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

"You'd have to could write it for me," Dan says, half-smiling. Lots of people in this town know he's illiterate. They've seen him at the library asking Aziraphale for help spelling out his please give cardboard signs. He no longer keeps it a secret; he feels like privacy has become yet another thing he can't afford.

He listens to what she tells him, and while she's right that he's uneducated, he does follow along with what she's saying.

"So you're doing high-tech gold panning. Well, precious mineral panning. You have to go to school a long time for that?"

There's a little headtilt at both the response itself and the poor grammar, just because it's so foreign to her, as someone who was reading complicated books at seven years old, before realization hits and the confusion shifts to sympathy. "I'm pretty good at taking dictation."

It's sort of still a joke, because if he can't read or write, it would drastically reduce his opportunities. She understands, now, why he might be in the situation he's in. It must be incredibly hard to find work.

"Something like that, yeah." If one of her coworkers tried to frame it like that, she might take offense, but it doesn't bother her from Dan. "It took a while but um, I started college a few years early."

The bragging feels sort of gauche, now.

"I been told I'm decent at talking, even if my writing leaves something to be desired." If Skye thinks she's being gauche, he doesn't seem to think so. Dan doesn't think his lack of education makes him any less smart or worthy than someone with a doctorate or master's degree; it's just the rest of the world that seems to believe so.

"I didn't want to make no assumptions based on age, but you look young to be a geophysicist." Then again, it's possible he just doesn't know how long it takes to become a physicist. Academia is a realm he has almost no foothold in. He tries to think of it like he would any new culture he encounters; he tries to listen about it more than talk, absorb more than judge, and accept that there's plenty about academia that he can't or wouldn't understand and that that isn't a measure of its value or his. "I never went to school so it's always interesting to hear about it. Seems a lot of smart science folks get stuck working the mines."

"Have you ever thought about learning?" She has to imagine that he has at some point in his life, but she can't help asking the question anyway, not when learning, and reading, has been so central to her existence. She grew up as that kid buried in a book, who spent summers indoor studying instead of playing with friends, who centered her entire identity around being smart.

"No, you're right, I was the youngest graduate from my college." It isn't a brag, this time, but a simple statement of fact. It was lonely in its own way, she never connected with her classmates, she's had to fight so hard for every scrap of respect among her colleagues, and now she has to deal with the way the locals here look at her as a young black woman in a backwards town. "But I'm not stuck, this is an interesting geographical area because of how old the mountains are, but I'll be gone by the end of the year."

"To read? Nah. I'm too far behind. I learn other things, though. I speak six languages." That's Dan's favorite factoid to drop about himself; it's a nice, quick rebuttal to the assumption that he's stupid, and it frequently springboards conversations about common ground with people.

He fiddles with a napkin. "Apologies. I just sort of assume folks are either passing through or stranded here like me. I might could see how mountains like this might could call someone's name, though, especially if you got a loving relationship with the earth."

It's never too late to learn is what she wants to say, but she doesn't know this man, doesn't know whether he's tried and failed before, so she keeps the words to herself. "What languages? I'm fluent in Spanish and Korean." The question is genuine, despite whatever background he might have, she doesn't see why he'd lie about something that's so easy to disprove.

The apology is shrugged off, her fingers tapping idly against her mug, the rhythm to a song that she doesn't remember but is so deeply ingrained that sometimes it itches under her skin. "They're a fascinating mountain range. They're so old that the Earth didn't have an ozone layer when they were formed."

This girl is a nerd.

In Spanish: "English, Spanish, French, Russian, and both American and British sign language. But my Russian's real rough."

Dan loves to talk to people, and more than that, he loves to listen. He never wants someone to be unable to communicate with him if he can help it, so he's taken it upon himself to learn languages whenever and wherever he can. He even considers asking Skye if she wants to practice Korean on him.

They don't know each other that well, though.

"I reckon the folks that believe in dinosaurs don't like that factoid." Dan assumes that Skye's one of those sensible people, like him, who believe the Earth is flat and that dinosaurs are a government hoax. "With no ozone they'd all have burned right up, right?"

"I've always wanted to learn sign language, I just haven't gotten to it yet." This is said entirely earnestly, as if she isn't twenty years old with three languages and Masters degree under her belt. Clearly she should have also found time to learn a fourth language.

She snorts, amused at that comment, but she also looks a little delighted that he has the right idea. "Sort of, the radiation from the sun would have been a problem but the lack of oxygen is the real issue. Life forms back then were mostly bacteria."

