nightlogs | ❅ SHITTY LITTLE TOWN ❅ PART 2

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❅ SHITTY LITTLE TOWN ❅ PART 2

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.

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.

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!

KNOWN IC DETAILS

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?

OOC DETAILS
❅ 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.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Dan gives Aster a look that's between unimpressed and offended as they scramble down. "I ain't an idiot."

He considers that maybe he does, actually, resent Aster's position of authority in this moment. Maybe that same nature he's always had, at best fierce independent, at worst stubborn and senseless contrarianism, will come between them.

"My employment ain't conditional on me letting you call the shots in this, is it?" Dan tries not to sound adversarial as he asks that. He just wants to be clear on what he's gambling if he decides to listen to his instincts instead of Aster's.

"I didn't say you were an idiot. I -"

I said I'm scared. The words do not want to come out. But Dan's comment about his employment reminds him this isn't personal, this is a very conditional relationship based on how long Dan cares to work for him, and he's already left Dan behind in the woods because he panicked once. Dan can't have a ton of confidence in his decision making.

"Look, you may think I'm a coward, but I want us both to come out of this alive, and I'm going to have a view you won't from the back. If I see a noose closing and you're looking the other way, or - "

He struggles to think of another metaphor. Or if there's a target and you get blind to everything that isn't it sounds more patronizing.

"If I have to go home to that house and it's empty again, I'm - I'm going to have a bad day," he says, and it sounds so needy, jeeze. "Of course your employment ain't conditional," he finishes, thinking, Dan must have not heard him when he said there was always a place for Dan in his house, or ignored it because it was inappropriate. Probably for the best, honestly. It probably was inappropriate.

Dan hops down from the fire escape, wincing because his knees aren't twenty-five years old anymore, and meets Aster's explanation with a rueful sigh. "I didn't say you were a coward. I know you ain't."

He does. It doesn't matter that Aster bolted in the woods; somehow, Dan knows that there's plenty of blazing courage that was just momentarily eclipsed by the strangeness of their situation.

"I didn't mean- I just am really bad at taking orders. I don't like nobody telling me what to do."

It's not like his parents never gave him directions when he was little, but it was always in the context of allowing him to push back and ask questions. Every order his parents gave him made sense. The first time he ever encountered because I said so was when he was herded into a police cruiser at gunpoint, never to see his parents again. That's his blueprint for authority.

"I don't want that house empty neither, it's just- this is the best job I've had. And I've had a lot of jobs. I got a tendency to fuck things up when they start going well for me." He hopes he hasn't started that spiral by pushing back on Aster's concerns about his wellbeing. He sighs and puts his hands in his pockets. "I know you said there'll always be a place for me. Reckon I was just wondering if you were about to change your mind when you found out I was stubborn and do things my own way."

Aster's not sure why it's so important to him to push this point. He isn't even sure why Dan suddenly doesn't like taking orders, when Dan hasn't so much as raised a single objection to Aster directing him around the farm chores. He supposes they've never disagreed on an approach to a job - well, they are now. A little bit.

I got a tendency to fuck things up when they start going well for me. Aster wants to say that Dan hasn't fucked anything up at the farm at all, but he finally started noticing the quantity of wine bottles that are missing in a cellar that has been dusted for the first time in half a year. That opened his eyes up to the absence of left-behind whiskey, both of which he's ignored all this time because there's no good that could come of him opening a bottle.

But this isn't the time to bring that up, and Aster doesn't want to bring it up at all when it turns out Dan heard him, and didn't think it was inappropriate either.

"I just want to get through all this together. Get some good news back to Lady, that we've learned something and nobody's the worse off. Being bait lends itself to being worse off." He shrugs, awkward. "I just worry."

Dan stays where he is for a moment and listens as Aster receives his confession and explains himself, all the bullheadedness leaving him as he thinks of how alone Aster is, how much grief Aster has to carry, and how much vulnerability it must have taken to bring Dan into his life as he has for the last few weeks. How sad it would be to once again be alone.

Dan knows how that feels, and that's why he doesn't lend anyone his vulnerability. Somehow, Aster got ahold of it, and that rattles Dan deeply.

