villagelogs | 001-003 » a chilling mathias welcome

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001-003 » a chilling mathias welcome

WHO: Everyone.
WHERE: The east end of Mathias, along the waterfront.
WHEN: Days 001-003
WHAT: The newest residents of Mathias Township are welcomed with a storm.
WARNINGS: Will update as necessary. PM this account to have a warning added!
NOTES: A small love letter from your mod. This spot can be used for plotting.

RECOMMENDED ♫ Deadly Avenger "Mara"

DAY 001
THE ARRIVAL BEGINS

Is it the whooshing crash of waves on dark jagged rocks that wakes you? Perhaps. It might also be the near-continuous rumble of thunder growing closer every second, the vibrations almost seeming to come from the wet sand beneath your hands. Or maybe it’s the shivering of your own body as water recedes from the pebble-covered shore, the cold sinking into your very bones as a chilled wind picks up. It could be any of these things that rouse you from a deep slumber that leaves you feeling groggy and out of sorts--

But it’s the fear that gets you moving. A deep, intense terror grips your chest and squeezes the breath right out of you, and you know without a shred of doubt that you have mere minutes before whatever it is you’re so afraid of arrives on that stretch of rocky beach to greet you. Even if you want to stay rooted to that spot and faced it head-on, your body betrays you, a survival instinct etched into your genetic code forcing you to seek shelter.

Welcome to Mathias. You should probably run now.

THE STORM ARRIVES

When the storm crashes into the small township, it's hard to remember what life was like before it. The ocean becomes a raging thing, waves rising and falling as if trying to attack whatever they can reach along the coast. Any foolish enough to venture along the beach have no hope of surviving the encounter; their bodies will be swept out with the current, gone in the blink of an eye.

The wind is a howling beast, screaming between buildings and driving spikes of cold into any crevice it can reach. The rain is just shy of freezing, every drop like a shard of icicle trying to itself into your skin. It will bite at your nerves and leave you shaking if you stay out in it too long, so you had best get inside if you haven't already. You certainly don't want to attract the attention of the lightning that arcs in the sky like a vengeful god ready to unleash its wrath.

The Grey Gull restaurant sits at the edge of the town along the beach, and just a few yards away are two parallel rows of houses lining what might be a picturesque street if the world weren't beginning to resemble an apocalyptic landscape.

Move quickly, and choose wisely.

DAY 002
THE STORM RAGES ON

The storm has somehow become even more violent overnight. The world outside your shelter might be trapped in an endless night, for all you can see through the thick covering of storm clouds. Lightning continues to streak across the sky, thunder following almost immediately in its wake, threatening just how near those spikes of electricity truly are. You can see them touch the shore at times, even the street between the homes, but never the buildings themselves. A blessing, perhaps, or an oddity to take note of?

Some may be foolish enough to try venturing outside. They are welcome to, of course, that is their right, but the rain is still like ice and that lightning is so very near. You may try heading further into town, and you can certainly see buildings beyond this row of houses, but should you walk toward them...

Well. It is far from a pleasant experience. Exhaustion sinks into your bones so quickly that it leaves you reeling, and every second you push through it makes you physically ill with a feeling that you might collapse at any moment. The second you turn away from that path, however, you feel infinitely, and even more so each step back the way you came.

Something wants you to stay where you are. Perhaps you should.

DAY 003
THE CALM DESCENDS

The third day begins much as the second, with waves crashing upon the shore and thunder booming with such force that the ground seems to shake. It feels very much like the world might end right there, torn apart by a force of nature unlike any seen before. Any who venture outside at this time are almost immediately afflicted with a terror so intense that they can make it no more than a few yards or the short distance to cross a street before they become incapacitated by the fear that sets their heart beating dangerously fast. The term scared to death may very well become literal this day.

And then, suddenly it stops. The rain, thunder, lighting— all if it just stops and the silence that fills the night is deafening. There are no sounds of life within the town, no car motors or dogs barking or the voices of anyone beside those new arrivals in the immediate vicinity. In fact, none of those things even exist in Mathias. There are no cars, no animals or insects, no other people. There is just... emptiness and silence.

