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

[villagemod]

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

Comments

[myfavoritemurder]

She does, to her credit, try very hard to listen and pick up as much as possible. She does it because she wants to spit and snarl and reject everything he says, and she can't do that if she doesn't understand it.

So she gets some of it, and what she doesn't get she guesses at, and what's too unfamiliar to make good guesses about she invents out of whole cloth. The effect she comes away with is very similar to the effect that Raylan had intended, even if the details differ a bit.

"But I don't want it," she says - turning her back to him, going to flop down onto a couch. "I could do this, but I don't want."

And there's the rub: between age eleven and now, she's forgotten how to want anything else for herself.

[tinstar]

The petulant way she answered and threw herself on the couch like a dramatic teenage girl was almost enough to make him smile but he had a solid idea that a smile would not be taken well. Either way, it spoke to an understanding.

"You're gonna have to do somethin'. Life," he gestured all around. "You, me. It all keeps goin'." He shook his head and worked his way slowly over to a chair to gingerly set himself down, feeling about a million years old.

"Do you like bein' a leader? Having Warriors?"

[myfavoritemurder]

"I like having warriors for fight Xena," she says listlessly, her eyes closed. The pop open again momentarily, though, and she cranes her neck to look at him.

"A leader is someone who have warriors? Their warriors?"

Someone who is in charge, rather than someone who is expected to follow others.

[tinstar]

Raylan wasn't sure if that meant she liked having the manpower to overcome Xena or if she liked the distraction they brought so she could fight Xena, but he supposed, in the end, it didn't matter.

"Yes. Lot's of names for them. Leaders. Commanders. Generals. Boss. You tell them what to do, they do it." The details and nuances of why they did what they were told was too much to be going into.

"You make big war on people, right? Not just Xena? You do it with your warriors, right? You are a leader."

[myfavoritemurder]

"No, just Xena," she insists, though it isn't true. And it's not that she's trying to deny the actions she's already admitted to. It's that she sees all those other villages that she's burned and all those other people that she's hurt as a means to an end - as something that she does to Xena, and because of Xena, and nothing more.

"I make big war on Xena by-- by with other people. You think I care about my armies? You think they matter to me, you think they give me satisfaction?"

This last bit comes out in rough, aggressive Greek, her fists balled at her sides.

"I don't care," she says in English, trying her hand at translating this sentiment. "I are a leader, but I don't care. I don't care soldiers, I don't care Theodorus."

[tinstar]

Raylan narrowed his eyes at her a little, not really believing the idea that there's just a band of motherfuckers running around in the forest chasing one lady. Not believing that Callisto didn't care, at least a fraction. Somewhere. Having seen exactly what Xena looked like, what it all looked like, he could understand a single-mindness, but he was having a hard time believing that Callisto ate, slept and shat Xena.

"Mm," came his reply, lips pressed briefly into a line. "You are, I 'am'," he correctly gently, like that was the point. It wasn't.

"Well, I realize that nothin' I say is going to change your mind on it." Maybe he'd planted seed enough. "You don't have to care about them to be a leader. Plenty of bad people are leaders, send their men out to die for them. You won't be alone in that at least."

[myfavoritemurder]

"You're a leader?" she fires back. "This is why you care?"

[tinstar]

His expression was unimpressed with the question and her fury.

"If I have to be. Why are you upset at the idea of someone carin'?" He would neither confirm nor deny, thank you.

[myfavoritemurder]

Callisto ignores the question entirely, narrowing her eyes as she tries to puzzle out that first bit. If I have to be. She understands all of those words, but strung together in that particular order? Nope.

"If you have--? If you have this?"

She slams a balled-up fist into the palm of her other hand, trying to indicate might, strength, force. Maybe he's saying he only likes being in a position of leadership if he has the power to back it up.

[tinstar]

Raylan shook his head. "I always have have that." His guns were always loaded.

"If I lead depends on the situation. The kind of war, who is with me, who is not. If my leader is there. If Tim is there." He hoped that was enough for her to get the jist of what he meant - it wasn't an easy idea to convey.