"Alright. I hear you." He walks over and gives Aster's upper arm a quick squeeze. "How about if either of us wants to call it, we agree we'll both call it? That way I can trust that you'll bail if I see you in danger, too."

He gets the car keys out and hops in. "I worry about you too, you know."

Aster pats Dan on the shoulder. "I can live with that," he says, sliding into the car, hearing Dan's concern.

"Well that's kind of you."

Aster doesn't want people to worry about him. And people, as a rule, don't. He's outspoken and confident and knows what ground is his to stand on. He doesn't make a lot of close connections. He's good at having very few people worry about him. It touches him that Dan does.

"I do my best to be a nice person," Dan says as he starts the car, smiling. He drives them to the edge of the woods, then parks and makes sure his firearm is all set to go.

"Alright, want me to just start walking in and you keep an eye on my six?" Dan lowers his voice and gets out of the car. "Do we got a signal for if we're going to call it?"

Aster hoists the growlight in one hand, the baseball bat in the other. "'Call it' is a signal," he says, following Dan into the mist.

Once they're inside the mist, the flora starts to shift as it was outside the town. Plants from different climates butt up against each other, and crows croak in the darkness.

"Don't go far," Aster murmurs, keeping his direct gaze on Dan, lest he disappear into the darkness, flicking to his peripheral vision, listening as the crows circle.

Dan gives Aster a wink and starts to walk deeper into the darkness, no longer pushing back on being told what to do now that he knows it's not about authority but about concern and affection.

He whistles some of the most famous refrains from Swan Lake and the Nutcracker as he otherwise silently picks his way over rocks and branches and deadfall. He stops when he hears something moving. He draws his gun, feeling more comfortable using it now against these creatures now that he knows it only slows them down.

He looks back to see if Aster sees anything, but the fog blocks his view. He takes a step back, hoping to get back in sight, when he feels his sleeve snag on a branch. He tries to tug it free, and something tugs back, and tugs back hard enough to pull him off his feet and into brambles.

"Whoa!"

The crows caw loudly and the bushes are rustling around them with the sounds of many running feet. Aster fires on his grow lamp and aims it into the woods.

The light illuminates a black-eyed woman in white - and then the light sends her screaming into the cool cover of the mist, colliding with a tree in her attempts to get away from the brightness. Her skin smokes faintly, and her black eyes are veined in white. She lays against the tree, stunned. In the mist, her sisters shriek.

Dan leaps to his feel, pulling branches away from where they caught in his clothing, in time to see the monster fully faceplant into a tree, all her grace robbed by the sudden glare of the light.

"Hold! Hold back!" Dan raises his hand in a stop gesture. "Over there."

He wants Aster to direct the light into the mist towards where the sisters are still screaming and lurking, rather than keeping it at their stunned and scared captive. He kneels down, pulling some paracord from his jacket and trying to make eye contact with the lolling black gaze if their stunned captive.

"Hey. Hey, I ain't want to hurt you. You alright?" Dan positions himself so that he's giving her space but is near enough to quickly grab and tie her legs if she makes any sudden moves. He doesn't want to restrain her if it's not necessary and if there's no way for him to tell her that it's for his safety, not her capture.

"You'd better tie her," Aster advises, seeing Dan choosing the kind thing but not what he'd consider the practical thing. He aims his growlight into the mist, scattering the others as they try to close in. "I don't want to hurt her anymore than she's hurt."

The light worked well enough that he doesn't want to aim it on the stunned woman again, but she may have murdered at least one child, and probably more. He doesn't want Dan to go the same way.

The woman's head lolls and brown, aged blood drips from her mouth as she groan-growls and looks at Dan with hate in her eyes.

She says nothing, just steadies herself and stops moving entirely, looking like a big cat stalking prey. When Dan drifts a little too close she lashes out to grab him, her fingers tangling in his hair, her nails catching on his forehead, skin on skin.

Dan's mind is filled immediately with the cacophonous blare of a symphony, underscored by the despairing wail of a woman in desperate agony, and the overwhelming, all-consuming declaration that I hate you. I will make you suffer. All feeling of his body, except the faintest tingling in his fingertips and toes, is gone, and with it, all his control over his limbs.

