063-064 » no matter how much / part ii (group A)

[villagemod]

WHO: Group A members only.
WHERE: Mathias Township proper
WHEN: Days 063-064
WHAT: Matthias becomes a little larger and a little smaller at the same time.
WARNINGS: (PM this account to have a warning added!)
NOTES: Plotting post over here!

RECOMMENDED ♫ DEADLY AVENGER "Raiju"

DAY 063-064
NO MATTER HOW MUCH
“No matter how much suffering you went through,
you never wanted to let go of those memories.”
— Haruki Murakami
At first, in the calm following the storm, nothing seems amiss. When the residents awake, it is to another glorious morning dawning in the unsettling paradise that is Mathias Township. Indeed, it does seem rather glorious that morning, for there is sunshine in a blue sky that has been cleared of any remnant of the angry storm clouds from the day before. But before long, residents will start to notice signs of something being not quite right.

It should be a familiar sensation to most by now.

It begins as just a feeling, a strange hint of something in the air, a nagging voice at the back of the mind. They can't quite put their finger on it but there is something. Something wrong, something that shouldn't be — which is quite a statement in a town where everything shouldn't be. But then the pieces will begin to come together.

A person has gone who ought to be there. This in itself is not a strange occurrence, for many have vanished and then returned, or not. This time, though, it is one person, and then two and three... A dozen people or more have gone, with no trace of their whereabouts to be found.

No resident is alone, thankfully. There are others who also remain: friends, acquaintances, strangers. Others who are just as trapped in this nightmarish place.

As the hours stretch on and residents begin to venture beyond their self-claimed shelters and move about the town, they will find that their fellow captives are not the only things that have vanished. The Chasm is gone as well, the crack in the earth that once stretched across and cut off the western part of town. There is not even the smallest mark to show where it had once been; it has gone so completely that some might wonder if they had merely imagined it.

---

ABOUT THE NEW LOCATIONS
POPPY COTTAGE This bed and breakfast has a sense of casual elegance with the elusive quality of being both sophisticated and comfortable at the same time. Aside from being covered in dust and grime, of course.

PENHEW HOUSE Perhaps familiar to some in Mathias, this grand house is different from any of the others the residents have entered. It looks... new. Fresh. Clean. The usual thick layers of dust and grime that would be caked onto every visible surface are nowhere in sight; this absence may be a relief for some and unsettling to others. There are certainly other unsettling things to be found in this location.

THE OLD CHURCH Barely more than ruins, the property is marked by a crumbled stone outline that has no roof and only partial walls, nothing left inside besides a broken cobblestone floor.

BANEBERRY HALL From the outside, Baneberry Hall seems like your average rich person's house, but one would be mistaken to assume anything of the sort. Even the baneberries that cover the back lawn leading to the forest treeline are deceptive, for they appear harmless but are fatal to any human foolish enough to eat them.

The building is decaying from within. The rooms have begun to rot, from the parlors and libraries still done up in grand and expensive style to the bedrooms that have locks on the doors and bars on the windows. There are restraints in some of those bedrooms, while others are bereft of sharp objects. In the hall closets, there are identical sets of white pajamas of all sizes, and the offices have locked cabinets (that may be picked) full of a rainbow of sedatives (that will not replenish). The names on doors and in logbook lists are all smudged beyond legibility, and all paperwork has been water-damaged and weathered, leaving no indication of who may have been kept in those bedrooms or why. But within each room, there is an item that may be familiar to one of the residents now wandering its halls. As caked in dust and grime as anything else, each item is placed as if it belongs there, as if it might have been there for years. But it couldn't have been... could it?



ABOUT THE ITEMS FROM HOME
Within the unsettling walls of Baneberry Hall, residents may find OBJECTS that are uncomfortably familiar to them. Each item has one singular memory attached to it that, when touched in any way, will be experienced first hand, as if the person receiving it had lived it themselves. This person will endure all of the associated emotions and psychological reactions to the memory that the memory's owner experienced.

