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❅ SHITTY LITTLE TOWN ❅ PART 2
There's an article in the local paper, but word travels through the town hours before the first newspaper hits a doorstep: a man went missing down the mine, and they couldn’t even retrieve his body for his wife to bury. The official story is that there was a freak cave-in while the night crew was working, that no amount of preparation or technology could have prevented the act of God that left one of the arterials from the main mining cavern obstructed. Given that it was the night crew, there was only one witness, and he was violating protocol and too far down another arterial to hear or see what happened; because Goluboy has a zero-tolerance policy for breaking protocols, he fired the surviving miner. Goluboy has informed the newspaper that there will be no further efforts to recover the body.
Thus, two events are happening in town this weekend: Ms. Cygne’s debut ball, and a protest against the mining conditions outside the mouth of the mines.
Out in the woods, the fog has been thick to the point where subsistence hunters can’t venture in more than a few yards, and there seem to be strange sounds, almost like music, soft tank drums and ringing, emanating from the murk. It almost feels like the menace of the woods is...encroaching.
PROMPTS
a) PROTEST OUTSIDE THE MINE
The rage at Goluboy has been a long time brewing, but the people who live in his apartments wisely don’t appear at the protest. Instead, it’s all about twenty people who have just managed to avoid being dependent on Goluboy’s grace who have shown up with posterboards and a loudspeaker, rallying during the miners’ workday. This was all coordinated the day before my word of mouth, and it isn’t particularly well organized; people frequently end up blocking the mining equipment, and the foreman shouts at them to stay away from dangerous areas with marginal success. The three people with loudspeakers end up talking over each other and the chants are piecemeal and overlapping; however, the fact that people are upset about the perceived lack of safety for the miners and particularly for the abandonment of the missing miner’s body. Bring Him Home is the main chant and the only one that seems to get any muscle to it. The fired miner seems to be the person leading the most vocal chants.
The administrative staff from MineCorp have been asked to come field complaints from the protesters, armed with nothing but some talking points from the MineCorp mission statement (something something synergized comparative advantage for diversified innovative solutions something something labor is our most precious resource yada yada). One scruffy man seems to have hijacked the protest with his loudspeaker and is rambling about the animal maulings in the woods. At some point, Goluboy arrives in his armored Ford F-250. He calls over his foreman and has an annoyed conversation, and then he gets out, bodyguard looming behind him, to talk to individuals, putting on an evidently forced smile with gritted teeth.
The rage at Goluboy has been a long time brewing, but the people who live in his apartments wisely don’t appear at the protest. Instead, it’s all about twenty people who have just managed to avoid being dependent on Goluboy’s grace who have shown up with posterboards and a loudspeaker, rallying during the miners’ workday. This was all coordinated the day before my word of mouth, and it isn’t particularly well organized; people frequently end up blocking the mining equipment, and the foreman shouts at them to stay away from dangerous areas with marginal success. The three people with loudspeakers end up talking over each other and the chants are piecemeal and overlapping; however, the fact that people are upset about the perceived lack of safety for the miners and particularly for the abandonment of the missing miner’s body. Bring Him Home is the main chant and the only one that seems to get any muscle to it. The fired miner seems to be the person leading the most vocal chants.
The administrative staff from MineCorp have been asked to come field complaints from the protesters, armed with nothing but some talking points from the MineCorp mission statement (something something synergized comparative advantage for diversified innovative solutions something something labor is our most precious resource yada yada). One scruffy man seems to have hijacked the protest with his loudspeaker and is rambling about the animal maulings in the woods. At some point, Goluboy arrives in his armored Ford F-250. He calls over his foreman and has an annoyed conversation, and then he gets out, bodyguard looming behind him, to talk to individuals, putting on an evidently forced smile with gritted teeth.
b) DEBUT BALL
Ms. Cygne’s debut ball at her mansion is the event of the year, with all the lavishness than this sort of town can muster; beautiful dresses, a chocolate fountain, gift bags with expensive accessories and bonbons, fine sparkling wines, and invitations embossed with gold leaf. Plenty of the little treats are the sort that were presumed extinct in this town; no one’s seen a pair of Gucci sunnies or eaten a Ghirardelli’s in years here.
