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

Dan mentions scars and without realizing it Lady's hand goes up to rub her left arm, right above the elbow. One morning she woke up with a ring of scar tissue she can't explain. There's a messy grid of burns on her back, like someone took a blowtorch to a metal fence and pressed her up against it. She has no idea where it came from.

The Bryant house is... nice. The interior walls are eggshell white, the carpet is beige, and the floors are a warm, dark wood. It looks less like a place to live and more like a staged exhibit. There's art on the walls, but few personal photos. Tasteful sconces light up the entryway. A large vase full of fake reeds sits in a corner.

Lady takes off her shoes at the door out of habit.

A second look shows signs of residency-- a duffel bag laying against the wall, a coat on a hanger, a glass on a coaster, but everything's clean in the way people keep their hotel rooms clean-- with an understanding that, no matter how long they're staying, this space does not belong to them. It is not hers to settle into.

Lady leads the men into the kitchen where she pours three glasses of water. She sets two out on the light granite counter and keeps one for herself.

The only thing that betrays her discomfort with Dan's question is the sudden tension in her jaw. She takes a drink to stall, and to clear the static from her brain. It doesn't help as much as she hopes, but more than she expects.

After realizing he was never going to answer her pleas, Lady had sat on the ground next to him. Watched over him. Wondered if she should reach out and hold his cold hand, if it might bring him any comfort. Wonders if she should lay down and let the bug burrow underneath her skin too. Let the rats chew chunks out of her skin. Take a rock and smash her ankles into pulp. They're twins-- a matched set. There's no place he can go that she won't follow. His blood is her blood, his flesh her flesh, and if he's going to rot then she should too.

She doesn't know how much time passes between finding him and leaving to find help, but she knows she had gone into the woods in the early morning and that the sun is high when she stands up to go.

Lady comes back to herself. Her fingertips are doing their best to gouge their way into the glass she's holding. She forces her grip to relax.

"A while," she answers.

Dan's immediately reminded of the vacant houses furnished to show buyers that he sometimes sleeps in. Like many things about the Bryant family, Dan feels a sense that there's an emphasis on keeping up appearances and somehow dodging the social criticism of the town. Dan kicks his shoes off, making a mental note not to touch anything he doesn't have to.

"All kinds. Plenty that I would could definitely remember getting. Plenty I can't show in mixed company, given the location," he says, raising his eyebrows at Aster to convey that Aster can look later, but Dan isn't about to take his shirt off in front of a young woman when he already has a reputation for being a creep. "Here, here's one."

He pulls up where his hair is getting shaggy to show a scar that looks surgical on the back of his neck.

He accepts the water from Lady and immediately regrets asking the question he did when he sees the way she's digging her hands into the glass. There were better ways to get the information he wanted, kinder ways. He shouldn't have asked her to recall a moment like that.

But he's already asked. She's already in pain. She was in pain before he met her and dug all that up, and he thinks he knows enough about her to accurately guess that she'd rather put what she remembers to solving this mystery than just have it brought up and then left unused. "If we get information from the coroner or the sheriff's reports, would you might be able to see what's false?"

Aster suppresses the urge to put a hand on Elle's shoulder, watching her dip into what is probably the worst memory of her life.

"You don't have to look at the files themselves," he adds. "We can - we can just ask you to confirm some things, and correct others."

Lady takes a long drink of water. Dan's right, being able to be productive with her pain is grounding.

"I can do that. It'll better if I can read it myself, I don't want to risk playing telephone with this."

She finishes her glass and sets it in the empty sink.

"There's food if you're hungry. And I'll be honest, I don't know where the sheets for the guest room are, but my parents' room has a king if you don't mind sharing? No toothbrushes, but there should be some soap." Lady winces as she begins to realize how unprepared for guests she actually is. "Feel free to make use of whatever."

"I'm going to grab a shower-" (and pop a couple of ibuprofen) "-but when I'm out, I've got something that might help us figure out what's going on."

"You don't got to offer me the world. Just soap's more than most of what folks have been willing to send my way." Dan hates that he's still in such a scarcity mindset that he's looking around this prim, organized house and wondering what things he could steal off it. He isn't going to pass up the offered food, either, even though he knows Lady likely needs it too. "And I usually don't sleep until past sunrise, if Aster wants to get a little rest. I won't intrude."

Even bathed and with laundered clothes, Dan feels the lingering sense that people don't want to be near him. He knows he doesn't smell bad right now and knows he isn't coated in dirt and mold, but he's seen so many people shy away from his presence that he's just started to feel that it isn't about his state of hygiene so much as it is about him as a person.

"What is it you got in mind to help us figure things out?"

