wellcome | Event 2.2

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OOC announcements

Welcome to month 2 of cycle 2! The repeating beat of this month will be the coyote sheriff, who will be coming into town for the mini-event on the 15th.

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 permanent change 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: watermelon, fresh and cold, cut daily.

When you first leave the hotel this month, the receptionist will give you a canteen, on the house, to stay hydrated out there.

The pool seems to be working again! The water’s cool, and little lounges line the edges. Floaties are available in a variety of novel shapes. Swimsuits appear in everyone’s wardrobe.

You can find weapons in odd places: swords in a barrel behind the Cactus Pad, a gun in your nightstand, maces on sale in the General Store, bows and arrows by gravestones. The vast majority of these weapons, it turns out, are useless: the guns will shoot flags that say “bang” and the mace is foam; arrows explode into confetti when fired. Some of them are real, but not many!

Also of note: the jail is back exactly the way it was, although without its resident sheriff, for the time being.

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 beautiful when it’s hot, around here. You can see the heat haze on the sand.”

Owner of the General Store: “Running a special on cactus juice! It’ll really quench ya.”

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 General Store is running a special on bottled cactus juice (two for one! It’ll let you explore the desert for just a little longer). You’ll also find pellet guns in the back, marked down to 25% off, and labeled “just in case!”

You can also find an unobtrusive rack of climbing gear, including a lot of rope, at the back of the store. It's covered in dust, but you're pretty sure you've never seen it before.

THE DESCENT

Content warnings: extreme weather, heights

The heat kicks off strong, searing the morning into existence and making the center of town all but unbearable by midday. The night is broken by hot, dry winds blowing in from the desert, offering no relief. All over town, the ground bakes, hardens, and cracks. It begins as a baked-out mudplain, with shallow cracks spiderwebbing across the streets and out into the desert.

After a couple days, sharp bangs sound in the night, and characters will wake to find the town criss-crossed by rifts running all over town and deep into the desert. They range in size from a few inches across to a couple dozen feet across. It’s unclear how far any of them extend down, but they are explorable.

You’ll have to descend carefully. Rocks tumble in from the edges, and footholds may fall away as soon as they’re stepped on. It gets hotter the deeper you go, and you have to go deep. They may seem bottomless at the beginning, but eventually the bottom of the canyon appears, far enough down that the sky is a thin line of light far above.

Down here, it’s hot as hell and very dark. Rocks jut down and up from the ground like rotten teeth. The air is stale, hot, and smells like rotting flesh. Be careful where you walk: more cracks appear in the reddish rock, sometimes right where you’re stepping. The canyon echoes with awful, creaking groans. Not a pleasant place to be, but maybe it’s worth sticking it out, because winking here and there from between the sharp rocks are artifacts, and occasionally dry, old bones.

Scattered among the rocks are old stone tools and tool points, belt buckles, lead bullets and twisted metal pieces. Some of them look like they belong there. Many don’t. Their shapes are too rounded, too strangely modern, even futuristic. Plenty to investigate (and feel free to), but even more interesting is the occasional artifact that looks not just out of place but familiar.

That’s right: secreted in the rocks and dust are items from home. Nothing massive—no one’s going to be finding a car down here—but if it might conceivably have been on a character’s person or in their home at one time, it can be found down here. No matter what it is, it looks like it’s been down here for hundreds of years, buried in rock and dust. No technology will work, and no magic remains on anything magical.

Each character can find two or three small items, or one large, important from home down here. Touching the items can either give you a memory point, or trigger an immediate regain of a one-point memory associated with the item.

tl;dr:

It's hot as hell out there, during the day and the night
Fissures of all sizes open in the ground, the largest of which can be explored
In the fissures are artifacts and items from home
This is the memory-regain prompt for this month!

DRY BONES

Content warnings: Potential psychological and physical horror, body horror, rotting flesh, zombies, skeletons

Artifacts aren’t the only things that turn up in the fissures. They’re full of noises: rattling, groaning, rocks clattering, wind howling; they smell terrible, and more than that, they are terribly dangerous.

Why is that?

Well, because of the zombies, of course.

They crawl out of the rifts, and worse, spew out of every crack in the earth big enough for them: half-rotted, bone-filled undead things. Some of them are just human arms, crawling spider-like along the ground. Some are entire skeletons, human or otherwise. Decaying coyotes shake dust from their leathery skin; bone snakes slither and rattle in the shadows. They’re in various stages of decay, from freshly-dead to rattling skeletons, and every single one of them is fast, strong, and vicious. They’ll swarm with a vengeance after any living creature they can find, and they seem particularly bent on getting to the residents of Wellstone by any means necessary. If they do get their hands (or claws, or teeth) on anything living, they’ll release an unholy, awful howl, gathering as many other zombies as possible to help them tear their prey apart. It’s a bad way to go! Probably don’t get caught.

They’re killable on their own, but the more there are, the stronger they get, and they don’t stay dead for very long, especially since dismembering them just pisses them off.

The only non-violent undead creatures are the bone horses. These rattly gentle giants can be found out near the edge of town, nibbling on tumbleweeds. They spook easy, and they look just awful, with their exposed bones and glowing red eyes, but they’re actually quite nice, and they can absolutely be tamed and ridden. This is much easier, you'll find, if you're actively wearing a cowboy hat. The hat seems to make you able to ride a horse even if you couldn't before. Weird!

tl;dr:

Skeletons and zombies of all kinds pour out of the cracks in the ground!
They're strong, fast, and work as a group to try to overwhelm characters and tear them apart.
There are also skeleton horses. They are friends and can be ridden, especially when you're in cowboy gear.

THE MONSTER INSIDE

Content warnings: Monster transformation, body horror

The heat really seems to be getting to everyone. It’s oppressive, even indoors. Without fans, even the thick stone walls of the Staywell don’t keep the heat out. It’s hard to sleep, it’s hard to focus, and something strange is happening.

Every time you catch a glimpse of yourself in a reflective surface, be it mirror, pool, glass, or really large belt buckle, you see something else.

You see a smug little smile, your own face looking back out at you with malice familiar to anyone who encountered their double during the storm. Your reflection grins at you, making a face you’re not making; they lean in close, and mouth something you can’t seem to understand, their breath fogging up whatever surface they’re in. Blink, and their face changes again: it becomes monstrous, twisted, with fur and fangs and strange ears and scales. An awful feeling washes over you, sick and cold and strange, but nothing noticeably changes. It’s still hot, the air is still thick, and there are still skeletons outside.

It’s just that, from that moment forward, it becomes incredibly easy to give in to your worse impulses, whatever they may be. Maybe retreating from society doesn’t seem like such a bad idea now; maybe it’s easier to just snap at everyone to leave you alone, and damn the consequences; maybe you’re just a whining, melting mess in this awful heat. Whatever it is, the more you give in, the more monstrous you become.

You’ll start to physically change into whatever monster you saw in that reflection, all the while becoming more impulsive, stronger, more prone to acting out the worse version of yourself.

Opening up about your feelings and why you’re acting the way that you are seems to slow and even reverse the transformation, after a while, although there is a bit of a delay on that, so you might be back to your normal self behaviorally for a while and still, you know, look like a monster. Eventually, with enough emotional honesty, you’ll change back.

Or you can just punch your reflection the next time you see it, shattering it. That’ll reverse everything very quickly!

Just be careful to avoid reflective surfaces after that. It can definitely happen again, and it seems to happen quicker after the first time.

tl;dr: