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

Entry tags:

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.

navigation | faq | locations | report updates

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"No," she says firmly, because she thinks she gets what he's saying. "No, there is just Xena; there is no more. Xena, and her men, and her fire, and my family."

Stalking closer, she gets right up in Doc's face, challenging.

"You see. You--"

Seed? No, wait; she's heard this one.

"You saw. And I saw. I saw yours."

"And what happens, pray tell, after Xena?" Because there is life now, even before Xena, life to be lived and spent on the good things, on making better memories with better people. But there will also be life after Xena.

"Xena will not unburn the fire or bring your family home." And however good she thinks she will feel, that vindication will be over in an instant. He knows this from experience. When the feeling passes and there is nothing left, what then?

"You saw mine?" he repeats back to her. What fleets across his face transcends language barriers. Surprise. Uncertainty. Suspicion. "What did you see?"

"I do not care after Xena." Her fingers flex like they're gripping at something that isn't there - an imagined weapon, maybe. Or someone's throat.

Callisto studies his face, taking in every little uncomfortable microexpression, wondering if there's a particular memory that he fears. "A fight. You and a man. The words; I don't know--" She gives a sharp shrug. They'd been talking too quickly for her to really pick much out - she just knows that she's recognized Doc's voice, and felt his hurt and frustration.

"But you must. One day, the only thing that will matter is after Xena." The language barrier frustrates him, because while they appear to be having the same conversation, he can't be certain that they are talking about the same thing. Nevertheless, he tries to get his point across, because he thinks it's important.

He's had a lot of fights with a lot of men (not like that), especially in the past when he had been bitter and violent and particularly unpleasant to deal with, so it's not specific enough of a description for him to pick any one incident. He just nods, though. Once you pick a fight with someone it's hard to stop fighting with everyone.

"I'm always fighting," he concedes. "As are you, I suspect." It is the only way he knows how to have a relationship, sad and untenable as that sounds.

"I do not care after Xena." She repeats the words with precision, wanting to make it clear to him that she understands exactly what she's saying. Regardless of whether or not she must, she doesn't. She suspects that even peace will involve at least some amount of emptiness.

"The man say you are afraid - a coward." That word, at least, she'd recognized. "Are you a coward, Doc?"

"Well... I do." He hates seeing her on this path, knowing full well where it leads. But he can also understand that it matters very little what other peoples' opinions are on the matter. It can be blinding, all-consuming, this chase for something that you don't know what to do with once you've got it.

At the back of his mind he wonders if she's trying to get a rise out of him, or if the affronting frankness of her question was carved in translation, unable to be tempered by more nuanced wording. Perhaps he's just old-fashioned in the way he tries to gently probe and let people down.

Had she asked him if he was a coward at the time he'd been told that to his face, he would have been defensive - perhaps even aggressive. It used to be an easy button to push, especially when he's got something to prove, when someone antagonistic is taunting him. These days the button is a little broken. Hell, maybe he's a little broken in all sorts of places in general.

"Yes," he replies after taking a deep breath in and letting it out in an inaudible sigh. A coward and a fool, he had been. Still is, sometimes.

"Brave men die, and I am still alive. So I must be." And he has seen that all bravery amounts to is a few posthumous token sentiments on the internet and in the books. It doesn't seem to be worth much to him. Honestly, while he would prefer being lamented as overly cautious these days, thinking before he leaps, he would happily be a coward if it means other people won't die from reckless bravery.

"Every men die," she snaps, which might help answer the question of whether or not she's trying to rile him up. She may not have it as a serious goal, and likewise, she may not have a serious interest in trying to hurt him - but she's a combative and provocative person, and it doesn't take much to bring that part of her out. Especially when she doesn't agree.

"People who aren't brave warriors die all the time. You saw the fire. You saw my oîkos - my mother, father."

She realizes, suddenly, that she's never learned the word for sister, which gives her pause for just a moment.

"And Thalia. They are coward, because they--"

She curls one hand into a small, tight fist and ducks it under the cover of her other hand, trying to mime hiding.

"No. They are not brave or coward. They were just people. Almost everybody is."

Well. There are exceptional circumstances under which not every man has to die. But he understands that sometimes it doesn't feel like what they do and what they believe in really matters in the end. It is not a good or meaningful way to live life, to be born and just die and consider everything in between point A and point B to be inconsequential. But to overthink things and inflate one's self-importance in what time they do have isn't exactly ideal either.

"They were unfortunate," Doc says, agreeing that in that moment, bravery or cowardice aside, the dice had already been cast. Reductive, maybe, and it's not all about luck, but had they been somewhere else at the time, or living in a different village entirely, they might not have suffered the same fate.

"If you go down this path, with Xena, you-- never really escaped the fire. And you never will."

"Escape is this?" She shoots the hiding hand out from under its cover, miming fleeing. She's pretty sure she gets that through context, but wants to make sure, because her next point hinges on it.

"Yes, you understand."

He's completely right. She never escaped the fire. She's never really tried.

"Yes." Well, sort of. That could mean various things, but for all their potential for miscommunication, they have been doing quite well so far.

