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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.
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"Such an imaginative boy." Her eyes flick to the stains on his clothing, the wildness of his hair, and there's something like pity in her voice as she asks, "and do you . . . believe you'll be able to earn a living, doing these sequential arts?"
The poor child, her tone says. He hasn't realized his art is terrible.
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Good thing he doesn't care.
"After art school maybe. There's the comic book industry, animation - self-published webcomic creators, too. There are a few good sites for it that are pretty professional. Also some artists make extra money with commissions."
It's not an easy way to make a living and he knows that but also it's good to have dreams. He can always try something else if they don't work out - and maybe he'll find something new that works better for him along the way. And he has talent. It's goofy art, but it's goofy in a stylized way. His style would adapt well to animation especially. His sense of humor even more so.
"In the meantime, I figure I can squeak by while I'm in school by being a DJ." He breaks into some beatboxing, imitating some bass. (He's pretty good at it.) Then ends it with, "oontz oontz oontz oontz," he mimics scratching a record, "wiki wiki."
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Cygne listens and her expression is pitying, bordering on sad.
But she nods, and smiles again at Cato.
"Mr. Goodspeed, I didn't know you were so passionate about your art. Few young people have such passion at your age." She smooths the front of her pure white cocktail dress. "Unfortunately, young man, I cannot sponsor you scholastically at this time, but I could sponsor your work with some new supplies. Do you prefer markers? Colored pencils? Have you tried oil paints? I have so many supplies gathering dust in my salon. You'll put them to better use."
She gestures up the hall for Cato to follow, and to a waiter passing says, "dear, do please bring some hot chocolate to my salon for our guest. Cinnamon in mine."
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"Yeah, I kind of figured it was more like a books kinda scholarship but my teacher still wanted me to try talking to you, so I promised her I would. But someone that's good at academic stuff might use it better anyway."
He knows his schoolwork is inconsistent at best and it really wouldn't be fair for him to snatch an opportunity away from someone else who puts more work in.
"More art supplies would still be pretty tight, though." Especially to work on a portfolio through his high school years. He realizes he should probably try to be extra polite about it. "I really appreciate it. I mostly use markers and colored pencils. Plus I scored a cheap tablet. But I'd like to try stuff like oil paints."
He's slightly confused, though.
"But why do you have a whole hair salon in your house?" A pause. "I guess that'd be kinda convenient."
Rich people be rich people, he guesses.
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"An art salon, child," she says, opening a door to a legitimate art studio. There are dusty half-finished paintings in a few styles, cabinet upon cabinet of half-used supplies, a treasure trove for an artistic kid to raid.
Cygne lets Cato go ham on his little shopping spree for a while before the waiter brings the hot chocolate. The waiter stands by at the door, awaiting new orders, and Cygne sits and sips her cinnamon hot chocolate.
After a while she calls Cato over. "Come show me another of those storylines," she calls, with another sparkling laugh. "Your hot chocolate is getting cold."
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After she calls him back over, he says, "Your art is really good. Like the paintings you were working on. It's not easy to work in a bunch of different styles."
The compliment is genuine. He's still at the earliest stages of learning the basics and developing his own style. He knows that working in different styles of art is well beyond that. It takes control and constraint.
He puts the last of the supplies in the little bag she gave him and goes over to sit across from her.
"Oh, I have tons of ideas for comics. One of them is this sci fi one about this girl who lives on post-apocalyptic Earth because some weird space disaster happened and the planet is dying as the threat gets closer. And her dad was important so she had a ticket off on a spaceship but she saw this mother with her kid and gave her ticket away to the kid. And years later, she's wandering the wasteland with her sentient robot buddy? But she winds up on one last hidden spaceship off with this alien bounty hunter who used to work with her dad. And her dad left messages about stopping the big cosmic threat but tells her that he and her mother are probably dead. Instead of going to safety with the space fleet with her uncle, she and the bounty hunter guy and her robot use the ship and decide to take over figuring out how to do it before the cosmic terror finishes destroying Earth."
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She laughs and smiles along as she looks at his comics, but her smile is a little strained, and she sips from her hot chocolate.
"How tragicomic! Dear, you haven't even touched your cocoa. Did you want whipped cream?"
cw: child abuse, kidnapping, drugging
But the unconscious part of his brain has been well-trained by trauma - and whatever had brought him here had deigned to give him a tragic life in this town, too. A life of loss and hardship. A life with a devastating mimicry of a devastating time in his real life.
But it'd had to adapt it to this town, this human life. Which meant some changes - new things to fear. Like how the man who kidnapped him would sometimes drug him unconscious if he needed people to come into his house to do things like make repairs, so there was no risk of them hearing his victim screaming for help in the hidden sub-basement.
It's a different trauma that created a different fear. (After all, if the Lord Commander wanted him to shut up, he had no qualms with just beating him unconscious or choking him out with his telekinesis, or telling Viro to punch him out.)
The cup is not yet at his mouth when he feels the fu - the hair raise on the back of his neck, along his scalp. A shiver runs down the entire length of his spine - and doesn't stop at his tail-bone. There is a strange feeling, like a phantom limb, that he doesn't recognize, but it puts him into the strange mindset he's sometimes in, of feeling like he's in the wrong body.
