villagelogs | 024-027 » neither reward nor punishment

024-027 » neither reward nor punishment

WHO: Everyone.
WHERE: Eastern/Central/Western Mathias + ???
WHEN: Days 024-027
WHAT: The consequences of their actions.
WARNINGS: Will update as necessary. PM this account to have a warning added!
NOTES: Plotting post over here! The next log will be posted January 23rd.

RECOMMENDED ♫ Deadly Avenger "Onryo" 怨霊

DAYS 024-025
CONSEQUENCES
“There are in nature neither rewards nor punishments —
there are consequences.”
— Robert G. Ingersoll
When the unwilling residents of Mathias Township wake on the morning of the 24th day, they will find themselves in yet another set of frustratingly unnerving circumstances. None of them are where they last remember being, and some of them have strange marks on the palms of their left hands. It's all incredibly unsettling, but truthfully they should be used to it by now. No one will remember traveling to their new location.

Residents can wake up anywhere within their new location and in any position. Curled up in a bed, sprawled on a couch, huddled beneath a coffee table, propped against a wall... Wherever they are, they will themselves to be in quite an unusual state. While they are wearing whatever clothing items they went to sleep in, plus their shoes and a coat. The newest arrivals to Mathias Township will perhaps stand out for being slightly more appropriately dressed than their new neighbors. They are all a bit damp, physically worn out, and half-frozen from their apparent walk through a blizzard.

Each of the four locations is inescapable — residents are trapped, with exterior doors and windows being shut tight and a blizzard raging outside. The locations are stocked with fresh food and water and a large pile of firewood for the fireplaces in each building. The circumstances residents will face, however, may vary wildly between locations as the forces at work in Mathias respond to the recent actions of certain individuals.

BOARDING HOUSE | GREY GULL
NEW HOUSE | MYSTERY MANSION

These residents will wake with a mark on their left hand palms, a spiraling black symbol similar to those some may have seen around town. All marks are identical and cannot be removed, but will have seemingly vanished from their skin on the morning of the 26th day.

Castiel, Daisy Johnson, Dean Winchester
Elena Gilbert, Elijah Mikaelson, Helen Magnus
Phil Coulson, Quentin Coldwater, Sherlock Holmes

DAYS 026-027
IN THE AFTERMATH
After their ordeals of the past two days, the unfortunate residents of Mathias Township will be grateful to find that they were back where they are supposed to be, a chill still clinging to their clothes in whatever place they went to sleep the night of the 23rd day. New arrivals will wake in the living room of the boarding house. None of the residents will wake with anything in their possession from the locations in which they were previously trapped, including any notes or documentation they may have made during their time there.

CONDITIONS UPDATE
— SNOW continues to fall heavily on Days 024-025, resulting in white out conditions from the wind that blows in gusts of over 35 mph; the temperature also drops drastically, making conditions extremely dangerous for residents. The blizzard clears on Day 26 and residents are left with a cold, calm world covered in white.

— THE FOG remains blocking the paths in the forest, urging residents to stay huddled within the town proper, and it also now blocks the northern section of town, beginning just before where residents know the chasm in the earth to be. Venturing into the fog is... ill-advised.

— DISAPPEARANCES continue to plague the town. Kylo Ren and Thomas Richardson have vanished without a trace.

— NO NEW DEATHS have occurred in town, but there is a new "grave" in the small makeshift graveyard near the schoolhouse. Rey's corpse has been moved and covered with stones to wait for the ground to thaw enough for a proper burial.

— THE LANTERNS will be gone from the morning of Day 024. No trace of them remains.

OOC UPDATES
— A GIFT for everyone! As a thank you for being part of this spooky little game, every character in the game is being gifted 2 Activity Points. These may be banked over here — instead of linking to an AC post, you may put "New Year gift" in that field. Happy 2021, friends!

— NEW LAYOUTS have been installed for our communities! Huge thanks to our Eldritch Librarian Stars for putting in the time to get this place looking shiny. (You may have also noticed some new page layouts being installed — these are also our Librarian's handiwork!)

