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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[HMU on disco or HMD to plot something specific. Default to prose, will match format. Wildcards welcome.]

You picked up the angel statue and suddenly you find yourself much, much smaller. A tiny little thing, only five years old, and you see the lights flashing from your window in your bedroom. You know that blue and red means the police are here, but you can't even begin to guess what they might want at your house. Mommy is the funnest, and Daddy's the best! Bubba can be mean sometimes, but that's just because he's a boy and he's bigger than you and he thinks that means he gets what he wants all the time. Daddy has told him to be nice to you, and he usually listens, so you don't think they are here for Malcolm, either.

You slip out of your room and wander down the hall to Mommy's room, but she's not there. Neither is Daddy. You shrug and patter down the hall and to the end of the stairs. You hear the voices and try to be sneaky and listen to what's going on, but it's just a lot of chatter and words you don't understand.

"Mommy?" You tug on the skirt of a woman in the doorway of the front door to your house, who gasps and turns to look down and scoop you up in her arms. "Mommy, what's wrong?" You turn to look outside the door, where you see daddy and Malcolm having some kind of secret conversation you can't hear.

The police, who's cars are around the front of your house, lights blinking fast like you saw from your bedroom window upstairs, are putting Daddy in handcuffs. There are also all kinds of vans and people with cameras and microphones. You hear someone say something about "The Surgeon", which you guess makes sense, because that's what Daddy does at work. He's the best surgeon, and he fixes people whose insides don't work right. But that still doesn't say why the police are taking him away. "Mommy, mommy, why are they taking daddy away?" You scream, struggling in the grip of her arms. If you could get down, if you could talk to them, tell them that your daddy is the nicest and he would never do anything that meant he had to go to jail, they would let him go.

Mommy doesn't answer. She just sobs and pulls you closer, moving with you further into the house. She sets you on the couch and tearfully begs you to, "Just stay right here, baby. Please. Be mommy's angel, okay?" She pats your cheek and spins away, leaving you confused and upset. Malcolm got to talk to Daddy, how come you can't? It's not fair!

You sit in a huff on the couch, arms folded across your chest, until a kind man that Mommy says is police, comes to crouch in front of you. "Hey there, Ainsley." he starts, and you blink and stare up at him. "Your mommy asked me to explain something to you..." He looks like he is having troubles finding his words. That happens to you sometimes, so you wait patiently for him to find them. "Your daddy has to go to the police station and answer some questions. And I think... when we get done talking to him, he's going to be going away for awhile."

"How come?" you ask, pouting at the idea of daddy being away.

"Your mother will tell you about why when you're older." He assures you with a gentle hand on your knee. "You'll be okay, kiddo... why don't you go sit with your brother? I think he needs a bi-iiig hug from you right now."

You frown at the way he does that thing grown ups always do when they just don't wanna tell you something. You can't wait til you're old enough that people stop saying you'll understand when you're older. But the mention of Malcolm seems to catch your attention well enough. You glance over where he's sat in one of the oversized chairs on the other side of the living room, looking really sad. You decide the man is right and slide off the couch to go climb up in bubba's lap and hug him.

His arms go around you, like an automatic reaction. "Everything's gonna be okay, Ains." he mutters into your hair.

I. The old church [OTA]

{Take me to church

Once she's over the shock of over half the town disappearing–– it doesn't take her long, all the people she knows best, or cares about, seem to still be around, and she can compartmentalize the rest like it's little more than a box of old things to put away in the attic–– Ainsley sets out to explore the parts of the town that don't look familiar.

First, she comes across the burned down church. And from her scrounging around in the rubble of it, that's about all there is to know about it. It was some kind of church, that experienced a wickedly terrible fire. How long it had been here like this, when it was built, anything remotely useful, as was the usual M.O. of this town, was completely turned to ash and rubble.

