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 – Not late for the Farmer’s Market [OPEN]

The farmer’s market is going well tonight in the parking lot of the condemned Texaco that shut down two years ago. Aster’s sourced one massive floodlight that illuminates the circle of parked vehicles, cars backed up with their trunks open, trucks with their beds full of wares, but the visibility could be better from the single industrial glare he found in the garage and figured out how to plug into the electric generator.

As usual, someone else drove for him, the teenage son of the Warren farm’s nearest neighbors, and Aster’s too busy patrolling the edge of the market and wandering up and down the road keeping an eye and ear out for snitches to sell his own wares. Thus the same kid’s going to take home a lot more than minimum wage for manning his open truckbed tonight, but the kid is really distracted by the girl at the jam car across the lot that he has a crush on, and Aster’s truckbed full of veggies and fruits are easy to pilfer without paying even the pittance he’s asking for them.

II – In the Jailhouse Now [closed to Dan]

Last night’s market didn’t go so well. Probably because Aster didn’t spot the plainclothes deputy in time, because he was too busy struggling with the generator again. He has never had a head for machines, and that generator fully has a mind of its own.

Anyway, the deputy had already called Sheriff Mallard by the time he heard the sourdough gal protesting as the deputy confiscated her wares, and by the time he’d wrestled the deputy to the ground and gotten all the jars free for Sourdough Gal to pick up, the sirens were already in the air and the other sellers were slamming their trunks and peeling out.

Then the deputy tazed him. A few times. He still feels like every hair on his body is still sticking up on end.

Once he noticed who was in the neighboring cell, he tried to ignore Dan for the remainder of this 24 hour lockup, but he’s too fired up to sleep, has already done all the t’ai chi that this cell gives him room for, plus a bunch of pushups after his heart rate still hadn’t gone down. Now he’s slouched against the wall, bored and mad and bored enough to talk to anyone. Even someone with a reputation as deplorable as Dan’s.

But he sure isn’t going to be the one to start the conversation.

The deputy he has an assault charge now on behalf of walks in, changing shift with another. “Black eye looks good onya,” Aster calls from the cell.

“Put your shirt back on or I’ll tase you again,” says the deputy. Aster, grumbling and sweaty, puts his shirt back on.

III – Folded In This Scrap of Paper is a Land I Grew In [OPEN]

The Warren farms seem brighter somehow than the rest of town.

Even the fields that grow well don’t seem to hold the light the way this land does. How could Aster be jealous of it, then, and report anybody who wanders on it? When he spends so much time wandering it himself, the orchards and the fields where there’s always food at hand, the spring where water is clean enough to drink from the ground, the woods that aren’t tainted by the aura of something menacing.

Autumn will strip the greenery out of his property like it strips everywhere else, and Aster quietly worries what the people who steal from his fields will do in winter. He worries this as he walks the runner beans climbing from their beds of squash around the towering stalks of corn. Winter’s going to come, and no matter who finds a way to sabotage his propane supply, he has enough wood in the cellar for himself. He has candles and terra cotta to make little space heaters and wool blankets piled over a tent in the basement to make the smallest space to heat, and enough batteries to power his carbon monoxide and fire alarms until spring again, but the kids he knows wander here to escape their foster homes, and the adults who come here because a sweet potato is more filling when it’s free, don’t have his resources. He can keep himself alive. He’s done it this long. He knows that it’s an imperative.

He suspects someone will be trying to stop him from accomplishing it. The way he suspects someone succeeded in stopping everyone he ought to have to come home to.

Right now, though, in the runner beans, beneath the apple orchards, in the hilly woods, he is worried about everyone aside from himself, and all the ways he cannot protect them.

When they popped Aster in, Dan stopped pacing like a caged animal; he knows that constant movement out of the corner of someone’s eye can be agitating, so he laid down on the cot with his blanket, leafing through the Bible that the deputy gave him to look and see if any previous jailbird populated any pages with doodles. He flips through the pages too quickly to be reading them, but he slows down when Aster takes off his shirt and exercises, to try and camouflage that he’s actually watching his near-cellie.