— 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.)

— 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

"We were locked in too. And I had not seen any bodies in the snow yesterday, though I did not manage to survey the entire town as we are doing now." It's encouraging at least although Doc knew that people in the house, for whatever unfathomable reason, were definitely trying to break out and go into the blizzard.

"And what about our mysterious captors? Do you think they were able to seize the opportunity to do something to the town? Did they orchestrate the blizzard or were they foiled by it?" Whether or not Doc believes in Malcolm's theory, he knows Malcolm is always working away at a few ideas simultaneously in his head. He does not mind indulging in one or two from time to time.

“I haven’t found anything different yet, but just because we can’t perceive a difference, that doesn’t mean nothing has changed.” He looked at Doc. “I don’t think a single thing that happens here isn’t their design,” he said grimly.

"Well we have managed to make some changes to said design. Changes that were not reverted. It appears as if they are at least open to some level of pushing boundaries and collaborative efforts here." Not too much, clearly. They may not be able to have any significant input or deviations, or control anything that would drastically change whatever is planned in whoever is drawing up the grander scheme of things, but they have been able to at least make the design... a little messier, somewhat. It counts for something.

"Perhaps we need to be a little more subtle about it, if we are to get away with anything." He's probably talking about leaving Mathias, not matters of the heart here. Maybe.

"No harm in letting us get away with a little light vandalism, so long as it doesn't compromise the integrity of their walls. Keep us busy. Keep us feeling like we're getting somewhere."

Subtle. Be more subtle.

He laughs self-consciously down at the ground.

"Subtlety is really, really hard for me when I'm barely in control of my..." He made a gesture that sort of encompassed his whole self. "Any of my emotional state. But. I thought I was doing... reasonably well. All things considered."

Light vandalism is an interesting choice of words. Not necessarily one Doc would use for what they are doing here. But it's true that so far, any damage done has not been anything too major that would have affected the entire town or everyone in it.

"You're doing just fine." There is nothing else to be said or done about Malcolm's state. He has accepted that this is who Malcolm is, intelligence and perceptiveness wrapped in a barbed, tangled bundle of raw nerves with loose threads hanging from every angle, simultaneously held together by outer pressure and inner strong will, and always one precarious moment away from unraveling and coming undone. Fate is not about resigning to the fact that a man cannot choose the cards he is dealt. It is how he will play the game.

"If you are in a better place today than you were yesterday then I would consider that a battle hard fought and won." This place has turned out to be a marathon, not a race. The game should be played by placing one foot in front of the other, not by focusing on the finish line.

"We can work on the subtlety," Doc promises. "...'tis not something I would recommend learning from Raylan."

"Okay, that's a fair point," Malcolm conceded with a laugh. "A subtle man he is not." He glanced over. "He took me to the store yesterday to get belts to reinforce my restraints." He opened his coat part way. "Got this sweater so you guys don't have to worry about me freezing every time I go outside," he teased, zipping back up.

Yeah, it's like Raylan picked up the 'man' bit but dropped the 'gentle' in front somewhere along the way. But the South has changed a lot since he was last there. There may be civilised folks in the towns Doc had passed through or at least folks pretending they are civilised, but over in the hills they breed only monsters and men. Where others have kicked decency to the kerb one cannot afford to play nice and hope to survive at the same time.

"Well we would want you to look dashing freezing to death," Doc appraises, his looks never lingering long enough to be deemed inappropriate. "Did you find those belts? It is more of a lack of expertise than because I do not care that I have not gotten involved in your... sleeping arrangements." He's not sure what to call all this paraphernalia otherwise.

"Yeah. It was my idea; he just helped me find them. He was there when one of the bungees broke. I don't... know how long we're going to be here, but I'm clearly not going to be able to get something a little more... purpose built, like I have at home. But the bungee hook scratched me when it broke, so I thought... what kinds of things could I make into... more like the cuffs I'm used to, so even if they break they probably won't injure me. I've broken restraints at home," he told Doc. "One of mine came out of the wall a few months ago and I went through the window by my bed."