It may be best to wait until daylight to move further inland.

THE NIGHT DARKENS

For those who are foolish enough to leave the relative safety of the cluster of houses near the Grey Gull, they will find their journey quite chilling, in a very literal sense. There is another row of houses beyond where they had been, branching off on either side into a neighborhood. There are no lights on in any of these homes, though there are occasional streetlights illuminating their way. But as they continue further, reaching a third block of houses, those lights begin to dim, until they have gone out completely, and what had previously been a simple fall chill becomes biting cold as the temperature sharply drops.

In all of this, there is silence. No sounds travel through that night air to comfort them, and even looking up to the sky stretched out above them offers little reassurance. That sky is black, without a single star and not even the faintest outline of the moon to guide them. All that reaches them here is the barest hint of light traveling from the way they've come. The longer they linger outside in this place, the colder it will become, and any light they carry with them will slowly begin to dim as well.

Truly, they should have waited until the sun rose once more.

LOCATIONS

THE GREY GULL is what one might expect of the most frequented restaurant in a small coastal town. The wrap-around porch is lined with white chairs characterized by peeling paint. Exposed wooden walls and worn seating speak to its many years of existence, and the mishmash of décor confirms that the owner never much cared for how the place looked. What mattered here was the food, and faded chalk menus advertise soup specials and a daily pie. The bar appears to have once been well-stocked, but all the bottles remaining are unfortunately empty. There is, however, quite a bit of food in the kitchen that is somehow as fresh as if it were purchased that day.

The second floor of the restaurant is a sparsely furnished apartment. There are no personal items to be found; perhaps it was waiting to be rented out to someone.

THE HOUSES are well-kept, middle-class homes, four lining either side of the street. Their doors are unlocked, windows unshuttered, and everything within feels like the owners might return at any second. There is running water and electricity, fresh food in the fridge, photographs on the wall... but also dust everywhere. If you didn't know better, you'd say the place had been abandoned for years, and yet nothing has aged. It is both strange and unsettling, and yet no matter how hard you search, no answers may be found within these homes.

What can be found within them, however, is a phone. One single black phone within a main room of the house, and beside it, a list of handwritten numbers and names that have been crossed out.

1302 8-5491 ~~Thomasen~~
1304 8-9256 ~~Lyrie~~
1306 8-4712 ~~Anders~~
1308 8-3201 ~~Mulcalley~~

1301 8-0415 ~~Sanderson~~
1303 8-6762 ~~Reese~~
1305 8-9132 ~~Evers~~
1307 8-9025 ~~Hirano~~

Should your character choose to shelter in one of the houses, you are welcome to choose the features of that particular unit. Please reply to the comment thread below with the details you decide upon, specifying the house number in the subject line.

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There's very little clues that Five actually has to hang on, aside from the bone deep, cold fear. It's difficult to ignore, the quick hammering heartbeat, the impulse to run far away until the knot in his throat loosens.

So he tries for pragmatism. He tries for strategy in uncertainty because that is all there can be.

Ellie is the first person he catches sight of, amidst the wind that picks up and whips stray sand across his cheeks.

He runs after her, likely too far to call out. Not that he would, relying on his power to teleport him closer. When she ducks into the house, he follows. Where she slips into the dining room, Five has the wherewithal to jump into the living, and head in through the threshold instead. "Do you know where this place is?" Five has very little social graces, the last remaining remnants tempering his sharpness.

Ellie has no idea if another window or door is open, having not explored yet, trying to get her breathing under control. It doesn't occur to her immediately that someone else might be in the house; she's not used to occupied houses in most places. This isn't like Jackson, a town rebuilt, full of people. It's obviously less populated than that.

The second Five appears in the doorway to the kitchen, Ellie springs to her feet. She doesn't have any weapons to brandish against him, but that doesn't matter. She'd never go down without a fight. She doesn't look like much, but she's wiry muscle under those jacket layers.

Everything about her stance is defensive, but not yet threatening. Her heart is still pounding. She doesn't want to fight this kid, anyway; he looks younger than her, and while she'll fight if she has to, attacking some kid isn't her first instinct.

