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

"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 can't help but chuckle. He feels some kind of way, still, that the first person he's managing to have a decent conversation with is the town pariah, still a potential child abuser, but they are locked in. "Any excitement at all would about kill half this town," he chuckles. "You should see how confused they look when I tell them about the train in Cambodia. They get so confused why someone with a perfectly good house to sit and watch TV in would go all the way to the other side of the planet to take an un-airconditioned train without a seat anywhere. I can't convince them that anything uncomfortable is worth doing." He raises his eyebrow at Dan's claim of six languages. "You get a lot of language teachers out there in drifter society?"

His history of uncomfortable but interesting travel lets him read between the lines of Dan's lack of capacity to navigate. "It's hard going out there," he acknowledges. "There's routes out through the mountains that I reckon can be camped, but you'd need a lot of supplies, and you might run into those bears that keep getting people. Or whatever it is that's getting folks." He sighs. "When I can get out of this town it won't be a moment too soon."

"Oh, they know Cambodia's on the other side of the planet? I would have could assumed they thought it was in Ohio." He snorts, then rests his head back against the wall. Even out of the rain, he sleeps poorly in jail cells. The deputies make it a point to be noisy every two hours just to wake him up, it's cold, and knowing he's going to get kicked out at six in the morning makes the whole endeavor feel not worthwhile. "I like learning how to talk to people. A lot of what I was doing between odd jobs was helping migrants on the southern border, so Spanish came first, and then everything else was just asking folks to teach me as I went."

That's when one of the deputies comes in, thumbs through his belt loop with his hips thrust out to show off either his belt buckle or his firearm in its side holster. He slams his billy club against the bars to Dan's cell.

"What, are the chomos in here swapping tips? Deciding what kind of rape van you want to rent together?" He rings the jail bars again. "Hands."

Dan gets up off the cot and waddles over in his blankets, holding his hands through the bars. No shaking yet; Dan can still feel the whisper of shoplifted tequila in his blood.

"Give me that. If he isn't using that, that doesn't make it yours," the deputy says, grabbing at Dan's extra blanket. Dan gives it up without complaint; unlike Aster, he's been here enough that he's given up fighting back against the deputies.

"Someone did ask me where in California it was." Aster listens with interest to Dan's reference to the border, and starts to ask, "Helping them with -" before he's cut off by the deputy.

The only clapback he can think of off the top of his head is that he already has a van that he'd never use to hurt anybody, and that isn't a good retort. He just growls at the deputy as he sticks his hands through the bars.

"You got no call not letting him keep it," he grumbles, not yet beaten down by imprisonment enough to keep his thoughts entirely to himself. "Nobody's paying you to make this more uncomfortable."

"This is a jail, not a soup kitchen. If either of you wanted a five star treatment maybe you wouldn't be molesting kids." The deputy rings the jail bars a third time, and Dan retreats back to his cot, one layer colder, chewing on his knuckle.

The deputy walks over to Aster's cell. "You're in here for what, a twenty-four hour hold for assault? Keep talking back and I'll ask the judge to set your bail so high you'll be here waiting for trial for a year."

Aster holds back the impulse to fire back that he can afford his own dang bail no matter how high, because inheriting a property even as prosperous as the Warren estate has had a bunch of legal fees and taxes he wouldn't have been able to navigate if their lawyer hadn't survived the winter, but his entire spirit rages at being told to do anything by this attack dog who's already bought into the worst possible interpretation of anything he's ever said and done. "Nobody here's done that," he does protest, even though he doesn't know for sure Dan hasn't. It just feels too true to keep inside, when he knows it's true of himself.

"His RAP sheet says otherwise, and don't think we don't see what you're up to with a "teaching school" on that farm of yours. Anyway, shut up, the two of you, the next guard will drop by in a few hours. Don't fuck up the cells."

