The Village Mod (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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villagelogs2021-06-05 08:09 pm
villagemod) wrote in villagelogs2021-06-05 08:09 pm
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"
CONDITIONS UPDATE
OOC NOTES
navigation | faq | locations | report updates
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.
— 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.
— 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.
memories but like pre-prompt disaster edition
That's the principle of the thing.
Not that he's thinking a whole lot about principle about now, admittedly.
He never forgot that cold read, what came out of it. He never forgot what it did to Parker. And hell, he was always knee-deep in foster siblings growing up, for however long they were around, he keeps in touch, he got attached, he could do the empathy math imagining what that would have been like to have to live through. Nothing good.
Living it firsthand is a whole new beast. Leaves him having to take a minute to just sit, scrape himself together, scrub his face dry. (And it's not fair that this place can impossibly trot something like this out for people to see. Parker keeps her layers and facets and secrets, just like Eliot, like Sophie and Nate, like anybody has a right to, Parker should always get to call the shots about who gets let into what about her past or present or future.
For everything he doesn't really get, he gets wanting to feel in control.
So this, this sure as hell ain't fair.)
Hardison sets off to find Parker in pretty short order, because he knows she's somewhere in this dusty-ass manor looking for clues or valuables or things that catch her interest. He has some kind of vague thought about how he'll probably have to explain, tell her to be careful, but he can't say his brain is on track for actively planning anything past asking her for a hug as of yet. ]
perfect
She'd thought she'd understood. She'd been scared too, after all. Scared that they wouldn't reach him in time, that it would be, somehow, her fault if they didn't. That she'd have to live with that guilt forever if he didn't make it. That she'd have to live without him.
But none of that compares to the pure terror she feels when she reaches down, curiously, to pick up the familiar scarf. She'd trained herself out of any fear of the dark or small spaces she might have had at a young age, but even before that, she'd never felt the way she feels now, the way Hardison had felt, trapped and immoble inside the dark, close coffin.
The memory flashes through on fast-forward, simultaneously too fast to process and feeling like it'll never end. It's not until it's over that she's able to unclench her fingers and let the scarf fall to the floor, recoiling and backing away as if it had burned her.
It's over. He's safe. He made it.
But despite knowing that, there's still only one thing to do. She turns and flees down the hallway, searching wildly and without a plan, and it's by pure chance that she happens to find Hardison, looking just as deathly serious as he walks down the corridor towards her. She doesn't hesitate, doesn't say anything, just rushes up to him and throws herself into his arms, squeezing him tight. ]
no subject
Past-tense. It happened, past-tense, no matter how fresh it feels, and she's here, and he loves her, and she might bruise his ribs, actually? He'll just have to take the risk. He knew it when he signed on. Hardison wraps his arms around her, tight as he can, like maybe that will magically be able to make her immune to whatever the hell it was that just happened to him.
They've managed weirder, right?
On the other hand, Parker hugged him. Threw herself at it in the kind of way she almost never, ever does, deathly serious, and Hardison goes ahead and splits the difference between dread and concern right there on the spot. Wanting a hug takes the backseat to whatever this is.
Did she see it? She couldn't have seen it. He was just in there, they're coming from different directions. Which doesn't exactly narrow down the possibilities on what does have her this upset. Town they're trapped in considered and everything. ]
Hey-- it's okay. [ Well. ] Is it okay? Are you okay? Gimme the briefing, mama, what happened, we'll- we'll handle it.
[ Local man conspires to learn to hack reality like the Matrix for his beautiful girlfriend, news at 11. ]
no subject
He wants to know what's wrong, which is...understandable, she guesses. She'd want to know why if he was this upset. But explaining it is another question. She doesn't want to bring up bad memories for him. Or worry him.
So she stays where she is a moment longer, just enjoying the security of a nice, classic Hardison hug, before pulling back just enough to look up and meet his eyes. ]
I'm okay. [ She is now. And he is, she knows that. But she finds herself wanting to double-check anyway, searching his face. Looking for reassurance that he's okay, that he hasn't been getting locked into coffins and fighting panic attacks while she hasn't had her eye on him. ] Are you okay?
no subject
I'm-- good. Okay. [ Good would be too good, he'd say. And there's no good way to try to figure out how to handle this. He looks over his shoulder, back the way he came, uneasy. ] There's a lot of weird stuff happening in here. Might not be a bad idea to call it quits on digging around.
no subject
But Hardison looks way less okay than he's claiming to be, looking over his shoulder as if afraid someone's been following him. She follows his gaze, staring intently down the hall for a moment, but there's nothing there. No one.