For a long few minutes, Dan tries to soothe her and get her to talk to him, but his words get met with hissing and snarling and his attempts to get closer get buffeted off by her kicking at him. He tries speaking to her in every language he knows - she seems to respond to French and Russian more than the others, but that's just to moan instead of growl at him - and gesturing with his hands, but he realizes she's just completely disinterested in communicating.

"Yeah, I think-" Dan moves to tie her, then stops as he sees her steady herself to pounce and knows he misjudged the situation and is too late. He tries to fall back but she has him by the hair, fingernails digging into his scalp until he bleeds as he wrangles his way out of her grip.

The feeling is overwhelming. Dan feels like an entire symphony is playing from two inches away from him and like his body is entirely disconnected from his mind, proprioception gone, sensation gone. Somehow, his legs are moving, and when he gets a sense of vision back, he realizes he's been squirming in tendus and pliets. He tries to stand up and finds himself too shaky to stay on his feet, so he tumbles over.

The women are all gathering around shrieking in greater number, and the degree to which Aster's made them angrier by having a weapon that can hurt them is clear. He growls as Dan does everything in his power to give the woman an opportunity to communicate, then whips around as she screeches and sees Dan frozen in space with the woman reaching for his face.

He lunges with the baseball bat and jabs her directly in the stomach, pushing her off Dan. The minute her fingers leave his skin Dan collapses to the ground like her very touch was holding him up. She slams against the tree and shrieks, darting off into the dark.

"Call it," he urges, pulling Dan to his feet. When Dan isn't steady enough to stand, Aster chooses between the bat, the light, and Dan, and picks the light and Dan. He hoists Dan over his shoulder, dropping the bat, and sprints away from the women, blasting an arc ahead of him with the growlight.

The women scream and several try to come at them from the side, but Aster's light weapon works well enough to get them to the edge of the mist. The light seems to cut through the disorienting effect of the mist, too, at least enough to get them out under the stars again. Once Aster and Dan stumble out of the mist, the women fall back, hissing and screaming and confined to the mist.

"Yeah, call it, call it..." Dan tries to say, but his body still feels numb and unresponsive to his commands. He ends up murmuring and drooling, twitching over Aster's shoulder until they're out of the woods. Blood streams down his face and neck; the wounds are minor, but they're effusive. He catches a glance of the shrieking, hissing women disappearing again into the mist.

"Let's get out of here," he says as soon as Aster sets him down outside the woods. He gets to his feet, holding onto Aster and feeling like he's trying to give his body orders in a language it only half understands. He staggers and fumbles on his way to the car, and takes a moment to catch his breath once they get inside it. He doesn't want to rush a vehicle with impaired coordination, so it takes a moment.

"I got to tell you about what she just did to me. Give me ten minutes to sort through it. I'm still processing it." He starts the car. "You mind patching me up at the greenhouse?"

"Of course," Aster says, still hearing shrieks in the woods. "Are you safe to drive?"

Back at the greenhouse, with every grow light on, Aster sits down in front of Dan with the first aid kit to start patching him up.

Head wounds bleed a lot and this one's no exception. The blood's dried in Dan's hair, caked down the side of his face and onto his shirt. Aster resists the urge to help Dan unbutton his shirt and just nods as he starts wiping blood away. "Take that off, I'll get you a spare."

Dan still seems a bit unsteady, so he uses his free hand to brace Dan's jaw as he slowly works away at the dried blood.

"So what happened?" he asks, reaching over briefly to hit boil on the electric kettle, so that when Dan's patched up he can have some tea.

Dan sheds his shirt without complaint, resting his head in Aster's hand. He isn't in much pain, but he appreciates the tenderness. He feels like Aster's one of the few people he can reliably expect tenderness from. Aster's palm is warm on his face, and Dan resists the urge to turn into it and give that palm a kiss. Just because he feels a magnetic attraction to Aster doesn't mean he wouldn't be risking his room and board if the feeling weren't reciprocated.

But there's nothing risky about enjoying the warm of Aster's hand on his face, the other gently swabbing away blood-crusted hair.

"They're in pain," he says, forlorn. "Emotional pain. Heartbreak and anger. I got a flash of- I ain't felt that much righteous anger before. But I know the heartache."

Dan's felt the gutted sense that his life is over, was over, is over, for decades now. It's just dulled by now, spread out over the years rather than honed to the fine point of the present.

