021-023 » the ghosts of fallen leaves

[villagemod]

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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Comments

the library!

[fika]

The library was just another point of stop-over for Five; he figured he might as well pick another book up for his shelf. As it were, the study of quantum theory wasn't high on the list of available books in nineties New England fishing, so he'd have to settle for anything that that caught his eye.

A part of him wondered if Vanya's book would be here, but neither time nor place made enough sense for that.

What he does find is another face, walking through the main aisle. At quick glance, she looks as though she has difficulty seeing. He wonders what she could be looking for here.

"Watch out for the hole in the floor," he calls out with a sigh. "About fifteen feet straight ahead of you."

[ghosthuntuk]

Melanie's steps don't just slow, but come to a complete halt at the sound of the voice. "I didn't hear anyone come in." She frowns deeply in the approximate direction he was standing in. "I don't like that." That was unsettling in ways this bloke couldn't even begin to comprehend.

There's a tension in her shoulders, in her jaw, and her fingers curl a little tighter around the cane in her hand. Wouldn't be much of a weapon, but it's all she had.

[fika]

"I was here before you," he says offhandedly, taking in her body language.

It screams tension, down to the grip on her cane. He keeps his distance, but his knuckles rasp on the dusty wooden table to her right, a small effort in being marginally polite.

"Yeah, no one does, honestly," if she was talking about the hole, anyway. "...What are you looking for?"

[ghosthuntuk]

"Right." Her voice is sharp, and cool, and she doesn't particularly sound like she believes him. Still, she takes him for what he's worth to her at the moment. A slight smirk curls one corner of her mouth up at the short knock on the table. At least the bloke is mannered, hey?

She wasn't, but it works, and is still true all the same if that's how he takes it. "Books in braille. Or audio recordings that might be around." She sounds bitter about those last words, for some unspoken reason. The last thing Melanie wants is to somehow be roped back into The Eye, by some grand loophole no one knew about.

[fika]

She doesn't need to believe him in anything - frankly, that's on her.

Braille. Huh - that likely means she hadn't been blind for long enough to learn before here.

Talk about a short end of the stick. Five can't claim to be a decent teacher, but it was certainly ironic in a crooked sort of way, to stumble across likely one of the few people who was knew it.

Between dad, the Apocalypse and the Commission, one tends to pick up an interesting rolodex of knowledge, after all. He snorts. "Gotta say, you're going to be shit out of luck on the audio recordings here, most likely. But I'll look around for the books." Listen, Five isn't a bleeding heart even on the worst day. But he isn't going to leave a blind woman when there's a hole the size of a crater to navigate. That's just a bad look. No need to make a shitty day even worse. There's a certain pinch to her tone he can't define, or much care to. They all had their shit they came from. No use assuming.

"You get any studying in on it before coming here?" He calls out, starting to walk along the shelves.

[ghosthuntuk]

"What makes you say that?" Not that she's particularly upset by it. If anything, she almost sounds relieved, in a certain way. Though, she supposes that does make her making any of her own notes a bit harder, still, too. Alas, she'll deal with that later.

She can hear where he's stepping, and she follows the sound both of his voice and his footfalls. "A bit, maybe two months? And then an idiot started the Apocalypse, sooo..." she drags the last word out, that same pinched tone in her voice again. She's still pissed at Jon. She supposes she always will be, on some level or another.

[fika]

"Because we're stuck in a very anti-climactic nineties catalogue," he calls out.

Sure, audiobooks were first made in the 1930s, but the likelihood of Mathias having a collection that included teaching braille was kind of slim. "And because convenience is a loose term around here."

He stalks to the aisle that will most likely have a book or two. He can't vouch for its quality, as he plucks one out by the spine with a tip of a finger. And almost laughs, at her last words.

He doesn't, and all that comes out is a dry snort. "Seems like apocalypses are something like a running trend," there's still an uncomfortable itch when he hears the word. Like a reminder, of home. Or a reminder that he can't know until he solves the puzzle of Mathias. "How'd that one start?" He asks, conversational and distant.

[ghosthuntuk]

She snorts at that description. "Seriously? The nineties?" Her nose scrunches up a little, perhaps a bit in disdain, but mostly it's still confusion. "Well, that's good to know," she mutters sarcastically. Truth is, she's used to discomfort. The Magnus Institute had ruined any sense of it she could have dreamed of having. Especially after The Change. Bloody idiot Archivist. She follows the sound of his footsteps and pauses when she hears his own slow to a stop. "How ready for story-time are you, mate? It's a lot harder to explain than you'd think, without a ton of background info-dumping."