villagelogs | 021-023 » the ghosts of fallen leaves

021-023 » the ghosts of fallen leaves

WHO: Everyone.
WHERE: Eastern/Central/Western Mathias.
WHEN: Days 021-023
WHAT: A cold storm approaches.
WARNINGS: Will update as necessary. PM this account to have a warning added!
NOTES: Plotting post over here!

RECOMMENDED ♫ Emily Kinney & Lauren Cohan "The Parting Glass"

DAYS 021-023
THE WORLD TURNS WHITE
“Are ye the ghosts of fallen leaves, O flakes of snow,
For which, through naked trees, the winds A-mourning go?”
— John Banister Tabb
The howling wind is what wakes the residents of Mathias each day now as the world turns slowly into a bleak stretch of white. Snow continues to fall in thick curtains of flakes that accumulate on trees and rooftops, swirling sideways in the gusts of wind that bow trees and whistle through any crack they can find. The drifts of snow grow taller against the buildings and the wind makes the already freezing temperatures feel bitterly cold.

By day 022, the far ends of streets begin to resemble the hazardous fog with how little becomes visible as the winds pick up. Buildings can still be discerned as dark shapes but the weather's warning becomes clear — a storm is coming. And by day 023, the storm arrives properly, the wind still screaming through the streets like a winter banshee announcing so many deaths to come. These conditions are far from hospitable and only the truly mad would be foolish enough to venture outside in weather such as this.

THE NEWLY ARRIVED
With an embrace of wintery white, Mathias offers a chilly welcome to its newest residents. They awake along the southern treeline bordering Mathias, near the small makeshift cemetery containing a handful of wooden markers erected without names or signifiers of those buried within. And not far from them is the schoolhouse, where in a snowdrift they will the frozen corpse of a young woman named Rey.

LIGHTS IN THE DARKNESS
“A lantern can give you light only when you light it”
— Munia Khan
When residents wake on the morning of day 021, they will find outside in the snow the abandoned lanterns of those shadowy spectres who have moved so silently through Mathias. Each nestled in a patch of frozen white outside their door, the lanterns are now cold to the touch, the half-burned candle within each one seeming to have been lit so very long ago. Inside the glass encasement is a small rolled piece of paper, upon which is written:

keep it lit
There is nothing more, and the prior owners of these lanterns will not return within these days.

There is one lantern waiting outside the building for each resident wherever they are sleeping — the exception for this is those who may have already claimed a lantern as their own. Removing a lantern from its resting place results in no apparent reaction, nor does lighting or not lighting it. However, whatever residents ultimately choose to do with these lanterns should be reported.

CONDITIONS UPDATE

— SNOW continues to fall, resulting over the three days in upwards of a foot of accumulation. The winds blow in gusts over 35 mph.

— 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.

— THE FOG has still receded from the town proper and much of the eastern and northern beach, with the path through the northern forest to the lighthouse still clear on day 021. On day 022, however, as the storm worsens, the fog returns to the paths in the forest, urging residents to stay huddled within the town proper or else.

— DISAPPEARANCES continue to plague the town. While Zed Martin has returned, Rey's corpse will be found in a snowdrift near the Schoolhouse; she disappeared on day 018.

— THE STRANGER is gone.

— THE SPECTRES are gone.

OOC UPDATES

— DISCOVERIES have been collected and collated for your review. Please note that this is OOC information only, put together for the purpose of helping you as players see connections and possibilities for CR and your own character's potential avenues of exploration and investigation. (If we are missing something, please report it so we can add it to the list.)

— AP REWARDS have a new option now — Ideas may be requested if you find yourself stuck. You may now claim up to 2 rewards per log: (1) idea and (1) other reward.

— SANITY may be regained in two ways: self-medication and treatment. In Mathias, this means such coping mechanisms as drinking or drugging oneself into a stupor that allows them to face their fears and issues, or talking to someone about those fears and issues. Since both of these will take some time, best get started. (A form will be added to the Sanity page.)

