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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The mock-affort had Raylan grinning and chuckling under his breath, eyebrows lifting a little with the mirth of his reply. This was good, this ease. It meant they could exist together without Malcolm going all.. Well. Proving it was a mistake. "You didn't," he assured.

His chin lifted a little as Malcolm stopped, concerned that maybe Something was Happening that he wasn't aware of.. because it couldn't possibly be that other thing. But the answer he got didn't seem like it quite fit. He wouldn't push, but that was only because he didn't want to open something he wasn't ready for.

"They mean well. Mean it to be some kinda comfort. They want to pad the sharpness of my ignorance to it. Like I should take it as.." He pulled a face and shook his head, taking a sip of his coffee. "Faith somehow. Very religion-esq. I do 'em the favor of not comparin' it to X-files. Aliens. Monsters.. Not too far off, if you really think about it. Both OtherWordly."

Malcolm looked at him.

"As someone whose perception of reality is sometimes skewed, it's no comfort to tell someone their perception of reality might be skewed. And I think whoever is telling you that wouldn't like it either," he said simply.

His eyes lingered on Raylan for a moment and then dipped back to his cup.

"Do you..." He paused. If he asked, was that going to make it slip through his fingers? His jaw flexed for a moment and then he looked at Raylan again. "Do you regret... what happened yesterday?" He made himself ask. In the aftermath of Neal's immediate regret for doing the same thing, he needed to know if Raylan's 'sorry' meant he had regretted it too.

He wouldn't blame him if he did, but. It was more difficult on his heart with Raylan. He'd wanted to kiss Raylan for a while. He'd been sure it would never happen but... when it did? He wasn't sure what to do with it. He didn't know what it meant.

He was right. It wasn't any comfort. There was no place in his existence where he told people who were supposed to be his equal on the innocent side of the law that they were rude unless he was pushed, so he'd always tolerated it. There wasn't any other way for him to cope and come out on top except for to take the quiet route.

Raylan's eyes had drifted out to the thousand yard stare beyond the porch but snapped back to Malcolm at his question.

"Should I? You didn't say no.. It was.." He inhaled, eyes moving back out into the darkness that had settled too quickly on the horizon before settling down in his cup. "New. A first."

Not the first time he'd kissed someone, obviously, but Raylan trusted that Malcolm was smart enough to figure it out.

"I don't," he reiterated. "Regret it," he clarified, gaze coming back up to Malcolm's too blue eyes. "I don't often do things I regret."

He was, if nothing else, a purposeful man.

The butterflies that filled his stomach at the answer threatened to buckle his knees.

He still wasn’t sure what it had meant... but it hadn’t been nothing. It hadn’t been a fleeting by-product of an emotional reaction like Neal’s impulsive and rescinded kiss.

But he had been a little relieved at that. He liked Neal a lot, but it wasn’t Neal he wanted to kiss.

“I... was thinking,” he said carefully, looking over at Raylan, watching his face to gauge his reaction, “of doing it again.”

Raylan wasn't really sure what it meant either, but he knew he cared. He knew he enjoyed the feeling it left on and in and around him. The same way laying with Malcolm after his nightmares or curled up into the couch with Doc against him felt. He didn't understand it. Where it came from. But he knew why it was there.

The edges of his lips lifted a little warmly. "Not out here on the porch, I hope." As fresh and new as.. well, everything was, kissing anyone in public was sort of a no go for him. This wasn't for everyone else. His heartrate was slowly climbing again and he kept himself firmly, safely where he was.

"But behind a door.." His eyes drifted to Malcolm's lips and he swallowed thickly with a nervous smile and a glance into his cup. "Wouldn't be bad at all," he finished, taking another drink to busy his mouth and hands for a second before they got him in over his head.

Malcolm shifted his weight, watching Raylan's face, watching the emotions play out there...

He glanced around and took a sip of his tea, both hands still clutching the mug tightly.

"Sometimes.... I see you behind a door."

He could wait until then, if that was what Raylan wanted.

"Sometimes." His eyes had found their way back up to Malcolm's. "More often than others." They were going to be dangerous alone, he could feel it now.

"And the straps of yours are gonna need to be double checked before you actually go down for the night.." As, ya know.. just a suggestion..

Malcolm held his gaze.

"That's very diligent of you," he said as evenly as he could manage, though he could feel a flush of excitement or maybe arousal creeping up his neck. "But that is the level of... care that I've come to expect."

"Can't have them snapping because the knots aren't tight enough or something'. Just cause we have doctors around doesn't mean we gotta use them, right?" See how reasonable a suggestion this is?

Raylan's smile slipped into a devilish smirk as he drug his eyes away and put them back off the porch for a second.

"What were you helpin' Neal with? What are all the apples for?"

"Poached apples. He was making poached apples. He wanted to make enough for Ellie and Daisy. I... apparently he's seeing Daisy in a... more than friendship sort of way."

He took a sip of tea.

"I've gone out a window before because my restraints didn't hold."

Raylan pulled a little bit of a face. "What do you do with poached apples?"

Clearly the most important part of that statement.

"Him and Daisy though that's.. Good for him," Raylan decided with a nod of his head, unaware of what else had transpired yesterday. That was fast, he thought, but to each their own. As long as the two of them were happy. "She seems like a nice lady."

Raylan looked back over at Malcolm, lips lifting a little again. "Probably shouldn't have put you on the second floor but.. We can't let that be happenin' again. How far was the fall?" He assumed Malcolm fell, having gone out said window.

