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Entry tags:
3.2 Event
3.2 Event Plotting
OOC announcements
Welcome to month 2! We're near the midpoint of the cycle and oh boy is it hot out there.There will be no event post on the main comm. Instead, make your own logs to include these prompts, and any other prompts you want to add. There will be a mini-event log mid-month.
Use the happenings form to report on what your character’s been up to! Did you break something? Did you get into a screaming match in the middle of town? Spill the tea! Everyone’s thirsty for gossip.
Post any bulletins to the bulletin board.
New this month
The weather
The weather continues to worsen. In addition to the dry heat from last month, heat lightning crackles across the skies at night, flashing bright. It’s joined by unusual lights in the sky. They seem to have migrated up from the edges of the desert, and they can be found hovering over town in strange formations, blinking at random before disappearing. When the lights are present, the air feels heavy, and smells of ozone.During the day, heat bakes the desert to a shimmering, cracked surface. Wildlife is practically nonexistent and even the cacti are starting to dry out. Some taller saguaros can be found swaying dangerously, their bases dry and thin. The desert is eerily silent.
At the hotel
The dining hall features one long table and the same meals every day: a nice, continental breakfast, sandwiches for lunch, and a roast for dinner.If you want to go for a swim, this month you’ll… also find an “Out of Order” sign on the door. Inside, the pool is bone dry. Uh-oh. There doesn’t seem to be enough water to fill it back up.
Water is in even shorter supply this month: The taps splutter and spit air instead of water occasionally. It takes forever to fill up a glass or a bottle. Showers will be even shorter, as the water will run out after around 3 minutes. Better hurry through that haircare routine! Don’t even try taking a bath, that tub won’t fill up.
The General Store
The General Store is still full of fun outer space paraphenalia. You can find stationary with stars on it, candles shaped like planets, slime with alien-shaped charms in it, plastic astronaut helmets, whatever your heart desires as long as it’s useless, novelty, and space-themed.This month, there’s a special on star-shaped pool floaties and novelty sunglasses! How helpful.
Around town
The diner’s special for the month: galaxy brownies! They’re thin, they’re gooey, they’re covered in chocolate frosting and cute little sprinkles.The jail’s back in action, and with it, everyone’s favorite Coyote Sheriff! This town is definitely big enough for him, too. He’ll be found at the jail during the day and the Cactus Pad at night, taking up a stool at the bar. Slide up a seat! He can’t speak any known language, but sometimes there’s value in silence.
When you visit the few other locations in town, you’ll find the employees friendly and welcoming, although they may say some strange things, in addition to the handful of phrases they usually say:
The receptionist: “Remember, we take water rationing very seriously here at the Staywell. Do your part to save water. It’s for the good of the town.”
Owner of the General Store: “Runnin’ a special on pool floaties! Make sure you stay cool in all this heat, y’hear?”
The bartender: “Remember: Alcohol dehydrates you.”
The waiter: “Boy, it’s a steamy one! How about a nice sweet tea to cool you off?” And he serves you a sweet tea, whether you want one or not.
The gravedigger: She’s nowhere to be seen during the day. At night, she’s digging graves.
The sheriff: Silently watches you like he knows what you did.
Wanted: Dead or Alive
Content warnings: incarceration, animal attacks
The sheriff’s back in town, and he’s got company. Everywhere you turn, there seems to be a coyote, perched on a barrel or crossing the street, watching you with bright, intelligent eyes. They’re not menacing, exactly. They’re not trying to hurt anyone, but they’re definitely watching, waiting for something.
Unfortunately, the sheriff isn’t the only thing that’s back.
Seemingly overnight, the town is absolutely plastered with posters.
Not just any posters: Wanted posters. With your face on them.
Or, well, something that’s probably supposed to be your face. Is that really how your nose looks? Each poster has a drawing of a character, as well as a crime (or list of crimes) they’re wanted for.
There can be as many wanted posters as you like, and as many crimes as you like. The crimes can be real, or made up. They can be serious, or not. The drawing of your character doesn’t even have to be very good.
Your wanted posters could have your given name, preferred name, or it might give you a new outlaw name, reminiscent of criminals in the Old West.
When you look at one, you’ll feel a very strong urge to confess to whatever is on the poster to the first person you see. The more you hold back this urge, the more explosive the eventual confession will be, so maybe just get it over with?
As you confess, you regain a memory in that moment of whatever you're confessing to, as long as it's a real "crime" that your character committed. The memory hits them immediately.