So the mountains are also older than things like: bones.

Dan signs in ASL as he says "any time you see me in here, I can teach you a few phrases."

Lord, but it's good to talk about nothing important, even as Dan can tell that he's waded in far beyond his depth on the science parts of this - but even awareness of his own ignorance doesn't rattle Dan's confidence. Dan doesn't dig his heels in often, but he's heard and absorbed enough conspiracy theories about the Earth being flat or the Sun being a giant surveillance camera that he simply doesn't accept evidence to the contrary.

"When did the world get oxygen?"

There's a brightness in Skye's gaze as she watches the movements of Dan's hands; she doesn't have a photographic memory, but she can commit every one of those movements to memory. "We can trades. Sandwiches for lessons."

It's careful wording. Not an exchange of money for services, just a simple trade, off the books, nothing that could get anyone in trouble. And if a few extra dollars happen to find their way into Dan's pockets, Skye wouldn't know anything about it.

"That's the cool part, no one actually knows for certain, but it's estimated about 2.5 billion years ago is when certain types of bacteria started producing oxygen as a result of photosynthesis — like how plants do. It took until 750 million years ago for there to be twenty percent oxygen in the atmosphere like there is now and another 150 million years after that is when there was enough of an ozone layer for life to exist outside the protection of the ocean."

She's normal.

"I like that exchange," Dan says, continuing to sign. He can't fingerspell, so sometimes he has to find circuitous ways to sign different words, so 'exchange' is a series of signs similar to 'one thing being traded for another.'

He listens to her intently, but by the time she hits photosynthesis she's already deviated from his understanding of science. Dan has a thorough knowledge of some areas of science, mostly from working on a farm or doing mechanical work or bushcraft. He has a near-encyclopedic knowledge of the uses for North American plants and the different species of birds, and while he doesn't know what different kinds of rocks are called, he does know how to interpret the shapes and grain of them to find water sources or edible lichen.

And yet.

"But the world's only two thousand years old."

"It's a deal, then." Skye isn't necessarily one for charity; she cares about the world in general, but she tends to be fairly removed from it. But it feels good to be able to offer something in exchange for learning, especially for someone who might have to go without, otherwise.

And then her expression does a complicated thing, as she goes through the five stages of grief and tries not to make it too obvious. She manages to get herself under control before she looks too incredulous, or worse, says something she can't take back.

Her dad would be so proud.

"The Earth is billions of years old." It takes every scrap of self control not to sound condescending, instead keeping her voice fairly neutral. "Why do you think it's only two thousand years old?"

That's the best place to start, she thinks. That way she can find the right piece of evidence to make him understand the truth.

Oh no. Dan tries to keep it off his face that he, too, is disappointed to find out that Skye is one of those people so completely taken in by the ideology of evolution and a round Earth and all those things that people take with religious-like faith after they go to school. Dan feels so lucky that his parents never exposed him to nonsense like that; he's sure if he went to public school when he was young and impressionable, he'd probably believe in crazy shit like dinosaurs and bacteria too.

"Because that's when time started." Obviously. "Maybe this might could just be a difference in religion. I was raised up with certain calendars and all."

Girl what.

"I'm an atheist." Raised culturally Christian in the way that most people in the US are, but the words come out because she doesn't know what else to say without straight up calling Dan a fucking idiot. And that would rude. It isn't his fault, he probably didn't have a great education, considering where he seems to have ended up in life.

"We have concrete proof that the world has existed for more than two thousand years. There's trees older than that." If he'd six thousand years, she could at least understand that from the perspective of the bible, but two thousand years is nothing.

"Me too." He raises his eyebrows like he doesn't think she can be an atheist and also believe fantastical spiritual hooey about the world being billions of years old, but also that he's trying to be as polite to her as she's being to him. She is, after all, highly educated in this subject; it must mean a lot to her, even if Dan's certain that her mentors have led her astray. He doesn't ever want to be rude about someone else's beliefs.

"I ain't never seen a tree thousands of years old. Trees may be long-lived, but they ain't immortal." He shrugs. "And ain't none of us been around for thousands of years so there ain't no proof can't be faked by the government."

Skye tries to be polite and nice to people, she really does, but it's the twenty first fucking century and this man is trying to tell her that the Earth being old is faked by the government and understanding clicks into place.

"Oh, you're just insane, got it." There are things you probably shouldn't say to strange men who may be insane, but Skye doesn't always have the best judgement, and she's pretty sure she can get out of this situation if it goes south. "Should I be worried about the lizard people, too?"

