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

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

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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Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Even if he had heard about the sedatives, they were not his numbing agent of choice. He was good with his moonshine, thank you very much.

"Just seeing what fresh hell Mathias has visited upon us today," he said with a glance around the room. Tim purposefully did not call out the jumpy way Malcolm had responded to his presence. Given everything that was going on it was understandable that many of them would be acting like cats on hot tin roofs.

Malcolm was often a jumpy cat by virtue of his anxiety disorders, but they had good days and bad days, none of which were mitigated by the laundry list of pills he was supposed to be taking. Only a quarter of which could be compensated for with the haul they’d found at Baneberry Hall. But it still put him on edge with both the prospect of relief they offered and the promise of it soon being taken away again.

“It’s some sort of institution,” Malcolm told him. “Medical. Well. Pseudomedical, really. Restraints and sedation are not the tools of doctors doing standard medical practice.” He moved to a wardrobe and opened it, only to find the same drab white clothes hanging in all the rooms. He riffled it anyway. “Either the patients were dangerous, or they were having something done to them against their wills.” Malcolm looked over at Tim. “My father used ketamine to sedate his victims until he could restrain them,” he supplied conversationally. “Medical tools for non-medical procedures,” he pointed out, tapping his temple.

Though he watched Malcolm flutter about the room like a butterfly with an injured wing, Tim still made no move to come in to the younger man's space. He listened to what he understood was anxious rambling, already well aware of all the points Malcolm laid out, with the exception of the comment about the ketamine.

"Like chloroform?" He asked. His tone was such that he did not say the words to be a shit or get a dig in at Malcolm. There was a knowing understanding in his slow drawl. Definitely a hint that he'd picked up Malcolm's object; endured that memory. But there was also the heavy weight of regret many lawmen experienced when they encountered a victim after a trauma they would have given anything to stop before it occurred.

Perhaps not unlike the tone that might creep into Gil's voice from time to time.

Malcolm stilled and looked at him, turning his back to the wardrobe, his gaze almost analytical, an eyebrow inching up.

“He saved that for me,” he admitted. “He chose it because it induces an amnesia effect in the right dosage. Which is why I didn’t know until very recently that he’d administered it again and again and again. Apparently, according to a… colleague of his, it was starting to loose effectiveness. I was building up a tolerance. How much chloroform do you have to give a seventy pound child for him to develop a tolerance?” He shrugged and leaned back against the wardrobe. “Sometimes I wonder how smart I’d be if he didn’t spend an undetermined amount of time giving me brain damage.” He looked down at his hand, pressing shaking fingers together until they turned white. “I still only have a few fragments of memories from that time. I still don’t know how much time it was.”

"Long term exposure, on a developing nervous system," Tim said quietly, not sure if the question was in need of an answer but supplying one anyway. Especially when his eyes lowered towards the shaking fingers Malcolm was trying to control. "Depression, anxiety ..." all of what he was saying, Tim figured Malcolm already knew so he let his words trail off.

"Your father left a living victim."

“I know what I am,” Malcolm said matter-of-factly. There was no aggression in the assertion; it was just true. “I’ve been in therapy for a long time. I fared better than most of his victims. He didn’t spare anyone an ounce of suffering. He ruined everyone he ever touched.”

He slid his hand into the pocket of his ill-fitting jeans, clenching it in a fist there.

“Complex Post Traumatic Stress Disorder is the official diagnosis. The anxiety and depression are just symptoms. Like the panic attacks. Like the night terrors. Like the psychoses.”

He glanced around the room.

“I almost ended up in a place like this.”

Still leaning in place against the doorframe Tim didn't say anything. It felt as if Malcolm maybe needed to talk, as much for his own mental processing of this place as for sharing information with the younger marshal.

So he stayed quiet and waited.

Tim didn’t say anything and Malcolm looked at him for a moment.

“It was okay,” he assured. “My mom’s super rich. Can’t institutionalize the children of the wealthy. Not in this sort of a dump. What scandal. That’s what private nurses are for.”

His promise to Raylan fresh on his mind Tim still struggled with himself over his next admittance. But eventually he lifted his arm and rubbed at his forehead, glancing down and away.

"This place would be the Beverly Hilton compared to what the VA has cobbled together," he said, lowering his hand and glancing around the room and towards the hall. "Even in its current state."

“How long did they make you stay there?” Malcolm asked, sympathy in his gaze, but no pity.

Tim shook his head and levered himself off the doorframe. The stiffness of his muscles telling him he'd spent too much time on his feet. Just going to go investigate this suss looking bed here and sit down.

"I was never an in-patient at a VA facility," he explained staring at the bed before perching on the edge. "Have some buddies who I visit regularly."

Edited 2021-06-10 22:08 (UTC)

Malcolm, still leaning against the wardrobe, one hand clenched tightly in his pocket, turned his head to follow Tim’s progress into the room.

“That’s kind of you. A lot of people treat mental illness like it’s contagious.”

"It's not mental illness," Tim said, paused and then clarified his statement. "Not in the way as someone who lives with depression, anxiety, OCD, or other illness like that all their life."

He leaned forward lacing his hands in between his knees.