Aster's a morning person, and as the hours drag on way past the time he's usually shut his eyes, he still feels too adrenalized to sleep. Which he isn't a fan of. Sleep's important, and he's cultivated the capacity to sleep uncomfortable, but to sleep rattled, that's another story.

Somehow, the idea that Dan will be awake makes the thought of sleeping a lot easier. Like he already trusts Dan to stand watch, which implies a lot of trust for someone he just met. But it does make him feel better. He does find it easy to believe that Dan might be a night person the way he switches on with sunrise whether he's had four hours of sleep or even a luxuriant five.

"Take your time," he says to Lady. "I'm not going to be sleeping any time soon."

Lady comes out of her room after showering and getting re-dressed. She's got something clutched in her hand as she goes down the stairs.

She approaches a closed door off of the foyer. She opens her palm to reveal a key that she fits into the locked handle. Before turning it, she pauses.

"Just... please don't tell people about this?" Not that she could really stop them, but they both seem kind enough that asking nicely might do the trick.

Lady turns the key and opens the door. She flips on the light as she walks in.

The room clearly was once used as a home office. There are tall, built-in bookshelves lining the walls and drawn blackout curtains cover a wall full of of impressive windows. A cushioned, high-backed desk chair sits behind an intimidating desk closer to the far wall. A couple of armchairs have been shoved into the corner to more floor room. All the furniture is made from matching warm-toned woods.

But all of that is secondary to the room's current purpose. The desk is covered in loose papers, some stacked and some spread out. A pile of library books sits on one of the shelves. A computer sits half-open on a side table. There are manilla file folders stacked on various surfaces, each one with a label too small to read.

Sitting in the center of the room is a freestanding, two sided cork board. Only one side is visible from the doorway. On it is a massive map of the town with various locations circled and highlighted in various colors. Multiple strings have been pinned across the board connecting various locations.

The main string is in red. The pins hold up pictures and small blurbs cut out of xeroxed news articles. Some of the faces are familiar-- some aren't. It doesn't take long to realize the connection between them all. These are people who have died from "animal attacks", their photos and obituaries tacked to the location their bodies were discovered. The articles go back decades, putting together a timeline that spans far beyond the deaths people have noticed in the past few years.

Only one point marked in red doesn't have a photo or label, and it's the one in the woods closest to Lady's home.

Other colors of string hold up names and locations. People who went missing and whose bodies were never found, places where people claimed to have seen one of the wild animals the attacks have been attributed to-- she's even marked people who have left town and never come back, not even to visit family.

Lady stands awkwardly to the side, letting Dan and Aster take it all in. It's a lot. She knows it's a lot. She also knows it looks more than a little insane, and that's before they've seen what's on the other side of the board, but after tonight maybe it looks a little less crazy than it would have otherwise.

It's a lot, and even though Dan can't read those news articles or labels, he can tell immediately what it is. It's like someone's taken the way he's started to think about those woods and given it a physical form, fleshing it out with details and context and history, slapping it up onto a wall in color and topography.

He folds his hands behind his back and feels deep sadness that this is what Lady's been doing with her time. This solitary activity that asks her to dive back into the worst thing that happened to her over and over. It can't be healthy. It can't feel good. It clicks to Dan that it must feel like a drug does to him; it's not even necessarily that he likes the way meth makes his mind rattle or heroin makes him drowsy, but it's something when the alternative is to 'let it alone' and suffer in his own head.

Same behavior. He thinks Lady is addicted to the conspiracy, that the idea that there's an answer, some closure, is her drug of choice.

"Is it alright if I make some notes?"

He steps up to the map, fiddling with a pen in his pocket. He knows the woods slightly better than most because he has a trap line there and has gotten some squirrels and gophers as game meat during the day, and because on some nights he sleeps in a meager tarp-tent. He has some of his more precious belongings in a ziploc bag stuffed under some roots under a big tree. He can clarify which wild animals people probably saw and some of the details of the topography of the edges of the woods that never made it into the current maps.

"Did this start before or after Adam?"

Aster is staggered by the work that's gone into this room, the amount of time Lady has willingly spent rehashing her trauma in search of the answers she's found, the amount of pain she's willing to put herself through if she thinks there's something to gain from it.

"You've learned a lot, here," he says, because credit where it's due. "You got a lot of information."

But it doesn't add up to any conclusion, even with the addition of the monsters. Because the conclusion she was looking for might have been how her brother died, but the how opens up entirely into another how. How are there monsters in the woods? Why Adam? Why monsters at all?

Still, Aster's drawn to the notes Lady's taken about people who've left.

"Do you know any of these people? The ones who left?" he asks, wondering how long it's been since anybody any of them know left town.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

❅ SHITTY LITTLE TOWN ❅ PART 1

cw: bugs, light body horror, light passive suicidal ideation

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