![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png){kind=small}
Entry tags:
❅ SHITTY LITTLE TOWN ❅ PART 2
There's an article in the local paper, but word travels through the town hours before the first newspaper hits a doorstep: a man went missing down the mine, and they couldn’t even retrieve his body for his wife to bury. The official story is that there was a freak cave-in while the night crew was working, that no amount of preparation or technology could have prevented the act of God that left one of the arterials from the main mining cavern obstructed. Given that it was the night crew, there was only one witness, and he was violating protocol and too far down another arterial to hear or see what happened; because Goluboy has a zero-tolerance policy for breaking protocols, he fired the surviving miner. Goluboy has informed the newspaper that there will be no further efforts to recover the body.
Thus, two events are happening in town this weekend: Ms. Cygne’s debut ball, and a protest against the mining conditions outside the mouth of the mines.
Out in the woods, the fog has been thick to the point where subsistence hunters can’t venture in more than a few yards, and there seem to be strange sounds, almost like music, soft tank drums and ringing, emanating from the murk. It almost feels like the menace of the woods is...encroaching.
PROMPTS
a) PROTEST OUTSIDE THE MINE
The rage at Goluboy has been a long time brewing, but the people who live in his apartments wisely don’t appear at the protest. Instead, it’s all about twenty people who have just managed to avoid being dependent on Goluboy’s grace who have shown up with posterboards and a loudspeaker, rallying during the miners’ workday. This was all coordinated the day before my word of mouth, and it isn’t particularly well organized; people frequently end up blocking the mining equipment, and the foreman shouts at them to stay away from dangerous areas with marginal success. The three people with loudspeakers end up talking over each other and the chants are piecemeal and overlapping; however, the fact that people are upset about the perceived lack of safety for the miners and particularly for the abandonment of the missing miner’s body. Bring Him Home is the main chant and the only one that seems to get any muscle to it. The fired miner seems to be the person leading the most vocal chants.
The administrative staff from MineCorp have been asked to come field complaints from the protesters, armed with nothing but some talking points from the MineCorp mission statement (something something synergized comparative advantage for diversified innovative solutions something something labor is our most precious resource yada yada). One scruffy man seems to have hijacked the protest with his loudspeaker and is rambling about the animal maulings in the woods. At some point, Goluboy arrives in his armored Ford F-250. He calls over his foreman and has an annoyed conversation, and then he gets out, bodyguard looming behind him, to talk to individuals, putting on an evidently forced smile with gritted teeth.
The rage at Goluboy has been a long time brewing, but the people who live in his apartments wisely don’t appear at the protest. Instead, it’s all about twenty people who have just managed to avoid being dependent on Goluboy’s grace who have shown up with posterboards and a loudspeaker, rallying during the miners’ workday. This was all coordinated the day before my word of mouth, and it isn’t particularly well organized; people frequently end up blocking the mining equipment, and the foreman shouts at them to stay away from dangerous areas with marginal success. The three people with loudspeakers end up talking over each other and the chants are piecemeal and overlapping; however, the fact that people are upset about the perceived lack of safety for the miners and particularly for the abandonment of the missing miner’s body. Bring Him Home is the main chant and the only one that seems to get any muscle to it. The fired miner seems to be the person leading the most vocal chants.
The administrative staff from MineCorp have been asked to come field complaints from the protesters, armed with nothing but some talking points from the MineCorp mission statement (something something synergized comparative advantage for diversified innovative solutions something something labor is our most precious resource yada yada). One scruffy man seems to have hijacked the protest with his loudspeaker and is rambling about the animal maulings in the woods. At some point, Goluboy arrives in his armored Ford F-250. He calls over his foreman and has an annoyed conversation, and then he gets out, bodyguard looming behind him, to talk to individuals, putting on an evidently forced smile with gritted teeth.
b) DEBUT BALL
Ms. Cygne’s debut ball at her mansion is the event of the year, with all the lavishness than this sort of town can muster; beautiful dresses, a chocolate fountain, gift bags with expensive accessories and bonbons, fine sparkling wines, and invitations embossed with gold leaf. Plenty of the little treats are the sort that were presumed extinct in this town; no one’s seen a pair of Gucci sunnies or eaten a Ghirardelli’s in years here.
Most of the festivities take place in the massive ballroom that anchors the mansion, and they spill out into the lawn, where Ms. Cygne has insisted on a sit-down dinner rather than a “ghastly” buffet. The lady of the hour is quite active, making sure to check in with every single person at least once to make sure she’s getting praised for her hosting skills and getting a good look at every youth who’s appeared. The youths themselves have been pressured, by family members, teachers or Ms. Cygne herself, to present themselves as elegantly and politely as possible, and to make a “good showing” at their first event as a notable, respectable young person who may be a contender for Ms. Cygne’s prestigious scholarship.
