059-061 » the place where you stop the story

[villagemod]

WHO: Everyone.
WHERE: Eastern/Central/Southern Mathias
WHEN: Day 059-061
WHAT: Time returns to "normal" and Mathias grants a reprieve.
WARNINGS: (PM this account to have a warning added!)
NOTES: Plotting post over here! The next log will be posted the weekend of May 15th May 22nd.

RECOMMENDED ♫ Nathan Johnson "Foul Play"

DAY 059-061
A BRIEF REPRIEVE
“There is no real ending. It’s just
the place where you stop the story.”
— Frank Herbert
Residents awake to a peaceful morning with the sun shining and earth remaining still. There is no unsettling shaking to rouse them at dawn, and time has continued moving onward as they slept. Whatever state they were in the night before, they remain that way now, for good or for bad.

On the surface, there seems to be little lasting effect on the tiny town from that strange series of days, save for the memories of any traumatic experiences residents may have faced — but there are always consequences within Mathias. The perpetrators of acts against the town are tormented by nightmares of those acts being used against them, and those who did not raise a hand to stop those acts of destruction may yet face consequences of their own. For now, however, the unwilling townspeople should do their best to rest and recover from the disturbing ordeals of late, for this reprieve from the madness shall surely be shortlived.




THE NEW ARRIVALS
The newest arrivals to Mathias will wake up on the beach near The Grey Gull. It's a bit chilly out with their wet clothes, but surely there's something to help warm them inside the restaurant. They may even find some alcohol within — and not just the cowboys' homemade moonshine.

---

CONDITIONS UPDATE

— THE HISTORY MUSEUM has not fared well with the return of "normal" time. The once esteemed wooden building is now a charred ruin, the recent fire leaving behind little of the contents within for study. The structure is unstable and it is not wise to venture into the ruins for long.

— THE WEATHER conditions remain fairly typical for early fall: warm days and cool nights. It feels almost like spring arriving except that there fewer red and orange leaves on the ground and more of them oddly returning to the trees and slowly fading to green. It's like watching one of those nature documentaries that have a timelapse of the seasons, only it's going in reverse.

— THE FOG has retreated from some areas!

— Residents may now wander the southern stretch of the forest surrounding Mathias Township — it is possible to leave the paths but potentially unwise to do so.
— The fog has also retreated farther into the western section of town, now stretching across town between Stine Road and Shelley Drive. This has revealed the Chasm in the earth that stretches from one side of town to the other between Stine and Hill Lane.
— Access to the northern section of the forest is still blocked beginning a few dozen yards past the treeline; this section of fog will urge residents to stay huddled within the town proper by inducing a physical reaction of panic and fear.

— DEATHS & DISAPPEARANCES continue! Max Guevara has vanished into the fog. Claire Novak's body can be spotted on Day 059 facedown at the bottom of the Chasm between Hill and Stine, near Phillips Drive; by the morning of Day 060, her body will be gone. (Attempts may be made to reach her body but will likely not end well for those involved. Such attempts should be reported under Exploration.)

— ALCOHOL is still in Mathias! Just barely. (Supply is running very low after recent town events.) A small stock of beer and cheap wine may be found at the General Store, and some homes may have a small store of alcohol in the fridge or pantry. The Grey Gull was also restocked with its lower-end offerings of a variety of alcohol types. (Alcohol does not replenish as food does.)

---

OOC NOTES

— PROJECT HELP Your mod needs help with some projects!

— FUTURE PLANNING If you haven't, please answer the questions here for future log planning. I will almost definitely need some of these answers for the log going up the weekend of May 15, so act quickly! Late submissions will not be considered for that log.

— UPDATES Don't forget to report updates as they come up! Changes to locations (like toppling a few bookshelves in the library), big plots you have coming up that will affect the game (parties, major property destruction, etc), or exciting discoveries that may tie into the game's mythology (even the things provided by the mod) are very helpful to have in one place so relevant page updates can be made.

— MOD STATUS The usual reminder that it's just Amy steering this ship, so things will are going to be pretty slow for a while. Apologies in advance, and please don't feel shy about pestering me if you're stuck waiting for something.