"I will keep a lookout for anything you could possibly use to prevent that," Doc promises. He might be blindly driving the ambulance at the bottom of a very steep cliff but he's not sure he can catch Malcolm if he goes soaring through the window one night. Often, for one reason or another, he has not managed to be there during the critical moments for the important people in his life. He anticipates missing a few more in the coming months.

"I suppose you cannot live that transient life that Raylan and I do. It is hard work to be tying yourself down into someone else's bed every night. I doubt the inns and various hosts would be too pleased with holes in their walls and broken windows."

"I used to travel a lot in my old job," Malcolm told him. "I had a set of restraints that I could attach to a hotel bed. I wear a mouth guard, too, at home. Keeps me from biting my tongue. Muffles my screaming a little bit. Though... security still ended up at my door a fair amount. I used to secretly rent the rooms on either side of my room so people wouldn't complain." He looked over. "Traveling was the down side of getting to the worst crime scenes, to be honest. You're right about hotels. They're not pleased with noise and... broken things."

Yeah Doc isn't too sure what a hotel is. He can gather it is another type of inn though. But at least in a motel you can make a lot more noise than in a room with many adjacent rooms with paper-thin walls.

"Do you miss it? Your old job." He does not know exactly what it entails, or how exactly it differs from what the Marshals service does. The FBI and several other agencies were established after Doc was put in the well.

"It is not for everyone, the... drifting."

"I miss the work. I hunted serial killers almost exclusively and I was good at it, so I had a lot of latitude. But... I don't miss navigating it. I had to hide my background and... once they found out who my father was, they were looking for a reason to get rid of me," Malcolm told him. "I don't miss the people I worked with. They thought I was weird before they found out about him. They thought I was a psychopath in waiting once they did."

He can't imagine a world where there are enough serial killers to be making honest work of it all the time. He knows so little about them. He is at least familiar with the concept of being judged on what your father and his father and his father's father and so on have done. He does not necessarily condone it, paying for another man's sins or reaping the benefits he has sown, as much as that hand might have guided or even forced those hands of their descendants, but it was common practice nonetheless.

"Is it something you are supposed to be passing down?" He had always thought it was more of a state of mind. Not like hair colour or facial features.

"Psychopathy? There's some evidence to suggest that... maybe there's a genetic component. It's... inconclusive, because the link could be related to nurture more than nature... it's a whole debate, academically." His jaw tensed slightly and he looked down. "The inconclusivity of the studies didn't stop kids at school from calling me 'psycho'. I've been watching myself for signs of it since I was eleven years old."

That Malcolm was bullied comes as no surprise. While the dynamics and intricacies of the modern school system are lost on Doc, he understands ostracism and stigma. Malcolm would have been a prime target of the special kind of cruelty that children have not yet learned to temper down.

"If you have it, you have it." Doc shrugs. What can be done, in such a situation? It is not a consolation, it is a fact.

"It wouldn't matter in the end how you got it, if you do end up a certain way. After finding a place to stow away the blame you still need to face the next day carrying it with you." All the yelling in the world until voices are hoarse and broken, bridges charred to black and feelings irreparably destroyed, does not make anyone no longer angry or lost or bitter.

"I am not sure what can be done for such an ailment, but if those around you cannot handle the mere possibility that you may shoulder a burden they are blessed not to have to, if you have to hide pieces of yourself to be accepted then they were never worth your time or efforts to begin with. It was better to bid them farewell and find the precious few others who are willing to stick the hard times through with you."

“I don’t have any desire to kill anyone,” Malcolm said. A fact he’d spent most of his life confirming. “My mental health issues are all related to post traumatic stress. The anxiety, the depression, the insomnia, the night terrors, the hallucinations... it’s all the fallout of prolonged or serious acute duress on the human limbic system. My own fight or flight response throwing my whole body chemically out of whack. But I suppose people who don’t know any better might confuse a trauma response with a psychopathic urge.”

He looked at Doc.

“I don’t know that anyone has ever stuck so close and so steadfastly through the hard times as you and Raylan have. You didn’t even know me when you took it on.”

