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wickedsrest-rp-archive · 2 years

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Town Hall | Group Thread

TIMING: Current PARTIES: Like half the town! SUMMARY: The town hall meeting goes about as well as you’d expect—everyone is upset and talking over one another until Leah drops the bomb that some people are going to have to stay behind to stop the damage before it spreads outside of White Crest. A few ideas on how to figure out how to stop the destruction of the town are thrown around, and Lil volunteers to make contact with some old, dead townies and see if they have any ideas.

—

Rarely was the town hall filled with such life, despite the thick atmosphere of dread from those within. Even those in White Crest who chronically looked the other way knew something was seriously wrong. They didn’t know what or how, but when all the town’s leadership had to say about things was “ayuh, this is real bad,” it seemed appropriate to panic. As the gathering crowd reached critical mass, a collection of friendly faces and those who rarely tread from their homes, many called out. “Who called this thing?” “Are these The Horrors? Are they back?” “A 20 foot lion ate my son and then flew into the sky”. Maybe there was no one who could truly appease such a fearful crowd, but for now, everyone only needed to listen.

Now was a bad time for Rio to remember how much he hated crowds. But he kept reminding himself that despite that, he had been one of the first people to ask for a town hall in the first place. It only made sense that he toughened up and threw himself to the wolves. Metaphorically, hopefully. As the group became more restless, Rio figured he needed to say something. He stood up, ignoring his shaking limbs and scratchy throat. He cleared it quickly, unintentionally doing the track of grabbing everybody’s attention. No going back now. “Uh hey everyone. I was one of the people that asked to gather everyone for a town hall. If uh- well anyone that knows me knows that I really don’t like public speaking, but this felt important.” He paused, scratching at his neck as he tried to figure out exactly how to describe the trip to the future he had gone to. “I think something really bad is going to happen to this town in the next two months. I don’t really know what. But I do know there’s been weird stuff going on for a while now. And me and a few other people ended up seeing this town in the future. Or what was left of it. Which wasn’t much.”

“Is this a Y2K thing? ‘Cause we all know how that ended up.” It was a bunch of mierda that Metzli had experienced. Everyone caused chaos from their paranoia and they were watching White Crest do the same. If people weren’t careful, the mass hysteria could prove to be dangerous, especially in a town filled with supernatural beings. “I’m not trying to be an ass, but we gotta be logical here. Stuff happens all the time here and it always settles.” Their eyes softened at Aylin, and they hoped they didn’t raise her anxiety further. “We just don’t wanna jump the gun.”

Aylin made her way over to where Rio was standing, tapping her fingers against her thighs. “Thanks - I - I appreciate you doing this. Apparently not supposed to say thanks but still, thanks.” She handed him a small piece of candy - one of the many sour ones she had on her person. “I also asked about a way to let people know about some stuff that I’ve found out. I - well, myself and some other individuals got a quite literal ‘blast to the past’ - as in, we’ve seen the past of this town and history is - uh, well, repeating.” Her gaze found Metzli and she offered them a small smile.

This whole town hall thing felt stupid and like a waste of time to Kaden. What the hell could most of the people in this town really do anyway? And would they even believe what was happening? He was pretty sure he should be shutting this down if he were adhering to his hunter duties. Not that he was great about adhering to any of those as it were. But if flannel kid was running it, he’d show up. He believed it had to be extremely fucked if Rio was running this shit. His brows furrowed at his words. “Future? And how bad is bad, kid?”

“I was born after Y2K” Rio replied shortly, but turned back to the person once he realized that his anxiety of the whole situation was going to hold him back here, “I mean I know what Y2K was though. And trust me, I hope I’m wrong. But I don’t think I am” Some dude no older than him called him kid like Kaden did, grabbing his attention immediately. “Really bad. Like a desert where the Common was supposed to be.”

Emilio was restless. He sat in one of the chairs that had been spread across the room, his foot tapping against the floor as he listened to Rio’s opening speech, grimacing with each new piece of information that was added. The future. It was a hard thing to argue with, wasn’t it? Especially when Aylin added in her experience in the past. It was undeniable that something was happening; the town had been ‘unsettled’ for months now, in a way that was far more intense than usual. What was happening still seemed up in the air. “If what you’re saw is real,” he said, “what are we going to do about it? Can’t fight something this vague.”

“So what, we’re fightin’ climate change then, izzat it?” Rhett complained from the back of the room, arms folded across his chest.

Metzli smiled back and gave a small wave, eyebrow raising at the bearded man bringing up climate change. They relented, raising their arm and pocketing their hand to stand back as they scanned the room. Some faces were familiar, some not. All in all though, it looked like everyone was ready to listen.

Lil wasn’t one for crowds of people, well at least living people. Still, as it seemed like the town was going up into flames, she figured she should at least come in and see what was happening, arms folded in front of her as she tried to blend into the back of the room. Her normal smile and easy glint in her eyes had become more solemn as of late as she listened to the kid in front of them trying to call the town hall together. She thought of a million things to say, but for a moment she couldn’t seem to get any of it out instead just sighing slightly. “ Don’t think we’d all be here if things were going well now would we?” Her voice more quiet, concerned than she normally lets on.

Rio’s nerves were almost palpable. Leah put a comforting hand on his shoulder, squeezing tightly with reassurance. She knew what he was feeling, and she hated public speaking just as much. But White Crest and its residents were some of the most important things to Leah, so she sheepishly looked to those around her as she addressed them as well. “I don’t think panicking is going to do us any good. We’ve all seen White Crest through some of its worst times, right? It’s quite possible that this will work itself out in the end, like the town always does. But it's important for everyone to know exactly what we saw, and it seems like there’s a cycle of things just… ending in White Crest. And the things that have been happening around town lately usually precede it.”

This whole thing was… weird. Cass shifted where she stood, glancing around the room. There were people here she recognized, and people here she didn’t. They all looked a little scared, which made her feel a little better about feeling a little scared. There was some comfort, at least, in the people she did know being here. She offered Aylin a reassuring smile in hopes of easing some of her anxiety, flashing Rio a quick thumbs up to do the same. “Has anyone ever stopped it before? Do we know that?”

“We don’t know if anyone’s ever stopped it before.” Aylin paused, “but I don’t think so. I mean, maybe, but we didn’t find anything that said this.” She bit her lip, offering a smile to Cass. “But that’s why we wanted to get all of you here, because maybe someone here can help! Doğru? Belki?” Right? Maybe?

Aavyan didn’t want to be here. In fact, a town hall meeting about the damned apocalypse didn’t even rank among the top 100 places he’d like to be. He slunk in, and stood against the back wall, eyes darting nervously among the crowd. There were some faces he recognized (some he wished he didn’t), but their presences did nothing to ease the anxiety that kept the hair at the back of his neck standing on end. “If no one’s ever stopped it before, what makes anyone here think we can do anything?” he asked, voice strained. “Shit–er, stuff, has gotten out of hand. I’m not feeling very confident in our chances with what I’m hearing thus far.”

Leah piping up was a cause for concern, causing Metzli’s eyes to widen and their anxiety to raise. The situation was definitely serious and they immediately started packing in their mind. When Cass spoke, they perked up minutely and quietly shuffled their way through the mass of people. Placing a careful hand on her shoulder, they smiled and looked back up to listen intently.