Too bad they don't have much time to take in what just happened, because The moment you confess, you and anyone around you will be swarmed with coyotes insistently trying to herd you to jail. You can get free of this with a little creativity, but the more you confess and escape, the harder they'll try to take you to jail. If they succeed, you'll be locked up for 24 hours before being set free.
You may regain up to 3 memory points with this prompt.
tl;dr:
The sheriff’s back in town, and he’s got company. Everywhere you turn, there seems to be a coyote, perched on a barrel or crossing the street, watching you with bright, intelligent eyes. They’re not menacing, exactly. They’re not trying to hurt anyone, but they’re definitely watching, waiting for something.
Unfortunately, the sheriff isn’t the only thing that’s back.
Seemingly overnight, the town is absolutely plastered with posters.
Not just any posters: Wanted posters. With your face on them.
Or, well, something that’s probably supposed to be your face. Is that really how your nose looks? Each poster has a drawing of a character, as well as a crime (or list of crimes) they’re wanted for.
There can be as many wanted posters as you like, and as many crimes as you like. The crimes can be real, or made up. They can be serious, or not. The drawing of your character doesn’t even have to be very good.
Your wanted posters could have your given name, preferred name, or it might give you a new outlaw name, reminiscent of criminals in the Old West.
When you look at one, you’ll feel a very strong urge to confess to whatever is on the poster to the first person you see. The more you hold back this urge, the more explosive the eventual confession will be, so maybe just get it over with?
As you confess, you regain a memory in that moment of whatever you're confessing to, as long as it's a real "crime" that your character committed. The memory hits them immediately.
Too bad they don't have much time to take in what just happened, because The moment you confess, you and anyone around you will be swarmed with coyotes insistently trying to herd you to jail. You can get free of this with a little creativity, but the more you confess and escape, the harder they'll try to take you to jail. If they succeed, you'll be locked up for 24 hours before being set free.
You may regain up to 3 memory points with this prompt.
tl;dr:
- Coyotes are around town, and they're watching you.
- The wanted posters are also back, and have your name, face, and list of crimes. The crimes can be real or fake.
- When you see your poster, you feel a strong urge to confess to the crime.
- If you confess, you both regain a memory of the crime, and you and whoever you're with will be immediately arrested and taken to jail by the coyotes.
- You can escape jail, or you'll be released after 24 hours.
Invasion of the Bodysnatchers
Content warnings: body horror, abduction
It happens suddenly. You’re minding your own business, going about your day or night, when a beam of light shines down from nowhere. It surrounds you, lighting up the ground and the edges of your vision, so bright that you can’t seem to see anything else. You’re paralyzed, standing there in the light; your limbs won’t respond to you, no matter what you do. The light flares brighter and brighter, and you’re lifted off your feet, pulled up off the ground by a force stronger than anything you know—
That’s the last thing you remember. Light, and levitation.
When you come to, you’re back in town, but you’re not where you were when you were taken. In fact, you aren’t even who you were when you were taken.
Congratulations: you’ve woken up in someone else’s body. All your memories and personality are otherwise intact, but you sound like them, you feel like them, and you certainly look like them.
Which might be a problem this month! Apparently, the sheriff and his coyotes can’t really tell that anything’s changed. Even worse: while you’ll still definitely feel compelled to confess to your crimes, should you see your own wanted poster, if you see the person whose body you’re piloting on a poster, you’ll feel the same urge to confess to their crimes as loudly as possible, and you can definitely still get arrested for them. Too bad there’s no such thing as a trial in this town!
To get your body back, there doesn't seem to be a way except to wait until the same light comes down and switches you back into your original form, although there’s an equally strong chance you’ll just become someone else instead. Everyone will be back in their original bodies by early October (although, feel free to have it take a little longer if you like!).
tl;dr:
It happens suddenly. You’re minding your own business, going about your day or night, when a beam of light shines down from nowhere. It surrounds you, lighting up the ground and the edges of your vision, so bright that you can’t seem to see anything else. You’re paralyzed, standing there in the light; your limbs won’t respond to you, no matter what you do. The light flares brighter and brighter, and you’re lifted off your feet, pulled up off the ground by a force stronger than anything you know—
That’s the last thing you remember. Light, and levitation.
When you come to, you’re back in town, but you’re not where you were when you were taken. In fact, you aren’t even who you were when you were taken.
Congratulations: you’ve woken up in someone else’s body. All your memories and personality are otherwise intact, but you sound like them, you feel like them, and you certainly look like them.
