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❅ SHITTY LITTLE TOWN ❅ PART 3
The cracks are starting to show. People have been reforging connections. Rebuilding their senses of self.
Digging into things that are potentially sinister, their curiosity dangerously piqued. Now, too many truths are coming back to the surface for everything to stay suppressed.
Somewhere deep in the MineCorp mines, a wire snaps. Then another, and another.
PROMPTS
a) A CRACK IN THE DAM
A feeling of déjà vu is commonplace, and people’s dreams start to contain more and more imagery that doesn’t align with the lives they know here in this shitty little town – fantastical sleighs, huge golden globes, fae and monsters. Some people stop automatically responding when their name is called, because the name they’re being called feels wrong. Others discover they have talents at skills they don’t remember ever trying before.
But it remains out of reach until they do something that affirms their true self, an act that goes down to the core of who they are. It might be true love’s kiss, or placing a hand on their signature weapon, or invoking certain words when speaking truth to power. One way or another, once that final requirement is met...it all comes flooding back.
A feeling of déjà vu is commonplace, and people’s dreams start to contain more and more imagery that doesn’t align with the lives they know here in this shitty little town – fantastical sleighs, huge golden globes, fae and monsters. Some people stop automatically responding when their name is called, because the name they’re being called feels wrong. Others discover they have talents at skills they don’t remember ever trying before.
But it remains out of reach until they do something that affirms their true self, an act that goes down to the core of who they are. It might be true love’s kiss, or placing a hand on their signature weapon, or invoking certain words when speaking truth to power. One way or another, once that final requirement is met...it all comes flooding back.
b) PUTTING THE PIECES TOGETHER
Your character remembers who they are, but their powers haven’t returned! The nefarious makers of the spell suppressing powers must be defeated. But who are the nefarious makers of the spell?
Several people have several parts of the puzzle. Time to put them together, anonymously, on the network. Skye has taken it upon herself to facilitate a discussion forum online with all accounts highly anonymized and access granted only by a password; details are being spread by word of mouth, friend to friend, always with the warning that just because the accounts are anonymous doesn’t mean that Goluboy or his people couldn’t try to sleuth people’s identities from context clues.
Skye sets a time for when the discussion forum will go live, and at midnight that evening, a website goes live with a simple comment post function and a message that all data will be deleted within 24 hours.
NETWORK LINK
The jig is up!
The source of the curse – and other mischief – is traced to Kyan Goluboy, and Noire Cygne. Confrontation with each of them will trigger counter-attacks and defenses.
Your character remembers who they are, but their powers haven’t returned! The nefarious makers of the spell suppressing powers must be defeated. But who are the nefarious makers of the spell?
Several people have several parts of the puzzle. Time to put them together, anonymously, on the network. Skye has taken it upon herself to facilitate a discussion forum online with all accounts highly anonymized and access granted only by a password; details are being spread by word of mouth, friend to friend, always with the warning that just because the accounts are anonymous doesn’t mean that Goluboy or his people couldn’t try to sleuth people’s identities from context clues.
Skye sets a time for when the discussion forum will go live, and at midnight that evening, a website goes live with a simple comment post function and a message that all data will be deleted within 24 hours.
NETWORK LINK
The jig is up!
The source of the curse – and other mischief – is traced to Kyan Goluboy, and Noire Cygne. Confrontation with each of them will trigger counter-attacks and defenses.
c) CONFRONTING CYGNE
As soon as Cygne is confronted, or receives word from Goluboy that the jig is up, wilis pour into town. Normally, these undead jilted brides will dance to death whoever they get their hands on, but in a hurry they’ll resort to tearing their prey apart. Any person who the wilis get their hands on will be overwhelmed by an empathetic sense of their grief, shame, and hatred, and control of their body will be taken over as they are swept into the deadly dance.
The wilis are strong against physical violence, but can be burned by sunlight, or artificial growlights. People dancing with wilis can be pulled out of their embrace and pulled to safety, but only those with formal dance training stand a chance of changing the course of the deadly waltz, once touched.
The sheriff’s department forms the final level of defense around Noire Cygne’s mansion and person. Get past the chaos of the wilis throughout town, and Sheriff Mallard and her deputies stand between your heroes and the town matriarch.
