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Well Mod ([personal profile] wellie) wrote in [community profile] wellcome2023-04-30 05:41 pm

2.1 Event Plotting

2.1 Event Plotting

OOC announcements
Welcome to Cycle 2! As we mentioned in the Wellstone Post: Special Edition, you're in a time loop! Sort of. The town of Wellstone is reset to how it was in February: all damage is gone and the town is like new. Well, like old. Anything that wasn't on your characters' person or in their hotel room is gone. Certain beats will repeat in cycle 2, like the pool being broken.

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 damage report form if your character damages or makes permanent changes to anything. Damage and change is permanent for the cycle.

Post any bulletins to the bulletin board.

Plotting/CR form


New this month

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 diner’s special for the month: agave nectar lemonade. Sweet, floral, just a little buzzy.

If you want to go for a swim, this month you’ll find an “Out of Order” sign on the door. Inside, the pool is bone dry.

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: “It’s good to see such a lively crop this month!”

Owner of the General Store: “Hope you staywell outta the graveyard, you hear me?”

The bartender: “Don’t be expectin’ any free drinks.”

The waiter: “Oh, I’m so excited you’re here! Here, on the house.” He serves you a milkshake in your favorite flavor.

The gravedigger: She watches you ominously.
The General Store is running a sale on walkie talkies. These two-way radios work within about the distance of 50 ft. You can share secrets with a friend!


Ghostly happenings
Content warnings: hauntings, injuries, scratching, intruders, sleep paralysis

This month, particularly at night, the air is thick and heavy. The night is watching you with eyes you can’t see, and your skin prickles with the awareness of it. It’s easy to feel paranoid and a little too-aware, particularly because something does actually seem to be following you.

You see it out of the corners of your eyes, in windows and mirrors, in shadowy corners and behind buildings, slipping out of sight: a silvery, misty shape, humanoid but otherwise hard to define. It would be fine, maybe, if it was just something following you, but there’s more.

You’ll come back to your room to find all the windows, doors, and drawers open, and your things scattered all over the floor. Something keeps pulling at your clothes and your arms when you’re not looking even when you’re not near one of those nasty cactus patches. Objects go sailing off tables when you’re around; you can’t seem to finish a meal before your silverware is being yanked off the table and your half-full milkshake flung against the wall!

Maybe you could even deal with that, but the longer the month goes on, the worse it seems to get. Scratches and welts appear on your skin, long, red, and angry, in patterns of five. Your sleep is disturbed, and full of nightmares that you’re levitating off your bed, or that a shadowed figure is crouching over you, leaning close to your mouth, whispering things in your ear that you can’t understand—are you sure that was just a dream? Even though you’re awake now, it seemed so real.

All this adds up to a pretty stressful month, especially if you’re alone. Sticking together, moving in pairs or groups, seems to lessen the hauntings for a while.

tl;dr:
  • You're haunted! Poltergeists are making your life hell.
  • They'll throw your things and leave your room a mess. They'll scratch you and disturb your sleep
  • Finding a buddy will make the hauntings easier to handle.

Attack-ti
Content warnings: blood, possible death, spines & needles

Cholla cacti are sprouting out of every crevice and reaching out with needles longer than they’ve ever been. By day, they look innocuous, just plants standing around. By night, they seem to move of their own accord.

Needles prick your skin, grab onto your clothes, and pull you in. Fighting it only makes it pull harder, and if you’re under the influence of the prickly pears or the agave, it will be all the more difficult to get away.

As you’re drawn into the patch, those wicked needles scratch and pierce your skin, burrowing their way into your body. It seems like they’re trying to drain you dry: the more you bleed, the weaker and more exhausted you get, and the more and more blood-red flowers bloom on the cholla. Struggling when you get caught in a cactus patch only seems to draw the thorns deeper, and much more quickly. The only way to get out is to stay completely still and move very slowly, and it’s very likely you’ll need help.

If you don’t find your way out the cholla patch, eventually, they’ll drain you completely and you will die.

tl;dr:
  • Cacti are sprouting everywhere, and at night they seem to move around.
  • The cacti grab you with their spines and pull you in. Resisting only makes them pull you in harder
  • Influence from the third prompt will make it even more difficult to resist the pull.
  • The only way to escape is to stay completely still. A little help won't hurt, either.