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Comments

[citharede]

She glanced back toward the chasm, just once, her imagination trying not to construct a thousand nightmares out of what might be down there. She bites her lip for a second. "Huh? Oh! He took it the way he takes everything, except he totally thought it was funny. I could tell."

Athena studies her bowl of coffee for a second. Hesitates. "Who's Claire?"

[tinstar]

"If he didn't bitch too much, he's probably fine," he needlessly reassured. But the jovial air sank at Athena's question. Of course she would ask. Had a right to. A right to know too, he supposed, since it could befall her as well.

Raylan swallowed thickly, throat already trying to close around the words. It took a few seconds of him working his jaw to work it open because he knew that silence wasn't an answer.

"Young Hunter. Family to Dean and Sam Winchester, as well as Castiel the Angel. About twenty years old. Been here for a.. a while, I'm not sure when she showed up but.. She's got a grave up at the graveyard. Won't be gettin' another one, she wants to be.. burned.. But we can't get her outta the chasm. No way down, no tools to get her back up." He hated it. He hated Mathis mocking them, mocking him with it. These young deaths, these stunted lives that he had to bury again and again and again.

How long before Athena would number among them?

[citharede]

Dean, Sam, Castiel--the names mean nothing to Athena, but she doesn't press him about them. Particularly as he goes on. Her heart aches for this stranger, this girl she hasn't met and might not, now.

She slips an arm around Raylan's waist, as much to anchor herself as to try and comfort him. After a second, she dumps the rest of her coffee carefully to one side as they walk.

"First time I ever saw a body, I was like... Nine? Ish? Maybe? Somewhere around there, I don't fucking know. We went to visit my grandma, she lived by herself--total piece of shit honestly, she scared the hell out of me, but anyway." Athena frowns, staring into space. "We got there, and like... my parents busted in, yelled that they were there, told me to go upstairs and see if she was asleep. She'd drink herself flat sometimes, which I wasn't supposed to know, but come on."

Athena leans against him. "Her bedroom reeked. I don't know how long she'd been dead up there, but it was a while."

She hesitates. Somehow it's easier to talk about that one than the next. "Second one, it was the first winter after my parents kicked me out. I was in Philadelphia by then, but I hadn't hooked up with my coven. Lived under one of the bridges. There was this fucking brutal night, and after some people just never came back to the squat. Which, y'know. Shit happens. People leave. But we all knew why."

She bits her lip. "I was out dumpster diving a little later and there were some rats going after something in an alley. I drove them off. Didn't know the girl, or anything, never even seen her before, but she was just... there. Maybe a little older than me? Dead, still frozen pretty much, with parts of her face chewed through. She wasn't the last person I found that winter, either."

Athena shakes her head. "Anyway, I guess I'm saying... I'm used to it. People disappearing, or dying, or... whatever. You don't have to protect me from that."

She looks up at him sideways. "I'd rather know than wonder."

She gives him a little squeeze. "I'm sorry. About Claire."

[tinstar]

It was odd, how welcome he had let her get under his arm, this little ray of swearing sunshine, and how it really was something of a comfort to have her give a shit at all. It also stoked his resolve to keep Athena from ending up in the same spot Claire was in right now. Maybe he could stop it from happening, even just a few times. He bet she'd end up going down at some point, that wasn't avoidable. But maybe he could get it to be put off.

His brow pinched as Athena started in, but he didn't interrupt. God. Raylan had been about that age when he'd seen someone get shot to death for the first time and he remembered how it rocked him. He couldn't imagine finding someone you knew like that.

"I'm sorry you had to see that," he murmured, giving her more room to continue if she wasn't done. She seemed not done. Raylan frowned softly as she did indeed continue. How many bodies had this poor girl seen?

He stayed quiet as she finished and squeezed her back gently.

"I'll keep that in mind." He wasn't going to make excused about what he was trying to do. "It's okay. This death is.. prettier than her last. I just hope she went quick and didn't suffer. She suffered enough in her home life. Fightin' werewolves and comin' out all bright eyed and fierce about it. She's gonna give someone hell, when she gets older."

He had to assume that, if she didn't show back up in a few days, that she'd gone back home. Like he had with everyone else.

