nightlogs | ❅ SHITTY LITTLE TOWN ❅ PART 1

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dan sagittarius

❅ SHITTY LITTLE TOWN ❅ PART 1

SHITTY LITTLE TOWN ❅ PART 1

Each year in this town, the winters seem to get harder and the summers seem to get hotter, and this was no exception. After several months of sweltering afternoons and sweaty nights, fall is finally starting to break the town’s fever, although with the cooler weather comes the death of the horseflies, leaving many of the town’s flat surfaces coated in bug carcasses. The sky is overcast, the air remains humid, and in the distance thunderstorms can be heard almost every hour of the day.

During the day, people go about their usual routines, working primarily at the slaughterhouse or mines during the weekdays, vegetating in front of the television on Saturdays, and sitting straightbacked and paranoid in the pews on Sunday, fearful less of the wrath of God than the ire of the neighbors. Evenings for the average person are filled with drinking at Nog’s or Auntie’s or peering at the TV until bedtime.

This is where our heroes find themselves, waking with a new lifestory that integrates them into this, the shitty little town.

PROMPTS

a) NOG'S

Nog's bar is the preferred haunt of most of the miners and slaughterhouse workers in this town, who meet to drink their woes away, complain about their supervisors and speculate on the personal lives of the people around them. Despite Mr. Goluboy's constant harassment, Nog has managed to keep his liquor license, and as such is one of the few successful businesses in town on account of all the stress-induced alcoholism. While one won't find fancy cocktails here, if they're just looking for a beer and some scuttlebutt, this is the place.

b) AUNTIE'S

"Auntie's" is the name of the old-school, 1950's-esque, 24-hour diner in the middle of downtown, with big red pleather booths, checkerboard floors and a jukebox. Typically, the only difference in clientele between Auntie’s and Nog's is that the people at Auntie’s wanted a burger or a stack of pancakes alongside their beer – but unlike Nog's, Auntie’s is only barely hanging on, constantly getting ticketed for waterspots on the silverware and not having enough napkins. Thankfully, one can get a full breakfast meal at Auntie's any time of day for a few dollars.

c) THE DOCKS

The town is alongside a lake, and once upon a time there was enough fish to sustain a modest fishing economy and a river that allowed for trade by boat with other nearby towns. However, with the mines' pollution, fish are no longer considered safe to eat, and only the water immediately adjacent to the springhead on the Warren Family Farm is safe to swim in. Draining from the mines has lowered the level of the river enough that it's no longer navigable. Residents will still occasionally use the lake for boating recreation, but fees at the marina keep going up (into Goluboy's pocket) and mothers are increasingly worried about letting their children get wet in that water.

d) THE SLAUGHTERHOUSE

The other major employer, owned by Ms. Cygne. Most of the locals who don't work at the mines work at the slaughterhouse, where the work is disgusting, dreary and grueling. Sometimes people get promoted out of the trenches and into admin. Yay.

e) BIG TOP CIRCUS COFFEE

Dick's Coffeeshop is in the bottom floor of an apartment building, and many locals have no idea how it hasn't been shut down yet, given that the owner is famously generous with his resources in a way that clearly irritates the city council. Dick offers jobs to those who Goluboy and Cygne won't hire at the mines or slaughterhouse and frequently sneaks day-old pastries to the hungry. The coffeeshop is one of the few areas where artists tend to converge, usually at the weekly open mic night; however, whatever one expresses at the coffeeshop is likely to be picked up by the town gossips, mocked relentlessly, distorted and spread around.

f) THE FARMER'S MARKET

Because Mr. Goluboy's malicious prosecution of small businesses has essentially shut down any legal avenue for a farmer's market, a few of the residents of the town have established a black market for homegrown fruits and vegetables, small-batch soaps and candles, and other small products. Words gets out through a whisper network, and a few times a month everyone in the know meets in a parking lot, opens their trunk, and does some bartering and selling with each other until they get found out. Sheriff Mallard and her deputies have arrested many people at these pop-ups and confiscated their products. By now, these pop-ups have around forty people trading and selling at a time, and the city council has announced that out of concerns for food safety the sentence for being caught vending homegrown produce will be increased to a misdemeanor with jail time.