"She hijacked my body. I didn't have no control over it. I couldn't might even feel it besides the tips of my toes and fingers. But it felt like I was dancing, or watching someone else dance but from inside them. If that makes sense." Dan taps his temple. "And I heard music. A whole symphony right up close. I think it was Tchaikovsky."

I know the heartache makes Aster want to ask how, hating that Dan does know. It makes him want to not ask, so Dan doesn't have to revisit something painful. He just pauses in cleaning the blood off Dan's temple, listening attentively.

"She had control over you," he repeats, reaching for the first aid kit to clean Dan's wound. "And shared her feelings, how? Did she make you feel them? Did she say anything?"

Do you want me to ask about your heartache, or do you want me to forget about it?

Dan closes his eyes as Aster wipes away blood and dabs disinfectant on, thinking of how infrequently he gets this kind of tender attention, how Aster patching up his chewed hands and taking care of his cuts and scrapes is the kindest touch he's gotten in so long he can hardly remember.

"Yeah, I felt them like I was feeling them myself." Which made the rage so hard to understand, this emotion that Dan only feels as a dim glow instead of a roaring fire. "She didn't say nothing, but I just got this overwhelming sense of blame. Like I was the one who done hurt her and she needed me to know it. I ain't felt that before."

Despair never seemed like something Dan could focus like that, but he never had a target or a desire to blame. He just remembers that feeling slowly creeping up on him when his home got taken away, this sense that nothing would ever be alright again, that all his hopes for the future were dashed, that his life was a photonegative now with the sense of security and happiness blacked out. It still feels that way now. He rests his cheek heavier into Aster's hand.

"Whatever we do with these women in the woods, I don't want to could hurt them."

With Dan's cut disinfected and the blood cleaned out of his hair, there's no reason for Aster to keep his hand on Dan's face except that he wants to do it, and with Dan leaning into his hand, plaintively looking into his eyes and declaring he doesn't want to hurt monsters, ones that have already hurt him, he almost leans in for a kiss.

He wants to do it. Dan would probably let him. It would feel so good. It just wouldn't be ethical.

Aster gets only the barest lean in before he stops himself, withdrawing his hand from Dan's jaw, busying himself packing up the first aid kit. "Yeah. I don't want to hurt them either."

But he's glad to know the light works, even if it works better than he wishes it would. He has a means to keep the angry women in the woods off his friends, but they're no closer to communicating with them, or getting answers about why they're there.

"What -" he casts around for something to talk about, other than how badly he wants to kiss his employee and won't. "How much of this do you think we should tell Lady about? See if she'll let us look at that theory board of hers again?"

Eventually Dan pulls his face away, reluctantly, a little disappointedly. He puts on a fresh shirt, sad that he wore a light-colored one out for a night in the woods, one that he's unlikely to be able to salvage from the bloodstains. He supposes the deceased original owner won't be offended, but he isn't about to say that to Aster.

He pulls the shirt over all those strange scars he showed Aster, the long one across his back that he must have improbably survived, the scar on his stomach with a mirror image near his kidney that makes no sense because surely he'd remember getting impaled. As far as he knows, the worst accidents he's been in have been wrapping a car around a tree or running over a fence or that one time he fell out of a third-story infinity pool, but his body tells a very different tale and he can't reconcile how.

"I reckon we got a duty to her to at least tell her the grow light works and what happens if those things touch her. You know she ain't just going to sit at home. She'll venture out into the woods again and she ought to be able to defend herself. And I want to see that board again, too." He pats Aster on the arm. "Ain't it past your bedtime? I can stay here and sing you a lullaby with my dulcet, soothing voice."

Usually Aster sleeps well before Dan does, and they had to be up late to find the women in white, and now it's well past midnight with Aster tending to his wounds.

Aster chuckles. "No offense, but you play piano better than most people sing, that includes you."

It takes him a second as he putters putting the first aid kid away that Dan is angling to, at a minimum, be around him sleeping, and he is starting to wonder if Dan's had some exploitative bosses before. I'll only sleep with you if you quit your job is a real bad thing to say, and he actually can't spare the labor Dan does, so he ought not to say it even if he's thinking it. He takes a little longer than he needs to, putting the first aid kid away.

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