It was almost like no one in the room recognized him. Not even Rio. Was there something on his fa– Oh. Right. He was still a damn teenager. “Putain de merde,” Kaden grumbled to himself. “Ending? As in…” His brow knit together as he concentrated on the thought. “But the town’s still here. What happened before anyway?”

The optimism in Aylin’s voice was somehow both laughable and admirable. Emilio doubted anyone in this room would have any answers; most people old enough to remember the previous occurrences of things like this probably got the hell out of dodge the moment history started repeating itself. “And if no one can? We should plan for the worst case scenario here.” That was probably going to be the most likely end result.

“Ain’t the thing about all them time travel movies is that, like… y’can’t change the future?” Rhett seemed incredulous at best regarding the conversation at hand, throwing an unimpressed glance at the few faces he knew. “Sounds like might be best to just rattle our dags n’ get the hell on outta here.”

Crow stood behind Rio keeping an eye on the crowd and taking in the words. He was a little inclined to agree with Rhett that leaving would be easier than staying and fighting an unknown factor but he wasn’t about to abandon the town if others were staying. “Running is smart.”

Metzli’s hand on her shoulder was a welcome comfort, and Cass offered her sibling a quick smile to show her gratitude. “I don’t think time travel movies are, like, based on facts or whatever,” she replied, glancing to the man who’d made the statement. “And I don’t know if we should just give up. There’s a lot of smart people in here, right?”

“Old dude is right. Can’t fuck with the time shit.” Mateo crossed his arms and leaned against the wall. He wasn’t one for gatherings with random people, but with the safety of his loved ones being a concern, he figured it was best to attend.

Lil saw some of the faces of the faces that she knew and she tried her hardest not to look at them, knowing that her face looked grim. Normally she’d be the first to jump in with Cass, trying to find a solution, but she wasn’t so hopeful about all of this. Not since Jonas didn’t come back. Lil’s eyes focused on Emilio after he spoke and then Rhett echoing what she was feeling. Clearing her voice slightly Lil said, “ I agree with them, but I don’t think it’s going to be that easy. The - fabric is all wonky now. We need to get people out of here if we can.”

“We got anything in place for that? ¿Plan de evacuación? Probably a good time to break it out, even as a last resort.” Though Emilio doubted they’d come up with anything better. Truth be told, he had little attachment to this town; so long as he could take the people he loved with him, he was willing to set up just about anywhere.

“Have you seen the news? Weird shit is happening in other places too. Not just here. Evacuating may not be a total solution.” Metzli raked their hand through their hair, talking toward Emilio. “There’s something bigger happening and it looks like we’re at the core. We can’t just run.”

Metzli had a point, and Emilio grunted in brief acknowledgement. “That happen in the past, too? This shit happening outside of town?” He glanced at Aylin, unsure if she’d know the answer.

Leah looked to the townspeople, the ones she recognized and the ones she didn’t (who was that teenaged boy? He didn’t look familiar at all). She looked to Nicole, and then down at her hands, and then back at the people again. “It seems that in past situations, whatever was happening in White Crest was stopped before it was spread outside of the town. I want to make that clear- the strange things that are happening in the outside world, they’re likely leaking out of White Crest. Stopping what’s happening here will stop it out there, too.”

Aylin glanced over to Emilio. “Not entirely sure - but I don’t think so? But also they didn’t have televisions back then, so they probably couldn’t find out stuff as easily as we can now, with like, Instagram and the news and whatever.”

A year ago, Aavyan would’ve laughed his way out of this town hall. Time travel and monsters eating people was the kind of thing in movies. Maybe the others had a point with that. If no one had been able to stop this thing before, maybe the movies held a grain of truth to them. “Well, we sure can’t stay either. I don’t know about you, but I don’t like our chances if it’s 1912 and we got big lobsters.” He crossed his arms over his chest, glancing between Emilio and Metzli. “Y’all cannot be serious about thinking of staying, right?”

Something stirred in Kaden. He wasn’t sure what he’d call it. Definitely not fear or concern. “We can’t just all die, either.” There were people in town he cared about and the thought of them all dying as the town caved in on itself – he couldn’t let his thoughts drift there. Not to mention the innocent people who just picked the wrong fucking place to live. “Whatever the solution, it can’t need the whole town. We should start getting people out.”

“Finally, someone is making some sense,” Aavyan said, gesturing at the French kid

Crow rubbed the back of his head but nodded at Kaden’s words, “Can help get people out. No matter what we do.” He knew how to get in and out quickly so leading groups outside of town and helping people collect their essentials would be easy for him.

“It’s not about staying, tonto,” Metzli rolled their eyes at Aavyan, “If it’s spreading, it doesn’t matter if we stay or not.” Looking to the teen boy, they nodded. Getting people out would be smart, but they’d need to keep capable ones in town to stop whatever it was that was causing the chaos.

“There are people who won’t leave,” Cass pointed out. “There always are. In every natural disaster, there are people who refuse to leave their homes. We can’t leave them to die if this thing really is, like, a ‘wipe out the whole town’ kind of deal. We need to find a way to minimize the damage at least.”

“If people won’t leave, then evacuate them,” Kaden said. “I’m not going to sit around and let innocent people die just because they’re too stubborn and stupid to leave town.” He didn’t know how but he’d throw people into buses heading out of town if he had to. “Whatever’s going to stop this thing clearly is taking the town with it. We shouldn’t sacrifice people just because they won’t leave.”

With so many people around to comfort him, Rio was starting to feel a bit more comfortable, though the situation didn’t exactly have much comfort to spare. “I’m not sure everyone could leave even if they wanted to.” Rio began. Leah and Rio had gone through hundreds of books probably, looking through all of the Scribe texts they had in an attempt to find records of this happening. They hadn’t been thrilled with what they found. “We couldn’t find much about the weird things happening outside of the borders before, but it’s spreading. We think that’s new.”

“D’you know how it was stopped?” Rhett asked Leah. “If you somehow know it all happened before… sure someone had to scribble down the damn cheat code, eh?”

“This ain’t a video game, abuelito.” Mateo chuckled, despite the man having a good point. If it’s happened before, there had to be written history about it. “He is kinda making sense, though.” He muttered with a shrug.

“You got anything about it in the library?” Emilio inclined his head towards Leah, shifting a little. He probably wasn’t her favorite person, given the whole ‘drunken bone theft’ ordeal, but they had much bigger problems than that now, anyway. “Rhett’s right. Somebody had to have written something down.”

“Oh!” Aylin chirped nervously, “there’s lots written down, but it does just all come to a halt. Which… is the issue, but also how we sort of figured out that stuff just all,” she gestured away with her hands, “goes poof.”

Lil sighed slightly, thinking that the entire meeting was going sideways but liking that it was going towards a clearer picture . “ Then we have to stop it, but we don’t all have to stop it.” She couldn’t help but snort at the idea of a cheat code but shook her head. “Do - you guys have any people that could be contacted that might help. Anyone - written down in that book?” She wasn’t quite sure how many cards she could flip, but being an exorcist did give her something to go on. “With all of it being wobbly, I might be able to - talk to them.”