"No," she answers, terse and quick because of nerves. So he must not live here. That question doesn't sound like something meant to taunt her, but closer to an actual inquiry. "I...woke up on the beach. I don't know how."

He gives her a wide berth. The fear is still palpable, settling down only in lieu of being out of the storm. But it still rattles in his ribs, and if her reactions are anything to judge by, it clings to her the same way.

It's funny, actually. Five isn't one for sentimentalism as the first knee jerk reaction. But something about her rings familiar - not in the literal sense, not at all. Rather, the sort that's an echo of one thing and it makes you think of the other and when he looks at her, he thinks of his sister, hidden in the stalks of corn with a ring of destruction in her wake. Defenses high, but no where close to defenseless.

It isn't a productive thought, though and he isn't even sure why it's there. And definitely not one useful in the face of callous survival. So he rolls his shoulders, and pushes water out of his eyes instead, and frowns. "Me too."

"Any chance you're from 1963 Dallas, Texas?" He supposes there's no point in waiting on his questions. He has to gather facts, he has to gather something, and scrambled as his mind is, this is the first thing he thinks of. Time travel fuck ups, usually, are the case.

Confusion overrides everything else for a moment at his question. She's not even sure what she's hearing at first, like maybe she heard him wrong. The words all make sense, but what a nonsensical thing to ask. In the end, she doesn't even parse the 1963 thing as a year. Time travel is a sci-fi concept, something impossible only to be found in books and comics and old movies.

It must be some sort of code for something she doesn't know, she thinks. That's the only way to make sense of it.

Texas, she thinks, and something inside twists and threatens to overwhelm her. She's never been to Texas, but that's where Joel and Tommy are from. That's her only association to the place. They aren't from Dallas, though. Austin. She knows it on a map.

She's already deep enough into fear that this sort of thing is a trigger she can't pin down, spiralling thoughts that make her think too much. She doesn't know how long it takes her to get it back under control (it's only about half a minute, but it's a weird half a minute to see, probably).

"I'm from Jackson," she says, and her voice sounds faraway in her ears. "Wyoming."

She steadies her gaze at Five again, seeing him, shoving down that sickening fear and the trauma she can't escape from. She notes his clothes, something for her to focus on, something...actually inexplicably weird. She's never seen clothes like that before. They don't seem very practical.

"What the fuck is this place?" she asks, though she doesn't expect he knows. If he just woke up here too, then what answers can he possibly give her?

"Yeah well, it was a long shot anyway," he says as he watches her go through the motions. “I’m going to look around the living room,” it isn't meant to sound like a warning, except that it is, because she looks like she’s seconds away from falling into a deeper panic and he was the wrong person for any sort of comfort. Dear old dad may not have taught any good bedside manners, but he knows the tells of it intimately well. There's no control over what puts someone back there, isn't there.

So his deliberate announcement is as much for his benefit as hers, because he really doesn’t want to have anything else thrown at him today.

He stays on the other side, and begins rifling through the papers on the desk. “Mathias Township, apparently," he rattles off, flipping over a postcard that had slipped away from the pile. "Never heard of it. And the year's completely smudged off." His irritation is quite frankly, very palpable in his corner. "So right now? Not a goddamn clue about anything else."

"I'm guessing there isn't going to be a clean little explanation, anyway. Nothing that makes sense to most people," he pockets the card. It'll be soggy and useless by the end of this day, but it's still something to hold on to.

"Seen anyone else here yet?"

If she was aware of it, Ellie would appreciate Five not dwelling on the panic attack she barely manages to stave off. As it is, she just does the best she can to shove all of that back down so she can have a breakdown later, instead of right now.

"Mathias? Never heard of it. I was...I was in Seattle," she says. She guesses Five was in Dallas because of what he said, even if he doesn't sound like Texas to her.

She crosses her arms, closed off, not really accepting him as not a threat, but not about to pick a fight with him, either. She's not sure what to make of him yet.

"No. You're the first person I've seen. Did you close the window you came in from?" She hadn't heard a door, so she assumes window.

"Seattle, huh. Okay." Five echoes, a bit distantly. His thoughts are turning, filing information away to come back to later, later when his initial exploration is done. Later, when he's proved to himself his family isn't here, and he can write all the facts out in a neat little list.