g) THE LIBRARY

The library, once well-stocked and indulgently funded, is now kept alive sheerly by the passion of the one paid librarian, Aziraphale, and the volunteers who work there. There is no interlibrary loan program and there have been no new books in years. The library is reduced to loaning damaged copies missing pages, and story hours or public events are difficult to organize due to the complete lack of resources. The city council has also forced Aziraphale to put up a sign against loitering or using the library "for any purposes besides the borrowing of books." An organization of local busybodies drops in frequently to comb through the stacks for "objectionable material," which is then destroyed at Ms. Cygne's behest.

h) WILDCARD/NEW LOCATION

Feel free to set things around town anywhere you want or make up new locations.

i) THE SPOOKY WOODS

Outside the town, there are foggy, dense woods, difficult to navigate by foot due to thickets and brambles that come up to a grown man's waist. The city council has done what they can to ban people from going into the woods, and the gruesome animal maulings are a compelling disincentive.

Note: Let the plot mods know when your characters are going into the spooky woods.

OOC DETAILS
❅ OOC Plotting: Here. More locations can be found there. You can also ask the players running the plot questions there.

❅ Event Length: This part of the plot is to establish CR and characters' roles in town. It will last about a week and half before future parts that allow the characters to start digging into the mysteries of the town.

❅ New Characters: If your character is introing at this time, assume they arrived just in time at the location the plot takes place in to be caught up in the magic drawing everyone in. They would have gotten the Man in the Moon's spiel from the welcome page right before being magically sucked in.

❅ Opt-out: Anyone that doesn't want to play in the plot can handwave their character didn't go on the mission that put the characters in the location where they were sucked in. You can thread your characters back at the Pole or send them on another smaller mission with other characters.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I. I Just Know Who I’m Not and That’s Alright with Me [OPEN]

Dan isn’t sure how the information about his prison sentence got out among the townsfolk, although he suspects it was one of the deputies who felt it would be a salacious topic of conversation. Whomever it was, they and the officer who impounded his car took Dan’s already difficult situation in this town and made it utterly demoralizing. For the last few weeks, Dan’s been living on the streets, bedding down in alleyways and, when he has enough time to walk back to the woods, sleeping in a tarp hammock in the tree line. He’s lost enough weight that he’s had to punch a new hole in his belt, managing one, maybe two paltry meals a day by begging and dumpster-diving and scavenging and trapping squirrels in the woods. His cough has gotten deeper and heavier even though he’s smoking less, mostly because cigarettes are difficult to shoplift when they’re locked in a case.

As of the last week, his homelessness is impossible to cover up. He’s started to smell bad, and his clothing is battered in ways he can’t fix with his little sewing kit. As he’s been chucked into jail several times for trying to busk or vend caricatures or solicit any kind of work – handyman, janitor, dogwalker, anything – he’s been reduced to outright panhandling, and even that’s been getting him in trouble with the new campaign to clean up the downtown. More and more, it feels like the town is removing all his options to just exist in peace, as if they could make his presence so unwanted and illegal that he would vanish into the air in a puff of smoke.

He misses his car. He would have blown this pop stand if he had wheels, and he’s considered stealing someone’s vehicle, but he knows that everyone here uses their cars or trucks for work, and he doesn’t want to get anyone fired.

Today he’s scrounged a shoebox from the garbage, and he plans to use that as his piggybank. He puts his one wadded-up dollar and a handful of pennies in it to give everyone the hint and finds a sidewalk downtown where he can see if police are coming from either direction.

He approaches anyone who doesn’t outright avoid eye contact, trying to avoid moving too quickly, trying to be smiling and warm so there’s no way his request can be considered menacing. “Spare change?”

II. I’ve Rolled in Dirty Dollars, Stood in the Welfare Line [OPEN]

As it’s raining, Dan’s engaged in the time-honored hobo tradition of nursing black coffee through the day to avoid being accused of loitering at the coffeeshop. He doesn’t think Dick would kick him out, but the sheriff and her lackeys have been sniffing around Dick’s business, and Dan’s sure they’d use any excuse to level a fine at Dick. Dan doesn’t want to be that excuse.