As soon as Cygne is confronted, or receives word from Goluboy that the jig is up, wilis pour into town. Normally, these undead jilted brides will dance to death whoever they get their hands on, but in a hurry they’ll resort to tearing their prey apart. Any person who the wilis get their hands on will be overwhelmed by an empathetic sense of their grief, shame, and hatred, and control of their body will be taken over as they are swept into the deadly dance.
The wilis are strong against physical violence, but can be burned by sunlight, or artificial growlights. People dancing with wilis can be pulled out of their embrace and pulled to safety, but only those with formal dance training stand a chance of changing the course of the deadly waltz, once touched.
The sheriff’s department forms the final level of defense around Noire Cygne’s mansion and person. Get past the chaos of the wilis throughout town, and Sheriff Mallard and her deputies stand between your heroes and the town matriarch.
d) CONFRONTING GOLUBOY
Destroying the torture machine hidden hidden in MineCorp will end the curse and restore all powers. Too bad everyone will have to sneak past mine workers and security guards who’ve been promised a big fat bonus for bringing your characters alive and restrained to Goluboy’s office. As the man himself would say, nothing makes a person work harder than money. Some of the wilis have made their way into the mines as well...
Destroying the torture machine hidden hidden in MineCorp will end the curse and restore all powers. Too bad everyone will have to sneak past mine workers and security guards who’ve been promised a big fat bonus for bringing your characters alive and restrained to Goluboy’s office. As the man himself would say, nothing makes a person work harder than money. Some of the wilis have made their way into the mines as well...
e) AFTERMATH
The villains have been defeated!
What will your heroes do with them? Can any of their past victims still be saved? It’s time to convene and pass judgement on your captors, and check that every I is dotted and every T is crossed.
The villains have been defeated!
What will your heroes do with them? Can any of their past victims still be saved? It’s time to convene and pass judgement on your captors, and check that every I is dotted and every T is crossed.
❅ Event Length: This part of the plot will last until 10/15, and the situation with the npcs are meant to be resolved by then, though general CR threads can continue to be backtagged after that.
(=✪ᆽ✪=)
Which means Crowley is sort of normal-guyish and doesn't have any context for this. It must be completely bewildering to suddenly have a person you know transform (mentally, if not physically) into a slightly different person.
(It doesn't feel like the fake human Cato wasn't him, but he feels more...complete this way. And definitely more confident. That kind of thing comes with competence.)
"Yeah, I can do that." He ejects the clip and clears the chamber like he could do it in his sleep. Past-time guns are different from what he has back home, but after realizing he might wind up stuck with one and not his normal gun on a mission, he's practiced with one of the ones he stole from Project Prometheus.
And he was right, naturally. He did need to know how to use them.
Sensing that Crowley is a might anxious, he puts the gun and clip in the glovebox. For now. If Crowley goes for it, he's taking it back.
He drums his fingers against his knees, awkwardly trying to figure out how to raise the subject of 'so by the way, you're brainwashed right now, and usually something probably not human that can shoot fireballs and turn into a big snake, but I actually don't know whether it's a magic thing or just a alien thing because you play it really close to the vest.'
But maybe he should start smaller.
"...so you probably have some questions..."
no subject
"You'd think that, wouldn't you?" If there's a slight edge of hysteria in his voice, that's his own business, because he has it handled and it's fine and he's driving exactly at the speed limit to avoid unwanted attention, suddenly grateful that he drives the same kind of car that half the town drives. They're not going to be able to avoid the consequences of this, but he can delay it for a little while, especially if he aims for the edges of town where they're less likely to run into a patrol. "Yet here I am, not a bloody question on my mind 'cause I wouldn't have a clue where to even start with how nonsensical this week has been. Do bats eat cats? Do cats eat bats?"
Quoating Alice In Wonderland isn't how he expected to end that sentence, and yet it feels apt now that he's drawn the comparison. Cato is the white rabbit, it seems, leading him into a world where nothing makes a lick of sense and a powerful old woman is offing people left and right. Or maybe he's the Cheshire Cat, considering how much easier he seems to be handling this situation.
no subject
He totally misses the reference. And now he's playing with the locks in the car because there is a novelty in this absolutely archaic form of transportation. He's re-interacting with a very normal past-times Earth as himself this time. Everything is new again.
"I don't actually know what eats what? Until a friend let me name his cat and then I wound up in this town, I only knew what cats were because my dad calls me spider-cat as a nickname."
