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7.1 Event Plotting
7.1 Event Plotting
OOC info
Welcome to the beginning of cycle 7! The town is fresh and... not exactly new, but you know. It's back in all its dusty glory. The sun is hot, the sand is hot, the food is hot, and the pool is hot.
Use the happenings form to report on what your character’s been up to!
Post any bulletins to the bulletin board and bother your fellow guests with your walkie-talkies!
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 steaming hot corn soup for dinner, extra-spicy.Throughout the month, new books appear on shelves in the hotel lounge:
Heat Wave: A Steamy Romystery
Fighting Every Active Revulsion: How to Power Through the Fear
Murder in Paradise
The Butler Really Did Do It, subtitled A Cozy Cactus Mystery
BEHOLD
Plumbing the Depths
BEHOLD is particularly incomprehensible this month, written in a language no one here seems to be able to understand. Plumbing the Depths is a terribly-written guide to emotional intimacy.
The pool is full of water this month! Unfortunately, that water is murky, hot, and.... smells weirdly like coffee. Actually, it might just be coffee. Gross.
The General Store
The General Store's stock is looking a little thin this month except for various forms of tacky memorabilia reading SEE MYSTERY LIGHTS and a new display of those little gas-station name keychains. Every character currently in-game has a keychain with their name on it but spelled very slightly wrong.Around town
The diner’s special for the month: hot fries! These are just fries absolutely covered in cayenne pepper. They are so spicy.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: Aggressively normal, and smiling way too wide. He drops in the occasional, "Wouldn't want to wander too far into the desert. Take a dip in the pool to keep the edge off."
Owner of the General Store: "Hey! Hey! Hey! Those lights! Hey!"
The bartender: Looks up at you when you walk in, opens her mouth to say something, and stands with her mouth open for an uncomfortably long time before walking away.
The waiter: Somewhat frantically greets you with, "Hi, darling! Those stars sure are bright, aren't they? I just love 'em. Love 'em to death." You're handed two milkshakes, the same flavor, overflowing with whipped cream.
The gravedigger: Digging in the same exact spot all month. She digs a hole, then fills it in again, then starts to dig anew.
The sheriff: Whining quietly under his breath whenever anyone walks in.
The weather
Hot. Hot hot hot and dry. The ground feels like dust beneath your feet, little puffs of dust cloud around each footstep. The sky is clear and the sun is bright.The catacombs
The catacombs are cool, dark, and mercifully free from eyes. In one of the tunnels, a wall has a large, dark crack in it.The Walls Have Eyes
Content warnings: feelings of paranoia, many eyes
The sun is hot, the town is dusty and full of rattlesnakes, and there are eyes absolutely everywhere.
Everywhere.
They're in the walls, yes, but they're also blinking on your pillow when you go to sleep at night. They wink into existence in the bottom of your coffee cup, straining up to look at you. They bloom in the faces of the NPCs, on drink bottles and wild animals and cacti. They even sometimes appear on your clothes.
They are all colors, shapes, sizes, and designs. All of them are trained on absolutely anyone they can see, bulging with the effort to follow you from place to place. They blink in and out of existence at different paces, but they're always there, and they're always watching. Their gaze prickles uncomfortably along your skin, so piercing it seems they can see right into your soul.
You have no idea what they want. It doesn't seem that they know what they want, or that they're going to do anything but watch you.
There's only one place in town to get away from the eyes: the catacombs. Once you descend into their depths, the eyes disappear from anything on your person they were on, and none spawn on the walls. The catacombs are weird and creepy, yes, but it feels like more of a relief than usual to escape the desert heat and all those eyes and descend beneath the earth. It feels like you can relax down there.
tl;dr:
The sun is hot, the town is dusty and full of rattlesnakes, and there are eyes absolutely everywhere.
Everywhere.
They're in the walls, yes, but they're also blinking on your pillow when you go to sleep at night. They wink into existence in the bottom of your coffee cup, straining up to look at you. They bloom in the faces of the NPCs, on drink bottles and wild animals and cacti. They even sometimes appear on your clothes.
They are all colors, shapes, sizes, and designs. All of them are trained on absolutely anyone they can see, bulging with the effort to follow you from place to place. They blink in and out of existence at different paces, but they're always there, and they're always watching. Their gaze prickles uncomfortably along your skin, so piercing it seems they can see right into your soul.
You have no idea what they want. It doesn't seem that they know what they want, or that they're going to do anything but watch you.
There's only one place in town to get away from the eyes: the catacombs. Once you descend into their depths, the eyes disappear from anything on your person they were on, and none spawn on the walls. The catacombs are weird and creepy, yes, but it feels like more of a relief than usual to escape the desert heat and all those eyes and descend beneath the earth. It feels like you can relax down there.
tl;dr:
- The walls, the floors, and just about everything else are covered in unblinking eyes watching you.
- The eyes appear and disappear at random.
- The catacombs are the only place in town free of eyes, and feel somewhat relaxing as a result.
See Mystery Lights
Content warnings: not being in control of your own body
All over town, seemingly overnight, signs appear. Some are the size of post-its; a few are billboards that tower over the buildings; many are somewhere in between. All of them read the same thing:
SEE MYSTERY LIGHTS
Well.
It's pretty clear, at least, what that means: lights shimmer out in the desert, near as bright as the stars and a hundred times more ominous. The moment the sun begins to fade, they glimmer into existence, shimmering pink and then green and then a hundred other colors. Sometimes they're hovering right outside your window. Sometimes they're a distant shimmering thing out in the scrubland competing with the stars. They are irresistible.