Dan doesn’t know why he’s in here tonight. He’s been flashed so many times lately that it’s hard to keep track; it seems like every time a deputy sees him, they find some reason to throw him in the back of the squad car, bring him here, take his belongings and lecture him about how much money they’re spending locking him up over and over. He thinks maybe it was an open container tonight, or maybe they just decided to enforce the curfew early, but either way, they cuffed him, took him here, stripped him down, and took the laces out of his shoes.

He tries to be optimistic about it. He tries to think about how he at least isn’t sleeping in the rain tonight, even though the jail’s drafty enough that he has to pull the thin, scratchy blanket tight around him. He doesn’t know how Aster finds the body heat to be shirtless.

“They just don’t want you to have no fun,” he says, venturing a comment, wondering if it’ll be met as an invitation to chit-chat and pass the time or if Aster will shut him down like he did the last time they met

If it hadn't been for the save Dan gave him last week, Aster probably wouldn't talk to him at all.

But last week when he was too antsy to stay inside and even too antsy to stay on his own property, the deputies about had him cornered until Dan broke the window on one of their vehicles. He hadn't had to do that, and Aster feels an uncomfortable mix of gratitude and dissatisfaction at being in an alleged child abuser's debt.

"What did they nab you for tonight?" he asks, dragging out the process of putting his shirt on. He hates being in lockup, and almost as much, he hates having to wear so many clothes. "Better not have been trying to kidnap another kid."

It's a low blow, but not as low as kidnapping itself is.

Dan flinches and considers just not answering when Aster immediately throws his efforts to start a conversation into his face. He pulls the blanket tighter over himself and stares at the wall for a moment.

He feels like he has to choose between uncomfortable silence and potentially getting shouted at all night. He doesn't know if Aster's receptive to hearing him out, and most of the details aren't ones he'd feel comfortable sharing if there are any deputies in earshot.

"I ain't never hurt a kid and I ain't about to start anytime soon." He pulls his knees up to his chest and wraps his arms around his legs. "I know what they been saying. I know what you think about me. It ain't what you think."

He sounds already resigned to being disbelieved.

"Kidnapping's pretty cut and dry," Aster says back, but it's a conversation, and he's resigned to having it.

He could pivot to a conversation about Dan's sneaking onto his property to use his shower. He knows it's probably the only place in town Dan can get one, between the 24 hour gym being closed and padlocked, and nobody else really having backyard showers. That's only going to work until the weather turns towards winter. Aster's wondering what Dan's going to do when that happens. He's dreading Dan and the community having no good answer to that aside from "die of exposure."

That's a heck of a pivot, from you're a deplorable child abuser to how are you going to survive the winter, and Aster isn't sure how to make it yet.

"It's- you weren't there. It wasn't like that." Dan wonders why he's bothering to try and correct the record; aside from Julian, no one in this town wants to listen to him. It must be nice to have a scapegoat, an outsider to look down on. Dan's never felt that way about others, but he knows it's a pretty common part of people's psychology. They don't want him to be better than what they think of him.

He picks at some loose threads on his blanket. He glances up as he hears a door slam somewhere in the jailhouse, but no deputy enters at this time. "This ain't the place to get into the details of a complicated situation. But it was a complicated situation. I was trying to protect a kid and I didn't have many good options. You don't get good options when you don't got a farmhouse to go back to, you know?"

Aster's quiet, digesting the possibility that he may have bought into this community's tendency to interpret everything in the worst way it can be received and rehashed.

But someone who kidnapped a kid would say it wasn't like that, I had a reason, no my situation's the exception, and at the very least Aster ought to get as many pieces of the whole story as he can if he's going to be drawing conclusions about it.