"Callisto is Callisto. Callisto's life is Callisto's to live. Callisto is not Xena's failure, or Xena's cruelty, or Xena's anything," he tries to remind her none-too-gently. She has so much time left, so much life ahead of her. It seems a terrible waste to give it up to Xena like the rest of her family had done.

She could react with anger, frustration, or denial here. Mustering some up is rarely difficult, and she nearly does so - but suddenly, the idea just seems tiring.

"I understand," she says, and she thinks she does - maybe not every single word, but the general gist of them, at least. "But Callisto doesn't care."

She could have yelled, or snapped, or swore at him - in any language she was comfortable in. She didn't. That's enough progress for him for a day. It was never his intention to tell her what she should and should not do. Only to suggest, from his own experience, that she won't find what she's looking for going down the path she's so intent on.

"This place isn't doing us any good," Doc gripes. Not for their sanity and not for their hopes of getting out of here. "I will be leaving shortly. Perhaps you would like to, too. Perhaps I can invite you for some food?"

She doesn't want to leave, and if she ends up doing so for a time, she'll be back. But she doesn't understand enough of what he says to make that clear - she just alights on one word.

"Food, yes."

Thanks to the amount of energy she expends in her daily life - even in Mathias, where she isn't roaming the countryside and leading armies - Callisto is often hungry. She also isn't used to food being so readily available. Combine those two things, and you get a woman who has to be in very dire straits indeed before she'll turn down a meal.

"Where?"

"Back there," Doc gestures with a jerk of his head towards the side of Mathias they'd come from. He's not much of a chef but there's some leftover casserole, some beef and potatoes. She didn't strike him as a fussy eater.

"I made some biscuits earlier. Suppose you haven't had them before." Doc would be happy to introduce her to some southern cuisine. Food is a universal language, or so they say.

The word is in fact totally unfamiliar to her, but she'll at least recognize bread when she sees it. Turning to head out of the room, finally preparing to leave the house for the first time since she'd found it, she addresses him over her shoulder.

"You live with Tim?"

1308 seems like a popular place.

"No. Next door," he explains, illustrating with his hands. He reads off a list of names in the stretch of Phillips Drive they have cornered, using his hands to show her where all the houses are in relation to each other, assuming she might have heard of all of the people since she was at the grilled cheese and CandyLand party. Raylan, Malcolm, Ainsley, Neal, Jeff, Athena, Tim. Conveniently he leaves Negan out.

"And where are you living?" No doubt somewhere ridiculous she's going to make him climb, he expects.

"The woods," she says, as if this is an everyday thing.

Well, he'd spent some time camping and drifting before Raylan picked him up, so he understands. There is a freedom to not being tied down to a place. Though lately Doc has found freedom in being able to say he is staying someplace and not feel tied down by it.

"Alone?" he inquires further. Not that he's interested in whom she wants to spend her nights with, but it is not and has never been a good idea to stay alone in Mathias.

"Yes," Callisto says, in a tone that means of course. She doesn't have an army here, after all, and she hasn't met a single other person who camps outdoors. "Everyone is in house...sss."

She's still working on irregular plurals, and this is a deceptively weird-sounding one!

"You should be too. It isn't safe." That's hypocritical coming from him. He recognises that even if she doesn't. But she's far younger than she looks and acts. And he has something of a protective streak, even if she tries to keep bumbling cowboys and childless fathers at bay.

"There are many vacant houses," he points out. "Warm. Food. Mmmmostly safe. And no rain, or fog." Not yet at least.

"I don't want this," she says firmly, even angrily. "Warm, safe - no."

What in the world would someone like her do with warmth and safety?

"You would rather stay somewhere where a spate of foul weather could kill you?" Doc asks nonplussed with a raised eyebrow, turning to look at her. He has no qualms subjecting himself to the whims of mother nature but Mathias has very different whims. Where he might feel rather unlucky elsewhere, this town sometimes makes bad luck feel awful personal.

"It is not weakness, to stay in a house." He's not certain if she feels she has something to prove - if so, he can't fathom why.

"It is bad," she insists, absolutely stubborn and unwavering. "It is--"

She presses her palm to her chest, just over her heart.

"It is bad here; you understand?"

It feels bad to try to civilize herself in even the barest, most oblique of ways.

He... doesn't really understand. She gets chest pains from staying indoors? Heart palpitations from all those ambient micro waves radiating off the appliances or some such superstition? Is she somehow even more claustrophobic than he is?

"Alright," is what he ends up saying, sounding unconvinced but not wanting to argue with how she feels. This is probably something they need to talk about without the language barrier.

"If you like, we can make food and go outside to have it," he offers. Maybe she'll feel more comfortable sitting on grass than at a dining table with all the unexplained, sometimes illogical social expectations that carries.

"It's bad," she insists through gritted teeth, seeing the expression on his face and immediately jumping to the conclusion that he understands her pain, but dismisses it. She stops walking, and spins to face him, lips curling into a snarl.

"My family has a house. Now the house and my family is fire. I want my house; my family."

And she will accept no substitutes - even now, more than a decade later.

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

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)

(no subject)