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.

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Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Raylan scoffed. "Of course she did." He shook his head - He still hadn't figured Callisto out, over all, but that tracked.

"Couple of different houses. Well, only two came down, I ran outta the third before it could fall on my head.. Probably oughta stop there and see if I can't find my hat, actually.. But once I got the idea that it was.. following me, my options ran out fast."

“You lost your hat?” He assumed Raylan wasn’t wearing his hat because he hurt his head or something. “We could g… wait. Did you say it was following you?” he clarified.

"Tossed it into the last house I was in before Mathis ripped it off my head and it was lost forever. Figured that was preferable," he chuckled.

He would like to go get it; they should pass by the house on their way.

"Yeah. That's the reason I ended up bouncin' through houses until I gave up and found Tim." Then, idiocy reigned. Malcolm had seen the result of that. "I don't know why.. Mathis is already punishin' me for burnin' down the town hall. More nightmares. They haven't gone away yet."

Malcolm started looking around.

"Which house did you leave it in? We can get it. We can just take a detour. Do your feet hurt too much? I'll go," he rambled.

Then caught himself.

"Or I can wait for you to answer a question before I keep asking them," he conceded. "What are the nightmares about? Fire?"

Raylan scoffed a breathy laugh, looking over sidelong at Malcolm. "If you want to take the lead and leave me on a porch, I can't say I'll argue. Not today. Each step feels a bit like I'm walkin' across nails, coals and needles. We find a place to set me down, I'm glad to sit there for a minute or three."

He wasn't too proud to admit that. Not in his current state.

"In part. It's always... It's always you and Henry, Neal, Tim, Negan, burnin' alive in a buildin' I can't break into." He shook his head like he could shake the memories of it away.

"It's alright. Nightmares, I can manage, even if it means coming to make sure you're whole in the morning."

“I’m never chagrin to see you in the morning,” Malcolm told him, glancing over sidelong. “Or any other time of day.” He glances around. More perfectly intact houses that probably shouldn’t have been. “You know I know what nightmares are like. If you… wanted to stay a bit more…” He lets that hang there, but he wouldn’t kick him out of bed was the upshot.

Staying more meant being on Nightmare double duty all the time. His limbic system was already stressed with both Malcolm and Tim's nightmares. There was no room for pity around his own. He'd been staying, keeping to their duty schedule, had these nightmares next to Malcolm.

Raylan shook his head. "It won't help. Nothin' will."

When they got up to the road, Raylan slowed and nodded up the way. "It's down here. You sure you don't mind my taking a load off while you get it? It's not like my socks can get anymore stuck to my feet."

He’d noticed a few times, but thought it was a cumulative effect of being in Mathias. Even Malcolm’s terrors had taken on a Mathias flavour for a while now. It seemed like a Mathias Thing.

He didn’t know about the added stress of Tim’s nightmares. He thought Tim’s Do Not Open door was Tim’s personal territory.

He nodded when Raylan said it wouldn’t help. It helped him, having someone there. But everybody was different.

He perked up a little as Raylan noted the direction of the house where he’d left his hat. “No, no, I’ll get it,” he said. “Which number is it?”

Raylan was pretty sure he knew why the nightmares had come back, but they hadn't brushed across the door that he could open to talk about it. Malcolm helped plenty when he was there, but there was no help that would stop them - Raylan's end goal.

Slowly working himself to the closest porch, Raylan carefully set himself down, wincing as he brushed his hands together and shaking them separately because it hurt too much to do that. "Third or fourth on the left, I can't quite remember, but it's on the first floor. I tossed it into.. a dining room, I think. I hope it's not crushed, that's harder to fix than bein' wet."

Malcolm ran up the stairs of the third house, disappeared into it for a few minutes, then bounded out empty-handed to rush into the fourth.

This time, he emerged triumphant, with Raylan’s (only slightly damp) hat on his head, grinning as he trotted back to Raylan with the prize. When he reached him, he took it off his own head and set it on Raylan’s.

“Back where it belongs.”

When Malcolm came out of the third house, Raylan had a wash of worry that his hat hadn't survived and there would be no replacement; he was quite attached to that hat, but Malcolm bounding out of the forth with it on his head was a sharp relief.