"I don't know about you, but I'm not going anywhere better than this anytime soon," Aster grumbles. He scoots up to the bars dividing their cell, inviting Dan to speak quiet.

Dan, still wrapped in the paltry blanket, comes over and sits next to the bars dividing them. He slips the Bible between the bars. "Deputies come in, we say that we're sharing reading material. Not colluding or nothing."

He feels a touch of hope that Aster invites him to keep talking. He was expecting to just continue getting dismissed.

"Sorry about the smell. I been able to find showers, just not a laundromat." By contrast, Aster smells very good, and if he's going to sit close enough to whisper at Aster, he's close enough to tell that. "She was my daughter. Not by blood, not by legal ties, but by- so that's why they called it kidnapping. It weren't safe for her to go back to where she came from so she was safest with me. I kept her safe for years until they separated us."

Dan doesn't talk about this with anyone, and as such towards the end of it he sounds like he's barely squeaking words out, like he's barely mustering enough force to get past his natural tendency to be quiet and his ragged voice's tendency to steal the body out of vowels. He notices that he's started shaking, and he pulls the blanket tighter around himself to pretend it's just cold.

"That just makes it sound like you kidnapped her from her birth parents," Aster points out, breathing shallowly but trying not to be obvious about it, given Dan knows full well what he smells like. He sits silently on the impulse to say use my washing machine then, because he may be the only person in town with the means and the willingness to think about ways Dan could get helped, but it's a hard sell that someone with no blood or legal ties taking a kid from their birth family without going through CPS was the best option.

But Dan sure seems to feel devastated by it.

"Either you really believe you've been wronged or you're real good at acting sad," Aster mutters, uncomfortable with how hard Dan's distress is hitting him in the empathy. Watching Dan shiver nags at him with the same grating itch that Dan needing to wash his clothes does, the bother of seeing someone who needs help that he can give, is the only one who's likely to give, knowing that giving it could seem like enabling a crime he still isn't sure Dan didn't commit. He tugs his blanket off his cot, though, and passes it through the bars to Dan without looking at him.

Edited 2024-08-24 06:28 (UTC)

"She ran away from her birth parents and I believed her when she told me why she didn't want to go back. So I raised her. It weren't safe for her to have authorities involved." He glances again at the door, worried about a deputy walking in. "I can't get into details here. I don't know if it could might ever come down on her, wherever they took her."

Dan grabs the blanket through the bars and wraps himself in it. "Thank you. You been nicer to me than anyone else who believes the worst about me."

He feels exhausted. Not just with trying to survive, but with trying to talk about Ellie, with the weird sense of guilt he feels that he isn't looking for her. Sometimes he tells himself that it's that he doesn't even know where to start looking for her; she gave him a fake surname when they met, maybe even a fake first name, and he did her the kindness of never pointing out that he could tell she was lying. He doesn't know how to read. He's fairly certain if he asked anyone with any authority they'd assume he was a perpetrator trying to stalk his victim.

But mostly he just knows he'll never see her again. He just knows. So he's alone in the world and stuck in a town that's isolated him more than he's ever been alone in his life, and of course he wants to latch onto one of the only people who's actually letting him say his piece. A little compassion is like warmth, and he's drawn to it enough that he feels scared that Aster's going to suddenly find his explanation suspicious again.

Aster glances at the doorway for the potential of approaching deputies. "Yeah, well." He rolls his eyes. "Nobody else has the options."

He means everyone who has the capacity to want to help, obviously. There are people who are more generous towards Dan and his allegations in the town. But they, like Dan, don't have a farmhouse and all the worldly money, possessions, and responsibilities of about two dozen dead relatives to stare down alone.

Aster scratches his back against the wall of the cell, arms crossed, realizing how much it bothers him that there's no way he can ever point out that his house, his options, make him sad, feel sometimes like an anchor holding him fast to the worst thing that has ever happened to him, the worst thing that ever will.

