villagelogs | 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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Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

“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.”

"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?"

“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.”

"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?"

He shrugged a shoulder. “‘Mechanism’ doesn’t have to be so literal. I just mean however they did it, whether that mechanism was... mechanical or magical or... some other ‘al’ we don’t know about yet.” He gestured towards the woods. “The walls are toxic fog. I don’t know what to call that category of technology.”

"Given I have just seen a machine that can control the flow of time in a small direct area? I wouldn't be surprised if there is something similar here." Helen shook her head. "I think the easiest explanation would simply be chemistry. While it's not exactly the same to Mustard Gas that they deployed in the First World War... a similar concept. Now, how they control it to remain in a certain area and height? That is a mystery."

“The effect it has is more like carbon monoxide. Some people had the option to run back inside, but it appeared to have killed them quietly enough that they didn’t realize it was killing them until it was too late,” he told her.

"It would certainly be a high concentrated amount of it to kill so quickly." Helen agreed. "Is the fog always like this?"

“How do you suggest we test that?” Malcolm asked. “I’m not sure anyone is interested enough to go try it out.”

Helen shrugged. "Carbon monoxide poisoning isn't going to kill someone right away. Especially if it is low exposure. Has anyone else gone into the fog other than when it apparently attacked us? Or, have people been hands off and leaving well enough alone?"

"A couple people I know of who've gone in said they felt an overwhelming dread. That they heard voices of people they knew inside. And they felt immediately compelled to flee," Malcolm told her. "Nobody has stayed in there long enough to experience symptoms, as far as I know."

"A psychological response as opposed to a physical one. Fascinating." Helen shook her head at that. It certainly must do quite a number on the human brain then. In some instances it might kill, in others it might cause the flight response? "And to know more, we would need someone to willingly do so. If we could provide the proper parameters and medical assistance? It might be worth testing at one point. We can't know what we are up against until we are aware of what it can do to us."

A pause.

"I would only encourage this if we could find the proper way to test it. No one should put their safety at risk if we cannot provide some measurement of safety. Yet, there has to be some risks given, if we're to understand where we are and what our environment is."

“...All we have here is each other,” Malcolm told her. “We can’t ask someone to do that. Not all the dead come back.”

"Which is why, if we cannot promise some level of safety, it should not be done. However... what happens when one of us does decide to do this? To test the boundaries of what we can physically see, and push forward for answers?" A frown took her face then. "Is there some sort of response or medically trained people here that we can go to if one of us does?"

".....We have a nineteenth century dentist. Great bedside manner. Hasn't pulled a single tooth but does a good job patching people up." Malcolm's jaw flexed slightly. "I'm very sure he would not be cool with people walking into the fog just to try it out, though. The note that says Don't go in the fog! on the bulletin board is his."

A dentist who hadn't had to pull a tooth? Well, that was considerably lucky. At least no one has had trauma to the mouth yet. Helen nodded. She had a doubt that she would find herself so lucky given the situation of the town.

"From your experience, in your field, knowing the people you have? You must know that some people will push boundaries, laws, rules, even safety measures when everything tells them no. Authority be damned. I hardly support the notion, but, there are risk takers. By pure statistics alone there must be a few of those people here among us. Which, if there are, then how can we best prep for when they inevitably do push those boundaries?"

Malcolm turned to his right a little and pointed, directing her gaze past the buildings of the town.

"See that clearing, just in front of the treeline?" he asked as he turned his head to look at her. "That's where we bury them."

"Ah, the graveyard. Yes. That was where I found myself when I landed here." Helen nodded. "Yet, we still need to focus on the living and how to aid them when they inevitably do thins they shouldn't"

“People who do things they shouldn’t don’t typically live long enough to be helped,” he told her. “I’d suggest trying to find methods of getting them to not, if you want to value their lives more than they do. Have... have you seen something like this place before?” he asked.

021-023 » the ghosts of fallen leaves

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