Dick’s let him use the shower, so Dan did his best to scrub every little bit of dirt off him, behind his ears and under his nails and between his toes and everywhere that’s gotten grimy and dusty from weeks of sleeping outside. Unfortunately, he had to go right back into his damp, filthy, tobacco-stale clothing, so the feeling of being purified and washed clean was short-lived. He was able to afford a muffin this morning – he insisted on paying – and he’s been paying for his coffee (which he's been doctoring with the small bottle of whiskey he was able to shoplift), but breakfast was many hours ago and he’s feeling the lightheadedness and tension of hunger again.

When he sees an abandoned table, half-eaten sandwich sitting in wax paper with a toothpick sticking out of it like a flagpole, he watches for a minute or two to see if it’s been temporarily or permanently abandoned. When he figures it’s been long enough that he can assume the sandwich is sitting there to be bused rather than boxed up and taken to go, he swoops in and takes it before it ends up in the garbage. He retreats to his corner and starts to wolf it down, feeling a kick of satisfaction until he sees the owner of the sandwich return to their table and find their food missing.

“Oh! Sorry, I…I took your sandwich. I reckoned you’d abandoned it.” Dan pulls a yikes face. He’d offer to buy a new one if he could, but if he could afford a sandwich, he wouldn’t be vulturing over the tables. “I’m so sorry.”

III. Halfway Home is Where the Heart Is and I’m Halfway Home [For Bunny]

Dan overheard about this farmer’s market by eavesdropping at Big Top, and so he made it a point to get up early and walk towards the lot where it’s taking place, walking quickly but with his gut tightened in an effort to push through his hangover. He has the cardboard sign a volunteer at the library helped him write, an uninspired please give, anything helps, a God bless on the other side to appeal to the more religious townsfolk’s sympathies.

The farmer’s market fills him with a sort of pride for people; he’s touched by this effort to flourish underneath the tyranny of Mr. Goluboy and Ms. Cygne’s weaponized business codes. With a pain in his chest, Dan thinks that this is the sort of event his parents would have wanted to participate in, if they’d only been a little less isolative. A wish pops up into his head that he could bring some of the squash he and his family grew on their farm to contribute; the wish is cruel, because there hasn’t been squash on that land in two and a half decades, and instead of produce, Dan has nothing but his open hand to offer.

After asking for change for a while, he approaches the Warren Family Farms cart, figuring that he should start with the vendor best known for his generosity and permissiveness. He stops by, counting out coins from his palm. He looks up and sees Aster, whom he has never spoken to, but who has the most lovely green eyes and strong arms, dirt from working the farm up to his forearms. Dan feels another pang as he remembers the feeling of digging up vegetables and planting seeds, and how that type of self-sufficiency felt so much less undignified than the way he's living now.

“Good morning,” he says, dismaying that he’s only managed to rustle up forty-five cents. “You organized this, right?”

IV. Nice Neighbors, Bad Cough [For Stacia]

After being chased off from the farmer’s market, Dan starts the walk back to where he’s been sleeping in the woods, up off the ground in a hammock made of a tarp and cord, exposed to the elements that have degraded his clothing to the point where it’s obvious he doesn’t have anything to change into. Dan repairs his own clothing with his father’s attention to detail, but there’s only so far he can mask the water damage, worn-thin patches and especially the discoloration of mud and spills and worse from his drunken nights.

He got a basket of produce from Aster, and he’s trying to let that buoy his spirits over being accused again of something he didn’t do, something he struggles to explain because he feels like he becomes stupid and dumb when he tries to talk about Ellie, and then being told in no uncertain terms to make himself scarce. He’s trying instead to think of how nice it’ll be to cook this sweet potato over his campfire, of having some herbs to flavor the burdock soup he’s been using to fill his stomach, of eating the jar of elderberry jam and licking it off his fingers.

He pauses when he sees a deputy car starting to roll up the hill, and he immediately about-faces and starts to walk back to the market. He runs straight into a small teenage girl, and makes the decision to talk to her even though he knows she’s going to end up being told to be more careful and he’ll add to his reputation as a predatory lech.

He has to raise the alarm. “You just came from the farmer’s market, right?”

