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Well Mod ([personal profile] wellie) wrote in [community profile] wellcome2023-12-30 07:54 pm
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4.3 Event Plotting

4.3 Event Plotting

OOC announcements

Welcome to the end of cycle 4! Things look a little different this time around, and a lot the same.

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 end of the event (and end of year 1!) sum up posted toward the end of January.

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. Remember that this is now on the new [community profile] wellcomms community. And remember that you can annoy everyone in town by using your walkie talkie! What will your character do with all this power?!
Plotting/CR form

Fill out as much or as little of this form as you like:


New this month

At the Staywell

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.

The fires are built up high, and there's a new hot chocolate bar in the parlor, complete with mini marshmallows. It always seems stocked up, and the chocolate is very good: rich and deep and just the right amount of sweet. Oddly, there's also a jar of cayenne pepper too, in case that's something you want in your chocolate.

Several new books appear in the parlor throughout the month:
Silent Night, Deadly Night: A Holiday Homicide

Sleigh Ride to Suspicion: A Snowy Crime Tale

Yeti's Yuletide Yarn: A Cold-Blooded Comedy Caper

Navigating the Winter Storm: A Self-Help Toolkit for Life's Challenges

Penguin Power: Embracing Confidence in Your Tuxedo

Snowga: Achieving Zen in Subzero Temperatures

The General Store

The General Store has its usual, new selection of renaissance knick-knacks, and a new stock of hand mirrors that have rhinestone encrusted backs.

The walkie talkies for purchase are now all compatible with the network, and you can pick up some little charms that you can tie onto your walkie talkie, themed to renaissance faires and the old west (think cowboy boots, swords, fairies, etc).

Around town

The tavern’s special for the month: ice cream! Yeah, that's a great idea!

The pub is offering various cocktails, most of which are a deep, dark red and come in fancy glassware.

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: "Having trouble keeping you all straight these days! The Manor is truly thriving."

Owner of the General Store: "I tried to argue with my mirror, but it just reflected my points!" He laughs heartily at his own joke.

The bartender: "In for a cold one."

The waiter: Looks very uncomfortable. His voice is oddly high and he looks around with fear in his eyes. However, he doesn't deviate from his script aside from this.

The gravedigger: Is very hard to track down this month. It's nearly impossible to find your way to the graveyard. If you happen to, she does not look happy to see you there.

The sheriff: Stares wistfully out of the window in the bath house reception with a towel draped over his arm.


Whiteout
Content warnings: natural disasters, avalanche, cabin fever, crushing to death, strong possibility of death by snow
The snow doesn't stop. In fact, it gets much worse, falling thick and fast, building up around the buildings. Travel is difficult outside of the beaten path between the main buildings in town. The wind is frigid, and stepping outside will make your eyelashes frost after only a few minutes.

If you do go off the beaten path, it's easy to get lost. It's snowing so hard that your path might seal up behind you. For the first week or so, going into the forest offers some reprieve--at least from the driving snow--but finding your way back to the town is nearly impossible without some sort of help.

Snow hammers the town. It piles up. And up. And up. By week two, it's difficult even to travel to the tavern. In the whiteout conditions—by week two, it's a near-constant blizzard—even trying to go get a drink might just be a death sentence.

By week three, the Staywell is snowed in completely, the snow five feet high. The doors are frozen shut. There's still food and warmth to be found inside, which is great, because the rest of Wellstone is completely inaccessible, buried in snow. Hope everyone gets along, because you're stuck together for two weeks.

Week four, naturally, takes a turn for the worse. You might pray for a break in the weather, but there is none in sight. A constant screaming blizzard whips outside the Staywell, driving heavy wet snow into high drifts against its walls and windows. The first day, you can't see out of the first floor windows. Then the second. Then the third. Thin daylight peeks through the windows on the fourth floor until the last day of the month, when it's completely shut in. The roof creaks and groans under the weight. There's no telling how high it's piled on top of the Staywell, how heavy it is, until the last day of the month: about an hour before midnight, the world goes quiet except for the distant, muffled snap of ice and the creaking protest of the Staywell. The quiet lasts all of five minutes, and is splintered by an awful tearing crash when the roof bursts and snow pours in, trapping anyone unlucky enough to be on the fourth floor.

This seems to trigger an avalanche, which comes thundering in from all sides, breaking through the floors, pouring down the stairs. Avoid it as you might, it makes quick work of the Staywell and those inside it. There are few places to hide, if any, and it just keeps coming, burying the entire building in a frozen grave.

tl;dr:
  • The snow gets worse and worse over the month. Week one, it's hard to leave the center of town. By week two, it's impossible to go anywhere that's not one of the main buildings.
  • Week three everyone is snowed in at the Staywell.
  • Week four, the snow is burying the Staywell.
  • The last day of the month, the snow creates an avalanche through the Staywell, effectively crushing everyone to death.
  • As usual, you don't have to play out a character's death, and if it happens because of the storm, it does not have to count as a death per the memory mechanics.

Another Path
Content warnings: headaches, potential bleeding from the face, brain stuff that could lead to death
Coming out of the snow, you see a familiar face: someone who looks an awful lot like you. Only, a different you. A you who is who you could have been, if you'd made different choices, been born under different circumstances, in a different world.

Meet your alternate universe self.