Superbloom
Content warnings: intoxication, disassociation, manipulation, forced intimacy, stalking

Everywhere you look, cacti are putting out frantic, swollen buds which burst open as soon as the sun goes down, eager to soak up the light from the high red moon. They open like eyes with eyelash-petals full and heady. You swear that some of them wink. A riot of wildflowers crowd around their feet and carpet open spaces, painting the desert in vast swathes of pink and orange and white, softening all its hard edges.

The nights are thick with a sweet scent that always smells just a little familiar, like home. Bright pollen drifts on the breeze, almost sparkling in the reddish moonlight, adding an air of mystery to the run-down little town. It’s beautiful and intoxicating.

Literally.

Resisting the draw of these flowers is very hard. Even if you don’t succumb to the urge to stick your nose in one—and that urge rises thick and fast every time you look at them—the pollen on the breeze might just do it for you, and each one comes with its own strange effect.
Prickly pear flowers: After one sniff, you’ll feel yourself retreat inside your own head, watching helplessly as your body moves of its own accord, like a puppet controlled by someone else. You can’t seem to speak or control anything at all. Your body will try its hardest to shove itself into one of the massive patches of cholla cactus that have sprung up around town.

Saguaro flowers: Suddenly, out of nowhere, you desperately crave intimacy. It’s entirely up the player what kind of intimacy that is, and how spicy it gets. It could be the sexy kind, making your body run hot, or it could mean you need to find the nearest person and get as emotionally close to them as you can possibly get, or that out of nowhere you’re so desperate for a hug that you’ll latch onto anyone close by.

Wildflowers: Fill you with a frantic, hyperactive energy. You’ll feel almost desperate to work it out of yourself through whatever means necessary, and even when you feel your body getting exhausted, you’ll just keep going until you pass out unless someone pulls you away and makes you rest.

Agave flowers: intoxicating. Make you delirious, hazy, almost drunk. You feel out of your own body, and are liable to wander away into the desert, following glittering pollen trails and the distant, flashing desert lights.

Cholla flowers: These only bloom after someone has been drawn into and drained by a cholla patch. They are bright red, and by far the most difficult flower to resist. If the flowers bloomed after you were trapped, smelling them fills with an intense, emotional longing for something you know you don’t have. You’ll be emotionally fragile and unstable for hours afterward. Smelling someone else’s flowers makes you minorly obsessed with them, and liable to stalk them around town until they pay attention to you.
tl;dr:
  • Cacti bloom at night, and different types of cacti pollen have different effects.
  • Prickly pear flowers make you disassociate and feel like you're being puppeted and directed into the patches of cholla cacti.
  • Saguaro flowers make you crave intimacy.
  • Wildflowers make you hyperactive.
  • Agave flowers are intoxicating and make you want to wander into the desert.
  • Cholla flowers bloom once someone has been drawn into the cholla patch. The scent makes you feel an intense longing and leaves you feeling fragile and unstable. If someone else smells flowers that bloomed for you, they will become obsessed with you and stalk you to get your attention.

hellonspectacles: (Default)

[personal profile] hellonspectacles 2023-05-28 06:42 pm (UTC)(link)
AMAZING. I love all of this!

Here's a little more about Pal's psychometry powers, which hopefully will help you with the final question! Pal is able to sense the presence of thalergy (life energy) and thanergy (death energy), elements that both power and are released when death occurs and life is created. Since cells are multiplying and dying all the time, everything organic is going to have a certain amount of thanergy and thalergy on it or around it.

When it comes to reading objects, I tend to interpret the above as meaning that Pal can do CSI-style forensic analysis, with a touch of carbon dating thrown in, but without needing fancy tools or chemicals. So he can, say, sense trace DNA left behind by skin cells on a coffee cup, or know that blood was spilled on a carpet (like they do with the blue light thingy), or figure out how old something is based on the rate of decay. He's able to pick up this kind of information for much longer and with much more precision than real forensic tools, but the longer ago something happened, the harder it is to pick up. It's also easier to sense places where death occurred and/or more organic material was left behind--so he can tell that someone bled out on a floor much more easily than he can tell that someone just walked across it.

Also worth noting that, particularly right now, all of the information he picks up is raw data. So, like, he can't tell who touched something unless he has another reliable sample to compare it to. He's also still figuring out, say, rates of decay, or what human versus non-human blood looks like, so whatever info you give me, he might not be able to interpret it perfectly. :D

So! The way he would go about figuring out if other people were once in Wellstone would be to examine various objects (including buildings and furniture) and ask: did anyone leave any particles of themselves behind? And does it seem like they did so long enough ago that it probably wasn't someone who is currently in Well? Are there any obvious sites of violence, death, and decay?