Present tense, not past. His dad is a alive again - one of the best possible side effects of this regaining his memory thing.
"Because I am kind of what you might call cat-like? Cattish? When I'm in my normal body." There, he broke the ice. He cringes a little as he continues, "You know my super skilled cat alien OC? Who has space adventures? Fighting unspeakable cosmic horrors?"
no subject
The present tense goes right over his head; he's too busy trying to parse through the rest of what Cato is saying, which is more difficult than it really should be, considering everything he's saying is technically English. Something about cats and space adventures and he has no idea how this ties into Cygne attempted kidnapping.
"I knew all that acid I did in the eighties would catch up to me eventually." He takes a hand off the wheel to scrub it over his face, unsure where to even start with all this. "You're trying t'tell me that you're a cat?"
no subject
"Alien." There, the bomb has been dropped. He has no idea how to work on 'and you're from somewhere else, too,' but he needs to wait for the right moment. "I'm Ventrexian. Something changed me human and our memories of me being someone that grew up in this town are fake, up to a point. I think all the stuff with my art was my subconscious trying to tell me something."
And then he quickly adds, because it needs to be said, "And before you say it, I'm not crazy. I know this sounds like I went crazy but I'm not. Crazy doesn't magically teach you how to do flippies and shoot someone's gun out of their hand."
no subject
Points for originality; Crowley's fairly sure that Ventrexian isn't something Cato swiped from whatever small handful of sci-fi books are left in the library, though that doesn't actually help him wrap his head around the situation.
He exhales roughly at the disclaimer. "If I hadn't seen it for myself, I'd reckon you were crazy, but I'm wondering if I'm the one that's lost it." The way Cato moved was something out an action movie, even if he'd been secretly practicing karate or whatever, there's no way he'd be that good at his age.
Trying to rationalize it to himself isn't going to work. He needs to just roll with it and focus on their next move. "Is this why Cygne wants to kidnap you?"
no subject
He watches Crowley carefully, out of the corner of his eye.
Maybe mentioning the team will jog something.
"I've seen some of my teammates around town, too, acting like they belong here, so they must be brainwashed too. We're not even from this world, though. We're from a bunch'a different dimensions. Some are human, some aren't. All of us have powers, normally. We're all trying to stop something really bad, so we go to different places to save people."
He adds, "This world is kind of broken."
Cracking at the edges.
"But hey, a lot of worlds are."
His dimension is cracking at the edges too.
no subject
"Right. Alien superhero team, of course, what else could it be?" He isn't trying to be rude or dismissive, because he is trying to believe Cato, it's just that this is the best defense mechanism that he has.
Up ahead, he spots two officers strolling down the street, so he decides that he always intended to turn at the next left, taking them away from the potential patrol.
"If we figure out how to wake up the rest of your teammates, can you lot handle Cygne?" He is, frankly, useless, but he wants to do what he can to help Cato, even if that means finding these teammates of his, so that they can fix the problem.
no subject
If someone had told him that his life was fake and that he was secretly a cat-alien on a superteam, he'd have -
Okay, he'd have really wished it was true.
...but also it would've been scary. Maybe this is something to ease Crowley into. Hope as they go along, something clicks. Telling someone "your whole life is a lie" would be terrifying to them.
"You just saw me drop four cops in like ten seconds after starting unarmed. And I'm, like, 14. I'm one of the youngest so some of them are better fighters than me, even without powers. Some are complete tech geniuses." He nods. "So yeah, if enough of them remember, we'd be able to stop whatever she's doing. And whatever did this to us."
The confidence is complete and unwavering and it's partly that he's a deeply confident kid but also that he knows the group and their skills. He saw how a lot of them handled things in Project Prometheus's prison.
"Some of them will probably have a better idea of what to do, too. Like, they're good at leading and tactical stuff. I can engineer a little but I'm mostly just good at fighting."
no subject
"That's the plan, then. Find these teammates of yours, see if they've woken up." The relief he feels at having a solid plan is palpable. He's good at running away from things, but there's nowhere to run to right now, so the second best thing is having an idea of what the next step is, not just wandering aimlessly. "Do you know any of them, or have they all been changed like you?"
This is the moment when the Bentley would start playing Alanis Morrissette, if it was here.