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

Interesting, that she's not sure it's right.

"...If you're not certain that it's morally right, then why do you want to do it?" he asked. "What do you want to get out of it, if not justice?"

"They deserve to pay for what they did," she answers immediately, that flicker of anger surfacing in her voice. She really hates them, Abby and the WLF and their torture and death.

But she thinks again of that girl choking on spores in the hospital. But they made their bed, didn't they, all those WLF assholes.

Ellie can't afford to be sorry.

"I can't let them live. I can't."

She doesn't know how to explain to Malcolm how she can't sleep, how she hears screams when there's nothing there, how the smallest thing can tip her over some edge she can't see. He already knows she has flashbacks. But she can't talk about so much of it, lacking the language for it.

"Do you feel like killing them will bring you some measure of peace?" he asks without judgement.

She shrugs a shoulder again. "Maybe," she answers, her tone bordering on defensive. "Maybe I want to see them suffer, too."

Like Joel did. Like Ellie herself still does.

She would never do what Abby had done, all the torture. She tells herself that, at least. She doesn't want to kill Abby slowly or anything. She just wants that girl dead. It's too much to think of her just getting to go about her life.

"No, you don't," Malcolm said with gentle certainty. "You're not a sociopath. You've just been through a lot and you've been hurt a lot and you feel like... there must be something you can do to make that pain go away."

"Sociopath? I don't know that one," she says. She reads a lot, fiction and nonfiction, but she hasn't really delved into psychology and doesn't really want to.

She shakes her head. "It's more than that, though. People just do whatever the fuck they want all the time. Eat other people. Sell people like they're fucking property. Walk into our town and get stuck in a blizzard and then fucking murder the man who was good enough to try to help them."

That's justice then, isn't it? In a world where there isn't any, where she and others like her make their own. She's aware it's perpetuating a cycle. She knows why Abby killed Joel, but like she told Malcolm, she doesn't care about that.

That, and it's hard to admit that she thinks it will make her feel better.

"Did you know that a need for fairness is so deeply ingrained in our animal hindbrains that even other animals that live in social groups display it? They did a study where they gave two monkeys the same food reward and they both accepted it, but when one got a better food for the same task or got the food without doing the task, the other got upset, refusing the food or refusing the task. What's more is they found the same sort of behaviours in dogs, rats and even some types of birds. We need fairness and justice. It's hardwired into us."

Ellie listens to Malcolm talk, frowning a little, though she isn't looking directly at him. She's not entirely sure what the point is, but he does get there.

"So you're saying I want justice because it's hardwired into me as a human?" she asks, sceptical. Maybe he's right, though. Maybe that's why this cycle just repeats, the violence and death.

Not that she's looking for someone to talk her out of it. She doesn't want to hear anything like that.

"Yeah. And in most societies, there's a mechanism in place that determines how justice is dispensed so that it's fair for everyone. But not in yours. So I don't think you necessarily have a choice in how you go about it, even if I think it's a shame that someone your age has to be in that position," he told her.

It's strange to find validation in Malcolm's words. She's not sure he gets it entirely because like other teenagers she's sure no one does. Dina tries to. Tommy might have an idea, since Joel was his brother, and he was out there in Seattle doing the same thing she was. But without living through it, it's hard to explain.

Malcolm's explanation is good enough.

"People a lot younger than me have to do terrible shit to survive, too," she says. She'd killed a man when she was fourteen to save Joel. It was one of the worst things she's ever done. That one seems so impossible now, despite all the atrocity that lies between that first undeniably self-defence murder and the slew of vengeful remorseless ones that now litter Seattle.

"I always knew my world was fucked up, I just...didn't think there was anything else left to compare it to. All these other worlds or whatever."

"If you could leave here and... go to one of those worlds instead, do you think you would do it?" Malcolm asked.

Ellie is quiet for a moment, considering.

"No," she says, finally. "I couldn't abandon my friends back home. If we could all go? Yeah, then of course I'd go. But just me? I couldn't do it."

She already feels like her life has no meaning, since she didn't get to die to create a vaccine or whatever. Abandoning Dina and Jesse and Tommy? Never.

"That's brave of you," he told her. "To think of your friends instead of yourself."

"Brave? I don't know about that. I mean...what's the fucking point if you have to just go through everything alone all the time? I don't wanna live like that. And I don't want any more of my friends to die."

That's really where it is; her protectiveness is genuine because she cares, but she also just doesn't want more endless death. Sure, she'll kill a bunch of people if she needs to, and she won't stop until she finds and kills Abby. And she's aware at least on some level that she's put Dina in too much danger and they could both die. But it's never been that she doesn't care.

"I guess you're from a way better place than here, so you wouldn't have to even think about it."

"In some ways," he acknowledged. "My world isn't lawless. I work for the law. But I also work for the law because my father was a very bad man who did evil things and I wanted to stop bad people from doing evil things," he told her. "There are bad people who need to be stopped so good people don't suffer anymore anywhere you go. It's just the mechanism of stopping them that changes."

"Jesus," she says. "So...does the law actually work?"

She's not really sure if she believes it would. Like, for a whole state? A country? She can't even imaging living people existing in such numbers. The Infected far outnumber the living, even with new people being born and growing up. It's not like all of them get to grow up. It was only by weird freaky miraculous chance she didn't die at fourteen. Well...not only chance. Joel made a choice to save her, too.

"I guess people just fucking suck no matter what we do."

“Some of them,” he conceded. Some of them perpetrated betrayals of trust so profound, their victims’ scars never healed. “But as long as the good people you save outlive the bad people you stop, then something is going right.”

She's not sure he's right, but...maybe that doesn't matter. She's not even sure if she counts as a good person. Did Joel? She's pretty sure that answer is no. Did Tommy? That's harder. Generally, she thinks of Tommy as a good person. Does she? She's not sure if she ever did, but she certainly doesn't now. But she still sees herself as better than Abby and the WLF, so maybe that's all that matters. The world is a big gray area; black and white doesn't even make sense.

"I don't know if anything can go right anymore or whatever, but...I don't know. I don't want anyone else to die because of me." In her mind, everyone who has been infected in the last five years has died because of her, but that's not something she's ready to put into words.

"That sounds like the impulses of a good person, stuck in a difficult world," he told her. "You can only do your best."

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024-027 » neither reward nor punishment

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