Poof was bad. Poof was very, very bad. Cass felt some of her hope slipping, and she leaned into Metzli a little for reassurance. But Lil made a good point; time was so fickle right now. If they could find some way to harness that… Maybe they could get more details? “Is there any kind of, like… pattern to the time travel stuff? Maybe we can figure out a way to work with it instead of against it?”

Aylin turned to the woman who’d asked about names in the book, “I remember one - Patricia Williams. I think. There might’ve also been someone called Alexander Parrish, too.”

Lil nodded at the younger as she explained some of the names, her arms stretching in front of her for a moment before nodding, realizing there were plenty people in this room that would be confused on why she asked - although she did find it somewhat charming Cass thought she was going to go through time to talk to them. With the veil breaking - and all the ghosts that loved to scream at her - Lil thought it would at least be a change of pace for them to be helpful for once. “Thanks. That’s something I could work with at least. Although if you guys got something from either of them, it might be easier. ”

Nicole stood in the back of the room, leaning against the wall just near the exit. Ready to bounce when things got too heated. It was her first town hall. And by the looks of it, her last one. It was hard to figure out what the real problem was. Something about time travel bullshit and— People kept talking over each other, and she wasn't sure if they were even listening. Was there even a moderator for this event? Just a bunch of kids it seemed. Not that she'd ever want to be in their shoes or to tell them how to conduct the meeting. So she kept her mouth shut, allowing the chaos and the discussions about…whatever the issue was to continue. She was sure Leah would bring her up to speed on the ride home.

Metzli’s arm draped around Cass protectively, sensing her fear rising as the conversation transpired. None of it was sounding good, and it didn’t seem like a sensible plan could be put together. At least, not with so many people around. Most of them were useless humans who had no idea what to make of everything. “The clock,” They spat out suddenly with a bap to their head, remembering Eilidh’s kid sputtering about her little time warp. “Maybe something is up there? At the tower? Heard lots of stories about all kinds of shifts, and it is at the Common.”

“We do know how it was stopped”, Leah answered Rhett, looking toward Rio and then Aylin. “And the library is partly how we know”, she said toward Emilio, holding his eye contact momentarily before she looked back in the group. “The problem is, in order to save the rest of the world from destruction, 12 people sort of need to… stay here. While it crumbles.”

Emilio snapped his fingers, pointing to Metzli in agreement. “Worth looking into,” he nodded. “Weird shit’s been happening when that thing strikes the hour, too.” Then Leah spoke, and he went quiet. Twelve people, volunteering to die. That was what she was saying. He glanced around the room uncertainly. A year ago — hell, a few months ago, he would have thrown his name in the hat without hesitation. But his eyes landed on Rhett, and he thought of Teddy at home. Probably wasn’t fair now, was it?

Oh. Well that was… less than ideal. Rhett’s gaze quickly found Emilio’s as well, and his brows furrowed. He knew what the idiot was thinking, and just shook his head slowly. “Stay here n’ do what, exactly?”

Now that was something. Metzli’s heart felt like it dropped, realizing what Leah was saying. “Twelve people have to sacrifice themselves.” They stated blandly, answering for Leah.

Aylin pressed her hands against her ears. The idea of people having to sacrifice themselves made her feel sick to her stomach. “But why can’t we save everyone?”

Twelve people had to die. No matter what. Kaden’s heart sank. Some stupid part of him figured he should volunteer and get it over with. It was his duty to protect people, right? Only no part of him wanted to die in this town. Not now. “Who… I mean how do we decide… who?”

People had to sacrifice themselves? Cass’s heart skipped a beat at the notion, and she swallowed as she glanced to her friends in the room. She knew the people she loved were selfless people. She knew some of them would jump at that chance. “Is there any other way?”

Levi, who had been standing creepily at a window this whole time listening in, turned tail and booked it the fuck out of there the moment it heard the word ‘sacrifice’. No way was it getting itself wrapped up in any of that bullshit.

The pain from Aylin and Cass was palpable, and Metzli couldn’t help but feel guilty at the thought of already willing to volunteer. Their embrace tightened around Cass, and their brows creased together as they stayed quiet and offered Aylin a worried glance. If they had to pick between themself and the ones they loved, it was always going to be the latter. With or without a soul.

“Any volunteers?” Aavyan deadpanned. “It’s just human sacrifice or nothing, right? I mean, come on.” Why were they trusting the word of some long dead prophets or whatever? Surely there must be any other option than just letting twelve of their fellow townspeople die. Everyone in this room was someone’s friend, brother, grandmother, cousin–something. He shouldn’t have come to this meeting. Better yet, Aavyan should have never come back to White Crest in the first place.

“Volunteers? We can’t seriously be considering this.” Cass glanced around again, hoping to find anyone as horrified as she was.

“Why do we have to have volunteers?” Aylin spoke up at nearly the same time as Cass. “That seems - cruel, or like - why do people have to choose to die? I really really don’t like that at all.” She took in a deep breath in an attempt to steady herself.

“We aren’t going to stop looking,” Rio promised. “If there’s any way to avoid this we are going to figure it out. We don’t want anyone to die. Or have to choose to stay behind. But…” Rio paused before letting out a big sigh, “From what we’ve found in old journals it’s never been stopped before.”

“We’ll figure it out,” Metzli stated with conviction, “We always do.” They swallowed and began to back away, a tumultuous parade of thoughts marching through their mind. There had to be another way, but panic was beginning to creep into the room—or maybe it was just their mind. With all the information they were presented with, there was a lot to think about. Too much, even.

“And what happens if we don’t find another way? If not enough people volunteer?” Rhett didn’t exactly make a habit of being a ray of sunshine, but these were the sort of things they had to consider.

Mateo had had enough of the conversation. Whatever the town decided to do, he decided that it was their problem, and left. Plenty of selfless people out there would volunteer, and in the meantime, he’d get Vida and Luz out.

Lil was already formulating how to get the ghosts to her with relative ease, when she heard Leah’s words and her brain settled for a second. Of course. She’d had a gut feeling about all of this and she settled for a moment. Everything always had a dam cost, and she figured that the piper usually got paid in the end. She should have felt some sort of anger or remorse, but instead her jaw settled, not wanting it to start drawing straws or some sort of nonsense. She knew when she entered White Crest she’d die here, and it didn’t seem as horrifying as the other’s expressions seemed to think.

Lil sighed and said, “ Then I guess I’ll be the dumbass to start it, so we don’t end up in fucking lots.” Lil said to Rhett knowing that it would start another argument. Waiting for the shock to settle down a bit, Lil tried to be gentle and said, “ It’s morbid, but I think we should at least consider having people that are willing to stay behind, if just if it comes to that, or many more people than twelve are going to die. For what it’s worth we still need to know what they did if we’re going to have any chance at all. They must have done some ritual that we’re going to need to do and since we don’t have a book on it we're going to have to ask them. So - at the very least I’m staying here. Whatever happens happens. ” Lil said the last part with a confidence that was mostly stolen from her father as she didn’t look at her friends with a shrug in her shoulder. She wasn’t frightened - death had never scared her - and she was fairly resolute on it. “So I guess I'm volunteer one. Hopefully it turns out they just fucked up the ritual huh.” She put on an easy expression, not one of fear in hopes that the rest of them would see that she wasn’t doing it out of morbidity.