What he doesn't know is it's an unconscious, deeply-buried part of his brain preemptively expecting a nonexistent tail to raise straight and puffed up in a bottle-brush. There's another part of his brain that wants to bare fangs he doesn't have, too, but his conscious mind is finally catching up and it ignores it just like he ignores the weight of the butterfly knife in one of his cargo pockets.
Not the right response. (It's not that dire...yet.)
She's trying to poison or drug you.
Maybe it's paranoid, worrying about her reminding him more than once to drink, but it feels a little weird. And paranoia and caution has both saved his life and kept him from getting caught by the cops for his ongoing mischief.
He schools his expression, to go from one that maybe could've been played off as decision-making about whipped cream, to the same cluelessly cheerful one from before. He manages it perfectly. He'd needed more deception and flattery this time around, during this kidnapping. The world has found new ways to hurt him.
But in doing so, it's also refined him, distilled him, strengthened areas that he'd needed more since he wasn't capable of the same combat.
"Actually, that'd be great," he says, to buy time.
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"Now tell me more about this silly little man," Cygne says, tapping one of the comics, not listening to a word Cato says as she sips her cocoa and waits for him to do the same.
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She's rich after all. For all he knows, he's going to get knocked out and wake up on some private island where he's hunted for sport. Or she could just be a good ol' fashioned serial killer. Rich people are crazy sometimes.
Her asking another question buys him even more time though. You can't drink something if your mouth is flapping open as you explain something.
"Oh yeah, he's kind of dumb but got the ability to travel inside different books."
He gets up, cocoa still in hand.
"I kind of want to make it so you can tell what books by the art style? Like if he's in some kids' book maybe it looks like a watercolor like this." He gestures to a specific painting. He gestures to another painting. "Or maybe some old-timey literature book is done with oil painting. For, like, the gravitas. That's why I want to get into other styles."
He walks back over, as if he plans to point something out in his art.
"There's a lot of public domain stuff that you can -" And then his foot snags one of the handles of the bag of art supplies. He stumbles. He doesn't ever look directly at the bag; he was operating entirely off peripheral vision for this. And wandering around and then coming over to chatter more about his comics is within the normal realm of high-energy teenager behavior.
The way he fumbles the mug is realistic too. He looks like he tries to grab it and self correct and it just causes the mug to tumble into him even worse. It is pretty scalding. Most kids wouldn't be able to bring themselves to hurt themselves to escape. Most kids would just ask to leave or cave into the social pressure of drinkng the cocoa, or not notice the vibe at all.
Maybe he's hurting himself out of paranoia instead of reality but he'd rather chew off his own leg and escape a safe situation than cave into a situation where it turns out he was actually in danger. .
"Son of a bitch! OW! Ow ow ow!" He holds the front of his shirt away from his chest to try to give it a few seconds to cool - it's extremely hot from the liquid soaked into it. His right arm, which took some of the worst of the spill, is an angry red. It won't blister but it's still uncomfortable.
Then he looks mortified, over both spilling the cocoa and over cursing in front of her.
"I am so sorry. This is so embarrassing. Do you have paper towels? I can clean it up."
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He backs away from the waiter, trying to figure out how to get around him to the door.
"You know, I think maybe I should just go home and change?" he says.
Then he tries to dart around him.
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The one time he lets himself be lured off by a stranger, he winds up cornered again. Hands are grasping at him, pulling him in by his arm because he's not quite fast enough to get out the door.
"Get off! Get off! Let go!"
The fight is vicious. He is suddenly somewhere else for a moment. His father's blood is still pooling on the linoleum of the kitchen floor as he's dragged through the back door by dead vines and branches erupting from the ground while his captor looms above, sharp teeth glittering in the firelight as he gloats and -
Wait, that's not how it went. He'd been carried off in Jack's arms.
No, what he remembers is the same as what's happening now, there was grabbing, there was a hand clasped over his mouth to try to stifle his yelling, there was the urge to claw at the arm grabbing at him. So he draws blood on an arm with ragged nails he usually chews off instead of clipping, as he digs them in as hard as he can.
Digging his claws in feels natural. So does sinking his teeth into flesh, this time biting harder than the last time this happened, this time drawing blood. When he was younger, the natural urge to not cause harm meant he hadn't bitten hard enough and he'd always regretted it.
But this is natural, isn't it? It's natural to bite and claw, even if his teeth and claws aren't as sharp as he'd like. So this time salt pours into his mouth and tendons snap because humans still have canines even if they don't have fangs.
He doesn't even hear if there's yelling because all he can hear is a rush in his ears, as adrenaline shoots through his body like a bullet, but it's enough that the grip is loosened. He immediately stamps down his heel on an instep, then turns and kicks the waiter in the nards as absolutely hard as he can.
He kicks ridiculously hard for someone his size and height. He's a skateboarder and his leg muscles are the strongest muscles he has.
It brings the man down to his knees and as he finally safely edges around them this time, he hisses at his two enemies, teeth bloody. He tells himself it's that he's channeling his OC, who would hiss at danger. It makes him feel braver.
Then he bolts out of the room, kicking his way down stairwells and ducking through doors away from any rooms that have the voices of other servants, ultimately just kicking out a window screen on the ground floor and diving through it to escape through an unconventional exit.
The sprints away across the lawn like his butt is on fire. As tears well in his eyes he tells himself that he's terrified because of what just happened.
He's not terrified of himself for finding the scratching and biting and fighting and hurting so easy, so comfortable. He's not terrified of himself for thinking ever so nonchalantly about how he should kill him. He's not.