— REMINDERS — Don't forget about the bulletin board. Please continue reporting your updates to locations, plots, and discoveries. The map of Mathias has been added to the locations page for ease of reference. Make sure your character's sanity level is kept updated. Prospective players are still joining the TDM, so it's recommended to track new top-levels so you don't miss them.

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What happened at the museum still remains a blur. It was a culmination of pushing himself too hard, of broken bones not mending fast enough (not after two whole days and Christ, what a disappointment that was), of powers draining. Of knowing something was viscerally wrong, and not wanting to risk himself dying again because he couldn’t put Klaus through that again. Neither did the idea of Ellie baring witness to that sit right with him either, for all the experience of death she wore on her sleeve in those subtle ways only people who did terrible things to survive knew the look of. Ends and means.

He had given her fair warning. Fair choice. At the end, choice is all anyone had left, and for all of how much he hated letting her venture further in on her own, that was her call to make.

That didn’t change the edge of concern, that twist of weariness against his shoulders when thinking of her the next day. It’s greeted with an edge of annoyance, too - this girl who gave a shit made it difficult to be indifferent. A lot of people here did - or at least, a lot more than he thought. It surprised and troubled him. Should he not stay more neutral? His priority should be Klaus, and getting them back home.

And it was, he’d say. And yet, he blinks himself to the house she was staying in, right into the front entry and out of the cold. Even though he lands indoors, he still knocks on the door itself, in announcement.

“Ellie?” He calls out, measured, curiosity hidden under habitual professionalism. So he’d think. “It’s Five.”

Edited 2020-12-24 22:31 (UTC)

Five had warned her, and she doesn't blame him for what happened at the museum. She's glad he left, hopefully avoiding the potentially lethal spread of the spores.

She doesn't feel like answering the door, like having company. But she's glad to hear Five's voice, because it means he's okay. Well, probably not okay, but he's alive. Not infected. At least there's that. It's been long enough by now that if he's still okay, he'll still be okay.

So she goes to the door, haggard and tired-looking, hair messier than usual.

"Hey, Five. Thanks for not, like, zapping in and scaring me to death," she says. It's a weak joke attempt, but she still tries. Sort of.

Maybe it would have been easier if she did.

Being okay was relative, and tremendously overrated in this fucking town. He still had going through the old windbags, and that would have to be enough on most days.

She - looks like she might not have been sleeping well. A trend set by more than one.

His snort is a half-hearted response to the joke, and for a quick moment, he tries to puzzle out if she's injured, and his eyes narrow. "You okay?"

"Uh...yeah. Yeah, I'm fine. I mean, fine enough. Here, just...you wanna come in for a few?" It's not a very good answer, but it's what she can manage. She steps back so he can come in.

When he follows her to the living room, he might notice the mirror above the fireplace has been covered up with a blanket, hastily tacked to the wall with some pushpins.

"You're okay, right?" she asks, looking back at him. She knows that if he was infected, it would be too late. Or maybe people with weird ass powers might progress slower. Or be immune? That seems like bullshit, though, and there's nothing about him to indicate that he might be sick, let alone actually losing his mind to the infection.

It may also not be like the infection at home; she's thought about that practically nonstop for the last few days. Not the point!

"Sure," Five nods, hands in the pockets of his slacks as he knocks the heels of his shoes against the entryway carpet, shaking the remnants of the snow off from when he'd stepped on outside.

He does, in fact, notice the covered mirror, eyes narrowing slightly, turning a more appraising look Ellie's way. He presses his lips, a not-smile, a rise and fall of a shoulder. "I'm still standing. The broken ribs are still a pain in the ass. Nothing else's changed."

Something is clearly wrong. Five may have all the social prowesses of a dry cactus, but it doesn't well adjusted social skills to notice. "What happened in the museum?" Because clearly something had. That isn't a leap to make, all things considered, another look thrown at the pinned blanket. "Or are you redecorating?" Always time for terrible humour!