Most of the festivities take place in the massive ballroom that anchors the mansion, and they spill out into the lawn, where Ms. Cygne has insisted on a sit-down dinner rather than a “ghastly” buffet. The lady of the hour is quite active, making sure to check in with every single person at least once to make sure she’s getting praised for her hosting skills and getting a good look at every youth who’s appeared. The youths themselves have been pressured, by family members, teachers or Ms. Cygne herself, to present themselves as elegantly and politely as possible, and to make a “good showing” at their first event as a notable, respectable young person who may be a contender for Ms. Cygne’s prestigious scholarship.
At the table, people rub elbows with people they may not necessarily speak to otherwise, all brought together by the commonality of being someone Ms. Cygne has deemed noteworthy. Almost nobody allows themselves to get too inebriated, but one woman has a bit too much champagne and begins to cry at the dinner table; her friend, another woman in her thirties, ushers her to the powder room, where she composes herself while everyone awkwardly changes the subject. A few people do mannered waltzes in the ballroom, and out on the lawn, people mingle and make toasts.
Ms. Cygne’s debut ball at her mansion is the event of the year, with all the lavishness than this sort of town can muster; beautiful dresses, a chocolate fountain, gift bags with expensive accessories and bonbons, fine sparkling wines, and invitations embossed with gold leaf. Plenty of the little treats are the sort that were presumed extinct in this town; no one’s seen a pair of Gucci sunnies or eaten a Ghirardelli’s in years here.
Most of the festivities take place in the massive ballroom that anchors the mansion, and they spill out into the lawn, where Ms. Cygne has insisted on a sit-down dinner rather than a “ghastly” buffet. The lady of the hour is quite active, making sure to check in with every single person at least once to make sure she’s getting praised for her hosting skills and getting a good look at every youth who’s appeared. The youths themselves have been pressured, by family members, teachers or Ms. Cygne herself, to present themselves as elegantly and politely as possible, and to make a “good showing” at their first event as a notable, respectable young person who may be a contender for Ms. Cygne’s prestigious scholarship.
At the table, people rub elbows with people they may not necessarily speak to otherwise, all brought together by the commonality of being someone Ms. Cygne has deemed noteworthy. Almost nobody allows themselves to get too inebriated, but one woman has a bit too much champagne and begins to cry at the dinner table; her friend, another woman in her thirties, ushers her to the powder room, where she composes herself while everyone awkwardly changes the subject. A few people do mannered waltzes in the ballroom, and out on the lawn, people mingle and make toasts.
c) EXPLORE ELSEWHERE [Link]
OOC: Please feel free to thread with each other at any location in the town. Available NPCs are bolded. Please indicate in bold in your comment if you would like an NPC to tag in, or reach out to Em or Juliet specifically. We request that each player only request one NPC per character so we may respond quickly. Thank you!
OOC: Please feel free to thread with each other at any location in the town. Available NPCs are bolded. Please indicate in bold in your comment if you would like an NPC to tag in, or reach out to Em or Juliet specifically. We request that each player only request one NPC per character so we may respond quickly. Thank you!
There is gossip around town that characters can be handwaved as knowing that might drive some questions about the town and npcs:
- The spooky deaths in the woods that have been going on for ages.
- Mining disasters like this have happened before, always before the announcement of a big new mining vein opening up.
- Children who take Ms Cygne's scholarship never come back to the town, and their letters are very formulaic.
- Goluboy's wife died under mysterious circumstances, his girlfriend went to jail for the murder, and he is about town courting again.
- Cygne has a pond full of so many beautiful swans, aren't they lovely!
- The curfew sure is heavily enforced. Is it because the sheriff knows something about the monsters in the woods and is withholding information?
❅ Deja Vu: Characters may optionally start getting some very brief flashes of memory or deja vu but this will be brief, confusing, and alarming rather than revelatory and full memory regain will not be possible. Still, players can opt to have this cause a feeling of possible unease or un-rightness to the situation that can be used to drive characters to have questions or be suspicious enough to investigate areas and situations.
