villagelogs | 012-014 » even the air itself was grey

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012-014 » even the air itself was grey

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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"Suppose that'll do then," he retorted with a smile back at Malcolm and no answer about the crack at his height. He hadn't been, no but now that it was mentioned, that was funny.

"I didn't get much time to look at it. The night I came here was.. busy, to say the least. What do you mean by weird?" he asked, looking over his shoulder at Malcolm as he dropped his books on a nearby table. Were they going to get put back magically? Maybe - not an answer he thought he'd give that internal question if he was anywhere else.

Malcolm looked a little concerned.

"I could... show you." He slipped past Raylan, moving past a table turned on its side, blocking off a corner that had cushions from the chairs in a little reading lounge off to the side on the floor and a few books piled up beside them. "We'd have to go back there. If you feel it...."

The corner was noted with a long look as he crossed the space towards were Malcolm had stopped before he swiveled his eyes back to the burned husk of shelves. He didn't say anything as he strode forward, picking up one of the green lanterns as he went. The same type, in fact, that caused the still healing wound on his palm.

"How old do you think some of these books are," he said, taking his time as he properly investigated the spines. "Lead the way but take it slow. Last time I was in here, everythin' was whisperin' and I hadn't seen the sun in three days. Didn't have quite the sense of mind to take in everything."

"Out there," he said, gesturing over his shoulder to the main area, "there are a lot of standard paperbacks. Could be from any time, from the Seventies up to now. But back here? They seem to get older and older as you go."

He glanced around.

"Maybe there were whispers all the way in the back, but I always hear things. I wouldn't have really... "

He tried to ignore that stuff.

Raylan hummed a note of interested, book distracted acknowledgement and looked over at Malcolm. "There's gotta be something informative in 'em." He looked back up at the stack and slowly kept moving.

"Let's go find out then, since I don't have those kinds of tendencies. And shit, this place, you hearin' 'em might be a good thing, so long as they're not tellin' you to murder us all." He paused and turned to face Malcolm again at the waist. "They don't, do they? Whatever it is you hear."

Malcolm just blinked at him a moment, his answer a little too long in coming.

"... No. Not.... per se. But I wouldn't listen to him if he did," he added, what he hoped was reassuringly.

Raylan gave another non-committal hum. "So it's just your father then? Least you can narrow out what's new to your head and what's not."

It was a place to start from his point of view, but he had no idea what it was like and so wouldn't take it too far. He wasn't sure he wanted to know what Malcolm did hear. It would have been hard to miss the char or the way it stopped short, and it was that line that Raylan stopped on to slowly take it all in.

"Odd stop."

"It's not only him. He's just... the loudest. The most insistent."

Malcolm scanned the line with his eyes, though he'd seen it before. "Once you pass that, that's where it feels weird."

"Mm." Raylan would ask more about that later, when he wasn't busy with this oddly stopped fire. He looked up at the ceiling. "Why not restore the place, add electric lights?"

He stepped over the line with only a little bit of drama, one boot setting down carefully before he brought it's mate over too. A moment passed and then he looked back at Malcolm. "Maybe you're a more sensitive canary then I am." That wasn't a bad thing.

But moving forward, Raylan almost began to sense what Malcolm meant. The walls and burned book spines were.. more intimidating and twisted up into a dark nothingness that even the daylight that did get in didn't touch.

"Why does this feel like the Lighthouse stairwell all over again."

“It’s possible they’re both caused by the same power,” Malcolm suggested, not stepping over the line. “So what is it hiding in there?”

The cowboy stopped again and looked up thoughtfully, eyes narrowing as he thought out loud.

"Knowin' what we do of this new time theory, that some places experience it differently than others, what if the library is indicative of that?" He turned around to face Malcolm. "What if it's a yardstick for this place. What if the early town found something. Built over top of it. Continued on their lives. What if this is part of it?"

“Without discounting that, because it’s a good theory, can I suggest it could also still be intentional messing with us. Except now with added magic and metaphysics as tools for doing it,” Malcolm said, wrapping his arms around his middle.

He shook his head. "It had that before and this place is everyone's, not just ours. It'd also explain why the township left it the way it was. To speak of what happened back then."

He had to get to that house that was in all these pictures; this great Grand Meeting hall. Elder's hall - he didn't know.