Well. Doc has the occasional compulsion to kill someone - and really, actually put a bullet between their eyes, not just saying it out of a moment of anger - but he wouldn't consider that psychopathy. Malcolm... kind of lost him on the other technical explanations. Nevermind that he has been through some shit himself and exhibits some similar symptoms, uses unhealthy coping mechanisms and self-medicates through his mess.

"Is that what people do in New York? They look at you and give you a wide berth?" It's little wonder that the king has ended up acquiring two cowboy knights to place by his side.

"Not usually on a glance. But if I were like I am now? Off my meds... if I were having a bad day... I'm sure they'd back away as quickly as they do any other lunatic on the streets of New York," he said. "They wouldn't be offering me a place to stay, that's for sure. You and Raylan are special people, Doc. You need to know that. You're... kinder than average."

Any... other lunatic? Exactly how many lunatics are walking around the streets of New York?

"No I'm- fairly certain I am at or below average. But perhaps my idea of average is a little skewed. Times have changed, after all. Or so I have been told on numerous occasions." It has not been easy to adapt to everything. But, at least he has patient company who is willing to put up with his old-fashioned ways.

"Well. It looks like our museum is still here. Along with all our handiwork." He's happy that not all the notes have blown away and the extra boards to reinforce the building are still in place. Hopefully they're not cooking up some insatiable beast in there.

"Suppose we shall have to do this again tomorrow. See if we can find the two new houses then."

Doc was not 'at or below average' in kindness. Definitely not. Not even just in this town. But Malcolm would push it. He looked over at the museum when Doc mentioned it, nodding at his suggestion.

"I can see how maybe the mansion is hidden away in the woods where we can't go, but... just a regular house? Maybe it's on one of the new streets," he suggested. "We'd just... have to look inside them all to see if you recognize one."

"It felt much bigger on the inside than the houses we have been in so far," Doc explains. "Two storeys, with over a dozen mirrors." What kind of house has over a dozen mirrors? It was not so small that you needed all those mirrors to make the space seem bigger.

"I am not certain we would find it nested away in plain sight, but it is worth a try," he agrees. It would give them something to do for a little while longer, at least. Time away from the house. Maybe make some new (harmless) discoveries, if they're lucky.

"It's weird that you and Raylan ended up in places that, to our knowledge, aren't even in town and me, Negan and Neal were stuck in places that are well known in town," Malcolm mused.

"Yeah that would describe our luck in life, just about," Doc comments, trying to lighten the events of the previous days. "I know it- should be strange. And it is unsettling. But 'ending up in places' has oft happened in my life." He used to be a drifter and in the recent few years he has been forcibly drifted, forced to adapt to the environment around him, forced to learn new things just to survive. In either case, he is not as perturbed as he should be. But it makes him reluctant to put down any roots and lay claim to anything.

"I'm a... spectator of the twentieth century. Or the twenty-first, now. Even in the house we share - through no fault of yours or Raylan's - I am a guest, borrowing a couch, eating out of a refrigerator I know not how it functions, wearing someone else's clothes." He doesn't talk about how he feels psychologically disconnected from everything from Wyatt's great great granddaughter, her family curse, their baby, to the way he hasn't unpacked his bag even after almost two weeks of sleeping in 1306. For all the reassurances he gives Malcolm about where he has a place to belong, Doc doesn't have one for himself. He's perpetually waiting to be displaced long before he is issued an eviction notice.

“We’re all in that boat,” Malcolm pointed out, not realizing how deep Doc’s sense of impermanence ran. “I can barely find borrowed clothes that fit,” he added with a self-conscious laugh. “But... we’ve managed to build a home here,” he said. “Until we figure this place out.”

"It's just a house," Doc clarifies, unconsciously disassociating and emotionally distancing himself from the refuge they have set up for themselves and for others. Building these walls is how he protects himself.

"Once we find a way out of Mathias we will end up in another place yet again." Doc smiles and shrugs. That is the way of his world. He has accepted this.

"Hopefully it's... where we came from."

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