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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Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"A wagon? There's nowhere to go. I guess if we were going to attempt a physical escape, a boat would make more sense but... if we just sail into another fog barrier just past the horizon, we'd be pretty screwed. We don't have enough information to attempt that. And the sea always seems to be choppy."

There's always somewhere to go. Especially for someone like Doc who never used to stay in one place for long. Recent events back home and present circumstances aside, of course.

"I am no good at building arks," Doc says wryly. He is a man of several talents, bitter jadedness and sheer necessity forcing him to pick up new skills throughout his artificially long life. A biblical saviour, he is most definitely not.

"You are of course, correct. We need to find out more information before attempting any such endeavour."

"Investigation is definitely a stronger suit for me than carpentry, too," Malcolm acknowledged. "But the problem here is the lack of context. We don't know what's real and what's contrived. We don't know how much of what we see if just exactly what they want us to see."

"Well the same thing could be said anywhere you go. I only see what I want to see, and so do you." Which is not to make light of their current situation, but there is nothing they can do about what they do not know and cannot find out. Doc is still not so sure about this big sinister 'They'. He does think that someone's hand was involved. There is something specific about disarming a man and then dropping him off on some secluded beach. But if 'they' wanted to kill him or anyone else in this town, then 'they' would have done it already.

"As long as you and I are both seeing the same thing, I'll be happy with that." And honestly, they would have a much higher chance of success commandeering an available boat than trying to do everything from scratch.

"I am not so sure anymore, if I trust everything I see and hear in this place."

"I don't trust everything I see and hear anywhere," Malcolm said lightly. He doesn't think they big bad 'They' wants to kill them, either. He's concerned They want something much more ominous than that. "But it's worse here. Not just being off my meds. Other people have talked about hearing things in the fog, for example."

"As did I," he confirms quietly. Not in the fog, per se, but he was neck deep in the woods when he heard a baby crying. He scoured everywhere before Five practically had to drag him away.

"I was with Mister Five. He did not hear the same thing I did. And this was before we were even able to get very drunk."

Malcolm leaned forward almost eagerly.

"What did you hear?" he asked, his eyes a little wide.

"There was a baby in the forest." He sets his almost empty cup down, lifting his gaze to meet Malcolm's. "I have not seen anyone younger than Miss Ellie, but I was sure of it. But I could not find any traces of it. The more I followed its cries the further away it seemed to sound. The only footprints I could track were my own, and Five's."

Malcolm canted his head slightly. "Does a crying baby have any significance to you? Is that sound related to any events or traumas in your life?" he asked.

It's an ever so subtle change, in his stance, shifting his weight to his other foot, both elbows on the countertop now with his left hand curled around his right elbow and his shoulders hunched. The line of questioning is so far fairly harmless, but it does feel like a line of questioning. There is an oddly high number of people calling themselves 'agent' something or other around here.

"Before I came here I was helping a young lady who is... quite far along now. Suppose I was worried." His Adam's apple bobs in his throat as he keeps his gaze on the sink behind Malcolm. He heard what he heard. It's different to when he heard things during those hundred and thirty years he spent alone in the dark.

Different how, he doesn't know, and he doesn't want to justify. He's not crazy, he just. Has a moment or two, every now and again.

"So whatever caused you to hear it, it could have gotten the content from inside your own head. What people hear in the fog... is personal."

Malcolm hadn't dared venture into the fog. He saw things quite enough on his own, thank you. He was what many might call 'crazy'.

"How is that even possible?" Hell he doesn't even know what's going on in his own head sometimes.

"There's probably just sommin' in the trees. Or in the water." Though he doesn't seem too bothered finishing his tea. Nothing's tried to attack him so far, and he's taken his eternal longevity for granted after all this time.

"I could stop eating and drinking," he muses with a shrug. "See if that helps any."

Malcolm looked at him with some concern.

"Won't that... hurt?" he asked. "Look. They've brought a lot of people here that know magic and they've somehow suppressed their magic to some degree. So if they're getting in our heads, they don't need to use anything as pedestrian as drugs, do they?"