“I’m not concerned about the possibility of there not being enough volunteers, not when White Crest attracts the very people who feel pulled in by this sort of thing”, Leah started. She looked toward Lil, trying her best to convey all the gratefulness she was feeling with just a look. “And again, there’s always the possibility that we’re wrong, that it’ll be nothing… Just a harmless ritual, and White Crest could be back to harmless fish rain as soon as the New Year.” It wasn’t an irrational thought. Despite the piles of research she and Rio had pulled up about what was happening, Leah couldn’t help but have a glimpse of optimism about the town that she loved so much. She had only ever seen it work out, somehow some way, at least in this lifetime. And how could she distrust what her eyes have proven to her so many times?

Leah was right — there would be no shortage of volunteers. That was the problem. Cass ran a hand through her hair, shaking her head quickly. “We’re going to find another way.” She said it with conviction, with a certainty she didn’t feel. They had to find another way. She couldn’t stand the thought of losing the family she’d built for herself here.

Emilio looked to Rhett again, heaving a heavy sigh as he forced himself to his feet. He inclined his head towards Rhett, then towards the door in a silent question. You wanna get the hell out of here? If he stayed any longer, he had a feeling he was going to do something stupid, like offer himself up for this batshit plan.

Taking the slayer’s point, Rhett frowned and nodded, pushing himself off the wall. “Great. Best put out a notice in the dailies, then.” Making sure Emilio was ahead of him, the warden followed him out the door.

“We’ll do everything we can to find another way.” Aylin’s voice shook, but she turned to Rio and whispered to him, “what about pancakes? I think I need sugar to get my mind off of this, and maybe it’ll help us figure out something to do so that people don’t have to sacrifice themselves.” She offered him her hand. “I’m ready when you are.”

Rio couldn’t ask people to volunteer to sacrifice themselves, he didn’t want to give up on searching for an answer. “We can set up research times. In the library or at the park. We have plenty of books to go through. Anyone who wants to volunteer can show up and help try to find something.” Somewhere, somehow, maybe they’d find some sort of hail mary. After that, he focused on Aylin’s question, grabbing onto her hand and wrapping his fingers in hers, “Flipped has the best pancakes. And they never held it against me that time I got thrown through their window.”

#wickedswriting #season 4 #chatzy

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wickedsrest-rp-archive · 2 years

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First came the dreams, the lines between sleep and wakefulness blurring until fish grew on trees and cars were full of mac n’ cheese. Then there was death – coming face to face with the departed, even when they should have moved on for good. Then came time. The clock turning both ways as people were plunged into the past or future, and even into another place entirely. Eventually, every hour spelled a different fate, and the physics of the town itself cracked open.

Those really in the know understand that a possible fate for White Crest has been spelled out in the history books and onto a memorial plaque. The order of The Horrors is exactly the same as it was so many years ago, before the town’s doom was sealed and everyone vanished. And, like before, White Crest’s population seems powerless to stop the town from crumbling out from beneath them. Worse, it may not just be White Crest. Some of the town’s anomalies are now stretching outside of its borders, threatening to share the fate of the town with that of the world.

Some feel that this is it, the end. As the last threads of sense and reality fray, and White Crest sees dragons soaring across its skies and ship-sized krakens towering out from the sea, even its people seem to be stretching into previously impossible realities. Someone’s house may simply grow a face and devour them. A werewolf may grow 50 feet long and eat the moon out of the sky. Vampires may now require a diet of human hair to sustain themselves. Everything goes black and white, like out of an old film. Little is making sense in this dying town, and it seems inevitable that it’s not going to stop with White Crest.

But deep in dusty old books and in the minds of those who journeyed to the past, there may be a solution, a way to stop White Crest’s fractures from spreading elsewhere, and possibly even save those within the town. But nothing comes without sacrifice.

INFO:

Even those who don’t know about the supernatural at all seem to sense that something terrible is going to happen. Many are hosting “end of the world” parties and gatherings, which don’t seem as cult-like as they once did.

This is your time to do ridiculous and lore-breaking plots! Anything goes. We just ask that if it will affect other characters/players in a big way, please talk it over with them first or reach out to us.

As before, all of the past POTWs are still in effect. If you want to do a plot involving ghosts, dreams, or time travel, those are all in play.

#potw #plot of the week

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wickedsrest-rp-archive · 2 years

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Welcome to this week’s roundup! We do these every week to provide plot drops, highlight starters posted that week, and share other information about the setting. Anyone is welcome to use these bullet points in starters, plots, anons etc. Also let us know if you want us to include one of your setting-related plots in here for next week by sending us a bullet point!

What’s new in town?:

The clocktower is chiming and everything is a little bit upside down in our ongoing POTW.

After a series of moose screams, downtown is currently in a state of repair. It’s recommended to keep pets away due to the shattered glass still scattered around and the debris from a fallen building. Local moose enthusiasts have been desperately trying to catch the moose wails on camera.

With time twisting about, a few residents ended up in White Crest as it was nearly three centuries ago. The funny thing is, a lot of what’s been happening in present day is happening are also happening in the past. The town’s past residents refer to these as the horrors and Jake, Leah, and Aylin may have an idea of what comes next for the future.

Wandering around in another part of town, Alan, Regan, Rio, and Nora come across an empty area that seemingly used to be White Crest. Whether it’s some sort of practical joke or not is yet to be determined, but the future seems just as, if not more, bleak.

Starters:

The town smells awful and Vida couldn’t take Luz kayaking because the river was taped off. What gives?

There’s an ocean in the sky and Cass wants to go swimming. Who’s down?

It’s Mexican Independence Day and Metzli is here for celebrating. No raining on any holiday parades here!

Once again, Rhett is contemplating eating questionable things. But really, would a mermaid be surf and turf?

#wcw #white crest weekly

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wickedsrest-rp-archive · 2 years

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Welcome to the Future || POTW with Alan, Nora, Orion, & Regan

TIMING: Current PARTIES: @alan-dixon @fearfordinner @3starsquinn @kadavernagh SUMMARY: An unlikely group finds themselves lost in what one would call a pretty desolate future. What was once White Crest is no more and looks exceptionally bleak.

As the road shifted into an expansive desert, Regan slammed on the breaks that weren’t there. The car wasn’t there, either. She stumbled and fell into the sand. Of course. She lay there with her eyes closed, feeling the coarse grains between her fingers, and death pulsing around her. What utter bull feces was this? Couldn’t she be done? The coyote was gone. Let that be the end of this wretched nonsense. But she knew better. Even before the wings and the screaming, she’d learned that White Crest was never done.

Regan collected her sanity and craned her neck up, forehead meeting the harsh sunlight. This was definitely not the road, she was definitely not in her car, and there was definitely a lot of death in whatever endless Sahara this was. It beckoned her like the shimmering heat on the featureless horizon, tugging at her senses. Slowly, she rose, squinting into the distance to see if anything or anyone might be here with her. “How did I even get here?” She asked aloud, then silently reprimanded herself for asking a question to which there would be no logical answer. At least not yet. She brushed the sand off her shirt and pants, and realized it wasn’t the fine, tan sand of nice beaches. It was peppery, with bits of various metals and materials within, as if an entire parking garage had been pulverized, including the cars and upholstery.

