nightlogs | ❅ SHITTY LITTLE TOWN ❅ PART 2

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dan sagittarius

❅ 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

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.

"I play goddamn bassoon better than I sing," Dan says, laughing to hide that he's disappointed to be turned down. "I'll play you to sleep. Grieg, Chopin. Roberta Flack."

And so when he goes back to the farmhouse, he grabs a bottle of wine from the cellar; he's already gone through the whiskey and vodka on the serving trolley in the study, because a house full of recreational drinkers would never have enough on hand for one alcoholic for two weeks. He doesn't pour himself a glass because he doesn't see the purpose; he just drinks straight from the neck as he practices the softest, most lovely melodies he knows.

When he starts missing notes, he moves to a new project, de-griming a shower that had a little mold before all the deaths and now has a bloom, and by the time he's done with that he's feeling a chill from the night air. He finishes the bottle of wine, gets another, and draws himself a hot bath, where he sinks in and thinks over how big the bed he's going to sleep in is, how over the last few days it's started to feel not just big but vacant.

Aster's telegraphed his disinterest a few times, and Dan knows that's for the better. It's just that knowing something's for the better doesn't make Dan want it. Knowing something's a bad idea frequently intrigues Dan, and trying to sleep with his boss is a textbook bad idea.

But he doesn't think that's why he wants to pull Aster into bed with him, to wrap himself in Aster's arms, to show Aster's lips the same tender attention Aster's shown his cuts and scrapes.

The tub is so positioned that Dan can smoke a cigarette while both holding his hand out and exhaling out the bathroom's French doors without letting anything linger in the room, something he wouldn't dare do anywhere else in the house. He burns down three cigarettes and rests his head on the edge of the tub, drifting off with the second bottle of wine empty as the water starts to cool.

It probably ought to be harder for Aster to drift off to sleep, given their close encounter with the women in the woods, but he and Dan have a routine that gives him comfort. Knowing that Dan is awake most of the night, to raise any alarm that might need to be raised, makes Aster feel safe enough to fall into a few hours of deep sleep.

He wakes up a little earlier than usual. There's no mist in the dark of pre-dawn, but Aster still takes his portable growlight with him to walk the fields.

But when he walks back from his morning round, Dan's balcony doors are open, the light inside still on. It's cold out, a frost on the dew, and Dan doesn't run hot.

Something feels off about it. Aster goes inside to knock on Dan's door. "You still up?" he calls. If Dan wasn't able to sleep after last night, they might as well talk about it.

But there's no response from within, and after Aster knocks harder to no response, he forces the unlocked door open and finds the bed unused, the fireplace cold, and in the bathroom, Dan passed out completely in the cold tub with his lips blue and his chin in the water.

Aster rushes over to check that Dan isn't already dead. The couple of empty wine bottles on the floor fill some gaps in the story for him as he pats Dan on the face, tugging him a little out of the cold water. "Wake up. Hey," he says, a little too forcefully, as he recognizes movement and that Dan is alive. He only recognizes his heart is racing too hard now that he knows he isn't about to bury another person he cares about. "Get up. What the hell are you doing?"

When Dan drifts off, he's warm and woozy. He can see his worries in the distance like gathering clouds, but they feel like an approaching inevitability he can't do anything about rather than a claustrophobic trap he might be able to wriggle free from. Something about resigning himself to the things he's afraid of and giving himself a little time to enjoy them before they arrive - and they will arrive, he knows, eventually this idyllic job with Aster will fall apart, eventually his body will break down, all these sad futures - is more relaxing than considering the possibility that they won't. It's in that relaxation that he loses consciousness.

When he wakes up, he's cold and nauseated and has a splitting headache and clammy skin. "Wh- Aster, what are you-"

The only thought that fully forms is that he was hoping that he would have time to get himself a car before his inevitable eviction and unemployment. Now Aster has all the reason in the world to decide that this isn't working, that he doesn't want an alcoholic drug addict in charge of all the family heirlooms and this property that was so beloved to people who were so beloved and aren't around to love or be loved anymore. He sees the anger and fear in Aster's face and hears it in his voice.

"I fell asleep," Dan says, groping around with clumsy movements for the fluffy towel he set next to the tub last night, shivering. "I'm sorry."

Aster grips Dan's bicep to haul him up out of the water, pulling the towel over Dan's chest to give him some dignity. He doesn't really know how to tackle the issue of the drinking, or Dan being hung over just yet, but he does know how to deal with a minor case of hypothermia. He leaves Dan on the rim of the tub to get wrapped up in his towel, but only to go to the bedroom and grab the bathrobe Dan's had to borrow and bring that back in. He hands it over without a word and goes to fix a fire in the fireplace.

He doesn't look up when Dan comes out of the bathroom, just says "I thought you were dead for a moment there."

Even he's surprised by how much that makes his voice shake.

Dan bundles himself up and drains the tub. He picks up one of the bottles of wine and drinks the miniscus in a futile attempt to fight the hangover. He shuffles out after Aster, hangdog and glum.

"Sorry I scared you." Aster isn't even making eye contact with him, which Dan takes for a bad sign. He doesn't blame Aster. Aster gave Dan hospitality and generosity and Dan not only didn't quit his destructive coping habits but leaned further into them. Dan's enlisted Aster in his most unseemly traits and made Aster complicit. "I know it looked bad, but I wasn't in no danger."

He sits in front of the fire, rubbing the bridge of his nose with one hand as he warms up. He probably was in danger, laying there in cool water only getting colder, but there are worse ways to die than in his sleep. The worst part would have been the unkindness of letting Aster find him like that.

As soon as he starts getting color back into his skin, his cheeks start flushing with embarrassment and disappointment.

"I don't think that's true." Aster sits on the foot of the bed next to Dan and lets the growing fire give him something to look at aside from his tardy employee, his friend who he's found in an embarrassing position.

When he does glance over he sees the flush of embarrassment, and feels annoyed that he has to have this hard conversation when Dan already knows this isn't a good position to be in - would have been easier on them both if, knowing this wasn't a good position to be in, Dan had never gotten himself into it.

"Does this happen every night?" he asks. "You always drink yourself to sleep in the water?"

Dan's glad that Aster phrases the question that way, because it allows Dan to both deny and answer honestly: "no, it don't."

He pulls the towel and bathrobe tighter around himself, feeling such a sense of despair and shame. He feels like an airplane with some defect that tilts the nose down into a spiral once it gets too high. Like sugar that bursts into flames when its just a degree past turning to caramel. Freezing on a vent in this town felt like an inevitable fate he was slouching towards, but somehow a roof over his head and food in his belly and companionship feels more liable to kill him.

"I won't take a bath when I'm already a bottle in, going forward." Dan knows that that's a pitiful offering, but he doesn't have the ability to offer sobriety or cutting back, so he hopes that that isn't what Aster's expecting from him.

Aster sighs out long, scratching the back of his neck. "You get a bottle in every night?" he clarifies, he suspects to Dan's chagrin.

Dan pauses for a few seconds before answering. "At least."

He could lie to Aster, but Aster's already caught him and if Aster cared to count the liquor bottles in the recycling bin or the disturbed dust in the cellar, he could find Dan out easily.

"I got a high tolerance. It's alright."

Aster sighs, pinching the bridge of his nose. "Don't tell me that's all right."

No one's supposed to be able to drink a bottle of wine - at least - a night and be fine.

"I knew you were drinking but not this - not a 'pass out in the water on a cold night' amount."

Dan's already promised to get out of the bath before the second bottle, but now Aster's running through all the ways a person could drink themselves into a fatal accident on this property, and there's a few of them.

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