His face falls a little, but he expects that he must have insulted her by pushing back on her confident piety. Dan really doesn't understand how that round Earth cult has managed to be so ubiquitous and numerous; the Catholic Church should take notes.

"Well, no, the lizard people are harmless," he says, even though he knows she was being mocking. He's not aggressive at all. He just feels like an outsider again, which isn't a new feeling but isn't a fun one, either. "It's the sleeper agents you got to watch out for, and they're fully human."

She can't even feel bad about his expression falling, because it's just so stupid; she's heard a lot of nonsense during her life, but this really takes the cake, and she's chalking it up to something like schizophrenia. Surely no sane person could think like this.

"You know the whole lizard person thing is just thinly veiled antisemitism, right?" She isn't even sure why she's arguing when she knows it isn't going to be effective, since logic holds no power here, but she can't help herself.

"I don't know what that is."

Being completely illiterate, Dan's understanding of the world is quite piecemeal. He's encountered the lizard person conspiracy a few times and thought it sounded quite sensible, but no one's roped him into the hateful sides of it, which tends to be where Dan gets off the metaphorical train. Nor has he encountered the term 'antisemitism' with enough surrounding context to differentiate it from 'astigmatism', so.

"But if it's just folks with a medical condition then that's a shame."

"Someone who's antisemitic hates Jewish people." This gap in his knowledge is something she's less judgemental about, since she can understand why he might not have come across the term, especially if he's apparently been sucked into conspiracy theories.

But still, "Pretty much any theory that states there's a group of evil people secretly running the world is implying those people are Jewish, and a lot of it goes back to Nazis." Maybe this is the angle she can work to get him to question some of this bullshit, assuming he knows what a Nazi is.

That actually makes Dan laugh. Skye’s been saying some absolutely ludicrous things about the age of the Earth and so on, but they can agree that those theories are wrong. “That’s ridiculous. If Jewish folks controlled the world we wouldn’t could be so obsessed with Jesus on this continent.”

Skye said she’s an atheist, so Dan feels comfortable rolling his eyes. He was raised quite Christian, and it feels like the one part of his childhood that he was eager to get rid of. When he encountered the real world, all the Protestant teachings told him to avoid the things that felt good, and he needed so badly to feel good - drugs, liquor, sex, gambling, vice in all its forms - so he chose to let go of religion and embrace pleasure. Since then, it’s been impossible not to notice how everyone expects him to still be observant; it’s like the idea of someone not being religious and Christian doesn’t occur to most people in North America.

Well, at least he's capable of drawing some basic logical conclusions. And to be fair, plenty of better educated people haven't been able to figure this out.

"Exactly!" Wait, now she has to figure out how to tie this together; there's a reason she's a scientist and not in a career that involves a lot of interaction with people. She's kind of bad at dealing with people, aside from the select few that she already gets along with, but she wants to at least get Dan to think. "So many people have agendas when they're spreading theories like lizard people or evolution being fake. You have to ask yourself what they gain."

"Usually it's that they want us to give more money to the government. Like how they plant dinosaur bones to convince people to give tax dollars to museums and libraries and- and NASA and all that."

It isn't that Dan's incapable of logical thinking; it's just that he's been brutalized by government policy enough in his life that all roads lead to Rome to him. All roads lead to the government as an unknowable, omnipotent, shadowy, tendriled enemy winding through his life and controlling everything on a level he can't comprehend. As Skye pushes back on his conspiracies, he feels alone again, like he's the only one who understands how great and painful the danger is.

Every moment of this conversation is a true struggle for Skye not to lose her shit, and if Dan wasn't so fucking nice she would've been way worse to him by now, but it kind of feels like it'd be the conversational equivalent of kicking a puppy.

"I'm a military brat and trust me, the government is not nearly organized enough to pull off a lie that convincing." She isn't nearly as critical of the military as she could be, but she does have first hand experience in watching leadership just straight up fumble the ball frequently. God knows her mom complained about it enough to leave an impact.

There's a moment of almost panic on Dan's face as he gets caught in a cognitive dissonance trap. On one hand, he believes that the government is this all-mighty, all-powerful network capable of massive conspiracies the vast majority of the world's been hoodwinked into believing; on the other, he thinks the government is incompetent and foolish and that they half-ass everything.

"That's because they-" Dan looks like he's flailing. "Different government departments got different levels of competence. Obviously police and corrections ain't know nothing, but when you get to the CIA and all it's real well-funded."

❅ SHITTY LITTLE TOWN ❅ PART 1

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