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

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Comments

day 14 (open)

[reydacted]

[ rey's not sure she'll ever get used to the rain here. she finds it lovely and soothing, even if a bit chilly.

she's set herself up on the porch of the grey gull, wrapped in an oversized sweater she scavenged from one of the houses. next to her steaming cup of tea are a couple of dessert plates, having apparently found pie an appropriate breakfast before she starts on her task.

from afar, she might look quite studious, they way she is carefully writing on the papers spread out in front of her. upon closer inspection, though, she's copying letters out of a children's book, practicing printing the english alphabet. she's still on a. ]

[volunteertomatoes]

[ He thinks, for a brief moment, he spots a fellow nerd. It's the children's book that catches his attention, a copy of the first Fillory and Further book securely in a messenger bag he's found in the village. The implications of the book in his real-life still bother him, as does the fact that his version of the children's fantasy novels are absolutely incorrect, but it's still somewhat comforting. The weight and the presence of the first book itself, and the knowledge that it's there, it almost makes him feel like he's home. ]

Studying?

[ He wrote his essay to get into Yale on children's literature, so it's not that farfetched for him. He's not close enough to peer at the words yet, or what exactly she's doing, but he does offer an awkward half-smile.

Also where the hell did she get pie? There was pie and no one told him? ]

[reydacted]

[ even good penmanship is a rare skill where paper is practically non-existent. she can scratch aurebesh, carving it into the sides of ships, but holding a pencil is weird. she thought she'd be pretty good given how precisely she can handle a tool, but the pencil just feels awkward in her hands, and the motion is foreign.

on a gloomy day like today, she didn't expect to get much company.

a little embarrassed that it seems she's working on a skill everyone else has perfected here, she leans over her papers, crossing her arms to obscure the makeshift worksheets. her smile seems a little forced. ]

Uhm-- yes. Just brushing up. Practicing really.

[volunteertomatoes]

[ Quentin recognizes that posture almost immediately, and it's solely because he'd done the exact same thing, countless time, shirking highschool classmates and not admitting what he'd had written was Fillory and Further fanfiction. ]

Cool. [ He genuinely means it, leaning over to try to get a peek. ] Practicing what?

[reydacted]

[ this time she's a little bit more obvious in how she crosses her arms, leaning on her elbow onto the paper. she twists the pencil awkwardly between her knuckles. fidgeting really. ]

Oh, it's nothing really. Silly really.

[volunteertomatoes]

You know that definitely means it's something, right?

[ He's not making a grab for it though, he's not a dick: just mildly teasing and trying to crane his neck just a bit to see. ]

I used to write fanfiction, believe me, whatever it is can't be worse than that.

[reydacted]

[ her eyebrows raise. she's not really sure what he means by fanfiction, but it feels like a confession. an invitation to bond over some vulnerability if she extended the same courtesy.

being guarded all the time does get exhausting... she moves her arms, pulling out one of her worksheets. ]

Everyone here uses a lettering system I'm not used to. I'm trying to teach myself it.

[volunteertomatoes]

[ Quentin holds his hand out, a silent gesture to ask if he can take it to examine it more thoroughly. She seems a bit strange in a way Quentin can't place--he can certainly understand the hesitance in a way only someone who's a bit of a social outcast can, but that's about it.

It's sort of refreshing. There's an awful lot of oversharers. ]

What do you call it? [ And, for a shot in the dark: ] You Fillorian?

[reydacted]

No. I've never heard of that.

[ she shakes her head. no dice, but it's the first place someone has offered her that isn't earth. she finds that intriguing.

but back to the letters. she looks back down at her sheets, thumbing through them before handing them over. ]

This is what we would call High Galactic. It's fallen out of practice. But this also looks like real parchment, so maybe it makes sense.

[endlessflask]

[ Rey isn't the only one with a bit of a sweet tooth this morning. Eliot's feeling the need to eat his emotions coming back to him, and what he really wants is something full of sugar. He could probably find some twinkies or something similar at the general store, but he likes himself a little too much to subject himself to that yet.

So the Grey Gull it is, where he discovered some food the day before. ]

I'm pretty sure it's illegal to look so comfortable in this place.

[ It's a joke. Honest. Eliot has to admire how cozy she looks, given the circumstances, and it'd almost be easy to forget that there's something beyond their control at work here. ]

[reydacted]

[ rey shuffles her papers so the one's she's already filled out shifted to the bottom. she's pretty much determined she is the only person here that can't read or write this alphabet, so she'd prefer not to advertise her disadvantage too much.

at the same time, she looks up grinning at his quip. when she speaks, it's with a light accent. some have called it british but she's never heard of the place. ]

I do wish the sun would set again. Haven't been able to scavenge thick enough fabric to block out the light at night to get a good night's sleep.