— Items may only be found within Baneberry Hall. These items from home are not all in one room or a specific location but instead are scattered throughout the bedrooms. (Only the items on this list are available to this group.)

— Ownership and possession of the item are important elements to this event. While the item is in possession of someone who is not its owner, it will continue to infect all who touch it with the memory that belonged to its owner. The item will also, before long, begin to make the possessor ill, both physically and emotionally uncomfortable and upset. This only occurs until the item is reunited with its owner, or until it is no longer in someone else's possession. (For example, if Person A finds Person B's teddy bear and carries it with them, they will continue to experience the bear's associated memory until they no longer have it in their possession, whether this means they have left it somewhere or it has been returned to Person B.)

— Recipients of memories will retain those memories even after the event has ended.

— When the owner of an item finds their item or has it returned to them, they will also experience the memory once themselves, having it returned to them as if they had just lived those moments again. The memory is only replayed once in their minds and then the memory effect of the object is gone. After this point, the item can be held by the owner or any others without consequence.

— If a person removes an item from its room in Baneberry Hall but does not remove the item from the property entirely, the item will be mysteriously returned to its original location when no one is looking. This is so that people do not have to keep close track of where items are going in the possible changing of hands, so the original owners can still easily locate the item without having to plan in great detail. Once an item is removed from the property, it will not return to its original location even if it is discarded by the possessor before reaching its original owner. Instances such as this should be planned among all involved parties, including the owner of the item.

— Once an item is removed from the property, please comment below so that information may be updated. Items that are not removed by the end of the event may reappear at a later time, so accurate records are essential.

— Before an item's memory is viewed by someone other than the owner, permission must be granted or requested for that memory to be viewed by another character. Because the experience is an uncomfortable one for the other characters, the viewing of memories not their own should ideally be kept to a small number.

---

CONDITIONS UPDATE

— 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 new boundaries.

— 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 from the western section of town entirely.
— 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.

— DISAPPEARANCES AND DEATHS continue! Yennefer, Number Five, and Tony Stark have vanished and Ellie is still missing, though this may be difficult to tell with half the town also seemingly having vanished. Will Graham's body may be found within the ruins of the Old Church; he appears to have been frightened to death. (If someone decides to take care of the body, please report it below. For in-game reasons, this does not need to be coordinated across groups.)

— ALCOHOL supplies have run dry, save for any dregs that have been squirreled away by individual residents. Moonshine can still be acquired by those in desperate need.

---

OOC NOTES

— NEW MAP Thanks so much to Scy for yet another amazing new map of Mathias!

— 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. IC events are also helpful to know about in advance so they can be included in the log write-ups.

— MOD STATUS For those who don't know, I run a summer program that is set to start in just 2 weeks. We've only recently been given the green light to go ahead in person, so it's a scramble to get everything pulled together in time. My non-RP life is going to be busy and chaotic for the next while and I am thus asking for your forgiveness and understanding as things continue to be slow, as I cannot guarantee timely mod responses beyond weekends, and even that is not guaranteed.

— NEXT LOG Because of the aforementioned real-life chaos, the next log will be more relaxed and free form with everyone coming back together again and having a few chill days. It would be very much appreciated if some of the more intense investigations could be saved to take place in future logs, as the new locations that are opening up in this log will remain open in the next few at least and there will be plenty of time to explore all their mysteries.

— ITEMS FROM HOME The items from home remaining in Baneberry Hall will not be available past this log, at least not in this form, so if you would like to play with these elements, you should not sleep on this opportunity. More things may show up in the future but, for now, this is the main event.

— DW NOTIFS Back at the beginning of the year, the issue of missing email notifs was discussed in a code push plurk by Mark of the DW admin team. For those who missed it, the gist is that the issue with missing notifs is not going to be fixed anytime soon. The issue is so sporadic that the dev team has concluded the only way to possibly fix it is to redo the notification system entirely. This issue does not extend to DW's internal inbox, so short of checking every thread you're involved in, the DW inbox is the best way to make sure you're not missing things.