[citharede]

"I hope I get to meet her," Athena says, the oddness of saying that about someone currently dead making her frown. "Man, I'd love to meet a werewolf, too. ...I mean, not if they were going to be murdery about it, but you can't do shit like that with the Gift, turn into animals and things."

She would be all over the ability to turn into things, if that was a something that worked. She shakes her head.

"Werewolves would be less weird to me than a world where no one has the Gift." A glance up at him. "No offense."

[tinstar]

"Just know I'm bitterly jealous that I'm not, that make it any better?" Raylan shrugged with a little smile cast down at her. He wasn't sure if he'd change it, not now that he was grown and settled into who he was, but the younger internal version of him desperately would.

"I think you and she'd get on really well. We'd have to guard all our apple carts to make sure y'all don't kick them over and set them on fire." It was almost ironic, with the blaze he'd set the handful of nights before.

"When I was a kid, I woulda given anything to have powers. Somethin' that made me special that wasn't Arlo. Anythin'. I woulda taken it."

[citharede]

She smiles at her feet, though it's not a happy expression. "When you're a kid, even having the Gift doesn't make a piece of shit dad less scary."

Or make a person feel less alone.

She scuffs at a rock with her shoe, still comfortably tucked against Raylan's side. "But it was nice, after I got thrown out. Having people like me, really having people like me for the first time. Having a girlfriend I didn't have to hide. Meeting other kids who got tossed overboard either because they were queer or Gifted."

She shrugs a little. "Throwing me out was probably the only good thing my parents ever did for me, other than getting me a piano, and my mom only did that when I was five because she wanted me to be a savant."

[tinstar]

It wasn't about that power though.. it would have become that eventually. Raylan didn't trust himself to make the right decision all of the time for the rest of his life and especially not at that age. He was a flawed man and already had plenty under his belt with his sidearm.

It killed him a little that he couldn't do anything about that, about them, to bend the law again and use it as a wedge to squeeze.. He wasn't sure what out of them. Something.

"You're not trash," he said with a gentle but unmoving opinion kind of tone, starting there with a squeeze of her shoulder. "But you deserve community. Mostly why I'm glad that Jeff is here. Someone to make you feel less alone among us normies. To hell with those people. Your parents. Dependin' on how easily you can let 'em go. They did the important part. They brought you into the world. You don't need them for anything else."

It hurt to say. It hurt because it was true and it was everything that everyone else seemed to have. A loving family, warm Christmases, no drunken nights where Mom and kid got whipped for answering too quickly or incorrectly or with too much attitude.

[citharede]

She blinks back tears as best she can, though that's not particularly well. Impulse gets her to drop the stupid coffee bowl, turning so she can hug him properly. Athena isn't sure when she came to this conclusion--it was even before Raylan fled the hug in the kitchen with Jeff--but he doesn't get enough of them.

"I don't feel alone," she mumbles. Yeah, maybe it was isolating, not having anyone here who knew about or shared her Gift. But there were worse ways to be separated from people. She shifts so she can press her face against his flannel and hope it absorbs whatever she can't hold back in the tears department. "I've got all you dumbasses, even if you don't know about the Gift."

[tinstar]

"oh-" he sounded softly in surprise as Athena turns and plasters herself against his chest. She was probably right - Raylan didn't get hugged often or by many people, so each one was treasured. He was never going to get used to it because the Hug Deficit was already so high.

He smiled crookedly at the swearing, at the sentiment, at the warmth from her as he wrapped his other arm around her slender shoulders. If she didn't feel alone, then they were doing a good job.

"And you're always gonna." For as long as they were here and together, at least. He could promise her that. "It's gonna be okay."

[citharede]

It's gonna be okay, he says, and god she wants to believe it. She wants to believe it, even with Claire at the bottom of the chasm and the roulette wheel spinning on whether or not she would come back alive.

"If we're stuck here," she says, and halts, because she hates even entertaining the possibility. She hates even thinking about entertaining the possibility. She lightens her tone. "I mean, we're not, but if we were."

She lets the levity go again. "I'm glad I got stuck with you. Even if... even if Jeff hadn't showed up. I'd be glad I got stuck with you."