At the table, people rub elbows with people they may not necessarily speak to otherwise, all brought together by the commonality of being someone Ms. Cygne has deemed noteworthy. Almost nobody allows themselves to get too inebriated, but one woman has a bit too much champagne and begins to cry at the dinner table; her friend, another woman in her thirties, ushers her to the powder room, where she composes herself while everyone awkwardly changes the subject. A few people do mannered waltzes in the ballroom, and out on the lawn, people mingle and make toasts.
Ms. Cygne’s debut ball at her mansion is the event of the year, with all the lavishness than this sort of town can muster; beautiful dresses, a chocolate fountain, gift bags with expensive accessories and bonbons, fine sparkling wines, and invitations embossed with gold leaf. Plenty of the little treats are the sort that were presumed extinct in this town; no one’s seen a pair of Gucci sunnies or eaten a Ghirardelli’s in years here.
Most of the festivities take place in the massive ballroom that anchors the mansion, and they spill out into the lawn, where Ms. Cygne has insisted on a sit-down dinner rather than a “ghastly” buffet. The lady of the hour is quite active, making sure to check in with every single person at least once to make sure she’s getting praised for her hosting skills and getting a good look at every youth who’s appeared. The youths themselves have been pressured, by family members, teachers or Ms. Cygne herself, to present themselves as elegantly and politely as possible, and to make a “good showing” at their first event as a notable, respectable young person who may be a contender for Ms. Cygne’s prestigious scholarship.
At the table, people rub elbows with people they may not necessarily speak to otherwise, all brought together by the commonality of being someone Ms. Cygne has deemed noteworthy. Almost nobody allows themselves to get too inebriated, but one woman has a bit too much champagne and begins to cry at the dinner table; her friend, another woman in her thirties, ushers her to the powder room, where she composes herself while everyone awkwardly changes the subject. A few people do mannered waltzes in the ballroom, and out on the lawn, people mingle and make toasts.
c) EXPLORE ELSEWHERE [Link]
OOC: Please feel free to thread with each other at any location in the town. Available NPCs are bolded. Please indicate in bold in your comment if you would like an NPC to tag in, or reach out to Em or Juliet specifically. We request that each player only request one NPC per character so we may respond quickly. Thank you!
OOC: Please feel free to thread with each other at any location in the town. Available NPCs are bolded. Please indicate in bold in your comment if you would like an NPC to tag in, or reach out to Em or Juliet specifically. We request that each player only request one NPC per character so we may respond quickly. Thank you!
There is gossip around town that characters can be handwaved as knowing that might drive some questions about the town and npcs:
- The spooky deaths in the woods that have been going on for ages.
- Mining disasters like this have happened before, always before the announcement of a big new mining vein opening up.
- Children who take Ms Cygne's scholarship never come back to the town, and their letters are very formulaic.
- Goluboy's wife died under mysterious circumstances, his girlfriend went to jail for the murder, and he is about town courting again.
- Cygne has a pond full of so many beautiful swans, aren't they lovely!
- The curfew sure is heavily enforced. Is it because the sheriff knows something about the monsters in the woods and is withholding information?
❅ Deja Vu: Characters may optionally start getting some very brief flashes of memory or deja vu but this will be brief, confusing, and alarming rather than revelatory and full memory regain will not be possible. Still, players can opt to have this cause a feeling of possible unease or un-rightness to the situation that can be used to drive characters to have questions or be suspicious enough to investigate areas and situations.
❅ Event Length: This part of the plot will involve an npcing stage. It will last approx. two weeks before the last part, part 3, though this end time may be shortened to match player pace if npc threads progress quickly.
❅ New Intros: If your character wasn't introed in part 1 you can handwave they've been there the whole time and just intro in part 2.
❅ New Characters: If you app a new character and want to intro them at this time, assume they arrived just in time at the location the plot takes place in to be caught up in the magic drawing everyone in. They would have gotten the Man in the Moon's spiel from the welcome page right before being magically sucked in.
no subject
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.
no subject
no subject
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."
no subject
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.
no subject
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.
no subject
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.
no subject
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.
no subject
no subject
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."
no subject
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.
no subject
Except he did.
no subject
"What?" he knows what he heard, doesn't want to have heard it, wishes Dan could convince him he'd said something else.
no subject
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?
no subject
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?
no subject
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.
no subject
And yet Dan drinks too much and doesn't appear to mind the thought of that killing him. Aster can't even consider the notion.