II. Baneberry Hall [OTA]

{Relics of the past

Ainsley sets out to search through the huge, dilapidated house that vaguely reminds her more of home than any of the rundown houses in the town proper. She doesn't know what she's looking for, so she just searches aimlessly and makes note in mind of everything she can. Bars on the windows, various sorts of restraints scattered about– was it a hospital of some sort? An asylum, maybe? What little paperwork she comes across is as useless as ever. This town gives them no clues to go on, just eternally more questions.

Perhaps she runs into you in one of the rooms? Or in the halls, or in one of the offices. She's around, doing her typical rounds of digging for answers.

III. Wildcard

{Tell me what you want

You know the drill here!

Edited 2021-06-12 23:50 (UTC)

Neal has never been religious, per se. He's not quite agnostic. He believes in something, though whether that's a god or the power of belief itself, he's never quite decided.

Regardless, the trappings of it all have always fascinated him. The houses of worship, the ornamentation, the ritual. The faiths that forbid the first two. Seeing this church burned to the ground, he feels a strange mix of vindication and sadness.

Whatever was worshipped here, good or bad, its sanctum is gone now. Not even a memory. He wanders his way in Ainsley's direction, wondering if she believes in anything. Wondering if she even can.

"If a religion burns in the middle of the woods and there's no one around who knows what it was, does it still exist?"

It's mostly an idle way to announce he's there.

She snorts at the comment and turns toward her company. "I'm going to go with: No. At least, not if there's no other record of it anywhere. It just went the way of the dinosaur."

"You ever see any kind of religious stuff in the library before?" She's sure even if he has, it won't mean anything. Even in her relatively shorter time here, she's realized how utterly circular everything is. Doesn't mean it will stop her from searching anyway; she doesn't know what else to do to pass the time, if nothing else.

I. Poppy Cottage [OTA]

{Quaint, picturesque cottage with not much to offer!

The B&B seems like it could be a place with some kind of reference. But unfortunately, for all of Ainsley's searching, there's a big fat zero nothing on that front. No personal items anywhere. Everything just looks the same as everything else–– dust and grime covered, like no one's been inside in a decade.

In her searching, however, she does see one thing she never sees in any of the things she finds in this godforsaken town: A date. There, plain as day, every single name she can't make out has a check-out date: April 10, 1993. "Holy shit." she mutters. She wonders if that's the most recent date of anything anyone's found. She'll have to find one of the others to ask about it.

II. Penhew House [OTA]

{Is this what a lead looks like?

Well, this is a definite change of pace. Ainsley isn't sure she's seen a house this clean in the entire damn down. She could practically eat off the floor in here; it reminds her of home in a way that makes something in her chest ache.

She pauses first in the entry hall and stands and stares intently at the mirror. First, she pulls all the pictures down, taking in every detail she can think to pay attention to among each one; how the people are standing, the faces that move from one decade to another and the ones that fade and are inevitably replaced with another; the details of the background. When she flips them over to see if anything has been written on the backs of them photos, her eyes light up at seeing the dates from the 1800s to the 90s. As she's putting them back around the edge of the mirror so someone else can be free to look at them, she sees a shadow-figure in the mirror, spinning to see nothing in the hall behind her. "Freaky." she mutters and finishes her task with the pictures.

She sets forward checking the other rooms in the house as well, searching through closets and trunks, dressers and desks, for anything else that might pull more of these fragmented pieces together. She will want to make a note of all the dates s he's found so far. It feels like the first lead she's had in this place since she got here almost a month ago.

III. Wildcard

{Tell me what you want

You know the drill.

Edited 2021-06-12 21:50 (UTC)

Malcolm had squirreled away one bottle of the cheap whiskey that had appeared and - as the sun set - he sat crosslegged in his room, an angel statue on his dresser and a bottle of pills on the bed in front of him. He poured two fingers of whiskey, took 4mg of Xanax and washed it down with a swallow of the whiskey.

He knew what was coming, but he didn't know how hard it would hit him. He was a lightweight these days. Maybe he should have taken half a pill.