You can choose any type of AU you want, including simply bringing the doubles from previous cycles back. The AUs know their whole history, and aren't missing any memories. They can know as much or as little about your character's time in Wellstone as you'd like. These AUs are like you, but also not like you.

The AUs try to integrate themselves into the ever-shrinking footprint of Wellstone. The one thing that unites them is that they feel second to you, the canon versions of them, and they hate you for that. They feel that they might be erased from this world at any second. Depending on they type of AU they are, they might want different things: they might want to replace you, like the doubles did, or they might want to sabotage you and ruin your reputation. They might want to make different choices than you did. They might want to be liked better by your friends than you are. If they want to replace you, they may try to capture or kill you, and they may pursue this doggedly to achieve their goal.

Your AUs will find themselves trapped in the Staywell with you the last two weeks of the month. This does make it pretty cramped in there. They seem to have their own rooms, but are difficult to follow when they don't want to be. They come and go as they please, and you never seem to know when one might appear, or where. If a character does find themself in a AU's room, it looks identical to the character's room in the Staywell, only the opposite orientation.

The AUs' touch will still hurt you, and anyone else they touch (except for other AUs). Their touch makes your head hurt, like the kind of hurt of trying to remember something you forgot. If they hold on too long, your head will feel like it's going to explode. If they hold on even longer, you may start bleeding from the face, and this may cause death.

tl;dr:
  • Your character now has an AU self wandering around! This AU can be anything: their double from a previous cycle, a canon AU, a crossover AU, a completely new AU.
  • The AUs feel inferior to their canon selves and want to replace them. This may mean they want to kill their canon selves, or that they want to ruin their reputation, or take their place socially.
  • If you touch an AU, your head hurts terribly. If they hold on too long, this could cause death.

Seeing red
Content warnings: death, murder, hallucinations, paranoia, hauntings, blood, compulsion to confess
The first time you and your AU touch, you gain a memory. However, this memory isn't yours. It isn't a canon memory, but one from the AU: a memory of a time for which you feel a great, heavy guilt. This will be a memory of time they killed someone, either directly or through the repercussions of their actions. This is not a canon memory and should be something completely made up. When you see this memory in your head for the first time, you then see blood on your hands, on your skin. No one else can see the blood but you.

If you have killed your double in a previous cycle, you may gain an additional fake memory, similarly of a time when you hurt or killed someone.

Your character will not be able to tell that these are not canon memories. The only way to discern that they are fake is through seeing blood on your hands afterwards, although your character will most likely have no reason to think that this makes the memory fake.

As the month progresses, you'll feel more and more intense guilt about this memory. You'll start seeing blood seeping out of the walls, bloody steps in the snow, blood on your hands.

This sense of guilt becomes more and more acute, and you may find yourself more prone to lashing out, physically or emotionally, particularly if you are in an enclosed space. You feel like others are staring at you, like they know your secret. Confessing it only makes the sense of guilt and hallucinations of blood go away for a short period of time.

If your character looks into a mirror, or a reflective surface, you see the reflection of the person, or people, who you supposedly killed looking back at you. They may talk or scream, but you can't hear them. They may even beat on the inside of the mirror glass, but can't get out.

You may also feel more likely to confess other things, too. Anything weighing on you might slip out as an attempt to assuage the sense of guilt.

The only way to make the guilt go away permanently is to kill your AU self, or for someone else to kill them. If your AU self is killed, the guilt brought on by the fake memory washes away and you feel lighter, and the world less harsh and judgemental.

There are no memory points to be gained during this event. The fake memories do not cost memory points, however it might be prudent to record them on the memory mechanics page.

tl;dr:
  • When you first touch your AU self, you gain a false memory of a time when your AU self killed someone or caused someone to be killed.
  • You feel a great, terrible guilt around this death, and see blood on your hands, in the snow, on other people.
  • You feel paranoid and are prone to lash out at others, particularly once everyone is trapped in the Staywell for the last two weeks of the month.
  • If you look into a mirror, you see the person or people you killed reflected back at you, screaming or begging for mercy.
  • Confessing your guilt relieves the guilt and the hallucinations of blood for a short time.
  • Killing your AU self relieves the guilt and hallucinations permanently.
  • The false memories do not cost memory points.
  • The guilt and hallucinations will be gone at the beginning of cycle 5, no matter if you kill your AU or not.

gideoncav: (24-11 | bored)

[personal profile] gideoncav 2024-01-03 03:17 am (UTC)(link)
pls feel free to assume gideon nav is or isn't hanging around on the outskirts of any investigation threads. she's just trying to make sure he isn't joining the ranks of corpses before cam gets back. #cav bro code
hellonspectacles: (Default)

[personal profile] hellonspectacles 2024-01-03 03:22 am (UTC)(link)
Beautiful. Plz assume that he just hands her things or asks her to measure things or starts talking nonsense to her.

Now I'm imagining Cam and Gideon comparing notes once she's back and they're friends. "Does he always do the thing where he just starts talking in the middle of a sentence?" "All the time."
go_loud: (pic#16877427)

[personal profile] go_loud 2024-01-03 03:58 am (UTC)(link)
(cam: *fistbump for gideon* also all the dessert, forever)

oh my god, i'm imagining pal just jumping into a thought completely media res (which will, obviously, be explained later on in the paragraph) with some excited reference to something that he knows cam knows (and has no real reason in well to know is unusual for cavs to understand)

and gideon just like O_o