❅ Event Length: This part of the plot will involve an npcing stage. It will last approx. two weeks before the last part, part 3, though this end time may be shortened to match player pace if npc threads progress quickly.
❅ New Intros: If your character wasn't introed in part 1 you can handwave they've been there the whole time and just intro in part 2.
❅ New Characters: If you app a new character and want to intro them 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.
no subject
“If we do find monsters and live, I still want the soda.”
The drone releases a high pitched whine as its motors are turned on and it zips up in a straight shot towards the canopy. Its jerky flight pattern was dragonfly-like.
He looks down at the screen on his controls, splitting a first person view with its mapping software.
“Is there an area you want to scope out first?”
no subject
"Me and Aster done run into them when we tried to drive out of town. The car broke down in a way that...I still can't wrap my head around how it might could have happened." And Dan knows machines. "So we tried following the road and ran into those things when we were only getting a little off-track. Probably a good idea to follow the road and use it as a landmark."
no subject
"You were both driving out of town?"
He looks pensively out of the corner of his eye with a misplaced curiosity given the mission he was tasked with. But the monsters, so far, were still fictitious. Dan and Aster trying to run off into the sunset? Well - not expected, but not impossible.
"He has to know that Goluboy's going to make a move if he leaves his property alone too long."
no subject
He nods. He's aware of the dynamic between Goluboy and Aster, and it bothers Dan, as someone whose home was ripped away from him. "Aster was just going to help me on the way out. He can't leave without that land getting stole."
Which is what Dan considers the death-by-a-thousand-cuts of regulations and citations Goluboy punishes the townsfolk with: outright theft.
Dan sits where he can see the screen as the drone flies. At first, there's nothing unusual, just the road and the woods and cloud-like blobs of mist, occasional birds and insects and at one point a fisher scrambling into some undergrowth. The drone follows the line of the road, passing a spruce tree with two lovers' names carved into it and a heart, a creek, an outcropping of rocks in the shape of a couch, another creek, a spruce tree with two lovers' names carved into it and a heart, a creek, an outcropping...
"Ain't we seen that tree with the carving in it twice already?" Dan says the third time the drone passes RL + AM etched into spruce bark. "And the road's stayed to our left this whole time."
no subject
He opts for reassuring Dan, because who could blame him for wanting to bail on this place? Miguel is glad that he at least had Aster in his corner give more of a hand.
When Dan points out the tree, he looks down at the tracked path on his controls and finds a bizarre loop akin to what Dan had marked down on paper. They had passed that tree twice already, and they were swooping in for a third time.
"Yes, we have - unless this couple was particularly dedicated to carving trunks. How is that possible?"
He's keeping his cool, but Miguel is enthralled and a little horrified seeing something breaking his understanding of how things should work. Was it a trick, somehow?
no subject
He doesn't want to freak Miguel out, so he wants to leave room for Miguel to make the decisions, but he has to point out when he sees a flicker of something on the screen, a flash of movement in the fog from something white moving over the creek. "Can you slow the drone down? Reckon we might have could just saw something."
no subject
Miguel lets the chit-chat sit where it may and sends a command for it to slow down and more carefully record its surroundings. The drone remains high above the ground, but hovers more measuredly in the fog, approaching the creek. Would they see movement again?
no subject
Then it happens again, this time more clearly and in a pair: two lanky, graceful figures dressed in white, darting between clouds of fog over the creek in leaps. They just so quickly and high that at first they seem like white deer jumping the creek, but no - they're women, ballerinas, throwing themselves in a grand jeté over the water and into the embrace of more fog. Their faces are a blur on the drone's camera, like a refraction error, and their long fingers seem skeletal as they comb the air and drag trails through the fog. They vanish into the gloom.
"Well, reckon I'm not crazy." Dan runs his hands over his face. "I'll be damned."
no subject
"Unfortunately for all of us, you're right."