He wouldn't ever argue that his inheritance isn't an asset. He just wishes so much that it still belonged to everyone else he got it from.

"Tell you what." There's still so much suspicious about the story, and no doubt someone who believed he was correct in taking a strange child would find a way to justify it to himself. At the least, Aster wants to know what the justification is. "We get out of here, next time you need a shower, you can use my washing machine and air the details."

"Plenty of folks got the options and just don't feel like sharing them, or at least, not sharing them with me." Dan starts to scoot back towards his cot. "I don't begrudge it of them. I really don't. But it means the world when someone helps me out anyway."

He wants to say I heard about your family, I'm sorry, but he feels like that would just be invasive when they barely know each other and what Aster does know about Dan, he doesn't necessarily trust. He regrets making a flippant comment about the farmhouse, now that he thinks through why it is that Aster has an outdoor shower. He should have been more sensitive.

"I'll take you up on that. If you eat mushrooms, I found some morels out where I'm camping. I could bring them over, you know, to repay you a little for the sack of food." He lays down on the cot, still burritoed up. "But I reckon if we put my jeans in the wash they just might could disintegrate."

"I don't need payment. I gave you spares. Take some more. Got plenty that don't fit."

It's impossible for Dan not to know about his family tragedy, and Aster's actually glad for it. He doesn't have to spell it out himself, not when everybody in this town knows everybody else's business, when even the local drifter has to have heard that an entire house full of people died in their beds in the freeze last winter.

Now he's the one who's voice is getting tight and cutting off, and he sucks in a breath against it. He just complimented Dan's acting over the same uncontrollable tension.

Whatever. They don't have to get into it. Except that they sort of do.

"Winter's coming. It's not easy here." Even if you have options. "You got a plan for that?"

"Well, it's good you don't need payment, because I don't know that I'll ever have enough on hand to cover that week of meals and soap you gave me." So he doesn't have to address that Aster's offering him a dead person's clothes, doesn't have to ask if that's doing Aster a favor or not.

He can hear it in Aster's voice, too, the way sometimes it's hard to get any more words out than those that are necessary to convey one's point. He wishes there were some way to convey sympathy, but that's the problem with being on the outs - not only are people unwilling to extend him much kindness, but his own efforts to connect and support are taken as nothing but manipulations.

"I been sleeping on the vent behind Auntie's." So long as they don't shut it off while he's asleep, he won't freeze to death, but he isn't about to say that out loud to someone whose entire family did freeze to death. If they do shut the vent off while he's asleep, he just won't wake up, and the worst part about that is that someone will have to find him in the pile of blankets and towels the next day. "That's the note of French fries you're getting, by the way."

That's not sustainable runs through Aster's mind, and he doesn't speak on it because he can already see down the line that he's going to end up putting this suspicious drifter up in a hotel over the winter, the way this conversation is going, because nobody else with that kind of money will do it and he just can't countenance the first death of a homeless person in town this winter being on his conscience. He doesn't want to have that conversation now, not when Dan could still leave town for warmer climates before then, go somewhere people don't know his reputation, and -

- and then what, if Dan's just spinning a good tale, continue looking for runaways to call his charity cases? Aster wishes runaway teenagers could count on the goodwill of strangers, the kind of story that Dan's trying to sell him, but he simply hasn't seen that story play out. The other kind of story - the one that Dan's story looks like it is on the cover - is a lot more common.

He shouldn't be surprised. A grown man reaching out to kids that aren't his, why, the town hasn't received him well for trying to do that.

There's no point chasing the story down in here. "Hey, how come that money I gave you wasn't enough to get out of town on? You said you didn't want to be here, and you're here still."

Edited 2024-08-24 07:35 (UTC)

The looming threat of winter just sort of hangs in the air between them for a moment, Dan not saying anything about the whole tragic frozen clan, wondering what Aster's thinking and finding the frown inscrutable from this angle. Dan partly hopes that winter never comes; the other part of him hopes that it comes tomorrow night, while he's sleeping, so hard and fast that he doesn't ever need to think about this town or anything else ever again.