— ACTIVITY CHECK Beginning with June's AC (posted at the start of July), all tags that consist of only dialogue will count as 0.5 comments, not just those that occur in an inbox thread. This applies to both AC and AP totals.

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Comments

[abrightboy]

Malcolm’s mouth opens and closes a couple of times before sound comes out, his hand gesturing uselessly towards the badge.

“I saw something when I touched it. It… showed me something when I touched it.” He looks at Doc uncertainly. “Something that belongs to you.” He looks at the badge and looks at Doc. “Is… is that yours?”

[thering]

"It was Wyatt's." Doc had thrown it into a fire once but to explain how it ended up resurfacing from a priest masquerading as a mechanic and all that magical jazz is a long story that requires more out of him than he is able to manage at this point in time.

"This building is full of visions. I wouldn't put much stock into anything." He's not going to make a grab for the badge of course. Might seem like he's trying to hide things. But whatever it is Malcolm might have seen, the man who happens to be crouching in front of him is not the same man from the 19th century. Surely he is permitted to still play a few cards close to his chest.

"You may have it if you want." Everyone's a Wyatt Earp fan. It wouldn't bother him none to give it away. Even though it was the only thing Doc had left of him, he had been ready to and did end up discarding it long before it showed up here. Things have changed these days, now that he has the Earp girls.

[abrightboy]

Malcolm makes no move to pick it up.

“Yesterday… Callisto told me she had a vision where she was you. And she described another vision where… she was me. Me when I was a child.” He looks at Doc. “Have… have you seen a vision of a woman in a travel trunk?”

[thering]

Well. He wouldn't be surprised if he's the last person to be encountering the badge. Lady Luck hasn't exactly been on his side ever since he'd been whisked away to Mathias.

"It was not meant for me," Doc says plainly, which is an indirect way of saying yes. And that also he isn't wanting to delve too much into the other things he had seen, repulsive and horrific as a couple of them were. He carries on with picking up the things that had fallen off the shelf, with that little smidge of hesitation at each new object he picks up in case he gets smacked upside the head with a piece of someone else's life.

[abrightboy]

Malcolm leans towards him with an almost urgent look.

“You saw her?” he clarifies. “Before I came here… I only just got him to admit she was real.”

[thering]

"Yes. I did see a lady." Malcolm is only able to get that much out of Doc because of that desperation in his voice. It must mean something to him. Of course, if Malcolm had hallucinated her being there, then whoever touched his cryptic fortune message container would surely also have seen her there even if she wasn't there?

Doc is wary of affirmations. 'I create a safe and secure space for myself wherever I am' doesn't really have the intended effect on a hundred and sixty-seven year old demon-hunting gunslinging outlaw that the government wants to dissect and experiment on.

"Is this something you wish to speak about? The lady in the trunk?" Doc has run out of things to put back on the shelf, and Wyatt's badge sits awkwardly between them. He's trying not to look at it.

[abrightboy]

Does he want to talk about it? He’s spent so much time trying to talk about it when nobody believed him…

He clutches the pill bottle in his pocket.

“She was the start of everything,” he says. The woman in the trunk, and then his father, grabbing him from behind, suffocating him with chloroform until he passed out. Poisoning him with it again and again and again. “Or… I guess it would be more accurate to say she was the end of everything.” He looks at Doc. “You saw her when you touched something? What was it?”

[thering]

That's... about as cryptic as positive affirmations. The start or end of what, exactly? But Doc just nods since it seems to be getting something off Malcolm's chest. It had not been his place to pry from the very start, so he's not about to start asking too many questions now.

"A container of verses." Belonging, presumably, to a religion of self-help which Doc happens not to subscribe to.

