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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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.

"Mom would be disappointed in your whiskey choices." She smiles a little, but there's no light in her eyes with it. As much as she drives her crazy, Ainsley has missed Mom since she's been here.

She nods a little. That makes sense. How could he know that? They were just kids. Just little kids. And their entire lives, and next two decades still, had been completely upended by one night.

"But you have every time you've said it, since then." she points out quietly. There's no accusation in her tone with it, though. She doesn't hate it. It's one of those big comforts she can still get from him, and it feels the same as it did that night, ever time she hears it. Even when she's covered in blood, memories blank, and he says it anyway.

She curls tighter against him at the thought. She hasn't talked to him, not really, about that. And she still isn't sure she's ready to. She doesn't want to accept what might be the truth. Most likely is.

"Sometimes, I think... there has to be a way to make things okay. You deserve better than what I got, Ains. I just wanted to help," he confesses, words just short of slurred. "But I'm not ever sure I'm much good to anyone if I'm not solving cases. I don't know that I'm even much good to me. Look at me. This is the best I've felt in two months and I'm a puddle of numbness."

"You always did." In his own, weird, Malcolm-y way. "For me, at least. Especially when I was little. You did a lot for me." Things Mom probably never even knew about, but he did anyway, because he was the big brother and it was just what they do for their baby sisters.

She tilts her head up to look at him, and it's a little bit like she's seeing him for the first time. Since getting here? Ever? Hard to say. But it's there, all across her face. She reaches up to card her fingers through his hair, just once. Fingertips lingering on his cheek, just for a second. She doesn't really know how to do this. But trying. Isn't that what Raylan said matters? (Since when did she start taking advice from the cowboy?)

"You are..." she whispers, her voice thick with tears pricking at the edges of her eyes as she stares across him blankly to the wall. "You matter, Malcolm." her voice breaks on that one. "You're important... to mom. To me."

"I know," he assures her quietly. "But I made things harder for everyone. And I didn't want to," he confesses. "I didn't know how to get... out from under it. I still don't."

“I don’t think you can,” she says softly, eyes still brimming with tears. Not the most encouraging thing to say, but Ainsley has always been brutal with her honesty.

“I— I saw yours, too...” and feeling it all the way he felt that night puts a thing or two into perspective. She mentally added the last two decades of dad’s head games exponentially to the trauma of that first night and... she still can’t truly, fully understand the scope of it for him, but she has a better idea of it now.

Malcolm looks at her, even though it takes him a second to focus his eyes.

“I didn’t want that for you,” he murmurs.

“Maybe Mathias thought we needed it.” To see that night from the other side. To feel all those things they both knew on an academic level but couldn’t truly know. Now they can. They do. And maybe it’s for the best. “So we can...” she doesn’t know how to end that sentence. Understand? Move beyond it? She sighs. “I don’t know. But— I think we did. Need it.”

He looks over at her blearily.

“He ruins everything he touches.” He reaches for her hand, squeezing her fingers. “But I remember, too. I remember when I had this great dad, who went to work every day to save lives and was my hero. I remember him.”

She squeezes his hand back tightly in her own and refuses to let go. "It was the only part I ever knew..." she can hear the waver in her voice, and she hates it. She hates the way she can clamp it back and dry the tears even more.

“I know. That’s why we didn’t want you to see him. Maybe you could escape. But that was… foolish dreaming. He’s inside you as much as he’s inside me.”

With that little bit of extra perspective that had been... forced on her by the town and its games (in such little time, she'd come to think of it as sentient, making choices for them at its own whim, like that was possible or normal) Ainsley can understand the side of things she was missing all those years. It was... still wrong. Still an unfortunate way things played out. She still wishes they hadn't hidden the truth and the monster for so long. But... it helps, knowing it on the other side, too.

Those last words make her whole body tense. Her fingers grip his tighter in her hand. She swears its like he just stole all the air from her lungs with that final statement. "Maybe more..." she whispers softly, and her heart is a jackhammer carving out a hollow in her chest.

She should have told him that first night. Should have been honest with him. She should have done a lot of things that she didn't.

But this could be a turning point. It could change everything.
A small voice inside her points out it could make everything so much worse.

"I didn't... tell you everything about that night... when I showed up here. When Raylan found me..." Her voice is a ghost of what it should be, barely able to keep it strong enough to make it through all of the words.

“There was directional blood spatter on your pants,” Malcolm said sleepily. “High velocity arterial spray, probably.”

"It was worse, before he found a shirt for me to change into..." she admits quietly. "I don't remember all of it, I still...just get weird fragments..."

She rolls her lips together in her hesitation, unsure of how much she still wants to tell him. "Nicholas Endicott is dead." That much she's sure of.

“The pharmaceutical magnate?” Malcolm clarifies. “I take it he didn’t have a heart attack if you got hit with arterial spray,” he surmises.

"...Yeah. Mom was sort of... dating him?" She pulls a face at the thought. It was still weird. And he was so slimy. She can't believe Mom even wanted anything to do with him. "No... but I don't remember very much. But you were there... and you had a gun." In her heart, she knows it wasn't Malcolm. He isn't a killer. Could never be. But it's the facts, as she remembers them, anyway.

He frowns. “Do you think I hit him in the neck or something?” he asks. Arterial spray: where could that have come from?

III - evening, Day 64

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