He looked up when he heard footprints walking nearby. He saw his sister in the hallway, possibly heading for the bathroom.

"Ains! Ainsley!" he called.

Whatever she may have been doing, it was interrupted by the sharp call of her brother as she was walking by his room. She jumped half out of her skin and spun on her heel. "Malcolm?" She sounds the tiniest bit panicked as she doubles back to his room.

She doesn't even come in his room much, if at all, so it feels like a weird invasion she shouldn't be involved in. But Ainsley Whitly put her nose where it didn't belong all the time, so she ignored that distinct, sharp, twisting feeling of wrongness in the pit of her stomach and presses forward.

"What's wrong?" she asks, eyes scanning across his face, his body, looking for some kind of injury or- or anything that might give her a clue of what's wrong.

“Wrong?” he asks with confusion. “…Nothing. I got you a present,” he tells her, his words slurring just a little. Oh. There it is. God, it’s like laying on the beach and letting the tide come in on top of you. But in a good way. He giggles. “Well, maybe not a present. That’s overselling it a little and there isn’t exactly a Saks Fifth Avenue here,” he points out, laughing at his own joke.

"A present?" Her rich girl childhood is showing in the half-hopeful note in her voice. "What are you talking about, Malcolm?" She moves over to sit on the bed. There is something... just a little off about him that she can't quite put her finger on. "What's got you in such a good mood?" She asks, an amused lilt to her tone.

“It’s a beautiful day,” Malcolm assures her. He flings his arm out in the direction of the dresser and the angel on top of it.

“I found it,” he told her.

"Is it?" She shakes her head, "God, are you high?" she rolls her eyes, getting up to go see what he's raving about. She gasps and hesitates. "Did you to– stupid question, you obviously did. I–"

She spins toward him, frowning. "What did you see?" She has an idea, she'd talked to Raylan about it earlier, but she wants to hear it from Malcolm's own mouth.

“I’m not high; I’m low,” he corrects her. “I probably shouldn’t have mixed central nervous system depressants on my first go but… I did hang back at just four milligrams. Still…” He lays back on the bed, taking a deep breath. “If I stop breathing, let me go knowing I died… well, not happy probably, but reasonably calm.”

"Malcolm, honestly?" She spins to look back over at him. She has a sudden realization that she has no idea what his usual dosage of anything was back home for that to be anything to compare it to. "If you stop breathing, I'm going do CPR on you, just so I can slap you and you'll still feel it." So there.

"What did you mix anyway?" She asks, turning back to the angel on the dresser. She picks it up and gasps as the whole thing plays out again like it was happening in real time all over again. "God, you really started the 'everything's okay' that night?" She turns to look over her shoulder at him again.

"That's what you saw, isn't it? Dad's arrest." She places the angel back on the dresser, though she's half-temped to just break the damn thing. Mr. Boots isn't the comforting memory of an imaginary friend she thought he was any more, anyway. She sighs and drops onto the bed next to him. "God, even a whole universe or weird military experiment city away from him, we can't get away." She huffs and lays down, curling up next to her brother, knees drawn up, making herself fit into the space at his side.

"I mixed alprazolam and...." He looks at the bottle on the bedside table. "Very bad and cheap whiskey," he tells her. "In case the paramedics ask," he can't help adding, then laughing at the very idea.

"God, you really started the 'everything's okay' that night?"

His expression sobers. "I didn't know it wouldn't be."

He smooths a hand over her hair, if a little clumsily, when she curls up next to him.

"I see it all the time. It didn't freak me out as much as carrying some of the other memories."

It was a little different from her point of view. He knew why dad was going away: because of him and because he put girls in boxes.

"I didn't know it was a lie," he repeats drowsily.

Ainsley Whitly | Prodigal Son

{Daddy's not coming home » Memory

Day 063

I

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Day 064

III - evening, Day 64

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{Tell me the story » Closed to Raylan Givens

For posterity - Day 64

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