He'll figure things out. He has to.

The question redirects his attention back, and he gives her a shrug. "Yeah, everything's shut." He doesn't elaborate further, an answer that isn't, never mind there's no wet footprints tracking from anywhere other than the room he appeared from, but he's pretty sure it wouldn't be mutually beneficial to mention anything about superpowers right about now.

"I wonder if there's others," he weaves around the furniture, back to the window. Being stuck with one person in an apocalyptic landscape was somewhat better than to be stuck alone, although the conclusion of that remained to be seen. He didn't trust her, and she didn't trust him. It would be stupid to be otherwise.

"Look, I'm guessing this question isn't going to mean anything to you, but I need a year. What year was it before you woke up here?" He asks, back turned and squinting out into the hazy rainfall beyond the glass.

She accepts his answer about things being shut at face value. She has no idea about any sorts of weird superpowers, so that's not where her mind goes. She makes a note to check all the windows and doors, though. Waiting out a storm inside makes sense, but who knows how safe they are here. She doesn't have her weapons on her. No sense taking chances.

"I don't know. I hope so," she says. "You and I got here from different places so maybe other people were kidnapped somehow, too." It seems kind of bonkers, but the whole situation already is bonkers.

"A year? What the fuck," she says. But she does answer. "It's 2039."

"Maybe," he concedes, before his train of thought gets substantially derailed by an answer that he, quite frankly, wasn't expecting.

"Well, shit," it slips out. Because. 2039?!

She's the first person he's seen here, so there's little to no evidence to think she isn't from the same linear timeline as him. Except, he wouldn't have made the leap of her being twenty years ahead.

Or well, as linear as a timeline can be. "That - wasn't what I was expecting," he says by way of explanation, a hand through his hair again as his heartbeat catches in his throat. What was that year like? Did that mean they succeeded in not ending the world?

Was that even a fair comparison? How linear are timelines anyway?

But that is a lot of questions and given that she found this one strange, he doubted she would be entirely helpful on all the rest. Or maybe there was too many to ask and if it was making his head swim, what the fuck would that do to someone who's already on the brink of shock?

"This - probably is going to sound crazy to you," he says, hands spread out in front of him. "But I don't think whatever brought us here just pulled us from different locations." And, more tentatively: "There any chance you heard of The Umbrella Academy?"

She looks at him, wondering if he's just fucking with her. Maybe he is, but that look on his face before he speaks, the way he runs his hand through his hair again, that doesn't seem like an act. Ellie isn't entirely trusting of people, especially now, but she doesn't immediately assume everyone is a total piece of shit, either. And of course, to her eyes, Five is barely more than a kid, younger than she is, though a couple inches taller.

Kids have to grow up fast where she's from, so his more adult bearing doesn't really register to her as weird. Other things about him, though? Well.

"You're trying to tell me we came here from different times?" she asks, face pulling into a frown. "That's impossible." Her tone is just this side of accusatory. She's never heard of anything like time travel being real. Sure, she knows some sci-fi stuff and she's read all the comics she can get her hands on. But to imagine any of it as reality is difficult, to say the least.

"Umbrella Academy?" Great, another group with some weird ass name that she has to keep up with. "No, doesn't ring a bell."

"That's exactly what I'm trying to say," for whatever it's worth, he isn't lying. His surprise is a bit too quick and a bit too honest, irate concern written over a very tired, boyish face. The fact that she doesn't know of the Umbrella Academy is, at least, some other proof of the lacking timeline.

"A hell of a lot more things are possible than you'd think," it's a quiet remark. It isn't meant to be cutting, for all his lack in social graces. A hard statement, maybe as he turns to a slow pace, but it's lacking a habitual tinge of sharpness. "I mean, look at where we are, right now. You're from 2039. I'm from - well technically 2019. We both wake up on the same beach in a town neither of us has ever even heard of, with absolutely no memory of getting here."

"It's not impossible. It's just - complicated. It doesn't make any sense. But complicated still means there's solutions. There has to be." There needs to be, more aptly. Because that's how the world functions. Because it may be hard and almost unattainable, but Five refuses to accept the possibility of anything less.