"You broke your ribs?" she asks. "Wait, at the museum? I think I missed that." Which probably makes her a shitty friend, but she'll own that anyway. She knows she's not a great friend these days.

"I told you about the Infection, but...I don't think I told you, like, details. What I saw in there was...spores. Like, floating spores. I know this place isn't home. But back home, if you breathe spores, you get Infected. It only takes, like, a second. There's no cure. There's nothing that can stop it. I mean, other than someone killing you, pretty much."

That's a lot for her to spit out at once. She sits on the edge of the couch and just looks at the ground for a second.

"Oh, um...it's really fucking crazy but...man, I don't know. I can't stand to look at the mirrors." She half-whispers the last part. She knows it's weird, but it's also just true.

She looks back at him, wary.

"You really didn't see the spores or anything, right?"

Ah, shit. It isn't surprising that she didn't know, considering Five was a tight-lipped on how he feels on a good day. And it isn't like Five is a good friend either. To a point, maybe he isn't sure how to be.

"No, not then. A couple days earlier," he's dismissive of it, a wave of his hand. "Nothing exciting."

His attention is carefully schooled on her when she speaks, and there isn't any of him that seems to carry disbelief. Maybe, he's just glad his own apocalypse wasn't like that. Zombies would have made things so much harder.

"It isn't," crazy, he means. They were all defined by their eccentricities, by the respective insanities of their realities. None of them chose their lives, but they are just living them. Far be it for him to comment on how anyone coped.

He shakes his head. "No, I didn't," he says with a shake of his head, and turns a little pace around the room, eyeing the bookshelves. "Were they any other recognizable signs? A familiar smell? Fungi, mold? If its spores, they must come from somewhere, right."

"You need some medical supplies? I found a stash in the clinic." She just accepts the injury without giving him shit about it. Her own injuries are mostly all healed since coming here, aside from that stupid arrow wound. It's closed and all, but actual healing does take longer than she'd like. It's not a big deal to her, though. And she's cracked ribs before, so she knows what it feels like. It's probably better than dying!

"Spores back home were fungus. Uh, mutated cordyceps. They take over host brains, which means they take over bodies. It's not a slow process, though I guess it just...keeps growing forever and it's pretty disgusting. But whatever was human in there is gone within a day."

Except for her. She gets to coexist with that shit around her brain for the rest of her life. That's not common knowledge at home or here.

"I don't know if it smelled like anything. I...it just looked the same and I just freaked out and ran. It felt so wrong, Five. Like you know how sometimes this place just feels shitty? It was like that. It's probably not the same as home but, fuck, why let anyone take the risk? We don't even have guns here to take anyone out if..." She sighs and trails off. It's hard for her to escape the idea, the spectres of home.

"Any chance there's an Advil in there? I'm getting tired of sucking down willow bark." No offense to the naturopathic ways of Doc Holliday, but the bitter flavour didn't make a good companion for caffeine. He's glad she doesn't ask. And yeah - healing always takes too long. Time that he can't afford.

And so it goes.

"I see." Sounds like a terrible thing to witness, and to survive in. But, nothing about that invokes pity in him - simply understanding. And respect, in his own way.

He finds a perch on an armrest of one of the lounge chairs, crosses an ankle over the other. "Yeah. I know the feeling." Everything they knew they brought with them - their inherent fears and obsessions, and this place seems to feed on them in whatever proverbial way that may be. "Mm - it definitely isn't worth running the risk. Did anyone else go in there? No one showing the same symptoms you'd seen before?"

A gun would be nice. Those tended to keep things neater. But there's so many other ways to kill someone. He isn't fond of thinking that.

"Uh...Advil? Wait, you mean painkillers, right? Actually...yeah. I got a few bottles. I have no idea how to get more, though, so...go easy, okay? Hang on."