"They could be thinly-veiled threats, or pearls of wisdom from wiser men than I or perhaps the dearly departed. I--" Doc purses his lips and shakes his head. "Am not certain of their origin."

[abrightboy]

“Verses? Can you show me?” he asks, ready to follow wherever Doc has to lead him, despite not finishing his desperate and pointless search of a room that clearly does not contain a cabinet full of pills.

“I found her in our basement one night. That’s how I found out what my father is. And he drugged me to keep me quiet. To make me forget. But I recovered enough, at one point, to call the police. I didn’t understand time had passed back then. It was probably a week or two, at least. I… still only have fragments of memories from that time. But… I thought I was saving her, when I called them. I thought I was saving her, but when they came, she was gone.”

[thering]

"In the other room," he confirms, confident that he can return for the badge later, now that he knows where it is.

"You were but a young man, then." Doc refrains from using the word 'boy'. Adulthood came early in his time, and it would be callous to belittle such a memory.

"Did they find her body?" he asks as they enter a room nearby. Everything is old and dusty and creaky so Doc has to wiggle the bedside table drawer a bit in a way that suggests that is how he got it open previously, and gestures for Malcolm to come closer so that he may see his affirmations sitting in there.

[abrightboy]

“They never found her. She comes in my nightmares and asks me to find her. I’ve been trying to make him tell me where she is, but until recently he wouldn’t even admit she existed.”

He looks in the drawer and his eyes widen before he reaches in and takes it.

And the memory hits him as hard as it routinely does in his night terrors.

He drops the card holder, spilling cards onto the floor. As he comes blinking out of the memory, shaking faintly, he looks down at them, then crouches and starts gathering them up like he just spilled a pouch of precious jewels. This time, when he touches them, nothing happens and his hand grows more confident with each one he gathers.

[thering]

"There would not be much left of her now," Doc points out. After all these years she would have likely decomposed, if he didn't... grind her to dust or eat her, or whatever it is serial killers do with their prizes.

Doc manages to catch the cardholder itself - apparently you might need some good reflexes to be a quick draw - but he can't do that and try to save the cards and also try to make sure Malcolm doesn't collapse and hit his head on something all at once. Two out of three ain't bad at least and his hand falls away after briefly gliding across Malcolm's lower back.

"What are these for?" he asks, deciding the affirmations to be a better topic than a dead girl who could not be saved. They've both got enough of those to dwell on.

[abrightboy]

"There wouldn't be much of her now, but her family would get closure," Malcolm says quietly. Looking down at the cards at Doc's question, he raises his eyes to Doc's. "They're daily affirmations. My therapist gave them to me. See, depression and anxiety, they... warp your perception of things. Slant your thoughts to the negative. So the point of these is, in the morning, you pull one and read it and try to set your intentions for the day from a place of positive reinforcement." He held one up and waved it. "'Negative thoughts only hold the power I allow them.' See? And so your task that day is to be mindful of negative thoughts and to choose not to give them power."

[thering]

"Maybe closure is moving on without ever seeing anyone who would remind them of what happened," Doc suggests. He knows Malcolm means well. But he can't see a good ending for pursuing this line of inquiry, made all the more difficult by his father's reluctance to come clean about the incident.

At the explanation about affirmations, Doc gives Malcolm a blank look for a long time. There is a delayed nod and just the smallest twitches of a smile.

"I see." No, he really doesn't see. But if it works for Malcolm, he's not going to be disparaging or rude about it. "I think I will stick to my 'shine." That's worked fine for him. He's pretty sure it would continue to work better than a card telling him off about his negativity.

[abrightboy]

“He took her from whoever cared about her and they deserve to know what happened to her,” Malcolm says simply, if a little sadly.

He notices Doc’s face as he takes in the affirmations and it makes him smile. “Different treatments work for different people,” Malcolm allows. “Every brain is unique.” He huffs a laugh examining the card in his hand, turning it over and back again before looking at Doc. “Anyway, you’re probably immune to liver disease, right?”