Which might be a problem this month! Apparently, the sheriff and his coyotes can’t really tell that anything’s changed. Even worse: while you’ll still definitely feel compelled to confess to your crimes, should you see your own wanted poster, if you see the person whose body you’re piloting on a poster, you’ll feel the same urge to confess to their crimes as loudly as possible, and you can definitely still get arrested for them. Too bad there’s no such thing as a trial in this town!
To get your body back, there doesn't seem to be a way except to wait until the same light comes down and switches you back into your original form, although there’s an equally strong chance you’ll just become someone else instead. Everyone will be back in their original bodies by early October (although, feel free to have it take a little longer if you like!).
tl;dr:
- Body swap! You get abducted by the lights around the town, stolen, paralyzed, and lose some time.
- When you come to, you're somewhere else, in someone else's body. You keep your own memories, personality, and skills.
- If you interact with the wanted posters, you'll feel the urge to confess to the person whose body you're in's crimes, and can be arrested for them.
- You can return to your own body, or swap to another character's body, by being abducted again.
- Everyone will be back to normal by early October.
UNEARTHED
Content warnings: N/A
The lights in the sky seem to congregate over an area in the desert, and that area looks a little different than the rest of the desert. While most of the desert around town is flat and featureless, this area is craggy and irregular.
If you follow the lights, you find something that wasn’t there before: maybe revealed by the storms, or brought by the strange lights in the sky, but now this area, roughly a mile outside of town to the east, is littered with strange structures: vehicles.
And not just any vehicles: ships. Ships of all kinds. Ships made for the sea, the sky, outerspace. Ships from your world, perhaps, or from any world. Giant starships to tiny dinghies. One ship is bigger than the others: a massive structure half-buried in sand, its curved hull visible even from the town, glimmering in the overbearing sunlight.
Parts from these ships are salvageable, from sheets of metal to wood to tech that may or may not work. It all looks very old and degraded by its time in the desert. Who knows what you might find in there?
Comment on the exploration prompt with what type of ship your character is exploring to see what you might find!
tl;dr:
The lights in the sky seem to congregate over an area in the desert, and that area looks a little different than the rest of the desert. While most of the desert around town is flat and featureless, this area is craggy and irregular.
If you follow the lights, you find something that wasn’t there before: maybe revealed by the storms, or brought by the strange lights in the sky, but now this area, roughly a mile outside of town to the east, is littered with strange structures: vehicles.
And not just any vehicles: ships. Ships of all kinds. Ships made for the sea, the sky, outerspace. Ships from your world, perhaps, or from any world. Giant starships to tiny dinghies. One ship is bigger than the others: a massive structure half-buried in sand, its curved hull visible even from the town, glimmering in the overbearing sunlight.
Parts from these ships are salvageable, from sheets of metal to wood to tech that may or may not work. It all looks very old and degraded by its time in the desert. Who knows what you might find in there?
Comment on the exploration prompt with what type of ship your character is exploring to see what you might find!
tl;dr:
- In the desert, a ship graveyard has been unearthed.
- You can explore the ships and find interesting and salvageable things. Comment on the exploration comment to see what you find!
Exploration
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Darin's adaptable and proficient at exploration but not so much sensitive electronics. He grew up in a port town so he knows a decent amount about ships and navigation. Also the type to look before leaping so if he found something dangerous, it wouldn't be all that surprising.
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Luckily for Darin, there's plenty of scrap metal left on that ship's massive bones. Unluckily, it's bolted down pretty intensely, so it'll take some doing to get anything off, and it's quite heavy! Even worse, each panel he pries free makes the rest of the trip a little more dangerous. It'll be tough to get everything back to town, although certainly possible.
With his proficiency in exploration, Darin will be able to get down into some parts of the ship that are clearly buried in the desert but not yet full of sand. He'll find what seems to have been some kind of cargo hold, long since gone empty, although there are a few rusted, hollow crates and what looks like the decayed skeleton of a smaller ship. If there was a crew on this thing, either their quarters and the bridge are buried in the desert or entirely gone: there's no real evidence of logs.
This is a big, dangerous, structurally unsound ship with a lot of tubes that drop down into the earth and end abruptly in sand. One wrong or careless move could spell trouble and necessitate some kind of daring rescue.
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Are there any salvageable tools. Things that can cut/weld metal or a rivet gun or anything of that nature that Darin can bring back and use to not only break down the ships but also use the tools to fortify the Staywell for the coming months.