V. Bless This Mess, Can I Bum a Light? [For Miguel]

Out by the docks, the only place Dan seems to be able to vend his art unbothered by the sheriff, he’s packing up his sketchbook, cardboard sign and markers into a weathered duffel bag that contains the majority of what he owns. After six hours on the dock, selling caricatures for ten dollars a pop, fifteen for a couple, he’s made twenty dollars total, and he doesn’t feel good about that, as he suspects the buyers cared less about getting some custom art than they cared about getting Dan to leave them alone. That’s not enough to get enough alcohol to get him to sleep tonight.

The autumn has brought on a nightly chill, so Dan wraps his arms around himself as he walks, hoping he can hitchhike home but knowing that there probably isn’t anyone in town willing to give him a ride. He’s sure he wouldn’t be particularly pleasant company either; he’s too worn down to feel chatty and he hasn’t been able to shower or launder his clothes in several days now. He tries to pick up the pace so he can get back to downtown, where the vent behind the kitchen at Auntie’s provides some warmth, before it gets too cold. After a few days of sleeping there, his clothing has taken on a faint odor of French fry grease along with everything else.

He's just reached the point where the marina connects to the main road when he sees a MineCorp truck with its hazards on pulled over by the side. He walks over, peering into the driver’s window from a distance and feeling relieved that the driver’s a large adult man; if they were a woman or a teenager, he’d worry about making them feel threatened.

He gently raps his knuckles on the driver’s window. “You alright?”

VI. A Long Life Ahead to Live with Yourself, So Think About It [For Logan]

“Show me your hands,” the deputy says, making Dan hold his arms out through the jail cell bars. Dan’s hands are riddled with scabs and open cuts, but they hold steady, and the deputy decides that there’s no concern at the moment that Dan’ll go into withdrawal. “Okay, get back to your cot. We’ll check on you in a few hours. If you’re here tomorrow night again, I swear to God…”

Still muttering, the deputy walks out of the ward. Dan huffs a sigh and lays down on the thin mattress of his cot, staring at the ceiling and mourning the last bit of tipsiness starting to leave his system. He figures if he lies very still, if his heart rate is slow and his blood obediently, slowly trudging through his veins, he’ll metabolize the last few shots he had less quickly and keep that easy, blurry feeling in his body just a little while longer.

He hates being left alone in the tank. There’s nothing to do, no one to talk to most of the time, none of the distractions of survival that fill up Dan’s days. That’s the only silver lining Dan can find to his situation in this shithole town; being homeless is hard work, and instead of thinking about where Ellie went or where his siblings might be, he’s thinking about where to get his next meal, which pedestrians might throw him a dollar, where he can launder his clothes, where to get his next fix of cigarettes and alcohol, how to move his belongings to somewhere warmer, where he can bathe, all these things that would be simple with a roof over his head. The tribulations of living keep him from being able to get stuck in those dark whirlpools in his mind.

But not in the drunk tank. It’s just him and his rapidly fading buzz. He thinks of the alcohol in his body like a lover on a departing ship, moving inexorably and slowly out of sight, as he waves from the shore.

“You got company, Sagittarius,” the deputy says, leading the next drunk into the tank, as Dan sits up with curiosity and dim excitement to see who it is.

VII. You choose!

Aster was speaking to the grandmother who sells apple tarts made with his apples out of the back of her Subaru, and that was a good, smiling conversation, but when he hears Dan’s voice and his head snaps to look at Dan, his smile goes away as if it had never been there.

The grandmother, too, tells her grandchildren to get her playing cards out of the glove compartment and quit running around, and as the kids complain about it, Aster lowers his voice.

“No. Get out of here.”

He reaches into the bed of the next-door pickup, grabs a burlap sack, and all but hurls it at Dan.

“There are kids here, so you aren’t going to be,” he says, pointedly, quietly, so no one can hear this as a fuss, so none of the kids can be upset by it.

Inside the burlap sack is a loaf of bread from one of the other local vendors. There are two jars of jam, butter from someone’s cows, a dozen eggs from Aster’s garden, already hardboiled. Sweet potatoes too, and carrots, a change of clothes and a bar of the soap that Aster uses at the outdoor shower behind his greenhouse. A pointed message, given Dan’s aroma. And, in cash, two hundred dollars.

Dan could be forgiven for taking this as a kindness until Aster asks, “Is that enough to get you out of town?”