She disappears up the stairs to the bedroom where her bag is. She keeps things in her bag so they're all accessible, because she's not sure when she'll need something and she's not sure who to trust, not really. She does trust Five, though. It's mostly herself she can't trust right now, after how fucked up whatever was going on with the museum was.

She brings a bottle back down and offers it to him. She doesn't offer him water right away, not because she's a bad host (though she's not a good host) but because she just...forgets. She's had to take painkillers dry before, and she's used to everything being scarce in a way it isn't (yet?) in Mathias.

"Doc and some other guy, uh, Negan? They went in. But it's been long enough and they're both fine. No symptoms, nothing."

"Really?" He looks surprised by her answer. "Huh, I wasn't actually expecting you to say you do."

When the bottle is offered to him, he makes no indication of wanting water. He takes tips two pills out onto his hand, but only takes one. The other, he seemingly intends to take to go. It's tempting to tip the whole bottle over, but in the end of the day, there'll be people needing it more than him. "Bones heal too damn slow." He mutters, feeling his age twice over, before setting the bottle back down in front of her. "Thanks."

He means it, even if he always sounds so dry. These rations, he'd assume, won't replenish so easily. Because its Mathias. It throws them a bone only to tighten its leash.

Case in point with the museum. A scowl, at the thought of two more risking their way in. Doc of all people. Looks like he didn't like listening to his own advice, the bastard. "Alright, good. Then we can rule out your world's virus as a possibility." In as much as they could with anything. But sometimes sounding sure was half the battle.

He can't say he isn't curious about the museum. About the why's and the how's, but... "Which leaves a whole slew of other questions, that neither of us are very likely to get any answers to anytime soon."

Five isn't good as asking anything twice. Are you sure you're okay? would be sitting on the tip of another person's tongue. "It's annoying how difficult this place is to predict."

"Yeah, sure," she says, taking his thanks at face value. Really, he just got lucky she had the pills. She got lucky, finding all those things in the clinic. Those don't seem to magically reappear the way that food does. She's not even sure food always will.

"It's a fungus, not a virus. But I don't know if we can rule it out. I don't know if anyone breathed it in." She told Doc already, but she decides to tell Five, anyway. He's going to ask her to explain her logic as it is, and she might have inhaled spores. She has no idea, but it doesn't bother her to think about it.

"I'm...immune. To the infection back home. I might be the only person alive who is. So we can't use me to tell if it's the same thing or not. I fucking hope it isn't, though. I hope you're right and whatever the fuck is in the museum is...something else." Although on the other hand, they may not know how to deal with it if it is? There's no good answer here.

"We don't have all this magical bullshit where I'm from, just the infection, which you can kind of predict, and shitty people. You can't predict them all the time, I guess, but this place? It's impossible."

There's guilty moments between this camaraderie where Ellie reminds Five of Vanya in a painstakingly familiar way. She's distinctly her own person, yes, and he'd never make the mistake of misnaming, but when your whole life you only have the memories of the six people who matter to you enough to inspire surviving for forty five years, you tend to look at a world and pick out those pieces of nostalgia all the same.

See, he thought he had her figured out. Just a girl from a shitty apocalypse. A stubborn enough will to survive, but beyond that? Completely ordinary. Ordinary in her complete lack of belief in the extraordinary, especially at the start. In her fears, and her humanity. Except even if it doesn't manifest itself in a brilliant supernova, it's obvious now that she's less ordinary than one would think. He can imagine the guilt, at least.

"I see." again, there's no pity. Nothing about her suggested its necessity, and Five wasn't in the business of handing it out. It's a shitty thing though. To survive when, undoubtedly, everyone in her life was in danger from it. He didn't envy that position. "Well, there hasn't been any other indication that anything else has followed us in from our worlds, right? And, if it was an infection, like your Apocalypse is, then we'd see more signs of it, from the sounds of it." He's sounding off his reasoning. Maybe, in the most roundabout of ways, he's trying to assuage her worry with pragmatism.

"I still think we need to keep looking at Mathias like - like it's a bubble. Removed from everything we know. It clearly plays by its own rules."

