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8.1 Event Plotting
8.1 Event Plotting
OOC info
The cycle is over. A new one has started. Right?
Fill out as much or as little of this form as you like:
New this month
The town is gone, and with it, all of the buildings. See below for environmental and NPC details.
THE WORLD AS WE KNOW IT
Content warnings: destruction, storm damage, trapped underground
When the world above the catacombs ends at the end of October, it ends up a crash of blood and sand. If you're in it, it feels like the end of everything, crushing the life from you in a blink.
If you're down below, safe in the catacombs, it feels like very little at all. The walls shake, and there are distant booms you can feel in your teeth, but otherwise it's a tiring night of waiting and watching, watching strangely-textured rock bounce down the walls. The rumbling keeps up all night. The waiter, having been dragged down to safety, flutters anxiously from person to person, offering hot chocolate seemingly from nowhere, thick and sweet. The world does not go dark. It doesn't end, and it doesn't start over. At some point, hours later, the rumbling just… stops, and everything goes very quiet and very still.
It's over, and everyone in the catacombs—including any NPCs dragged down—has made it through the end of the cycle. Welcome to the new world.
At first, it's hard to even get back up. All the entrances to the catacombs have been plugged up with a concrete-hard mixture of blood and sand, which hasn't quite set yet and will burst forward or ooze out of cracks. It'll take some digging to get back to the surface, and when you do, you'll be faced with a very changed Wellstone:
it is, essentially, gone.
It's like the aftermath of a volcanic eruption: the town is smashed to pieces, buried, spread out in the bloody debris field like a smashed insect. Timbers and boulders stick up at odd angles. There are half-filled craters, bits of cactus and wood and stone, keychains and walkies glittering here and there. The saloon and the diner are gone. The bathhouse is standing but full of mud and will need to be excavated.
The Staywell is a skeleton. It has cracked in half, its walls jutting up like teeth, mostly-buried. Its roof is gone and there is rubble everywhere. Anything characters want to retrieve from the rooms will need to be excavated, and you can comment below to see how that goes and what they can pull free.
This means character rooms and beds are inaccessible, and new accommodations will have to be built or found. There is no running water in town. There is no electricity. There is no weather: the sky is a clear, endless blue, and the sun is hot. It remains this way all month long.
In the catacombs themselves, new tunnels have opened. Branching away, opened out from cracks or rifts, are three newly-available paths: one dry and cracking, full of rocks and strange shapes; one wet and dripping, glowing faintly with what seems to be cave moss, smelling of rot; one small and dark and so low that it must be crawled through.
tl;dr:
When the world above the catacombs ends at the end of October, it ends up a crash of blood and sand. If you're in it, it feels like the end of everything, crushing the life from you in a blink.
If you're down below, safe in the catacombs, it feels like very little at all. The walls shake, and there are distant booms you can feel in your teeth, but otherwise it's a tiring night of waiting and watching, watching strangely-textured rock bounce down the walls. The rumbling keeps up all night. The waiter, having been dragged down to safety, flutters anxiously from person to person, offering hot chocolate seemingly from nowhere, thick and sweet. The world does not go dark. It doesn't end, and it doesn't start over. At some point, hours later, the rumbling just… stops, and everything goes very quiet and very still.
It's over, and everyone in the catacombs—including any NPCs dragged down—has made it through the end of the cycle. Welcome to the new world.
At first, it's hard to even get back up. All the entrances to the catacombs have been plugged up with a concrete-hard mixture of blood and sand, which hasn't quite set yet and will burst forward or ooze out of cracks. It'll take some digging to get back to the surface, and when you do, you'll be faced with a very changed Wellstone:
it is, essentially, gone.
It's like the aftermath of a volcanic eruption: the town is smashed to pieces, buried, spread out in the bloody debris field like a smashed insect. Timbers and boulders stick up at odd angles. There are half-filled craters, bits of cactus and wood and stone, keychains and walkies glittering here and there. The saloon and the diner are gone. The bathhouse is standing but full of mud and will need to be excavated.
The Staywell is a skeleton. It has cracked in half, its walls jutting up like teeth, mostly-buried. Its roof is gone and there is rubble everywhere. Anything characters want to retrieve from the rooms will need to be excavated, and you can comment below to see how that goes and what they can pull free.
This means character rooms and beds are inaccessible, and new accommodations will have to be built or found. There is no running water in town. There is no electricity. There is no weather: the sky is a clear, endless blue, and the sun is hot. It remains this way all month long.
In the catacombs themselves, new tunnels have opened. Branching away, opened out from cracks or rifts, are three newly-available paths: one dry and cracking, full of rocks and strange shapes; one wet and dripping, glowing faintly with what seems to be cave moss, smelling of rot; one small and dark and so low that it must be crawled through.
tl;dr:
- The town of Wellstone is gone, and did not reset.
- Everyone in the catacombs lives through the end of the cycle, including the NPCs who were saved, and wakes blocked in.
- Characters can explore both further in the catacombs and in the ruined town once they can find a way out.