[ not that she sleeps super deeply anyway. old habits die hard. ]

[endlessflask]

If you need help sleeping, you should see the cowboys with the moonshine. A couple hits of that and you'll be out like a light.

[ But he gets it. The constant presence of the sun, even if it's hidden behind clouds, is unsettling. Maybe they should all take a page out of her book and deal with it by eating pie in cardigans. ]

I'm sure it'll set. Eventually.

[reydacted]

Moonshine?

[ she quirks an eye at that. clearly not a term she's familiar with but given the name and the context she can only assume it lays among other potent potables or other altering substances like jet fuel or star dust.

(it's cowboy that is really the term she's more boggled by.) ]

What kind of rotational axis and solar orbit would make them vary so widely?

[ the physics of planetary orbit is probably the same here... right? ]

[endlessflask]

You're really asking the wrong guy.

[ Yes, Eliot understands the significance of planetary positioning. To do magic, it's all about circumstances, and one has to adjust their casting to make up for shifts and orbits. And given that he recently had to literally move the moon to save the world, maybe he should have more knowledge when it comes to this sort of thing.

It's definitely more Quentin's area of potential expertise than his own. ]

It's just, you know. Different worlds have different things, right? This one world I lived in, it had two suns and two moons and I never really did understand how it all worked.

[reydacted]

Are you not from Earth?

[ she's honestly more excited than alarmed at that prospect. finally, finally! she knew that there had to be more people not from this backwater planet. ]

[endlessflask]

Oh. No, I'm from Earth.

[ He almost feels bad saying it, because he can see how excited she is by the prospect. Eliot actually frowns a little in apology. ]

I sort of ruled another world for a while. I guess you could say I've split my last few years between there and Earth. Are you not from Earth?

[reydacted]

[ well. it was worth a shot. ]

No. I actually had never heard of it before I ended up here. If that is where we are.

[ her new housemate had painted a pretty bleak picture of the planet, leaving her thinking the planet wasn't exactly habitable despite everyone claiming this was likely where they were... ]

[bestfuneralever]

[When he's not holing himself up in the boarding house where he stays with his brother and a smattering of other folks that hang about the place, Klaus has taken to wandering idly through the town. The rain isn't entirely unpleasant, and he has a long leather jacket wrapped around him as he moves at an idle pace through the town, arms folded across his chest comfortably to keep his jacket pulled close.

Most of it is a lot of the same picture over and over, empty houses and vacant buildings in various states of disrepair. All of that emptiness makes it obvious when he comes across someone sitting outside on the porch of what looks like it might have been a restaurant once upon a time. Klaus is a people person, he's a social butterfly kind of guy and can make friends just about anywhere he goes. He wanders up to the porch with a little wave of his fingers.]

Enjoying the rain?

[reydacted]

[ although rey hasn't met everyone, she's a good observer. this man she hasn't seen before, though. there's so few people in town a new person is definitely cause for further investigation. she sits up in her chair, shuffling her papers subtly before waving back. ]

I'm still not used to it truthfully. It never rained where I was from.

[ which seems to contrast pretty strongly with her british-sounded accent. ]

[bestfuneralever]

Never? [He echoes as he steps onto the porch, taking an empty seat near her. He knows people say that in an embellishing sort of way sometimes, but she sounded perfectly serious about it.] It even rains in the desert sometimes, right?

[reydacted]

[ she crosses her arms and rests her head against her palm in a move that is a little more obvious in her attempt to hide her papers. deception isn't her strongest suit.

her consideration is thoughtful and genuine though. ]

Dust storms, electrical storms, sure... but rain? [ she shakes her head. ] Almost never. And definitely not across days.

[bestfuneralever]

Huh. Well, I guess there's a first time for everything, right? [He chuckles a little. He can't help noticing the oh-so-obvious way she's guarding whatever she's doing. Unfortunately, it only pulls the curiosity toward it more. She should have never brought attention to if it she didn't want to talk about it.

He gestures vaguely to her papers.] Whatcha doin?

[reydacted]

Oh-- uhm. Drawing. [ sort of. learning a new script was sort of like that right? it's been a long time since she used to keep her journal with spare bits of flimsi left behind by spacers passing through the outpost, but there's time here... ] I'm just a bit rusty.

[ she tries to scoot everything together to hide her makeshift worksheets beneath some blank papers while she tries to run the conversation in a different direction. ]

Are you new here? I haven't seen you around.

[bestfuneralever]

Oh, cool. You'll have to show me something, sometime.

[But he'll drop it there, all the same. He nods at the question, it's one he's getting a lot.] Yeah, I just got here a couple days ago.

[reydacted]

[ she lifts her brows, intrigued. the deluge of questions is more like intense curiosity than an interrogation. she skips the 'are you from earth' because everyone seems to be from that backwater planet. ]

Did you wake up alone? On the beach or somewhere else? Have you met anyone you recognize?

[ she's going to keep going unless she's interrupted. ]