"You should - you should take the day off. Get to feeling better," he murmurs. "I can take care of the work today."
no subject
He just wants Aster to turn a blind eye to it, to pretend to be ignorant, to let things revert to how things were before Aster found him passed out wasted in the bath. He selects a shirt and pants and underwear and socks, pausing with his eyes closed for a moment as a wave of nausea moves over him.
"I'm okay. Fresh air'll do me good. I can help with the work." He isn't any more hungover than he usually is at the start of the workday. He knows he'll feel more alive when he's had a cigarette and some breakfast, but the shame of this conversation is going to sit like a weight inside him even once he starts his day. "I can still do my job."
He wonders if Aster can hear in his voice how badly Dan wants to ask Aster not to shut him out over this.
no subject
"It's early. You're never awake this early anyway. I gotta walk the orchards - I'll come make some coffee in a few hours. I need to think."
no subject
Dan fails to keep the quaver out of his voice. He doesn't know what's going through Aster's head, but if it's anything short of things going back to the way they were, he doesn't think it's a good thing. Maybe Aster's considering keeping his distance, making sure Dan stays far on the side of the line between professional and friendly. Maybe Aster's going to serve him up rehab program options like court summons. Maybe Aster's putting together a good argument that Dan can't hear about how alcohol's going to kill him.
Dan doesn't suspect there are any conclusions Aster can come to out there that will do anything but hurt.
He changes into clothes and rests in bed but can't manage to sleep. He just dozes as the hangover starts to subside, feeling so sad and guilty that he feels like his muscles are made of wet sand, missing Ellie in a way that seems to flare up in him whenever he's upset about anything else, like her ghost is coming to kick him when he's down. He eats a small breakfast. He cleans water off the floor of the bathroom.
When he shows up thirty minutes early in the field for his shift, the only sign that anything's amiss is that he's wearing sunglasses, and that could easily be excused by the afternoon glare.
no subject
He nods at Dan and goes back to the patch for a minute or two, before he asks what he guesses might be too simple of a question.
"Why do you drink that much every night?
no subject
It's a simple question. Dan has simple answers. He drinks because being sober hurts as much as being tortured to death. He drinks because he misses his family and misses his daughter and he's helplessly at the mercy of that grief. He drinks because it feels good in a world where barely anything feels good enough to penetrate that formaldehyde-like sadness he's embalmed in. He drinks because it's easy and he's been doing so much hard work just not dying or killing himself that he needs things to be easy. He drinks because if it does kill him, it's technically not suicide.
Dan has every explanation in the world for why he drinks, and all of them die on his tongue.
"I don't know how else to get through the night."
And for as terrible as Dan's addictions have been for him, he feels so certain that the alternative would be worse. He doesn't know what would be waiting for him at the end of a day of voluntary sobriety, but it must be worse than death and worse than pain and worse than humiliation, because even deep in intoxication's brutal grotesquerie, even shivering sleeping on the street in clothing soiled with bodily fluids and with a pounding headache and inflamed, damaged organs, it's always just made more sense to keep drinking. That misery's been preferable to the alternative.
no subject
Aster's aware that these are big complicated topics and feelings he's boiling down, but also, the way he sees it, they can be boiled down. Not cured, not solved, but identified, ameliorated. Hopefully by something other than alcohol.
Not, he's aware, that he can convince Dan to pick something else.
no subject
Dan's had those anxiety and depression checklists applied to him in jail a few times, and they've all been accurate, but the language is always so minor. Difficulty sleeping and feelings of hopelessness. Not feeling like a hollowed-out shell all day, every day. Not waves of terror and sadness so extreme he can hardly breathe. Not feeling so uncomfortable in his own skin that he doesn't feel like it's his at all.
Dan doesn't sound like he's looking for a solution as he keeps digging up weeds. He doesn't believe there is one. Alcohol and drugs are just the band-aid.
no subject
Dan's still working, but Aster's stopped to pay attention to what Dan has to say. He hopes Dan will pause his work to talk back. When Dan keeps working he puts his hand on Dan's shoulder to get his attention.
no subject
"I don't know. I don't want to be here. Not on the farm, not in this town, just..." Here in this world. "Drinking puts that out of mind a little. Takes it from a ten down to a six."
If Dan could become a black hole and collapse into himself, he would - he almost feels, constantly, like that's what's about to happen, like the sense of strain and tension is so unbearable that there's about to be a break, but there never is.
(cw: discussion of suicidal thoughts)
(no subject)