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

[notanemptymotto]

Dangerous fog. Her eyebrows rose slightly, a silent way to ask for more information. Fog could certainly be disorientating. It would be easy to be lost in it for certain. She bites the inside of her mouth, hand sliding into the pockets on her leather jacket.

"It seems rather detailed to be simply made to look like a town was here. I mean, they hardly go to the extremes to fill in every single house on a movie set." Helen nodded the way she came. "I've found one home that looked as if the owners could return at any moment. Except for the fact it was covered in a thick layer of dust."

[abrightboy]

“It seems detailed, yeah. Very. Have you tried making food yet? Found any kitchen knives sharp enough to cut meat?” he asked.

[notanemptymotto]

"I made a few easy things. Are you saying every knife in this town is dull?" That would be tiresome - and annoying. "Actually, no. I think the better question would be is what houses have you found that are lacking in details? Minus the ones that are already falling apart."

[abrightboy]

"I'm saying there isn't a sharp blade of any kind. We're in a village on the edge of the forest. There isn't one axe or hatchet. There are a whole bunch of houses here, where people seem to have abandoned all of their personal effects in haste, but they had time to comb through every drawer and toolbox and take out every steak knife and jigsaw blade and every prescription pill? It makes less sense that those specific things were removed and more that they were never added to start with," Malcolm explained. "We only have their planted evidence to tell us that anyone ever lived here and it's vague at best."

[notanemptymotto]

"Not one knife in the whole town? Are you sure?" Helen raisd her eyebrow. That seems oddly suspicious and strange. Even more so than the rest of the town. "If anything then it sounds like we need to resort to sharpening rocks and attaching them to sticks. Or, getting metal and sharpening it that way."

She had just done something of the sort.

Helen sighed then. Then, she offered her hand. "I believe introductions are in order. Dr. Helen Magnus."

[abrightboy]

"Malcolm Bright," he told her, reaching out to shake her hand. "One of my roommates has been sharpening a butter knife but it's more like a prison shiv than a blade."

[notanemptymotto]

She laughed gently at the mental image. "A butter shiv. There's a first time for everything."

It was certainly new, that was for sure.

Her arms crossed under her bust again. "Dangerous fog, a lack of proper sharpened blades... I don't suppose there's anything useful in this town."

[abrightboy]

He shrugged. "Some of the people stuck here are pretty sharp," Malcolm told her. "And they have some good shampoos in the hair stylist's shop," he added, pointing.

[notanemptymotto]

"Sharp enough to make a shiv for certain." Helen perked her eyebrows playfully. "Oh, well, I suppose I do look a little worse for wear."

It's an attempt of lightening the situation.

"Any other suggestions?"

[abrightboy]

“Find shelter before it gets dark. You don’t want to be out after dark. I think the boarding house has rooms left if you don’t want to take on a whole house,” he advised.

[notanemptymotto]

Her head tilted ever so slightly then. "What happens after dark?"

It almost sounded like a horror movie. The small one, where you don't feed the gremlins after midnight. It is certainly one hell of a warning.

[abrightboy]

"People hear voices. ....See things. It's.... unsettling. Being out after dark. It's not safe."

He'd had a bad feeling at night when he first arrived; he'd sought shelter in the library to escape it. Could he explain exactly why? No. But the cowboys told him it wasn't safe, so it wasn't safe.

"You want to have the option of getting out of it."

[notanemptymotto]

Auditory and visual hallucinations? Helen frowned at that. She wondered if there was something in the air that caused it. Perhaps some atmospheric effect that hung there when the fog rolled back? It'd be hard to tell without any instruments. Regardless of the cause, it meant that they had to be careful for potential health risks.

"I would say the choice seems to be, rather, does one go out into the darkness at the chance to learn and understand the surroundings... or does one play it safe and allow another to do it? Science is hardly without its risks."

[abrightboy]

"What if you don't learn anything from it?" Malcolm asked. "What if it just makes you a little crazy?"

[notanemptymotto]

"Then you've learned that one side effect is madness. There is always something to be learned from cause and effect. Even if we don't quite like the outcome." She pointed out with a small shrug. "I've learned to accept that in my line of work over the years."

[abrightboy]

"It's not a side effect," Malcolm told her. "It's the intended effect of a game or... an experiment or... someone's entertainment."

[notanemptymotto]

"Implying you believe there is a mastermind behind it all. To what point and end would that hypothesis lead? A social experiment of sorts?" Helen tilted her head. At least they were able to pick one another's brains on the matter. It was comforting to find someone else of the scientific mind.

[abrightboy]

"How would we even get here if not at someone's behest?" Malcolm pointed out. "I don't know if it's a social experiment. It might just be... a zoo, of sorts."

[notanemptymotto]

"Plenty of different ways. Ones I'm not entirely sure of just yet. Although, how would they have gotten us here? Boat? Plane? I hit the ground falling when I arrived. Unless someone never saw a helicopter to drop me low enough to the ground."

She frowned then. "A zoo?"

The implications she understood. However, the word got under her skin. More often or not people found her work that of a zoo as opposed to what it truly was. It was a bit of a sore spot.

[abrightboy]

"A place where they put us to look at us. For amusement. They haven't expressed any particular demands of us, really. They just... made this place that looks like our natural environment and dropped us in it."

[notanemptymotto]

"That is certainly one theory. One that causes an extreme amount of money and interest. Things that ego depraved maniacs tend to put their money into are more lucrative than this." She shook her head. "Could it be that its far simpler? It truly is an abandoned town with a mystery behind it."

[abrightboy]

“If it’s just an abandoned town, we’re back to ‘where are all the steak knives and hand saws and axes?’ Everything else is where it would be if someone left it lie, but specific things are nowhere. Not one overlooked piece.”

He shrugged.

“Seems unlikely to me, but I could be wrong.”

[notanemptymotto]

"If you were to place people in a town to merely watch them go insane and murder one another? You'd give them access to weapons. Especially if they wished to invoke the idea of gladiatorial days of Rome."

Helen gave a small smile. "Have we considered the option that we may never know the reason behind it?"

[abrightboy]

“Maybe they don’t want it to be over that quickly,” Malcolm pointed out. “It’s a zoo, not the Coliseum.”

At her next question, the corners of his lips twitched up in amusement. “Obviously. Since we can’t access the mechanism the brought us here, the mechanisms that keep us here or the intelligence behind it.”

[notanemptymotto]

"Sometimes they put animals on display to fight for amusement. It's a matter of it is a fight to the death or not."

Her head tilted at that. "Mechanisms? You believe it was some sort of machine?"