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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Malcolm looks over at him suddenly.

"A frozen corpse? Do you know whose?" he asks.

But he understands the urge not to sleep, as long as Neal understands he can't keep it up forever. Even Malcolm, the chronic insomniac, couldn't.

Neal's expression twists. It's very, very obvious how upset he's pretending he isn't. "I don't. I don't even know how long she was out there, what might have killed her... That kind of thing isn't what I do."

He closes his eyes for a moment, trying to banish the image of the girl rendered in pastels from the cold. It doesn't work. "She was young. Twenty at most. Brown eyes, brown hair--I could draw her, easily enough."

"Maybe you can draw her in your sketchbook while I make the coffee," Malcolm suggested as they reached Philips Drive. "I might recognize her. ...Did anyone bury her?"

"I don't think so. Not unless someone went back and uncovered the body again. I marked it, where it was, so I could go back, but." But he hasn't been able to bring himself to do it, not yet.

"I understand," Malcolm told him.

Not everyone was comfortable around dead bodies. Most people weren't, as a matter of fact.

"I examined the first round of people who died. I'm no medical examiner, but I've investigated unnatural death for a long time. They seemed to have suffocated by way of some sort of chemical asphyxiant in the fog." He looked at Neal. "Stay out of the fog," he said firmly, before leading him up the steps and into 1306.

"Don't have to tell me twice."

Neal can't help snooping as they go inside. Look for the things that must have been there when Malcolm showed up, look for the things that have been moved or added since. He can tell there's more than one person living here, that's easy enough--and that the other someones are probably male.

"Where's the roomies?"

Good observation. The sort that Malcolm might have made. He raises his eyebrows faintly and shrugs off his coat, hanging it in the closet by the front door before heading around the kitchen island.

"Out and about, probably. They like to keep busy. Getting supplies. Helping people out."

He put the kettle on the stove and took the french press and two mugs down from a cupboard.

Neal sits down at the table, unwrapping one of the sketchbooks and opening to a clean page. He's got pencils, a full set of them thanks to the toy store. Not the best quality, but they'll do.

He looks up, eying the french press. "Fancy. Have to say, I was expecting ye olde coffee pot."

"That's what we had at the old house," Malcolm told him, gesturing across the street. "Before the cowboys turned it into a fulltime distillery and we moved here."

"That sure was a collection of words that were all in one sentence."

Of all the things Neal wants to question today, though, that is one he'll let slide.

He studies the blank page for a moment, taking a deep, quiet breath. Envisions the girl's face, what she must have looked like with life behind her eyes. Then he starts to draw. It's impossible to stay tense once he puts pencil to paper. There's something meditative about creation, there always has been to him. Blue eyes soften. Muscles loosen. The manic energy of the day so far starts to fade as Rey's face takes shape on the page.

“The cowboys are my roommates,” he explained, scooping coffee into the press. He didn’t try to look at Neal’s work in progress; he gave him room to work. “Raylan and D... Henry. They built a still out of scavenged copper piping and bits. They brew moonshine in the house across there,” he said, gesturing towards 1307. “They share with anyone who wants some. It’s closer to drain cleaner than single malt scotch, but sometimes an itch needs scratched.”

He poured hot water into the press.

“It’s not safe to live with a makeshift still. Could explode.”

Neal hadn’t asked, but Malcolm recognized the question nonetheless.

Neal makes a tiny, amused noise. "Oh, I know. I have a friend who lost a safehouse that way."

He pauses mid-stroke with a pencil, clears his throat. "...Long story. I've got a lot of those."

Malcolm laughed. "So I don't have to tell you to stay out of the moonshine house, then," he confirmed. "But if you do want some moonshine, just ask one of the cowboys for it."

He pressed the plunger down and poured a cup of coffee, sliding it towards Neal. "Take anything in it?"

"Not if it's good." Neal picks up the cup and salutes him with it, not looking up from the sketch. "And for some strange reason, I trust your taste."

He pauses again, looking into the eyes of the stranger on the page. His throat tightens. He tries to clear it. "She's just a kid. She was just a kid."

Malcolm's eyes followed his down to the page.

"Her name was Rey. I met her once, in the library. She was looking for books in her language. She wasn't from Earth."

Neal looks up, startled. "What? What are you talking about?"

“She told me she was from another planet. She lived a sort of nomadic lifestyle. She understood our spoken language but our writing was different. There’s a note on the bulletin board with weird symbols that look like stylized squares and triangles. That’s hers; she wrote that.”

"...That isn't funny." He doesn't even know how to take what Malcolm is saying. The utter ridiculousness of it. Why he would make up something so ludicrous about a dead girl.

“I’m.... not joking,” Malcolm told him earnestly. “I thought you met John Constantine. His demon stuff is way weirder than intelligent extra-terrestrial life.”

He stares. Just stares, trying to get his mind around this latest bomb dropped into the middle of his life. A faint laugh. He really needs to stop making that noise.

"Right." Somehow, he'd pushed it out of his mind. Constantine's theories, Dean and his... everything. Somehow, with the comparative normalcy of a bookstore conversation and something to do with his hands, he'd almost managed to forget.

He can handle this. He can handle this--

Neal leans forward, elbows braced on his knees. "Right."

Breathe. Just breathe.

It isn't even the revelation itself, not really. It's one more impossible thing. It's the fact that everyone he relies on, everyone he can bounce theories off of is quite possibly a reality away. It's the fact that the impossible things haven't stopped happening, and every time he thinks he's got a step up, the next part of the stairway goes missing.

Get it together, Caffrey. Falling apart in front of a perfect stranger isn't something he does.

Deep breath. Soft exhale. He sits up in his chair again, shakes his head, puts on a smile that doesn't need to pretend at being dazed. "I really need to stop expecting anything from this place."

Malcolm steps around the island and puts a grounding hand on Neal’s shoulder. It’s something Gil does for him at home. Something Raylan has done here to help him feel calm.

“Don’t be too hard on yourself,” Malcolm advised softly. “It’s your first day and this place is A Lot.”

If he imagines the contact is Peter, it's okay. If he pretends he's sitting in the Burkes' kitchen, that he's not being touched by a stranger. It is something Peter would do. It's not that hard to pretend.

Neal fakes a grin. "I'm fine, really. Like you said, it's just. A lot."

Neal did not like that. Malcolm withdrew his hand and moved around the island again, on the pretense of picking up his coffee cup and taking a sip.

"You're not. I can see that you're not. But that's okay, you know."

Profiler.

"I, um. Am not as okay as I look, either." He glanced around. "There are things you can normalize, but. You'll run into more people who think 'magic' is a realistic explanation for things. More people from weird places or who've... traveled between dimensions or who have some kind of super power. But you know what? In this place? They're not any better off than we are. They don't have an advantage; they're just as stuck."

His hands tightened around his cup a little.

Neal doesn't like being called out so bluntly. He also doesn't have the energy to keep up appearances when it's clear there's no point. So instead, he just avoids looking at Malcolm, fussing with a pencil and drawing a tiny rose in the corner of the sketchbook. He manages to keep his voice wry, at least.

"If you're trying for comforting, you're hitting a bit shy of the mark." He taps the point of the pencil against the paper, then finally looks Malcolm's way. "You're not-- You don't have anything like that? In your background?"

"Yeah, I'm..." He looked down into his cup. "Sorry."

Was there a way to be honest about their situation and comforting? If there was, he wasn't sure he was the one equipped to work it out.

He looked up a the question. "Superpowers and magic? Oh, god no. Monsters, yes. But... the human kind."

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