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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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"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."
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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?"
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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.
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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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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.
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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?"
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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."
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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.
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"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.
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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?"
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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.
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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."
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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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Because outside that, it isn't any of Aster's business what Dan does to his body. He knows why he's getting lectured, but he doesn't know what Aster thinks there is to accomplish here. Dan isn't going to get clean. He doesn't think he can. He doesn't think he could withstand the sobriety, like every moment when he isn't at least a little intoxicated is weight pressing on him from every angle until he cracks and collapses.
But if that's what Aster wants, then Dan's only option is to leave. He wraps his arms tighter around himself and considers that it won't take him more than a few minutes to pack his things, but that will leave so many projects unfinished and that will cut out a part of Dan's life that he realizes only now he's gotten attached to. What a horrible time to have this awful revelation.
"I understand if you want me to get out," he sighs.
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Aster says it so fast and so finally that he overlaps Dan.
"I don't want to have to come in here and find you hurt, or worse," he says, so concerned and so hurt that finding Dan worse was a possibility at all today. Dan's comment about buying his own alcohol doesn't even register. If it came from the liquor store or his cellar and the end result is still that Aster find another body in this house, he isn't going to feel any better.
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He doesn't want Aster to walk in on a nightmare situation, and so he's sincere that he won't get sloppy like that again. He doesn't even know why he let himself slip last night in particular except that he's felt the slow crescendo of panic rising in him for a week now.
His hands are shaking, but he raises one to his mouth anyway and digs his teeth into his thumb.
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If Aster had kicked him out, Dan thinks it would have felt like prematurely amputating an infected limb. Horrible, painful, the sort of thing that would damage him for life, but probably necessary. Probably the way things had to be. Probably better than the alternative.
But now Dan feels like he's heading towards whatever the alternative was, and his whole body feels afraid and his mind feels like it's been scrubbed and battered. He doesn't know why he's terrified like this. He just knows it's decent enough propulsion to send him to the bottom of a bottle.
"I've had some hard times in my life. This is just how I deal with it." He sighs again and tries to smile to make light of it. "Ain't killed me yet."
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There was a point in time, and he doesn't remember it, but he knows it happened, that he considered - or received the suggestion - that he could drown his feelings in one substance or another to dull their intensity. He immediately discredited the idea because the possibility of disabling himself as a habit was too dangerous to consider. He isn't sure how Dan picked the opposite option. He isn't sure how Dan justifies telling him over and over that it's just a thing he does and it's fine actually.
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Except he did.
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"What?" he knows what he heard, doesn't want to have heard it, wishes Dan could convince him he'd said something else.
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It's a lie. Dan thinks about it all the time. He considers that poisoning himself to death isn't the worst way he could go, that ever since Ellie was taken away from him his life has felt like treading water and he isn't sure anymore why he doesn't let himself drown. The days feel aimless, the suffering pointless, like he's putting himself through something for what? For moments when he finds a soft place to land and manages to be unhappy and stressed out and anxious and heartbroken anyway?
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And yet somehow, deep down, Aster is so certain that Dan isn't joking, and he's not sure how or why he knows it. It just feels true as the sun rising, and the night falling, that Dan is quietly, passively hoping to die. And that feels as foreign to Aster as wanting to pull his own fingernails out, or get a job digging for oil, or go to law school.
He stands up, needing to let off some tension in moving, running his hands through his hair and considering that there's at least a full day of work ahead of him, that at some point he'll be out in the sunshine, in the fields, dirt on his hands, smelling clear air and late-season grass instead of in the midst of this conversation. It calms him down.
All he can think of to say is "I - it's made me happy, having you here," and that feels like such a stupid thing to say in the face of having fished a hungover Dan out of the bathtub, hearing Dan say what a big deal it isn't.
But it feels like the real problem. He's happy Dan's here. In his house. On the earth at all. Dan doesn't seem happy about it, though. And isn't that the problem, really?
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Then Aster looks utterly lost and even rejected, and Dan finds himself at a loss.
"It's made me happy being here. You've been the best thing happened to me in years." It's true. It's entirely true, and yet it's not enough. Dan doesn't think anything will ever be enough to patch up the hole that's in his heart and mind. He feels like the events of his life crashed through him like a wrecking ball, and that just loading the raw material for happiness back onto the ruins isn't the same as fixing his life, and he lacks the expertise. Aster can give him everything he needs to get himself together and Dan doesn't know how and can't figure out why it doesn't work.
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(cw: discussion of suicidal thoughts)
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