Miguel isn't sure why that's the first thing that comes to mind when faced with the impossible, reality breaking revelation of monsters in the woods prancing around in their impossible forest. Once the initial shock subsides, he finds himself taking the news rather well.
The drone is sent on a path back to them, and Miguel is just hoping it doesn't get caught in whatever broken physics caused the setting to loop in on itself. He is of the mind to collect the video footage at once.
"They moved like dancers more than any animal in the woods."
no subject
Dan's father taught him trades and his mother taught him the arts. He only knows the rudimentary figures of ballet, but he knows that if he were to hone his skills with years and years of discipline and practice, he might approach what those women were so capable of.
"I want to see if we got anything clear about their hands." Dan's watching the drone camera now less than he's watching Miguel's reaction. "They look...peaceful out there on their own. You wouldn't could believe they're monsters."
Dan sounds like he doesn't want to believe they're monsters.
no subject
"I'm going to ask you to explain your secret background as a ballet dancer after this." he says after a beat. Sure, there were monsters in the woods, but he's just unlocked some new facet of Dan that begets some natural curiosity. But back to the monsters:
"I only got a glimpse of them, but their hands looked like skin and bones."
The drone floats over the creek back to the forest as it retraces its route. He ponders what he just saw and how peaceful they looked while left to their own devices.
"I wonder if there's something provoking them to attack people, or if that's just part of their nature."
no subject
He watches for the drone to come back through fog that's only getting thicker.
"Well, if they're like animals, it's their nature to attack when scared or hungry, which are sympathetic and solvable. If they're like humans, it gets more complicated, but it might could still be sympathetic and solvable." He hopes Miguel isn't about to propose a violent solution, but Miguel seems to have a good head on his shoulders and a kind heart under the brusqueness.
no subject
Miguel comes with a crappy killer's instinct, turns out. Part of the reason he kept to himself was not enjoying rowdiness that rippled through the depressed workers of the town - sometimes coworkers of his. He was more academic than a brawler, although his build and cold demeanor did well to disguise that. He holds his chin pensively.
"Well, the noise of the drone didn't scare them like an animal would be. And attacks are reported from the forest, right? It's not like they're hunting people in the town. They could see the woods as their territory. That'd be reason enough."
The drone appears as a blinking, green light in the fog before its body is visible. It flies above them in the canopy, only lowering itself once it's located its little plastic landing pad, able to maneuver well despite the fog. Once the rotors stop, he turns it off and starts to pack up. Miguel does not allow himself the moment of pride from his invention working exactly as planned. That can come later.
"We should review the footage back in the truck."
He glances back from where the drone came. It's not impossible for it to have been followed by the dancers if it caught their attention.
no subject
After non-verbally checking with Miguel to see if he can help carry something, he starts to walk back to the truck. Now that he's got a place to sleep and reliably gets healthy food, the way he moves is much less stiff and feeble. The fact that he's an athletic person in his thirties becomes more obvious. He walks backwards, keeping an eye on the woods to see if anything is following them. Miguel knows Dan carries a gun, so Dan keeps his hand on it as he scans the treeline behind Miguel.
"I'll be honest, I don't know what we ought to do with all of this information. I don't reckon law enforcement's going to be helpful, especially if they already know about it and don't see fit to do nothing but impose a curfew."
no subject
The thought of actually having to stab something to defend himself feels unnerving, but he doesn't rule out the possibility. The knife remains in his hand.
"I'm not sure. Even if someone humors us, we'll be fighting against having to explain that what we just recorded was real."
He needs time to think about this.
"We need more information on what these things are, and where they're coming from." he starts, and finds himself desperately hoping that the disappearances and the creatures weren't connected.
gasp! I lost this notif!
The fog makes it difficult to see if they're being followed, so Dan tries to attune his ears, which means patches of silence in their conversation. What Dan's senses lack in reach they make up for in canniness. After a few minutes, he's fairly certain they aren't being followed based on how bored the birds are, but he doesn't take his hand off the butt of his gun.
"I think me and Aster are going to try to talk to one. You want me to report back to you if we make it out alive?"