"It'd make sense that it's not in the town hall, even if that's missin' plenty on it's own. The story that we're standin' on top of. The town hall wasn't the most important building here." His skin was crawling, hairs on the back of his neck raising like Hell itself was breathing down his shirt and the cowboy very stubbornly refused to move, soaking in the fear.

"We don't have to believe the narrative they're selling us," Malcolm told him. "You want to find that hall that's in the picture, right? We won't find it until they reveal it. Like the lighthouse. Although..."

He took his phone out of his pocket and opened the gallery.

"Maybe we can tell how far out it is if we can see which roof seems likely in the pictures I took," he pointed out.

"I'm just playin' out the viable possibilities here; our science and logic has fallen through so far. This is a place that needs a little adaptation, clearly."

Still, he walked forward to see what Malcolm could make of his pictures.

"It's gonna be at the edge somewhere. Maybe on a rise. Likely cleared out around it by a little, but I didn't see it when I was up there."

Malcolm nodded. "It's just as likely as anything else," he agreed. He held his phone out to Raylan. "Come out of there. I keep...." He took a breath. "Things keep reaching for you out of the dark."

His gut screamed to stride forward but Raylan smothered that and turned around, almost daring the shadow to reach out for him. But there was nothing there and Raylan couldn't be a hundred percent sure that they weren't there while he wasn't looking. He let another moment pass before he turned back around and stepped back over the line, free hand coming out behind Malcolm's back to gently urge him back towards the front of the library.

There, he could set the light down and take the phone, zooming in with a frown.

Malcolm didn't know that whatever he felt was reaching for Raylan wasn't in his own head: a reaction to the weird energy of the place. But there was no need for anyone to stand in a ruin. He was easily steered away from it by Raylan.

"What do you think?" he asked, leaning to look over Raylan's arm at the screen.

It didn't matter, it played into Raylan's head as much as it did in Malcolm's.

"I think we got some possibilities and not a lotta hope beyond waiting to see. At least three of these spots - here - here, and here," he said, moving the picture around, "Are good possibilities. Btu we still can't get there." He frowned at the picture for a moment more before handing the phone back.

"Be careful with your battery. Unless you got a charger hidden somewhere."

Needing something to do, Raylan sighed out of his nose and eyed Malcolm's previous nest. "Is that where you stayed?"

"I keep one in my inside jacket pocket," he told Raylan. "I use my phone for everything. I have some heavy duty nitrile gloves and a penlight too."

He followed Raylan's gaze to the cushions and the overturned table, looking a little mortified.

"Oh. Yeah. I didn't think it was a good idea to be outside at night. But I didn't want to sleep. I figured... if there were a lot of books, I'd have something to do to keep me up."

Raylan gave him a look, honestly surprised at that. "You a Boy Scout or something? Damn." It made him wonder what kind of charger Malcolm had.. And if it'd fit his phone.

"Let's clean that up before we got perusing. Unless you want people askin' questions about the fort that's been erected."

"Never know when I'll get called to a crime scene," he said with a shrug.

At the mention of the nest, Malcolm looked over at it.

"Oh. Yeah. I guess I don't... need it anymore," he conceded, stepping over to pull the table upright.

Edited 2020-11-21 00:54 (UTC)

He bobbed his head in concession and followed to help right the table, moving over to the books to pick them up and investigate what kind of titles Malcolm had busied himself with.

"Gotta say that I'm glad there's at least a library here. If they're not going to give us whiskey or answers, at least we have entertainment."

There was a selection of classic titles. Dumas. Verne. Wells. Entertainment.

"Yeah, I guess I gravitated to it for the familiarity," Malcolm acknowledged. Books had been a companion of his even before his father was arrested. They never judged you.

"These aren't light names," he said as he stood up and glanced around the library. "You think books put themselves back at night or not?" Without waiting for an answer, Raylan started sticking the books in random spots, eager to come back later to see if the library reorganized itself.

"I started readin' when I was young to get away from the noise of the house," he offered as he emptied his hand to the last, turning to stare at the cushions. "Better than listenin' to the noise of Arlo and Francis argue.. 'Course, I was readin' Hardy Boys and Stephen King at that point. Whatever fiction that I could.. Treasure Island, some Issac Asimov."

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