Seeing the mystery lights is going toward the mystery lights: you are drawn like a moth to a flame, full of a burning need to See or maybe to Understand. There might be whole groups of people making pilgrimages into the desert night after night, trying to get to the lights.
So what happens when you reach them?
Whether you go to the lights or the lights come to you, the moment you touch them they flare bright and expand into little shimmering oases of memory, made real, playing out right there in the desert. They might be yours, or those of the people drawn out with you. They might belong to someone…. else. There are a few special memories that definitely do not belong to a player character.
No matter what the memory is, who it belongs to, or how long you spend in the lights, you feel whatever the main emotion is in the memory deeply, intensely. It thrums through you and overwhelms you. When you're spit back out into the night wet-faced and crying. Your emotions feel bigger than yourself, too big to handle, like they're going to split out of your skin if you don't get them out. Talking seems to help. Talking about what you just saw really seems to help. For a while afterward, you'll crave company of some kind, at least until the next time you're wandering out in your pajamas to look at the lights.
Up to 3 memory points can be regained by interacting with this prompt, one per time you interact with the prompt, whether it's your memory or someone else's.
tl;dr:
All over town, seemingly overnight, signs appear. Some are the size of post-its; a few are billboards that tower over the buildings; many are somewhere in between. All of them read the same thing:
SEE MYSTERY LIGHTS
Well.
It's pretty clear, at least, what that means: lights shimmer out in the desert, near as bright as the stars and a hundred times more ominous. The moment the sun begins to fade, they glimmer into existence, shimmering pink and then green and then a hundred other colors. Sometimes they're hovering right outside your window. Sometimes they're a distant shimmering thing out in the scrubland competing with the stars. They are irresistible.
Seeing the mystery lights is going toward the mystery lights: you are drawn like a moth to a flame, full of a burning need to See or maybe to Understand. There might be whole groups of people making pilgrimages into the desert night after night, trying to get to the lights.
So what happens when you reach them?
Whether you go to the lights or the lights come to you, the moment you touch them they flare bright and expand into little shimmering oases of memory, made real, playing out right there in the desert. They might be yours, or those of the people drawn out with you. They might belong to someone…. else. There are a few special memories that definitely do not belong to a player character.
No matter what the memory is, who it belongs to, or how long you spend in the lights, you feel whatever the main emotion is in the memory deeply, intensely. It thrums through you and overwhelms you. When you're spit back out into the night wet-faced and crying. Your emotions feel bigger than yourself, too big to handle, like they're going to split out of your skin if you don't get them out. Talking seems to help. Talking about what you just saw really seems to help. For a while afterward, you'll crave company of some kind, at least until the next time you're wandering out in your pajamas to look at the lights.
Up to 3 memory points can be regained by interacting with this prompt, one per time you interact with the prompt, whether it's your memory or someone else's.
tl;dr:
- The desert at night is full of shimmering lights that call you helplessly toward them.
- Touching the lights means seeing a memory: yours, someone else's, or a special memory not belonging to player characters.
- When you exit the memory, anyone who witnessed it is crying and full of emotions for a while afterward.
- You can gain up to 3 memory points using this prompt.
Special Memories
Memory 1
Sparks pop. They flicker, glittering, into the sky, joining a few early stars glimmering there. The air is stiflingly still. The shape sips the warm beverage in a warm tin cup, clutched in a hand that, when you look at it, fizzes into static. That's alright. You feel content out here with the popping wood and your own breath.
Something buzzes in your teeth. The liquid in the cup sloshes into perfect, even rings. A sandstone pebble by your feet jumps once, twice. The logs in the fire shift restlessly, exposing their charred bellies as the fire slumps to one side.
The shape sits up suddenly, attention pricked.
Out on the horizon, a town explodes.
You can barely see it from way out here but it still looks beautiful the way destruction always does. Buildings go up in flames like matchboxes, barely more than flickering horizon lights. If you listen closely, you can just hear the screams when they start.
The straining shape, somehow laughing, lets the cup drop, spilling dark liquid onto the sand as it leans forward to press its fingers into the desert's shaking skin.
Memory 2
"Almost, almost..." their voice says, equally indistinct.
Up ahead, down the tunnel, something shimmers. The air vibrates, and the person gasps and starts to move quickly, running along the stone, breaking out into a giant cavern, huge and imposing, filled with... something. If this person is indistinct in a mundane way, whatever this is is indistinct in a huge, overwhelming, incredible way.
It pulses and flares, light and sound and vibration moving too quickly for your eye or your mind to comprehend it. It's awe-inspiring. It's incredible. You feel overwhelmed, like everything you've been seeking is suddenly in front of you: every goal you've ever had, every wish is fulfilled. The person steps toward the pulsating mass and drops the flashlight. They don't need it anymore. They don't need anything else anymore.
Memory 3 // cw: body horror, tentacles, gore, torture
The static person steps up to the slab and you can see their head tilt as it observing Jose's suffering. Jose gurgles and screams as the tentacles pierce his chest, ripping it down with no regard for his life. The static figure watches and makes no move to help him.
The tentacle leaves Jose's mouth and delves into his open chest, and he cries out and curses, sobbing and begging, "god, please! Haven't you done enough?! Haven't you done fucking enough?!"
The tentacles press between his ribs, over his heart, like they're looking for something.
The static figure is quiet for a moment, and then replies: "no."