"It's a trauma induced injury. As shocking and debilitating as having a limb blown off, and like that sort of physical injury, it changes the way you will live your life forever."

“Are you referring to shell shock? Neurasthenia? Are you reluctant to refer to a chronic limbic injury as a mental illness because of the stigma?” Malcolm asked curiously. He wasn’t offended; just fascinated by people’s reasons.

"Definitely not Neurasthenia," Tim struck that one of the list immediately. "PTSD in military personnel and veterans is defined as Immobilization of the nervous system. The nervous system gets stuck in a heightened state of fight or flight and in shock.

It is as much a battle wound as a mental illness," he continued. "Mental illness is a different animal all together and I won't argue that many veterans with PTSD also struggle with mental illness."

“Tim…” Malcolm pressed his lips together, unsure whether he realized. “I have an advanced degree in psychology from Harvard. I know what PTSD is.”

A hint of a smile pushed at the corners of his lips. “Not to mention twenty years of therapy and medication for it.”

He pushed away from the wardrobe and sat down on the bed next to Tim. “Trauma is an injury inflicted on the nervous system and it’s an emotional wound. In all its forms. What we call it doesn’t change how much it ruins lives.”

"You have Complex PTSD," Tim corrected, though not in a hostile or aggressive manner. "That has significant differences from PTSD developed in response to time spent in an active war theater."

His tongue again made it clear he wasn't trying to place one above the other. Simply that they were different. With different causes and different symptoms.

"But you are right. It ruins lives and a lot of the men I visit have lost their families and civilian friends as a result of their wounds. Physical, mental and emotional."

“I’m aware of the difference,” Malcolm said calmly. “Can I ask why you couldn’t take the compliment? Is it because you feel like you somehow don’t do enough for those men?”

Tim blinked.

His expression showed that he hadn't even considered what Malcolm said as a compliment. Supported by the way he shook his head and looked down at his hands.

"Being kind isn't something that should ever deserve a compliment, Malcolm."

“Maybe it shouldn’t, but since it’s not the choice most people make day to day, it kind of does. If you’re as busy with your work as Raylan is, you can’t have a ton of free time. You go out of your way for those men.” He shrugged. “A lot of people would forget about the institutionalized. Out of sight, out of mind. But they stay in your mind.”

The sniper isn't really sure what to say to that. It doesn't feel like anything special to him, simply what was right and what you did for people. That was how Tim did things. He didn't talk about them, he was just there when Mark called, or there when Raylan needed back up. No muss, no fuss, no thinking of it as something other than what a person did for others.

Figuring that if he kept talking on the subject, they'd just go in circles, Tim decided to let it drop and toss out another topic for conversation. He waved a hand towards the wardrobe Malcolm had been rifling through when he came in.

"What were you looking for in there?"

Malcolm’s hand fidgeted inside his pocket.

“Do you take anything for your anxiety?” he asked in a seeming nonsequitur. He’d attempted talking about their respective regimens-slash-coping mechanisms before. Perhaps Tim was feeling more sharey today.

"I drink." It was a truthful answer and said in a tone that suggests he knows good and well that he drinks too much. Another day he would have left it there, but Raylan's words are echoing in his head so he looks down at his clasped hands.

"I read," he explains. "Young adult, fantasy novels, I watch old time cartoons on weekends; Bugs Bunny, Animaniacs and I like coloring books. Not those pretentious adult coloring books, but ones I find at yard sales and flea markets. Things like that." He unfolds his hands and takes a deep, cautious breath before pushing himself a little further.

"The other night, with the grilled cheese and the board game. I'd gotten blind drunk the prior two nights and I knew I couldn't take a third like that. Having people around, distracting myself with childhood comforts like that. It counterbalances an active episode; brings it down to a manageable place."

Edited 2021-06-11 22:29 (UTC)

“I exercise. Do yoga. Daily affirmations. Therapy. I take cases. And I take a heavy course of anti-anxiety meds, anti-depressants and antipsychotics. When I was trapped in the lighthouse with Raylan, I was in fullblown benzo withdrawal. I’ve searched this whole town - every crevice of every house - for something to take the edge off. Not so much as half a Valium in the whole place. But this place? This place had a formidable stash of sedatives. Benzos, barbiturates, ‘Z’ drugs, diphenhydramine…” He glanced around, then shifted position on the edge of the bed to face Tim slightly, taking his shaking hand from his pocket to gesture. “I checked everywhere we found some yesterday but they didn’t refill. So I’m checking… everywhere else. Everywhere,” he added, the last word in a dramatic whisper, accompanied by a sweeping hand gesture before he hopped off the bed and went back to the wardrobe, pulling open a drawer full of socks, pulling all the socks out and dropping them on the floor, then shoving it shut again.

"Ever try weed," Tim said after a moment. He wasn't being snarky, it was a legitimate question.

"Those are some heavy duty actors," he continued. "Not saying weed would be a one for one substitute but it could be something. Seen the greenhouse someone has clean up and someone else has some tomato plants in, plenty of room for a pot plant or two and it would be a more stable sustainable source."

Edited 2021-06-12 23:31 (UTC)

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