The deputy leaves, slamming the door as he does, which makes Dan flinch. Dan feels like he's been jumping and startling and flinching over anything and everything ever since the police took his parents from him all those years ago. He feels like there's a cord inside his body that got wound tight that day and has never loosened.

"My RAP sheet don't got no child abuse convictions." Dan sighs, not sure if this has set him back in Aster's good graces when he feels like they've so tentatively started to consider each other's perspective. "They didn't have no evidence because it didn't happen and I refused to plead guilty to something I didn't do."

"This town's going to lose its 4-H without one," Aster shoots back, as the deputy leaves. He rolls his eyes, growls, observes Dan's flinching, wishes he didn't feel so impulsively bad for Dan every time he looks sad, expresses discomfort, appears to have been kicked and hurt before.

"Yeah, well. It doesn't look good," Aster points out. Dan has to know that. "Doesn't sound good by any stretch."

And nobody else in town is going to do enough to prevent this man from dying of exposure in winter, or give enough to get him out of town before it, but every moment Aster spends extending a mote of support or kindness to an alleged child abuser gives this whole town more fuel to pour on the pyre of his reputation. It's not fair. Here he is, trying to solve all the problems the town just wants to ignore until they become unsolvable, and all he gets for his trouble is accusations of being the worst person in town.

Furious and humiliated, he paces his cell and resists the urge to flip his cot, rattle his bars, fuck up the cell in a futile display of the only power being locked up has left him with.

"I know. Trust me, I know." He hopes Aster will still give him the benefit of the doubt when they meet outside these cells and he comes to clean his clothing. "Anyway. I was doing water work by the border, you know, leaving food and supplies caches along migration routes to help folks make the journey. Met a lot of folks who didn't speak English."

He lays on his side so he can look at Aster while they keep conversing. He's heard the whispers about Aster, and unlike Aster he's taken every nasty speculation people have made with a huge grain of salt. The people here were far too quick to believe the worst about him without checking; he doesn't want to make the same mistake they're making.

"I believe you just want to help folks out." Dan hopes it doesn't sound like he's offering Aster some goodwill in the mercenary hopes that he'll get some back in turn. "Ain't your fault the people here are...like this."

Aster's quiet as he reckons with how much the whispers about him echo the worst-interpretation-possible words spoken aloud about Dan in their community, how someone who's leaving food and supply caches for migrants doesn't align a lot with a child abuser; how nevertheless, people don't just take children away from their families for good reasons, usually, and the reasons Dan has can't be spoken in a police station.

When he looks at it, he doesn't want it to be true. He doesn't want Dan's situation, the way he lives his life, to be hopeless. He feels like so many people in this town do want other people's situations to be hopeless. They want someone else to be failing in a way that they never will fail, so dramatically that anything they do looks like success in comparison.

He wants none of them to fail, and everyone seems to receive that with suspicion. Like he can only be lying about every way he wants everyone to believe there's a future for all of them.

"Yeah," he says, at Dan's insistence that he knows. He believes. "Yeah. Ain't yours either."

He takes a deep breath, sits on his cot, shrugs out of his heavily embroidered green flannel and hands it over to Dan.

"Keep that hidden under the blanket," he says. "Tell me about the border work."

"You know, everyone I meet, I can find something I like about them. Even the worst folks I met - and I done met some real winners - there's something about them I like, like a great smile or a sense of humor or just this sort of earnestness...I can find that in anyone. But these folks make me work for it."

It's the meanest thing he's said about anyone in a while, and here he is saying it about the whole town. But the whole town has really calcified into some ugly smallmindedness. Dan sees the way they react to him and he knows, deep in his heart, that they'd rather he be a predator and they be correct than for no child to have ever been hurt and for them to not have someone to look down on.

"Thanks so much. I'm fucking freezing." He takes the flannel and takes a moment to look at the embroidery as he walks back to the cot. He raises his eyebrows and holds the flannel back out to Aster, palm under the fabric so a chain of roses and daisies on the cuff are easy to see. "I know this stitch. Where'd you get this?"