- Since rooms, beds, and sources of food are gone, characters must find new ways to survive in the catacombs.
I FEEL FINE
Thankfully, you aren't alone in rebuilding what you can. The waiter seems incredibly grateful to have been saved, and is more talkative than ever this month. While he still says all of his old phrases, he seems to pitch them and various words in a way like he's actually trying to respond to you with his limited vocabulary. He flits around all month, variously making faces at the state of the town if he's allowed to see it, offering people food and hot chocolate—which, it turns out, he's sourcing from the glittering room in the catacombs, and which only turns out wrong half the time—and generally trying to make everyone feel better with new peppy phrases like:
"Chin up! It can't get worse! Well, it could, but maybe it won't!" and
"Hey, we'll get through this together!" and
"Where there's a will, there's a way! Probably!"
Occasionally and fervently, especially for anyone who helped in his rescue, he'll say,
"Thank you. Don't worry about me."
He may say other things if directly asked. Comment below to ask him basic questions.
Drinking his hot chocolate does seem to calm you down and give you a sense of focus.
When he's not serving food or trying to help, the Waiter and the other NPCs can often be found clustered near the wall with the opened tunnel, peering inside without entering.
tl;dr:
- The waiter seems to have a new spark of life to him, and seems to be trying to respond to characters and to help.
- He serves hot chocolate that calms you down.
- He can be spoken to and may try to respond.
DEEPER
Content warnings: tentacles, body horror, psychological horror
After about a week the walls, already a strange, fleshy mixture of stone and something else, seem to grow… lumps. At first, they almost look like raised fissures or long dark cracks stretching along the walls and up the ceiling, running along the rock like veins. They're hard as rock except that they seem to pulsate. As they appear, something else thrums in the background: a slow, rolling rhythm that can be felt more than heard, rattling through the bones like a deep drumbeat. It starts as just a vibration in the back of the teeth, barely noticeable, always the same low, deep, strange rhythm.
As the month goes on, both the growths and the rhythm get more noticeable. The growths get bigger, wider. More appear, stretching along the walls, pulsing, notably not in time with the background beat. By week three, they're moving like sinuous tentacles under the rock, and every single one of them leads right back…
to that tunnel, half-open and almost always watched by at least one NPC. The rhythm is louder there, too, and harder to ignore. Whenever you're close to the tunnel mouth, the dissonance between the writhing rock tentacles and the background beat makes your bones feel wrong. If you stand too close for too long or enter the tunnel, it's so strong that it supersedes your own heartbeat, sending your blood through your body in a beat that doesn't make sense and leaves you dizzy and sick to your stomach.
Worse: while the tentacles seem harmless at first, after a while they burst out of the rock at particularly weak joints and slither, fleshy and awful, until they find flesh, and then they do something very familiar: try to burrow, just like the ones last month. By week three, the tentacles will be everywhere and making an awful nuisance of themselves, burrowing and breaking, scraping and pushing.
Trying to enter the tunnel is an awful feeling, but the longer you spend in there, the more your brain seems to throb. Every time you enter the tunnel and stay for longer than five minutes, gain a memory point. There is no limit to this. At the end of the tunnel is thick, fleshy rock-meat that pulses loud and awful. It can be excavated, but it will be bloody, awful work.
tl;dr:
After about a week the walls, already a strange, fleshy mixture of stone and something else, seem to grow… lumps. At first, they almost look like raised fissures or long dark cracks stretching along the walls and up the ceiling, running along the rock like veins. They're hard as rock except that they seem to pulsate. As they appear, something else thrums in the background: a slow, rolling rhythm that can be felt more than heard, rattling through the bones like a deep drumbeat. It starts as just a vibration in the back of the teeth, barely noticeable, always the same low, deep, strange rhythm.
As the month goes on, both the growths and the rhythm get more noticeable. The growths get bigger, wider. More appear, stretching along the walls, pulsing, notably not in time with the background beat. By week three, they're moving like sinuous tentacles under the rock, and every single one of them leads right back…
to that tunnel, half-open and almost always watched by at least one NPC. The rhythm is louder there, too, and harder to ignore. Whenever you're close to the tunnel mouth, the dissonance between the writhing rock tentacles and the background beat makes your bones feel wrong. If you stand too close for too long or enter the tunnel, it's so strong that it supersedes your own heartbeat, sending your blood through your body in a beat that doesn't make sense and leaves you dizzy and sick to your stomach.
Worse: while the tentacles seem harmless at first, after a while they burst out of the rock at particularly weak joints and slither, fleshy and awful, until they find flesh, and then they do something very familiar: try to burrow, just like the ones last month. By week three, the tentacles will be everywhere and making an awful nuisance of themselves, burrowing and breaking, scraping and pushing.
Trying to enter the tunnel is an awful feeling, but the longer you spend in there, the more your brain seems to throb. Every time you enter the tunnel and stay for longer than five minutes, gain a memory point. There is no limit to this. At the end of the tunnel is thick, fleshy rock-meat that pulses loud and awful. It can be excavated, but it will be bloody, awful work.
tl;dr:
- Tentacles snake under the rock walls of the catacombs, growing larger and more numerous over the course of the month.