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Key focus points: inscriptions/carvings on the structure (anything she can use her Mending skills on to get a better look at?), logs/records/anything with writing on it, any traces of latent magic that can be sensed (or any familiarity linked to the ghosts she's been reaching out to with Palamedes), trinkets
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While there isn't any lingering magic, there is a familiar air about the ship she ends up finding. It feels sort of papery on the skin, tastes a little bit like the air does when she's doing the seances.
Deep in the piles of half-rotted timber, if she's really determined to root around in there (there will be a lot of splinters and definitely a couple nests of scorpions to get through), Cece will find:
-a golden device with a hinge, which can eventually be pried open to reveal some kind of spinning disk, covered in the same sorts of flowery writing
-a long, rusted tube, smaller at one end than at the other
-a book, leather-bound and tied together. Most of the pages have rotted away or been torn out, and insects crawl through the spine, but careful turning reveals some pages with more of that flowery writing, mostly worn away but legible with some careful mending.
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AND tell me what could be read from the mended book pages after someone graciously gets rid of the bugs for me bc ew
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An Evil Pitch
The ship that will catch his attention while he's alone is this one here mostly buried in sand because huh, that's kind of a weird shape for a ship, what the hell is that?
But, I have an evil thought (approved by Joey). This would be a terrible time for him to switch bodies with someone, so we'd like to have Ryan get caught in a body swap beam right here (maybe there's a hole in the ceiling or it goes through the door or something) and switch with Min-Gi.
Is this feasible? And if so, what does Min-Gi find in this strange ship he's never seen before in his life? :)
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Once Min-Gi has figured out how to work his new limbs, with that door pried open he'll be able to make his way into precisely 1.5 spacetrain cars before being blocked by what seems to be just a whole bunch of sand. He'll find intact seats with their cushions long-since rotted away, leaving mostly tufts of padding and rotted bits of fabric everywhere.
Down near the end of the first car—which is a tough climb, because this thing is jutting diagonally into the earth—there appears to be a pile of about three suitcases. Two are fabric, or were, and only their metal clasps and a few scraps remain; one was a hardshell plastic sort of thing, and while it's been cracked open, there's more intact fabric in there, including what was once some weird space-agey clothing and a strange little bit of metal with bristles on the end.
Re: Exploration
He picks out something that's probably as big as a large party boat that would not look too out of place in a canon like Star Trek, or like underwater vessels that are properly designed and not likely to implode when it reaches a certain depth.
He's not especially trained, but he's from a world with a tech level comparable to our own.
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The space vessel has clearly seen better days: most of its cockpit is destroyed, but some of the computer components from its communications station can be salvaged. They're quite high-tech for someone from a modern world, and it won't be immediately clear how to use them or integrate them. More than that, they've clearly been fried and damaged, either by an impact or time, and will also need some expertise and time to bring back to life.
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Since Ariane has been on a ship like this before, she'll be pretty capable at exploring it. She will be particularly interested in any technology that resembles a radio, and any artistic/cultural artifacts.
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Ariane will also be able to tell that all of its systems were fried / overloaded at about the same time, resulting in a lot of radiant explosive damage. She'll be able to salvage some of the parts of various systems, but they'll require some work to get anywhere functional again.
Artifact-wise, there's actually plenty to find! You know better than we what sorts of things would be available, but generally, it'll be clear that this was a crewed ship and in fact that after it ended up here in this desert somehow, it was used as a temporary shelter by its crew for a little while. Feel free to get creative in terms of what Ariane actually finds to support that.
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annoyed sigh
are there any ships with like. sexy female figureheads that could be removed.
regardless Vic is drawn to wooden sea vessels without knowing why but his huge bigness means he can't climb or really get into them mostly. He wants to find cannons and cannonballs, and that's only partially because they're good for lifting. Maybe rope? Sailcloth? Hardtack?
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The ship she's on isn't in much better shape: it's falling apart in places, right down to the desert floor, which will make exploration a little easier for someone as big as Vic. It had, at one point, 6 cannons, 2 of which are still present. A few scattered, rusted cannonballs can be found strewn among the bleached wood, as well as a half-rotted ring of thick rigging rope.
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I am going to guess that the cannons are cracked/pitted and not useable even if there had been black powder but yeah sure he'll drag those across the desert, he's got the hoss hocks for it.
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Re: Exploration
I would love to have Cam explore a Gorgon-class ship like the one she was on while a prisoner of war between GTN and showing back up in HTN. We don't get a VERY good explanation of what it looks like, except that it's a little bit weird and presumably a little clunkier than a lightcraft should be. According to Judith, our expert on Empire-side military equipment:
What's a stele? Well, it's:
The blood is supplied fresh from some unfortunate necromancer who's also making sure it's running, and it keeps the blood fresh by passing it through two huge organic chambers at the bottom of what is otherwise I presume kind of a monolith since, eight feet tall and "stele". "Half open-work heart, half fountain."