Regan exhaled deeply from within her lungs, a high-pitched whistle of a screech riding her frustration. Then she spotted it. Them. Not one person, but two. She visored her eyes with a hand to try and see better – she couldn’t tell much, other than that they seemed to be coming her way. For a moment, she expected the coyote to warn her. They wanted to steal the skull, the one that no longer existed. They were a threat. But that warning never came, and its absence left her as uneasy and confused as its presence would have. She would decide for herself. “Hello?” Regan called out, “I don’t recognize this beach.”

Claiming that things had been strange since Rio got back to town felt unnecessary considering nothing about this town or Rio’s life had ever been normal. But he didn’t feel like he was crazy in his assessment that things seemed even more on edge and more off the wall than they had been before he had left. Walking through the common, Rio found himself taking more careful steps, looking around the place as if he was searching for something and jumping at every dog bark or car horn. Clearly, that careful footing wasn’t helping him. It only took a small mound of dirt, misplaced and making the ground uneven for Rio to twist his ankle and fall face first into the innocent person walking by him. His only hope was to grab out at the person’s arm to try to stop himself from crashing entirely into them.

“Oh god- I’m so sorry I didn’t mean to-” Rio froze as he pulled away from the stranger, his attention now entirely lost on them and instead focused on the desert surrounding them. This place looked like it was straight out of a Mad Max film. And it definitely wasn’t the Common. Glancing around, he couldn’t see anything besides sand and skyline, both engulfed in blowing dust. “What the-?” Rio began to question, only to be cut off immediately by an ear piercing scream. Rio gasped in pain immediately, shoving his palms against his ears in an attempt to muffle the sound. He looked around for a source but could see nothing at first. Whatever that was, it wasn’t close by. And if his hunter senses were picking that up it must have been loud. “I uh- sorry. You have any idea where we are?” Rio asked the stranger with him, hoping they might have some clue as to what the hell was going on.

A woman’s voice came soon after, one that Rio hadn’t heard in a while but was pretty sure he recognized. He turned towards the voice, watching a figure slowly come into view. “Doctor Kavanagh?”

Nora was walking. She was very good at walking. If walking was a profession she probably would be in a high paying tier for it. Not that she needed a profession. Thus were the perks of being rich. The other perk of being rich was the innate knowledge that you didn’t need to pay attention at all times because if you broke something you could buy it. Which was why Nora got to be lost in thought at the current moment. Walking down the street. Enjoying the day. Being toppled to the ground as someone landed on top of her. Falling on sand instead of pavement. Falling on sand instead of pavement?

That caught Nora’s attention. “Wow…. How did you know I’ve always wanted to be kidnapped by a stranger and whisked away to an unknown location where survival would be in question?” Nora peered at the boy who had knocked her down, ready to keep the interrogation going. That was ended by a scream. A loud scream. A scream so loud it hurt her poor innocent ears that had never done anything wrong and were infact featured on many websites as the world’s cutest ears. (The last bit was only in her bear form but it was still a bragable achievement). Was there a metal concert here? Were they at burning man? Nora staggered to her feet, swirling around for any sign of the giant man who she wanted to incinerate herself.

Her kidnapper seemed to be doing a very bad job at this. He also had no clue where they were. However, he turned to his accomplice. Dr. Kavanagh. “You.” Nora’s voice, a normal monotone, was practically a growl in this moment. “I know you. You broke my best friends heart. And now you’re kidnapping me? How evil can one person be?” Plus Nora had long suspected she was a serial killer online, but the proof wasn’t in the pudding yet so she kept it to herself.

One moment, Alan was filling up his thermos with coffee and picking up a pastry from the break room (he shouldn't have, he had been putting on weight ever since he turned 40 and his doctor told him that he just had to deal with this being absolutely normal), the next, he was stepping into the scorching hot heat of a desert instead of enjoying the AC of his office.

Feeling as though he'd been teleported back to Afghanistan, the startled estate agent turned around, expecting to find himself completely alone in this big and empty land. To his surprise, Alan found 3 figures in his horizon. He gave his watch a look, then gave one to the sun.

He could have been dreaming, he could have been dead too. Or maybe this fucking town was playing with his nerves again. Taking off his navy blue jacket, the werewolf, pastry in one hand, coffee cup in the other, took a couple of strides toward the trio, waving his hand at them, and hoping (but not too much) that they wouldn't be hostile. "Hello," he tried, "Are you from White Crest too?!"

Walking in the sand with brogues was proving to be extremely tedious, and he could already feel it slipping between his sock and his sole. “Mother fucking sand, always getting…” Cutting himself off, Alan narrowed his eyes and found that he recognised at least one person out of the three. She’d been trespassing on his building sites. And she wore clothes now.

Regan braced herself for anything as the pair came closer – and as they did, she realized one of them looked quite familiar. The other simply looked quite goth. And before they could even get closer, she spotted a third figure, this one alone and glancing around as if confused. Well, at least they had that in common. And wasn’t he hot in that suit? Regan exhaled another deep breath at hearing her own name. A name. The name she so rarely heard these days outside of the ME’s office. “Yes,” she confirmed, glancing hard at the young man. It had been so long since she’d laid eyes on him. He looked… “Malnourished as ever, I see. I might have some sustenance in my purse. Perhaps a protein bar.” She was looking down at the tendons in Orion’s lanky ankles as she dug into her bag.

The second person stopped her. “Excuse me,” Regan said, looking up, a hint of irritation in her voice. “I break hearts on a daily basis, technically, if you consider the autopsy of them and removal of tissue for histology to be “breaking”. My condolences for your best friend.” Her fingers brushed up against the bar she was looking for, and she presented it to the starving child. “Who might you be?” she asked the goth, remaining expressionless at the proclamation that she was evil. “And you, for that matter,” she gestured toward the besuited man who looked as though he’d been dropped here straight from Wall Street. This was confusing. But one thing was comfortingly clear. It pressed against her from all sides, a reminder that this place could never be truly alien. “I am delighted to inform you all that wherever we are, we are surrounded by the dead.”

Rio had been so wrapped up in trying to make sense of their new surroundings that he had barely registered what the stranger that had been teleported with him had been accusing him of. But as the world slowly registered in his brain he scoffed at the idea and turned back towards the “I did not kidnap you. I don’t even know where we are. I would be a terrible kidnapper.” He stopped just short of exclaiming just look at me. But that would only add more fuel to the very offensive fire that the doctor led with as soon as they ran into each other. For the first time in over a year, Rio noted. “Ah. Always a pleasure, doctor. I missed you too.” Rio mumbled, feeling completely defeated. Not only because it wasn’t the warmest welcome after what felt like a long time of not seeing her (especially full sized and not fairy sized), but also because Rio was pretty sure he was the healthiest he had ever looked. Props to Ari for forcing him to eat her real food.