- At the same time, a deep, throbbing rhythm pounds louder and louder.
- The tentacles will attack much like the tentacle room, probing if not cut off or stopped somehow.
- The tunnel feels awful, and the rhythm changes your heartbeat and makes you dizzy and nauseous, but you'll regain memory points by trying to go through. The end cannot yet be reached.
Catacombs Exploration
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Broken Town Exploration
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In the end, he'll find most of his work somewhat intact, with one notebook (your choice of contents!) damaged nearly beyond repair and most others with at least some torn/ ripped / very bloody sections. He'll also find evidence of Cecelia's archive.
Edit to say: call it about 75% salvagable.
Slides in so, so very late.....
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Waiter Questions
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Would he be willing to cater a party?
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He is 100% willing to cater a party and is visibly excited by the prospect. Once asked, he will spend a LOT of time prepping for it.
Re: Waiter Questions
* Where are you from?
* How long have you been here?
* Can you tell me about any of the people who were here before?
* Do you know José Burch, Sherman Navarro, or June?
* Which tunnels should we explore? Should we be looking for something in particular?
* Do you know how we can leave Wellstone?
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"I think," he says, slowly and hesitantly, like he's picking each word, "they— we— were wrong. Killing something—" a long beat, and a visible struggle to continue, "it never does solve anything. Do you understand?"
Other Questions
Re: Other Questions
ETA: sorry, I should have gathered all my questions first!
How do the wall growths compare to other fleshy things they’ve encountered? Biologically/materially, are they similar to the flesh walls? To the tentacles? To the blood from the taps? The eyes? All of the above? Pal is basically trying to figure out if all the grossness is from one creature!
Is it possible to stay so long in the pulsing tunnel that you pass out or are otherwise seriously injured? Asking for my blorbo with no sense of self-preservation.
…is there anything weird in the hot chocolate?
OH, and just to double check: there are still bones around in the catacombs, right?
cw: body horror & blood
The wall growths are basically identical to the tentacles, and very similar to the eyes. They are not similar to the flesh walls.
It is absolutely possible and indeed likely to pass out in the tunnel, and if this happens, it'll be pretty awful! Pal's heartbeat will sync to the strange rhythm, which won't be circulating his blood correctly. He'll wake up eventually disoriented and bleeding from the ears with limbs gone fully numb and some extremities completely bloodless. He'll likely need to be pulled free, but could possibly drag himself back to the entrance before collapsing.
There's... glitter?
There are absolutely still bones in the catacombs, yes!
Re: cw: body horror & blood
Let's say Pal constructed some skeletons and directed them to dig the pulsing rock-meat: what would they find? They'd fall apart as soon as Pal passed out, so it would be limited to what they could get done while he was still conscious.
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Your pronouns: He/Him
Contact:
Character name: Darin Altway
General ideas or plans for the month: OKAY SO: Darin is going to step up with a semblance of a plan once he gets his bearings. The way he sees it, there's two things that need doing and he'd like to try and assemble teams for each.
Rebuild/Excavate the Staywell
-Darin's reinforced this place so many times he can do it in his sleep at this point so he's probably going to want to do this but he'd be open to delegating someone else to work on it with his plans. The way he sees it, whatever's gonna happen, they need the Staywell to weather it.
Explore the three new tunnels
-They're going to need to map out and see what the hell's in these new tunnels and Darin would prefer it if small groups checked them out. Maybe we could get some small groups with a team lead to coordinate? I'm up for orchestrating it via Darin
All in all, four total teams would be his proposal. One for each new tunnel and one to help excavate and work on the Staywell. With Darin's magic, he'd make more headway on the Staywell for sure.
Event ideas: NOTHING YET, playing this by ear.
Are you planning to create a log this month? PROBABLY
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Your pronouns: She/her
Contact:
Character name: Palamedes Sextus
General ideas or plans for the month: Pal is going to be running around doing so! Many! Things! Mostly along the lines of trying to keep people as safe and comfortable as they can be in these weird circumstances, while also attempting to find a way the hell out of Wellstone. In particular he’ll be
- Spending a lot of time talking to the waiter and getting some very interesting answers
- Creating skeleton constructs that can be used to build, dig, and do other manual labor
- Salvaging what he can from the Staywell
Eventually he will also try to explore the Spooky Heartbeat Tunnel—in fact, he’s going to stay in there long enough, trying to figure out what’s going on, that he’ll pass out. Someone please rescue him!
Are you planning to create a log this month? Yep!
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Also, I just asked the mods what could be excavated from the rock-meat at the end of the tunnel and I can make sure to ping you when we find out, muahaha.
Gideon Nav & Ezri Dax
Your pronouns: they/them
Contact:
Character name: Gideon Nav
Character name: Ezri Dax
Are you planning to create a log this month? Y, I'm going to do TLs for radio reactions at least!