guess. My psychogenic tremor is worse and almost constant. My mind is racing all the time. I feel pretty consistently on the edge of a panic attack...” He paused. “I probably don’t need to go on.” He gestured to Thomas’ bandages. “What happened to your hand?”

[unwilt]

He's not painting a very pretty picture. Their precise medicinal needs might be a little different, but Thomas knows the beginnings of a craving well enough to understand that it can only get worse from here. On top of everything else, the situation pushing him to a point of probable delusion isn't the neverending fog or being in a world so far removed from his own that it's alienating – it's his own weakness.

He's almost thankful for the change of subject, morbid as it continues to be. He glances down at his hand with a small furrow of his brow, staring at the dead air where his fingers had once been. "Ah," he says, shrugging lightly, and decides in the moment that there's no sense bottling everything up, especially when he reckons that there might be some use in sharing. The problem is that he doesn't know how to explain it without sounding certifiably insane. "It's a rather long story involving a... human-sized meat grinder."

[abrightboy]

"....Someone put your hand in a meat grinder? Why would they do that?" he asked, looking at the hand.

[unwilt]

"I don't think he was quite in his right mind," Thomas says after a moment. It's really quite difficult to explain, and it's only now that he's sitting here and trying to find the words that he realises he hasn't really reckoned with a lot of it yet. "My sister was taken. By a... community, living on an island off the coast of Wales. Erisden. They wanted to ransom her, so I went there to get her back. It was a cult, really, there's no more charitable way of putting it. But..." He looks up, his eyes wide, and makes sharp eye contact. "Their deity was a goddess. And she was real. I saw her."

[abrightboy]

Malcolm considered him.

"What about her made her a deity?"

It was a Clarke's Third Law kind of deal, he was thinking. Between the magic and special abilities he'd seen in people brought to Mathias, he was expecting this deity to be more like one of them.