It’s not that Dan didn’t expect to be told to go home, especially when he saw the way the smile just ripped itself off Aster’s face, but somehow expecting to be shunned doesn’t actually make it sting less. Dan’s face goes through the full breadth of hurt and resignation, and for a moment it looks like he might be brought to tears, but instead the rejection just pools as a flush in his cheeks.

He opens the neck of the burlap sack and raises his eyebrows at the contents. “Thank-“

But then Aster cuts him off by asking him if that’s enough to get him to leave, and Dan doesn’t have it in him to appeal to yet another person who won’t listen that he isn’t the man they think he is and that he didn’t do the things they say he did. He’s familiar, by now, with the go away dollar, the act of generosity that’s really an act of rejection, the gift people give to people they wish didn’t exist.

“I wish it were,” Dan says quietly. “I don’t want to be here no more than you want me here.”

And with that, he takes off, planning to make himself discreet and scarce next time he sneaks onto Aster’s property to use the shower.

"And I know you've used my shower," Aster calls after Dan, a warning that if you don't toe the line I'll stop you.

It depresses him so fast and so hard when the drifter looks like he's about to cry that Aster has to remind himself that this is a child-abductor. Maybe it depresses him that this guy has made so many choices he didn't have to make that all inched him further and further out of society to the point where he can barely exist in it anymore, to the point where anyone who wants him to leave but not die has to boil his eggs for him, because anyone who thinks about it for a second can tell Dan won't be able to find anywhere to cook anything on.

It isn't that kidnapping a child is forgivable, or sympathetic. It's just that the very idea of being so pushed to the edges of any kind of a life is sad. Even if someone did it to themselves.

Aster doesn't really find it in himself to keep up the socializing the rest of the night, keeping to the perimeter of the market to ensure it doesn't get crashed for everyone who needs this moment.

Julian had gotten to know Dan before the rumors had gotten bad. He asked about them one day, and got the saddest fucking answer he'd could've imagined. Considering the shit these people say about him, and each other, he takes it with a grain of salt. Dan's been nothing but good to him-- better than good, even.

When Dan comes up to Julian he's carrying his guitar case, like always, and looks slightly out of breath.

"Give me a moment," he huffs out. "I just ran several blocks to get out of our dear Ms. Mallard's earshot."

Julian had been busking on a street corner, as he does near every day, when he heard the sounds of 'friendly' townies greeting their beloved Sheriff. He knows better than to stick around, especially when she almost certainly heard him playing. He didn't have time to do more than grab his shit and run.

Edited 2024-08-24 03:24 (UTC)

Julian's one of the few people who doesn't act like Dan's radioactive, and as such, Dan simultaneously wants to spend more time with him and wants to make sure he doesn't draw any fire to Julian. As soon as he sees that Julian's out of breath, he immediately pivots away from seeing if Julian has earned enough to spread the wealth and instead gets into cahoots.

"Shit, well, one of her deputy's a block over and moving this direction." Dan shoves his hands into his pocket and gestures with his head. "This way. We can stash your guitar behind Auntie's."

Dan's had his stuff confiscated by the police often enough, and unlike his damaged clothing, Julian's guitar is actually expensive and hard to replace. Dan had a ukulele for a while, and was able to rustle up some money with that, but getting a new one of those has been out of his reach for a while and the old one's sitting in some locker at the jailhouse gathering dust.

"Successful day crooning?"

"Excellent idea."

Julian goes through extensive efforts to keep his guitar from being confiscated, up to and including stashing it in random alleyways and praying no one steals or smashes it.

He follows Dan behind the old diner and sets his case on the ground.

"Let's see what we've got," Julian unlatches the case and-- very carefully-- hands the guitar to Dan to see his spoils. His face falls at the handful of coins, small pile of ones, and a single five.

"Those cheap bastards... wouldn't know music if it was shoved up their uncultured arseholes," he mutters as as he counts the bills. He pockets all of the change and about half the bills, but keeps seven of the ones in his hand. These get traded for the guitar, which he sets back in his case.

Dan Sagittarius | Open and Individual Top-Levels

III

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I. Used to Be a Lover, a Queen and a Drifter

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I.

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VI

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II

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II. I’ve Rolled in Dirty Dollars, Stood in the Welfare Line

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