Edited 2024-08-25 02:45 (UTC)

It makes Aster laugh, that this feels like the meanest thing Dan can think to say.

"You could be unkinder about them, you know. They're not shy about saying what they think of you. You know what," he adds, thinking he might as well, "I can be ruder. They're all a bunch of drunk homebodies who can't think of anything more interesting to talk about than how they're better than everyone who's not in the room with them."

He says it loud enough that maybe a deputy in the next room over can hear him. So he's distracted when Dan points out the embroidery.

"Huh? I don't know. I've had it forever," he mutters. Embroidery's embroidery. "Honestly I don't wear much else."

His grey henley and khaki shorts look worn and washed enough to testify to that.

"I don't want to be unkind. What does that get me?" Dan doesn't seem to get much out of hearing the townsfolk insulted. It just makes him sad.

"I ain't never seen this stitch outside my family." He puts his arms through the flannel backwards, so it's a sort of Snuggie situation when he curls back up on the cot. "I always just assumed my dad invented it. Reckon he must have learned it from somewhere."

Not that Dan'll ever get to ask him. He groans and wraps his arms around himself, wishing that he were out already and could go grab some alcohol from his stash behind Auntie's and have a cigarette. It feels like his cravings are just interrupting every thought halfway through.

"Does it have to be unkind, if it's the truth?" Aster is so frustrated by the company he's got to keep here, how dull and unpleasant it is, and all he wants to do for a moment is feel like someone else understands it. "They don't have to be interesting, but by the dawn, they don't try."

He shrugs about the embroidery. "I don't know. Your dad must have traveled." He doesn't even know why he says that. It seems like the thing to say in the moment. "Is it doing the job, anyway?"

"You know," Dan says. "I can't read. There's a lot of interesting information that just fully ain't available to me without assistance. The idea of having access to all that and just thinking it ain't interesting is...painful to watch."

He doesn't feel like he needs to keep that a secret. He's been seen at a the library asking for help making cardboard signs often enough. He doesn't say that his dad didn't travel, never left California and Nevada, because if Aster doesn't remember where he got the flannel then there's no point in continuing to ask. He runs his fingertips over the embroidery, thinking that if he closes his eyes, it reminds him of being back home and feeling those same flowers under his fingertips around the wood-stove and upright piano.

"It's something. I'm grateful for it. I don't handle cold well." With the extra layer, at least he doesn't have goosebumps anymore. "I didn't intend to be here past April, but here I am."

Aster starts to say 'I know,' then his brain catches up with his mouth and he remembers there's no reason for him to have assumed Dan can't read. No reason at all, for him to automatically agree that it makes sense Dan can't. Or to agree that he expected Dan not to

"I didn't know," he says. "But you would be hard pressed to find many people who get lost in a good book here, so you're not missing much in terms of conversation."

Speaking of conversation, this is the best one he's had in months, but he's not going to admit that this soon, in a jail cell.

"Just don't let the cops see it. I'd rather them not take it." He doesn't want to part with his flannel in a way parting with, say, his shorts wouldn't be as painful. "Where would you go, if you could go now?"

Insane, how much he wants to think about every place other than here.

"What are you talking about? They read the good book all the time! Ain't their fault if they miss half the messages!" Dan says with a laugh, tossing the Bible onto the floor. He feels somehow certain that Aster won't be insulted. "I won't let them take the flannel. I may have to quickly cram it back into your cell if they come by."

He lets his eyes unfocus and tries to relax a little. "I don't know. Somewhere else, anywhere else. Probably back to one of them border towns. The government took my home away so I can't go back there and there ain't no one left anyway."

So that's something else he and Aster have in common, and that makes him sad enough that it doesn't merit saying out loud.

"You ever been to Costa Rica? It's beautiful. I only ever been once, but one of those beaches sounds like paradise right about now."

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[cw: rape joke]

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