Grinning as it was sat on his head, he adjusted it with a sigh. "Thank you. Shit I'm glad to see it survived the night. Gonna haveta reshape the brim when we get some down time-" While he was letting his feet heal by not being on them.

With a deep breath and a wince, Raylan pushed back up to his feet with a nod. "I know it's probably stupid to be so worried about where the damned fog line is but.. Somethin's happenin'. Feels only right that we find out where our new fence line is."

Malcolm nodded, taking his arm as he pushed himself up until he was relatively steady on his feet.

“Yeah, I want to see it, too. If the line has moved back, then they’ve changed something or completed something.”

Normally, Raylan would have pushed off the help but frankly, he needed it.

"Thank you," he murmured about it all, almost reluctant to pull his arm away. "Are you okay? After last night?"

“Oh. Yeah. I’m okay. I got Callisto down into the tunnels and stayed with her for a bit and then I went home and got Doc out of his puddle and into a bath and then some dry clothes. After you got home, I stayed with him the rest of the night. He didn’t have a good day yesterday.” He looked at Raylan. “He seems better this morning. He was grumbling something about you being an idiot.”

It had to have been before Raylan got home, as he'd gotten home in the pre-dawn hours.

He frowned at the telling of it all. "Well, he's not wrong. He was in a puddle?"

“Yeah, he was sitting on the floor in the garage, dissociating, while it flooded. I think it was just… one more thing too many,” he told Raylan. “But I think he’s… more or less recovered. For now.”

If they hadn't already been walking slowly, he would have slowed down, the frown on his face deepening. "I'll have to check in with him. I asked how it went, what happened. He didn't mention like that but he wouldn't, bein' who he is."

He was sorry he wasn't there. Couldn't be any help to a man who'd been such a help to him. Couldn't help the people he loved. Well, he'd helped Tim, he hoped. There wasn't much to do about it right now, so he pressed on.

"I'm glad y'all are alright. Wish I coulda been there."

Malcolm gave him a small smile. “We always wish you’re around but… we’re fine. I took care of Doc.” He raised an eyebrow down at Raylan’s boots. “We fared better than you did,” he teased lightly. “W…” But then he paused, staring at the road ahead. “…Raylan… Isn’t this where the chasm was?”

Of course they were. Capable men that they were. And Malcolm was right, over all, Raylan being there would have been trouble.

He slowed to a stop, frowning deeply as he looked behind them and at the treeline.

"Yeah.. Yeah it was. What the hell?" He started walking again, a little fast than before, despite the pain until he was standing just about where the center of the gap was. "Tell me she's not fucking with me specifically. All that goddamned work and there isn't even a tear in the land to show for it. This feels personal." After the night he'd had, how could he think otherwise.

“You wanted to see what was on the other side,” Malcolm said evenly, drawing up beside him. “…Should we take a look?” he asked, surveying the scene in front of them.

Raylan let out a rough sigh and gestured towards that side of town as he turned, resigned and irritated.

"Guess we better, in case she decides to block it off again... You think it had anything to do with my tryin' to cross it? Maybe I just annoyed her to the point of lettin' us over."

"I think... nobody makes her do anything."

Malcolm caught his hand for a moment. Gave it a small squeeze before letting it go.

"They've opened the borders before. And closed them again. The path to the lighthouse comes and goes."

Things being an arbitrary choice that no one influenced in any way was the worst.

But the touch on his hand has him looking over, squeezing Malcolm's hand in return before it slipped away.

"Where should we start?" Better to start than linger in more shit he couldn't change or explain.

Edited 2021-06-14 21:09 (UTC)

Malcolm pointed straight ahead, at a big building looming at the back of everything.

"That place looks important," he declared. He looked up at Raylan, an undeniable excitement in his expression at the unknown. The dangerous. The discovery.

Raylan glanced at Penhew House and nodded towards the big building with a deep breath. "Doesn't look like we're going find a brunch waitin' for us, but maybe we'll find somethin' interesting. I hope we get more than a day with this half. Too much to cover in a day. Or two. Shit or three, as expansive as this place must be. I wonder if this is it. All of her."

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