"It's just about finding the right one." The implication being that he is going to find what said solution will be.

"I was born in 2019," she tells him. "But the world was already fucked sideways by then. What...what's it like, where you're from?" She's not sure she believes him, of course, because it sounds fucking insane. It sounds like something from a comic book. At the same time, Ellie has - or used to have? - a pretty good imagination. She's seen some crazy shit. So why not, right? At this point, it's not the worst thing to consider.

And again, there's that whole thing where unless Five is the world's absolute best liar, he...doesn't seem to be fucking around about this. Even though he seems young to her, well, who cares? Ellie isn't so old that she thinks anyone younger than her is just making shit up.

"Solutions like finding a way outta here? Because I'm definitely in."

He can tell. He can tell she's holding on to disbelief and honestly, who could blame her. It wasn't as if he wasn't skeptical, halfway to not believe anything he was seeing or hearing here, either. His answer then, sure as fuck wasn't going to make it any better.

He hesitates, when she asks. It isn't an easy question, for so many different reasons, and his stomach does an involuntary lurch when she refers to the 2019 of her birth as already having gone to shit. If they had failed, no one would have been alive in their year.

"Well, it's - complicated, too." He rubs at the back of his neck, eyes downcast. "Assuming what we were trying to fix actually worked, it was pretty normal to most people." It's oddly disorienting, trying to describe a point in time he realistically spent ten days in, far removed from the realities of living in that world. The 2019 he had know was much different. And then, with the time in the Commission, years lost most of their meaning aside from being as mundane as a name of a street. A bus stop destination to jump to for work. "If we failed - which I was on my way to see before I woke up here - well, it would be launched into a lifeless apocalypse, I guess."

"We?" she asks. Of course she figures Five was with other people before coming here. She was, after all. Most people, even the super loner types, aren't 100% alone. But she has no idea what he's really talking about. Who is this we that was...what, trying not to have the apocalypse happen?

"I mean...where I'm from isn't lifeless but a bunch of people still call the Infection an apocalypse." The end of the world, wasn't it? People were still alive, but the world from before...that's something Ellie has only really been able to imagine at all in the past couple of years. Jackson is relatively safe, but nowhere can ever be entirely safe.

"This doesn't make any fucking sense," she adds, not really for his benefit or anything, but because it doesn't.

"My family," is the simple answer, as he leans himself back against the wall, ankles crossed, and makes no move to offer any more than that. Listens instead, stoic and serious and crooked, an old man's habits stuffed messily into a child's body. "It's a long story."

"There was an infection?" He knows he's straying from the point. And he shouldn't feel relief, but the truth is he does, if only just. Less and less does her world sound like his.

"No," he concedes. "It doesn't. But I'm going to make sure I figure this out," said as a promise, or a threat? Hard to tell. He doesn't want to think about the alternative.

"I'm going to go see what else I can find out. There's got to be something, somewhere." He pushes himself off the wall, rolls his neck, and starts heading to the door. When his hand hovers on the handle, he pauses, glancing back towards her. "Name's Five, by the way. I'll let you know if find anything."

"Yeah, there was a fucking Infection," she says, somewhat put out by the idea that he doesn't know that. The feeling of sci-fi shit being real just...hasn't sunk in yet. It's hard to change your whole idea of the universe in one day, after all, so it's probably excusable.

She almost believes him. She wants to believe that he'll figure this out. He's a kid, but he seems pretty grown up. He moves more like an adult, which she can't really make too much sense of, but she just chalks that up to weirdness. He seems so sure, though.

"Uh...Ellie. I'm Ellie," she says. "Wait, your name is Five? Is that some kind of codename?"

That's a new one, he thinks, but has enough wherewithall not to say anything out loud. A comment for another time.

Surety and Five went hand in hand, if only because he's batshit enough to convince himself; because there was no other alternative than to succeed, he'd say. No other option he'd accept. He's had a long time to be desperate - it's an old friend.

He can't help the chortle, stopped by the door. "What can I say. Dad liked numbers more than kids."

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001-003 » a chilling mathias welcome

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