[thering]

"They already know what happened to her. She died. Sometimes the... gruesome details are unnecessary." But hey, what does Doc know about these things? He is a cold and unfeeling man whose own personal death, or the prospects of it, bothers him a hell of a lot more than anyone else's.

"I didn't need the magic to be immune to liver disease. They made our organ linings out of tougher stuff back in the day." Nevermind that he would have probably died young anyway, found some other means of getting himself killed even if illness hadn't ravaged his body.

"You can't even eat canned meat." Or whatever luncheon meat is made out of. Doc can't tell if it offends Malcolm's delicate palate or if the New Yorkers need to work on their iron guts.

[abrightboy]

That draws a genuine - if self-deprecating - laugh out of Malcolm. “I can’t eat most things; I’m not sure I’m a very standard example of a modern constitution. Raylan can eat almost anything, it would seem.”

[thering]

"Well. Raylan is from Kentucky." Doc doesn't elaborate as if everyone ought to know that you have to be able to eat anything if you're from Kentucky, although his tone might have implied some gentle Southern ribbing. He would have said the same about Georgia but they already know Doc would eat anything. They'd probably have to stop him from giving himself food poisoning at some point when the supplies inevitably run out again.

"Speaking of that particular devil. I haven't seen anything of his, but. This is a big building and there are many rooms." He isn't sure if he should bother trying to collect everything up and return them to their respective owners or if it might seem a little intrusive, like he'd been particularly nosy and wanted to grab all the fragments of everyone's lives that he could find.

[abrightboy]

Malcolm considers that for a moment. “I guess that makes sense, that we’d all have something in a room.” He looks over at Doc, fidgeting at his cards in the holder. “Raylan’s is a paperback novel.”

[thering]

"None of this makes sense." They hadn't been here before. There was a great big hole in the ground after all preventing them from coming here. He didn't have Wyatt's badge with him at the time and he doubts Malcolm carries his treasure trove of positivity with him everywhere he goes.

Maybe they belong here. He wouldn't be surprised if he was told he was, also, certifiably crazy. Much as he prefers to be the one to have his shit together.

"Best you return it to him, then." Doc respects that a man tells what he wants to tell in his own time. Whatever is in the novel, in all senses of the term, is not for him or anyone else to find.

[abrightboy]

“I don’t know where it is,” Malcolm admits softly. He fidgets with the cards, shifting his weight back and forth from foot to foot. “I was going to bring it to him, but… I just kept seeing the memory as long as I was holding it and… it was so… he’s so lonely and the… the pain… I dropped it. But then, a bit later, I felt like a coward, so I went back to where I dropped it to pick it up and it was gone. I don’t know where it is.”

[thering]

Doc's eyebrows furrow though he doesn't seem angry or disappointed by that particular revelation. He's more concerned about Raylan's item falling into other peoples' hands.

"Shall we retrace your steps?" Doc offers. He doesn't know what he's looking for but he is going to help.

[abrightboy]

"I can show you where I dropped it," Malcolm tells him. "I know where I was."

He's searching systematically.

"It was yesterday."

He puts the card holder down on the nightstand where they found it and leads Doc from the room and down several hallways to another room, as identical as all the others.

"I dropped it here, in front of the wardrobe."

[thering]

Doc follows behind Malcolm, occasionally turning his head left and then right as they pass the rooms. By now they are quite familiar territory to Doc but he's checking to see if they're passing anyone that he had thought to be missing, or if anything looked out of place at a glance.

"Alright. We shall have to work backwards from there. But, Malcolm, don't you want to take your..." What did he call them? "Confirmations? With you?"

[abrightboy]

"Yeah, I'll grab them on the way out. I don't want to drop any, carrying them all over," he replies. "Um. I worked my way room by room from that direction," he says, pointing.