Surprisingly, the oddest part about this scenario wasn’t even the weird desert, but the company apparently. Stuck between a stranger that just called him a kidnapper and a medical examiner who was taking the phrase heartbreaker way, way too literally. “I really don’t think that’s what this person meant…” Rio began, but gave up halfway through the sentence. A fourth person was coming to join the group, and if Rio was lucky at all this person may actually focus on the situation at hand. Considering he was in full suit, Rio didn’t have the highest hopes.

“Hi!” We are from White Crest! Or at least I am.” Rio explained, hoping to be a welcome face for the stranger. As long as this stranger wasn’t a murderer. But as the man got closer, Rio could feel the hair on his neck rising, and goosebumps break out across his skin. Okay, so definitely a werewolf. That’s a start at least. A protein bar was placed into his open palm, distracting Rio temporarily so he could look at Regan and bring a small smile to his face, “Uh, thank you?” Rio gave her a thumbs up and decided against trying to refuse the treat. “I’m uh- Rio. Nice to meet… two of you. Any idea where we are?”

A doctor, a scrawny kid, a werewolf and the bear woman : that was certainly not the perfect line up to get out of a desert. Sure enough, Alan used to work in less than ideal conditions back in the days, but he would have happily switched his current work clothes for the 68 pounds of equipment they used to make them carry. At least he’d have been prepared for this crap. What was he supposed to do in an Armani suit?

“Alan.” A pause, “Dixon,” he glanced at the doctor, then at the two others, then down at the protein bar in the kid’s hand. Poor boy definitely looked like he could use a snack. Holding out the pastry in his hand, the werewolf smiled, a kind, worried frown on his forehead : “You want a piece of my Danish?” It was not like Alan needed it anyway…

Instinctively, the man turned his attention toward the doctor, assuming she would be the most responsible of these three. Her declaration that they were surrounded by death, however, deterred him immediately. “Come again?” Once again he gave his watch a look, tapping at the dial. Glancing up at the sun, he pursed his lips. “We’re still in our time zone,” Alan hummed, rubbing at the back of his head. “Any idea of where we could be in our longitude?”

“You are a terrible kidnapper.” Nora agreed, “You didn’t even take my cell phone. Kaden is going to hear all about this.” Nora pulled out her cellphone to start typing out a message about how his ex girl friend and her little kale goblin kidnapped her to a secondary location and that Alan was here for some reason but she hadn’t gotten around to asking. It didn’t send. She tired three times while the others were talking amongst themselves. “Does anyone have service?” Nora asked, holding her phone up to the sky.

Something clicked in Nora’s mind. Something important. They didn’t have service. In a desert. With out cards. Which means she was going to run out of ham eventually. Nora’s hands started roaming up and down her jacket as she started taking inventory of her pocket ham. How long would it have to last? She wouldn’t be able to order more… She eyed the others in the group. They’d probably need pocket ham too. It looked like the doctor had pocket food too. While Nora thought that was very smart of her, as everyone should have pocket food, she also didn’t trust the doctor to not poison them and maybe eat their bodies.

Did bears eat people? They did right? Nora eyed them. Nah. She wasn’t that kind of bear. Also why was no one talking about the scream? The ear shattering scream? “What was that loud noise we heard? Is that what brought us here?” What if that was some kind of light speed shattering noise? And that’s how they got here so fast. Sick. She’d love to be able to do stuff like that. No wait, Nora reign it in, she told herself, she was getting off topic again.

Regan couldn’t help but think that, even stranded wherever they were, she would have been better off alone. The famished adolescent was clearly lacking in survival instincts, considering he’d thanked her. At least it seemed like a question. Maybe it didn’t count. And then there was the man in the suit – he seemed like he just wanted to get back to whatever important meeting he was pulled from. And… “Kaden?” Regan’s nose wrinkled. “How do you know – my boyfriend hardly matters right now.” Neither did what she just said, once she’d realized she’d said it. Ugh. “I would hardly call that one ear shattering, but unless any of you plan on dying within the next – oh, I don’t even know, maybe a few days – then that doesn’t matter right now either.” Regan brushed her pants off again as if some sand still stuck to her, but her busy hands told her it was nerves more than anything else. Unacceptable. She needed to take charge if no one else would. She scanned the horizon, not really expecting to see anything. It just looked like an endless wasteland. And, to boot, The Goth was right. Her hardy flip phone had no signal.

“Yes, death, it’s really quite impressive how much there is here,” Regan said offhandedly to the Suit Man, now Dixon. Then continued in the same breath. “I was driving past the Common when I ended up here. My car – I don’t know where it went. Who loses their car while they’re inside of it?” Regan shook her head. “Anyone spot some kind of a landmark somewhere? Surely we’re by the beach, given all of this sand. So where’s the water?” But what she smelled on the air was only pungent metals and harsh chemical scents – no ocean breeze and salt. And then there was the death, refusing to guide her in any particular direction, because it surrounded them from all sides. “Or just pick a way. You,” Regan said, looking at Dixon, who seemed least likely to immediately perish, “You appear to have more muscle mass; glowing, healthy skin; and more danishes than the rest of us. Where should we go?” Was it misplaced confidence to think he might have survival skills, or might’ve seen anything while walking over here that could guide them? Probably. But she had no clue, Orion most probably had a severe iron deficiency and could faceplant in the sand at any moment, and the Goth was… well, Regan bristled again at the mention of Kaden.

While the two women argued about who he assumed to be a common acquaintance, Alan took out his phone, pointing it up to get any sort of signal. "Well that's not promising," and it seemed like Nora wasn't getting any more luck than he was. It would have made things a lot simpler, but this didn't mean that they were lost.

"Is it something to do with... ghosts? Can you see ghosts around us?" He knew for a fact that such people and abilities existed, and figured this could be what she meant by those cryptic words. "If we're by the shore, where are the birds? We'd see at least one sea gull," Alan shook his head. A course of action had to be figured out, and soon. In this heat, they couldn't just sit still and wait for help. He was about to suggest that when the doctor gave him quite the complimentary description and forced a thin smile out of him. "We'll get along," he noted, glancing back up at the sky. "Alright, so north this way," he pointed toward the scrawny kid and Nora. "And since we're still in the same longitude, the sea's gonna be East. I suggest we head this way." Truth be told, he didn’t know either where they were exactly, or why they were here. “I was in my office. It’s right by the Common,” perhaps it was something to do with the location, but this didn’t really look like home… “What about you two?” Folding his jacket over his arm, he led the way, hoping that wherever they were headed toward, they’d find support.

The mention of Kaden made Rio perk up, but Regan beat him to the punch by questioning the name drop. “Boyfriend? I’m so glad you two are still together. I always thought you two were cute together.” They had made a good if not odd and unexpected pair. “Actually that’s hardly important. And neither is you thinking I kidnapped you- which I didn’t, just to re-emphasize. And once we have cell service again you can ask Kaden that. Trust me he probably won’t even think I’m capable of kidnapping someone.” Which he totally was, for the record. If he wanted to kidnap someone he could do it so fast and so well. Not that he planned on kidnapping anyone. “I have no service either.” he confirmed, locking his phone again and shoving it in his pocket. For now, the thing was nothing more than a glorified paper weight. Maybe a flashlight or a notepad depending on how long they were stuck here. The werewolf, Alan, was then offering him a piece of his danish. Rio exhaled a long sigh and shook his head, mostly in defeat. “No - I’m okay. Thanks though. I’m really not even hungry. The protein bar is like… sort of a bit between us.” Only neither of them found it humorous.