At least Five can be counted upon to just...not make a big deal out of anything. She once accused him of not having feelings, though she doesn't think it's like that. He's strangely practical. But didn't he say something about stopping the end of the world? God, what kind of place does he even come from?

But she doesn't need him to pity her. Obviously he wouldn't freak out; he's never seen what the Infection does anyway, and he just doesn't seem the type.

"I guess not. I mean, I don't know. I think lots of people here come from way crazier places than I do. That's fucking saying something, too." She tries to smile and sort of manages it.

"I guess you're right. It's not like anything here makes any fucking sense. But...man, those spores were fucking nasty. Whatever's in the museum is bad news. I guess most of the town is bad news. Every time there's something new to look at, it just kind of sucks, you know?"

"I don't think thats a fair comparison," he says, quickly, and maybe on more instinct than he means to and finds himself surprised, not for the first time, at the ability their conversations have in weeding out hints of sentiment. "Sure, all of us being here implies there's too many instances of too many places, but - doesn't change the realities we come from, either."

No, he doesn't know what the Infection is like. It sounds a bit too close to zombie apocalypse and maybe his own was lucky. But he can guess at whatever the implications of her immunity might be.

"No it doesn't make any sense, and any clue we get has to, apparently, be accompanied with a goddamn sucker punch." He snorts. It's not funny, but situationally? It kind of might be. "I just don't like the idea of anything else leaking out of our worlds and into this one," his own smile is dry. "A little too many Apocalypses around for comfort.

She shrugs. "I guess. I mean, I guess we can't all be stuck in a well or stop the apocalypse with our siblings or whatever." It's a lame attempt at a joke, but in her defence, she's having a harder time than usual.

"I don't really like it either, gotta say. John's magic shit and whatever else? Hard pass. Whatever's in that museum, though, is fucked up." Not that Five needs her to say that.

"Oh, speaking of fucked up, did I tell you about the knife I got?"

"No, we can't," and that's not a bad thing, really. It's not a contest, and his eyes level on her, a crease between his brow.

He nods along in quiet agreement. John's magic was still something to get used to, and while his parameters for adjusting to the unnatural were a bit different than Ellie's he'd be hardpressed to disagree.

His interest immediately piques at the mention of the knife. "Shit, did you actually find one that's not just for butter?"

Even though she doesn't have any idea how or why Five can do what he does, aside from the teleportation thing, he seems much more down to earth than some others. At least they feel more on the same page than she does with some other people.

Magic is fucking wild.

She actually smiles, though, at his interest in her knife. She pulls it out of her back pocket and offers it to him.

"I'd say you're not gonna believe this, but I bet you are, since this whole fucking place is crazy. But I thought I was dreaming. I woke up in this weird stone place. I found that knife and a...a bowl that filled with blood when I picked it up. It was pretty awful. I woke up covered in blood, but...I still had this knife."

That's the thing about the apocalypse, and being stuck - it humbles you. One probably couldn't tell, what with his general disposition.

But the thing is, about any one of their lives - be it Hargreeves' or Ellie - is that they didn't choose this life. They're all just living it.

The knife is a sight for sore eyes, and even if his composure is still mostly restrained, there's a little gleam in his eyes. Not unlike a kid at a candy store.

"No, no," he snorts. "That sounds about par the course. Guess those dreams were a bit more real than we thought."

She catches the sort of gleam he's got. So he likes weapons? She can't be totally surprised about that. He's kind of a weird person, after all. He looks young, but she's known how to shoot a gun since she was little, out of self-defence. Maybe it's like that for him, too. There must be some sort of reason.

"It's not a gun or anything, but I like to have a knife just in case anyway, and of course they took mine before I woke up here. But...it's wild about the dreams, right? I've heard a couple other people had similar dreams, too-real ones, or where they wake up somewhere else. Too bad we can't do it on purpose."

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021-023 » the ghosts of fallen leaves

day 21 - closed (ellie)

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