"I'm used to it. Won't hurt like catching a bullet or getting stabbed." And he knows he cannot die from starving or dehydrating. Although he hasn't tested a few other ways to go, he's pretty certain he has to meet a violent end to break this spell. Of course, if there's something in the air, there's not much they can do about that.

"They have brought a lot of lawmen here too. Many... people with titles." Doc is uncomfortable enough with government agencies to notice these things. And he really has to wonder why a group of their size requires so many Agent This and Agent That running amongst them.

"Apart from me and Raylan?" Malcolm said. He thought about the people he'd met. "Who else is in law enforcement?" he asked.

"Miss Johnson and I surmise Mister Coulson by association are... some kind of agents." Are they strictly law enforcement? Who knows. He did not ask too deeply. It is not like how things used to be, where you could make the rules up as you went along and if someone didn't agree with you, you were fine if you minded your own business - or could outdraw them, if things came to that. There are different rules these days that they need to be complying with.

"Now I cannot claim to have met everyone when I don't know who all has set up camp here, but I dare say that would be a quarter of us." Doc straightens up a bit and tugs his jeans up by the belt loop, not used to not having the familiar weight of his packed gun belt weighing his hips down.

"Where, pray tell, is everyone else? The accountants and the barbers, the blacksmiths and the barkeeps, the plumbers and the priests?"

"I've met Mr Coulson. I don't know a Miss Johnson. It's more if you count that John Constantine is some sort of private investigator," he acknowledged. "Do you think the assortment of people here gives a clue to their motives? Because you've got a point that they're not trying to populate a town if everyone fills the same role that, as a little community, we barely even need at all."

"She arrived at the same time as us. Had some injuries to her arms." It is implied that he saw to them as best he could. Doc doesn't mention that his complicated woman friend person from back home is also working for some kind of agency that is possibly government, possibly something else entirely, and he's... sort of freelancing. He does not approve of Black Badge, but. She never asked for his opinion, let alone of his approval.

"I do not have any... theories as to why we were chosen. Only that it- does not seem random. And I would argue that there are far more essential roles to maintain a town than 'agents'."

"But they've also made skills largely unnecessary, at least for survival. Food and shelter are provided. It's not like we need hunter-gatherers and carpenters," Malcolm pointed out.

"Have you seen some of these people in a kitchen?" Doc mutters, keeping his head inclined as he scratches at a spot above the bridge of his nose.

"I would argue that you need sleep for your survival. Yet I have not found a place that sells what you require."

“The drugs I take don’t mitigate my night terrors,” Malcolm told him. “Three or maybe four hours of sleep is pretty much a good night for me. The drugs mitigate... my other symptoms. Crippling anxiety, panic attacks, mania, hallucinations....” A beat. “To some degree,” he allowed. “But if other people are hearing things in the fog and in the back of the library, maybe that’s what they want: for us to be... unbalanced here.”

These words, they don't mean the same thing to Doc as they do to Malcolm. The symptoms, he is most definitely familiar with, but all these labels - there's... a lot of labels in there that probably don't mean what he thinks they mean.

"Honestly Mister Bright, I do not see that figuring this out would get us home." His hand moves to scratch at the corner of his lips. They all have many questions that they cannot find answers for. But even if there were answers for all the whys - why would anyone do this to anyone else, why are they here, why are they hearing things, why would you take away everyone's weapons before... dosing them with incidents to make them doubt themselves - none of them can get them to the how question, of how can they be getting back to where they came from.

"I think it safe to assume that we all would like to leave. Much as I have enjoyed our time together." He doesn't sound like he's merely being polite, but. That's probably part of the charm.

"Figuring out what they want is the first step in not giving it to them. Resistance may be the only tool we have. We can't see them or talk to them. We can't pull the curtain back. But if they're not getting what they want from us, maybe they'll let us go. We can only try to be more trouble than we're worth," Malcolm pointed out.

"Or they will take us out back and shoot us, bring in some other folks who will do what they want," Doc rather unhelpfully suggests with a tilt of his head in the other direction. He doesn't play games he can't win, and he believes that whoever is responsible for their current predicament would have the same mindset.

"Potentially. But the other option is that we just... what? Do what they want?" Malcolm said. "I don't like that either. Is there a third option?"

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