(....and as I'm quoting this it sounds like a stele looks like a giant dick, and I've just never thought about the structure of where the chambers are. I would say I'm being a perv but honestly I don't discount Tamsyn Muir from doing it quietly and seeing if someone notices.)
Anyway, it's gross! Even if it's not that specific ship, the thing will probably be shooting death energy everywhere (...ew?) and also give John Gaius specifically the migraine of his life.
MOVING ON: Cam: is not specifically skilled at exploration, but she's pragmatic, tends to prepare for all eventualities, and has physical training in acrobatics and fighting, which although she'll be in Pal's lanky and not-good-with-strenuousness musculature at the time, she can still probably apply to not like, spraining an ankle, climbing on top of turned over things, etc. She's also extremely detail oriented and so is Pal, so that's good for ship exploring too.
She would want to: just find out ANYTHING; but would be fascinated by anything that links it to where she's from (pretty easy, since she remembers watching herself fight Marta with Judith watching, both of whom would've been in Cohort uniform, so insignia or colors or idk, a corpse of the pilot or people who died on board (fun!) who are still in uniform would all tip that off); any interesting history or, for that matter, conflicting history that she could pick up with Pal's psychometry; any knives or swords or useful bladed weapons (knives would be more likely to come from BOE unless they were a cavalier's offhand, so unless it's THE actual ship, they'd be rare and probably daggers; however a ship transporting Cohort personnel would have cavaliers and they'd all carry rapiers).
That said, she'd be INTERESTED in anything she finds, especially if there's anything particularly to link it to how it got there. She's most familiar with kind of weirdly old technology, so if not a spacecraft I'm almost tempted to want her to find like -- a pirate ship or something in the same age bracket AS rapiers, since John apparently decided he was going for not-even-quite-steampunk: they have spacecraft, but they don't have cameras or digital media or computers.
She'll be going out with Ariane and Pal, so it's possible to explore several ships.
Sorry for the novel! I should make that my signature lol.
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You can find old pirate ships--and I mean old. These ships are the most decayed of all, like they've been here for a very, very long time. The deck is sagging and half-gone, and the hull is full of sand.
There's a surprisingly low amount of death energy on the pirate ship.
As for how the ships got there: it's hard to tell. The systems are fried, but it doesn't look like they've been touched. There are no marks on the hulls. They don't even quite look like they crashed. They look like they just... got there. Were dumped there, sort of like a scrap yard. Like someone used them, then threw them out like old toys.
If you have other specific questions, let us know (and writing out the questions separate from the context would be helpful!).
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Thank you! And apologies for the messy format. I wasn’t quite sure what I was asking as much as throwing things as offerings if you wanted to use them, so it got kind of. Well. Novelly!
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But anything is good! He is a solid explorer. Got the strength to force open anything he needs to and a sensitivity to elemental magic.
Any journals, maps, and the like he will yoink back to safety.
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He can also find a journal in one of the old ships. It's old and rotted, but some of it is legible--if you could read it. It's in a language that can't be identified. But there are things in it that might perk his interest: little drawings of eyes in the margins, a sketch of a well. A word repeated over and over again on a page.
And, the name on the journal happens to match a name in the graveyard, one that can be easily found near the entrance.
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Re: Exploration
Wolfwood is going to focus on the smaller spaceships, figuring it's more likely they haven't been disturbed as much. his goals will be finding 1) any water stores 2) any nonperishable food 3) maps and 4) easily portable technology that looks intact (i.e. radios, a tablet, etc. he doesn't really know what to do with them but they're probably useful somehow)
Wolfwood is pretty perceptive and has better than average sight and hearing, so he can notice things that may not be obvious. he's inclined to go slowly and carefully. on the other hand, his approach to finding a stuck door or the like is "kick it for however long it takes to get through," which is not a recognized archeological technique.
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2. There are some rations, but nothing that one might consider delicious. It's all nutrition packs that taste like dust.
3. Most maps that there were are in the computers on the ships, and can't be accessed. However, in one small ship, they do have paper maps that will look entirely unfamiliar. There are annotations that are illegible, but one thing that might seem familiar are eyes sketched in the corner of one, and then violently scribbled out.
4. Yes, he can find communicators from various different worlds. None of them work, but they have parts that could be used to do--something!
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