[myfavoritemurder]

Callisto nods; good enough. There are clearly a lot of ifs.

"You do it out of duty," she sums up in Greek. "Not enjoyment."

But there's another thing she want to make clear.

"You do not always have that. You do not have that--" The fist motion again. "-- on me."

He has no power over her, she means; he can't control her. And that's what she really cares most about, when it comes to discussions of power. Having it over others is something that she can take or leave: it's useful sometimes, but it's not worth actively striving for. Not letting others have it over her, however, is vitally important. Only her grief and anger are allowed that honor.

[tinstar]

Well. There was some enjoyment but Raylan would keep his sins to himself. Callisto didn't need to know all that.

"You're right," Raylan said with a nod, but Callisto would likely pick up the slight change in his demeanor. He did not want her to be an adversary. But he also was strong enough to not cave under the push of her power. He was not to be pushed over. "Just like you don't have that over me. I got a feelin' we're gonna butt heads about somethin'. I think you and I are gonna end up fightin' durin' some shit, so I'm going to say this now.

If I am trying to stop you from doin' something, it is not to show power-" This time he used the accompanying hand gestures "-Over you. It is to save you from yourself. You might not agree, but your life matters."

[myfavoritemurder]

"You will death me, if we fight?"

Sure, it's the exact opposite of what he's actually saying, but she's more interested in his potential for brutality than she is in his potential for heroics.

[tinstar]

"No. I don't have to." There were other ways to put her out of commission. He wasn't afraid of knocking her out if she made him. He hated it. He could feel Arlo cackling in the back of his. That all it take for you to lose your temper?

Killing one woman was enough. He wasn't going to do it again if he had any other choice.

[myfavoritemurder]

"You don't have what?" she asks, frustrated. "Weapon? Sword? Gun?"

[tinstar]

"I don't have to kill you. I don't have to make death on you, of you-" Whatever, she'd get it, "-if we fight. Even if I had my guns."

[myfavoritemurder]

Someday, she'll work out - or have explained to her - what that particular phrase construction means, but that day is not today. Today, she just snarls in frustration: at all these weak-willed men, and at her own inability to understand what he's telling her he doesn't have.

Nerve, she thinks furiously. Or ability. He won't give me a proper fight because he doesn't have the skill to.

"Because you're afraid," she snits. "I know. A divorce, been served coward."

Which isn't something that she personally judges - but she'd much rather try to openly goad him into a fight than hear about how she should make more of herself.

[tinstar]

Raylan's jaw worked for a second and the expression on his face wasn't one that normal people tended to test. He understood - she was a hard woman, a hard Warrior from the shitty side of history, comparatively speaking. He understood the urge to fight, to destroy, to drive forth your enemies, hear the lamentation of their women but he also understood that his bare limit of what he was willing to inflict upon a woman without a damned good reason was child's play to her.

How long would she let this little back and forth kind of dance they did go before she did something drastic to force his hand, to make him react? A few more days. A week or more if he's very lucky. He was grateful that his feet were pained and bloody - the pain of it kept him very much centered in the chess game of now. Later would wait until later.

It broke off his face with a scoff and a little gesture of his hand as he turns towards the door with a dismissive shake of his head.

"You're not worth the shame it would bring me."

[myfavoritemurder]

Multiple emotions flit through her at that. She's pleased that her provocations worked, but she's displeased by the dismissiveness in his tone (and, she imagines, in his words, though she can't understand them). She's pleased that she's driven him away, but she's also somehow, at the same time, displeased that he's leaving.

Many of these feelings are contradictory. All are fleeting.

"Go," she says. "I don't care."

[tinstar]

"It's been my experience that women who say that never really mean it," he says, pausing at the door to look back at her, the angry but capable young woman that stood there like she might set the house on fire in a tantrum fit. But he didn't tend to answer those, in most of the forms they came in. They were all past childhood now. Time to set aside childish things.

He can't help but wonder back to his former question. Then again, he'd always been a studier of people, in his own way. Feeling that tipping his hat was respect that she didn't deserve and he didn't have it in him to spare right now, he left and shut the door oh so calmly behind him.