"...You eat poached apples. Well. The rest of you do; I don't think I can handle them. But they smelled good."

He hadn't met Daisy to comment on whether she was, in fact, a 'nice lady', but Neal's judgement seemed... reasonable.

He huffed a little laugh at the question. "It would have been about fifteen feet to the sidewalk, but the other restraint held so I just kind of... hung there until I woke up enough to pull myself back in. My apartment's on the second floor at home, too."

He moved to sit down beside Raylan, turning to the side, pulling his knee up so he could still mostly face him.

"I'm sure there's some poached apples left in the kitchen if you want to try them. I bet they're good with coffee."

"Without makin' 'em into something else? Anything else?" Sounded weird to him. But they did smell good.

Raylan's eyebrows stayed up at their surprised angles. "Oh only fifteen feet, okay." It wasn't okay. "Hellva a way to wake up. Most people couldn't have done that. Suggests some impressive upper body strength." Was that why Malcolm's shoulders looked the way they did?

His eyes followed Malcolm over to as he sat down, smirking a little. "But you just sat down," he protested with a teasing tone. A beat later and he was nodding. "I won't say no to tryin' one but I don't promise anything else. Never much cared for apples, except for Mags Apple Pie moonshine."

"I do a lot of yoga," Malcolm told him. "And pull-ups."

He did have some upper body strength, yeah. But it was part of his mental health coping ritual. The strength was a bonus.

But you just sat down. He grinned. "We are going to get you some vices that don't destroy your internal organs," Malcolm declared, pressing the pad of a finger gently to Raylan's shoulder. "In time."

"Hey, it's not my choice that moonshine is our only option. I'd love to drink somethin' that doesn't taste like gasoline and clean me out." He wasn't going to go into detail with that but he wasn't drinking unaffected. Oatmeal was going to become a regular breakfast.

"My Aunt Helen and I used to tease each other about bad habits. I'd get on her for smokin'. She'd tell me I didn't have enough bad habits. Drinkin' is cultural at this point. Though I suppose it always has been. Beer History bein' what it is." He glanced at where he was poked. "Watch out, all that yoga, gonna do serious damage with that finger. Break a bone or somethin', geez."

"We've established boundaries," Malcolm retorted with a smirk. "If I use upper body strength on you, it's not going to be in public."

"What's that suggest for when we're not in public," he shot back sassily with a faint lift of one eyebrow. "Should we establish a safe word?"

Was this really how he was dipping his toes into the subject? He was stunned, even at himself, but there was an ease to joking about it. An easy way in that didn't twist and gut him as he fell into it.

Malcolm gave him an almost shy smile.

"We don't have to be that formal. If I frighten you... just tell me and I'll back off."

Maybe he wasn't talking about sex anymore. He could see where Raylan was twisting.

And just like that, there was no more easy joking about it. They'd been swerved back onto a blunter honesty. Raylan's smile curled at the edges and he nodded.

He wasn't going to say that Malcolm frightened him. Practically speaking, he didn't. They weren't talking 'practically' and Raylan found it hard to turn around to face the suggestion being made because there was a very loud ring of truth to it.

"Not much scares me, generally speaking." But the way he spoke left room for the exception that was Malcolm. "Not knowin' what I'm doin' does make the list every now and then."

“If you didn’t know what you were doing... it sure didn’t feel that way,” Malcolm admitted, ducking his head a little. He dared to glance up at Raylan’s face. “Made me a little dizzy.”

"If you would have fallen, I would have caught you." He knew Malcolm wanted more than that. Malcolm wanted how he felt when he kissed him, what was in his head. It was still a mess.

A million things sat on the tip of his tongue as he looked at Malcolm and none of them could fall without him twisting some more.

"Let's go see about those apples." He patted Malcolm's leg and stood, taking the opportunity as they walked towards the kitchen to reset a little. "Glad to hear that Ellie is bein' kept fed. Seems to be a pastime of people here. I wonder what about her triggers that."

Malcolm actually found If you would have fallen, I would have caught you extremely romantic and he didn't know what to say, though the goofy look on his face may have given it away. He was almost relieved when Raylan changed the subject.

"She looks like a little girl who's lost," he said by way of an answer to what was possibly a rhetorical question. "She has severe PTSD. But that's probably normal when you survive the apocalypse."

It was a good look on him, much like many others. There was a small amount of pride that was bolstered by it. He'd caused that. Even if he hadn't exactly meant to. It was better than the tension.

"I haven't asked her about what she's suffered, but I asked about her world. 2039," he scoffed with a shake of his head as they hit the kitchen, the whole house still smelling of warm apple. "Apparently, the world ended in 2013 and no one invited us. Rude, innit?"

Edited 2021-01-25 03:20 (UTC)

"In 2013. That's definitely a different world," Malcolm remarked. "From talking to her at the boarding house, I know there's no official authorities of any kind. Just... lawlessness and vigilantism. She's seen people killed."

Malcolm took down a plate for Raylan to put his serving of apple on.

"A lot of people here have been through some things," he noted.

"Made her nervous. Then again, maybe that's just how we all are here.. Nervous under the skin, amped up by stress." He took a deep breath as he fished one of the apples out onto the plate and got a fork out of the drawers to cut into it.

"They have. Some more than others. Not much use I've found in the comparing of it all. Suffering is suffering. It all leaves its scars."

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