It would be a peaceful way to go, drinking himself to sleep on the warm vent and then being in too deep a stupor to notice the danger.

"They impounded my car and I don't got enough to pay the fee. Plus there's interest, so if I couldn't might afford it before, I damn might couldn't now." Dan glances over at Aster. "I really would have might used it to get out of here if I fucking could. I hate this town. I hate it more than I've ever hated any place in my life, so of course it's where I get stranded. I don't reckon I'd get on with the people even if they didn't think I was a pedophile."

"Well if it makes you feel any better, they won't say to my face what they think of me and I don't care for most of them either."

Which might seem a weird thing to say for a community organizer who has people to chat with at the community event he organizes, but Aster says it with as much conviction as Dan says he wasn't abusing that girl he claims to have adopted off the streets.

"How much is the fee?" he asks, wondering what an impounded car could cost to get out anyway, avoiding admitting that he had no idea if two hundred dollars for a cab two towns over to get to the bus stop and get on a bus somewhere far, far away was too much, or too little.

"I don't know if it's better if they say it to your face or not. I've had some pretty awful stuff said to my face." At least when Aster kicked him out of the farmer's market, he didn't call him names. "You know, they keep calling you 'well-traveled' like it's an insult."

Dan smiles at that, because he doesn't think it's an insult. He thinks it's a virtue that makes him want to get a beer with Aster and hear about all the places Aster's been, if only he could guarantee that that date wouldn't be shot through with suspicion and judgment.

"It was eighteen hundred when they took the car, so I'd bet it's a few grand by now." Dan sighs. "I bet it's been auctioned off by now. If I get out of town it'll either be because I'm dead, because I stole one of those MineCorp trucks or because I somehow found the way out through the woods."

"They mean it as an insult," Aster says, and it actually makes him laugh. "They don't know why anyone would go somewhere foreign on purpose. Once they were there they'd have to deal with foreign people."

Finally, getting to talk to someone who doesn't think 'he backpacked through Asia' is derogatory.

I've got three cars and I don't know how to drive any of them, Aster thinks, but again, doesn't say, because he isn't ready yet to give this guy a car, although if Dan can end up proving he didn't harm that kid, what's the point in not giving him one? It'd solve the problem of Dan having nothing to do but stick around til winter kills him, the town wouldn't miss him, Aster would be down one less piece of property he has no personal use for.

He files it away for later, and picks up on something else.

"Those aren't easy woods to get through."

"Oh, no. Not foreign people and their interesting cultures and excellent foods and exciting music." Dan chuckles a little too. "I speak six languages, you know."

Now that he thinks about it, he can't remember where he picked up Russian or British sign language - he vaguely remembers a big man with a white beard, a blonde girl with an accent - but now that Aster's given him the slightest opening, he finds himself wanting to impress his cellie. Failing that, he wants to hear all about Asia and Africa and everywhere else Aster's been, places he'd love to go and knows his circumstances would never permit. Like many of Dan's fantasies and desires, exploring another continent started off as a dim, flickering hope, and then this town smothered even those muted embers.

"I grew up in the woods. Reckon I can navigate them, I just ain't had the capacity." It's exhausting being homeless and always underslept and underfed and in pain, and while Dan doesn't have many belongings, with his camping setup he has enough that hauling them through the thickets would be a struggle. But just getting between the docks and town seems to use up all the energy Dan has, and where last year he could hike for miles without tiring, after six weeks of sleeping on concrete and eating out of dumpsters he has to take breaks from fatigue.

Aster Warren | Open and Individual Top-Levels

II

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I – Not late for the Farmer’s Market

Re: I – Not late for the Farmer’s Market

Re: I – Not late for the Farmer’s Market

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