“Impressive? Not sure I’ve ever used that word when talking about death before.” Rio sighed. The doctor had always been a bit eccentric, so hearing her sound impressed by a certain amount of death didn’t concern Rio as much as it just perplexed him. In his own way, he had spent his whole life around death. But he could never see it the way she was able to. “I uh- don’t hear any water. Or smell the ocean for that matter. I don’t think we are near water.” He wanted to stay vague, even if the supernatural and impossible was impossible to ignore by this point. The last time Rio saw Regan he was pretty sure she didn’t even believe that he could be a hunter. Or that hunters existed. And who knew how Alan would react to the knowledge? The final stranger was a bit more of a wild card, getting a read on her didn’t seem possible.

Well, Alan was just putting cards on the table, clearly. “I uh- can’t see ghosts” Rio hesitated with his response, unsure how the others would take the same question. But the man seemed to take Regan’s advice to lead the group, and considering Rio had no better ideas he figured the smarter choice would be to stick together. “I was walking through the Common. Heading to the campus. I lost my balance and fell into them-” Rio paused and pointed towards Nora, “Sorry again, by the way. I closed my eyes for like- a few seconds max and all of a sudden we were both here.”

If Nora was going to rank all the times she’d been kidnapped, this one was going on the bottom. It was severely unorganized. None of them had working cellphones for ransom money and they hadn’t even tired to tie her hands together. Free hands. She could do so much. Plus the kid was scrawny and malnourished as everyone kept saying. And she already knew she could take Doctor lady over there in a fight. Well, she wasn’t sure, but she was on the edge of sure. “I don’t think Kaden knows he’s your boyfriend still.” For whatever reason, Nora had decided the sub conversation of Kaden and Regan was more important than the main conversation they were trying to push.

“If this had been a better organized kidnapping, you guys would know where we are.” Nora turned to Alan. “Are you kidnapped too, or did you miss me and hire them to kidnap me?” Nora really just wasn’t sure how Alan fit into this scenario. Unless they were so unorganized that they picked up a stray. Really. They should be way more thoughtful in their kidnappings. Nora turned to the kid who had been identified as Rio. “You shouldn’t apologize for kidnapping someone before you get your randsom.” She admonished him.

“I was walking in the commons.” Nora added as they shared what they had been doing. “I was on my way to break into townhall.” Nora had just watched National Treasure for the first and thought it looked fun. Eyeing the three others Nora stared to wonder if they worked for town all. After all, everything that happened in White Crest directly revolved around her. “I don’t see any ghosts. What I do see is a cool bug.” Nora dropped to her knees and crawled forward in the dirt. She picked something up an examined it. It wasn’t a bug. Just a piece of metal. She dropped the piece in disappointment.

“Ghosts?” Regan looked sharply at Dixon, still finding the word to be distasteful, even after her recent experience with a talking coyote being in her head. “No. Not whatever you’re actually referring to. I mean death. Pure, simple death. It’s underneath us. Everywhere.” Wait a second. It was underneath them. Why? Was it the sand? She scooped some up and let it filter between her fingers, but it didn’t feel like the cemetery of sorts that must have been further down. She shook her head. It was a detail that would matter to her and no one else, considering their lack of enthusiasm over a deathly discovery waiting to be found. At least Dixon was doing what she’d hoped, and picking a direction. They trailed toward the direction he’d pointed in. Regan always found walking on the beach with shoes to be an irritation, and this was no different; the sand felt like it could suck her in with each step. At least she’d be closer to whatever she was feeling.

Orion and the Goth quickly made her wish she would be sucked in. “Stop talking about me and Kaden.” Regan hissed, and a high-pitched screech escaped from between her teeth. Maybe enough to make their ears itch, but not much else. She wouldn’t apologize for that. “Go play with your cool bugs and your danishes and your nonfunctional cell phones instead.” Regan kicked up an arc of sand, in a display of emotion that she knew Deirdre would have given her weeks of admonishment for. But– what was that? Something metallic poked through where she’d kicked, black and shiny. Regan squinted and bent down, hoping the others would pause their walking and take a look. “What is this?” She glanced quickly at the Goth, anticipating ridiculousness. “It’s not a bug.” Regan pulled a packet of nitrile gloves from her pocket – always with her – and stretched one over a hand. Carefully, she reached out and traced a finger along the curved black metal. There was more attached to it, ratty wooden planks. The sand was easy enough to dig out of the way to get a better picture of what the object was. And it was beginning to look a lot like the corner of a park bench. Like the ones in the Common.

“Well that sounds like good news,” Alan would have rather this had been a normal day for him. Then, he could have pretended that the lady had lost her mind, but this was another one of those days, wasn’t it? Loosening the knot of his tie, he led the way, glancing behind him every now and then to make sure no one was struggling or getting left behind. And he was doing exactly that when the doctor shrieked about her boyfriend, causing the werewolf to cover both his ears and glare at her in barely concealed offense as she proceeded to throw what he would have called a tantrum had this been a child. “Wow, she really roasted us all here,” taking a sip from his coffee mug, he found the beverage managed to make him feel a bit cooler. Enough, at least, to stop in his train of thoughts and pay attention to that piece of metal in the sand instead. “That’s… could be from a… plane,” he tried, figuring that was the only thing that would make sense in the middle of this deserted hell. Glancing at the other two, Alan motioned them to get closer and help the doctor and him as they tried to dig that thing out. Sure enough, he didn’t have plastic gloves in his pocket (like a normal person), but if something had been buried in the sand, he doubted that would matter at all. Setting down his coffee mug, and placing his danish on top, the businessman took a hold of what looked like one end of the object. “Maybe we can try to pull it out, what do you think?” He glanced at Nora, then at the kid. Neither looked exactly strong enough to help, but it would be better than trying on his own.

Breathing a sigh of defeat, Rio accepted his fate as the kidnapper. “Thanks for the advice” he admitted toward Nora, taking special note to withhold any apologies in the future until he acquired the ransom. Technically speaking, it probably wasn’t terrible advice, though he wasn’t sure the amount of apologies given to the victim really changed the situation much. He also wasn’t sure why he was so hung up on the kidnapping thing considering they still had no clue where they were.

Regan’s brief screech made Rio wince and tried to play it off by pretending he was scratching at his ear rather than an attempt to muffle the noise. Regan served as a constant reminder that banshee and hunter hearing did not mix well. If it had been an actual scream Rio wasn’t even sure he would have kept consciousness. Kaden had been Rio’s expert on hearing, and his expertise wasn’t exactly fae. Although in a way, he was probably the best source to ask about Regan’s screams in particular. Not that he wanted to question Regan about Kaden right now. He had thought they were still together, but Nora’s comment combined with Regan’s general anger implied otherwise.