She's still and quiet for a beat too long, thinking, trying to figure out what to say. ]
Um.
[ Her voice is very small suddenly. ]
What if...it's too late for...that?
To...not dig around.
[ Dig. Even the word makes her wince, face scrunching up in discomfort and dismay. How can he just say it like that? Her arms tighten around him again, fingers twisting into his shirt. ]
no subject
Kinda sounds like our luck. [ Hardison can't fully commit to the joke, but he figures that's okay. The way things go around here, it's not much of a joke anyway. More like a statement of fact.
He squeezes back, tries for reassuring. ]
I'm gonna go ahead and guess you found something, too. Awful and impossible?
[ The Mathias brand. Seems like a good starting point. ]
no subject
At least they're all still together. At least none of them had disappeared with the others. She nods in response to the not-joke, hesitates, and then nods again. Definitely awful. Definitely impossible. It doesn't even occur to her to wonder what he'd found. Whatever it is, it can't possibly be as bad as what she'd seen.]
I saw... [ But it's not just that. She shakes her head, trying again. ] I felt...
I was you. In the coffin.
[ She risks a glance up at him, only because she has to see his face. Confirm for herself, yet again, that he's still here and breathing normally. ]
I...remembered it. I know what it was like.
[ And it was terrible. Tears hover at the corners of her eyes, and she smushes her face into his chest again, squeezing him tighter. Probably not the most helpful thing for a guy with a fear of tight, enclosed spaces, currently being forced to revisit his unquestionably absolute worst experience of that fear, but she just needs to hold him. ]
no subject
Hardison doesn't know what he expected. Or he half-expected it, someone else running into the weird memory... thing, he could see that upsetting Parker for sure. He just didn't expect he'd hear anyone ran into that memory.
Metaphorically speaking, it knocks the wind out of him. Gums up the works.
He wouldn't wish knowing what it was like on anybody. Including himself, because he sure as hell doesn't have some martyr complex about it. Not on anyone all-around, the dark and the panic and the uncomfortable built-up warmth--
And maybe it doesn't help exactly, the tight squeeze, but it doesn't not help. It's Parker and he's not alone, which is what got him through it in the first place, and if he's with her then she's not alone with it, either. Hardison flounders with it, a little, trying to get his brain back in motion, figure out what to say. ]
I'm sorry. [ In a general sense, a sorry you have to know that now sense. That's somewhere to land. That's something. ] I, uh.
[ A swallow, a shaky exhale. ]
I remembered something of yours, too. Pretty sure.
no subject
She can feel the way he tenses up a little, like maybe it's a little harder to breathe, like maybe now he's remembering too, and she makes a helpless little sound against his chest. Parker's never been any good at comforting anyone. Before Hardison, she'd never had to learn. There had been no one she would have wanted to help that way, even if she'd been able to. Now, she wishes she know what to say. How to make him feel better, the way he always makes her feel better.
But she can't.
When he mentions remembering her memory, she stiffens a little, mind going blank with fear for a moment. But it's Hardison. It's okay. Whatever he'd seen, it'll be okay. He won't hate her for it.
Even so, she looks tense and wary when she pulls back her head just enough to look up at him, trying to think of what her equivalent to his memory might be. ]
When...when I was in the stall with the horse?
[ She'd been scared then, too. But it had turned out okay. ]
woman yelling at cat meme but its me yelling at notifs
He'd have thought the memory would be the harder part. Having it. Seeing it.
He was wrong. The hard part is telling. ]
No. I-- I, uh.
[ It takes him a little working up to it. Ask him any day of the week, he'll admit he's not the brave one. ]
Your brother.
shakes cane at dw
And then it clicks all at once and it's like Parker completely shuts down. Her arms drop from around him, blood draining from her face as she backs away, shaking her head. ]
No.
[ She brings her arms up, not quite pushing him away but pressing her hands against his chest, as if she can press the words back inside, make him take them back. Undo all of it. ]
No, you can't -
You can't see that!