The discovery of something under the sand was exactly what Rio needed to get his mind off of other distractions. He joined the group in trying to unearth the object, pulling his sleeves over his hands to help shovel it out of the way. “I got the other end” Rio agreed with Alan, partially to try to be helpful but mostly with something to prove. He was sure that they’d still call him scrawny and feeble after a display of strength too, but at least it might show that he’s not completely useless. He found the other edge of the object and grabbed at it. “I’m good. Go ahead.” He nodded towards Alan, putting some extra strength into effort but failing to pull it free. “I think it’s bolted down or something.” Rio suggested, slowly realizing what this thing looked like, but trying to ignore the implication. Plenty of parks probably had benches that looked like this one, bolted down just like those in the Common. He didn’t want to entertain the idea that this could be the Common, but in this hypothetical scenario, it at least gave him an idea. “If this is a park bench-” Rio paused, wondering if he made himself sound crazy by suggesting the idea at all, “Maybe we should head that way.” He pointed off towards the center of where the Common would be located. He couldn’t think of a good excuse to justify why he was suggesting this at all, so settled on a poor lie, “Maybe the bench was uh- facing something?”

Nora watched as they digged wondering why Alan was digging with his human hands instead of wolf paws. As they talked about where to go in the commons, Nora was steadily stripping off her clothes and stacking it in a pile next to her. When Rio suggested the bench was facing something, Nora made a dramatic show of her transformation and started digging. Her bear paws were much bigger than her tiny little human hands which meant she made some good progress as she tossed sand around her.

This was kind of fun, Nora decided to herself. Fun in a 'I hope I find a body down here with a ghost so we can talk about sand' kind of way. Nora did hit something. It was a square piece of metal attached to a little stand that she easily ripped off and threw behind her in her digging frenzy. She was not to be stopped by anything. Eventually she met with pavement stopping her from digging more. She climbed out and switched back into a naked human covered in sand. "Nothing there."

As the sand was slowly cleared by combined digging efforts, Regan only watched with narrowed eyes as more of the bench was revealed. And it was a bench. They all seemed to be thinking the same thing. But was it a familiar bench? And did that matter? Regan wanted to chalk this whole experience up to a bad dream, but the feeling of death all around plucked at her skin in a way that could only be real. She didn’t have any better ideas than what Orion suggested, so she gave him a curt nod. It didn’t take long for them to stop once more and dig around again, looking for something in this endless expanse.

And then there was a bear. Nora had just been there a moment ago. She– yes, she was definitely in that very spot. Regan doubled backward, a scream climbing up her throat, but she locked it inside of her along with her fear. Most of it, anyway. “There is a bear,” she pointed out, looking emphatically toward the other two, “a bear.” At least the bear seemed to have no interest in causing them harm, and started pawing around in the sand. It made fast work of the hole it dug, and Regan wondered if they ought to throw sand over it and try and trap it down there.

A piece of metal was hurled into the air from out of the pit, and it seemed to break into a second piece in the air. Regan turned and watched one piece land soundlessly in the sand behind them. Did she dare completely turn her back to the bear? She sucked a breath in through her teeth and marched back, carefully pulling the object from the sand. It was old and worn, a thick layer of rust covering the engraved letters. Down the center, the object had undergone sufficient trauma for it to tear in two. Regan held the metal up to the sunlight. A plaque. This was a plaque of some kind. She heard Nora’s voice and felt a shiver of relief, but this had her full attention. The death even quieted against her senses, as if it wanted her to focus on reading. After reading it, she could partially understand why.

She called out to the group. “I think the bear dug this up. And it… come here.” Did this even deserve the importance she was giving it? Her fingers, as they brushed against the letters, said it did. “It broke in half,” she pointed out, “but it’s legible. I don’t…” She held the plaque up for them to read. “In remembrance of

1770”

“In remembrance of who?” Regan asked, knowing her companions were unlikely to know any more than she did. Perhaps even less. “1770. This must be commemorating someone around the founding of the town.”

Nora made it clear that she didn’t care much for hiding her true identity, and Alan did his best to pretend he didn’t see her bear form or that he didn’t feel a mix of worry and terror anytime he glanced her way. Better this than trying to explain anything to anyone. “What do you mean there’s a bear?” Turning to look at Regan in confusion, Alan watched as a piece of metal was hurled up in the air by Nora and sent away.

While Regan fetched that piece, Alan turned back to the two others to take a look at what they’d dug out. “Well that’s odd,” he gave the plaque a puzzled look, brushing sand off of its surface with the back of his hand. His brows furrowed at the text engraved in the metal. “Doctor, would you mind coming over here?” Taking a seat in the sand, Alan gave a glance up at the sky, squinting as his eyes met the Sun. “This doesn’t make any sense,” he muttered, reaching in his pocket to check once again for signal, but his Maps app wouldn’t load and his screen stubbornly remained white. “So, what does it say?”

There was a bear. Seemingly out of nowhere. Rio would have been freaked out if he hadn’t been able to connect the dots so quickly. He had learned about bugbears growing up, and had read about them at the Scribrary, but he had never seen one in person. He knew that the correct reaction was to be disgusted as a hunter. He also knew that the appropriate reaction for him should have been fear. But his eyes widened in adoration instead as he watched Nora in fascination and mumbled a not-so-subtle “Woah. So cool.”

That brief moment of awe was disrupted by the flying piece of metal that made Rio cringe in fear and try to use his arms as cover as he tried to spot them mid air. The pieces split at the end, with Regan and Alan both going to fetch the separate pieces. He heard Regan’s first, nodding in agreement once she read it off. The town had been founded in the later half of 1770. It had to be significant to that. “Maybe just the founders? I don’t remember any books about White Crest ever naming any families specifically.” Though he couldn’t remember any sort of plaque in the Common that had paid tribute to the specific year of founding. The thought gave him chills. And found himself wandering with Alan to take a look at the second piece. He read it to himself at first, feeling his blood run cold as he tried to think of an explanation. “Um… this doesn’t make any sense.” Rio stressed, nerves inching into his voice as he prepared to read it out loud.

“of White Crest, ME

- 2022”

The connection was clear as day, though Rio hardly wanted to admit to it. But eventually he just had to say it. “It says ‘In remembrance of White Crest, ME. 1770-2022’”.

#wickedswriting #season 4 #season 4 thread #potw #potw thread #alan #nora #regan #orion

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wickedsrest-rp-archive · 2 years

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Blast to the Past || POTW with Aylin, Jake, & Leah

TIMING: Current PARTIES: @onlyaylin @hackysacking @phoenixleah SUMMARY: A few White Crest locals end up in White Crest in the late 1700s when the Horrors originally began. After some digging, a pattern is noticed and it’s not so promising.

Lately, Jake had often dreamed of a house burning as the evening sun blazed like an ember in the smok-choked dusk sky. He’d bolt awake on his dorm room bed, drenched in sweat as he struggled against ropes tying him to a stake. Jake’d apparently cussed and cried out in pain so much in these dreams that it’d woken other guys in the fraternity house, leading to the awkwardness of Jake coming to his senses while being surrounded by confused half-naked dorm-mates keeping to keep him pinned down while trying to assure a frantically delirious and struggling Jake that he wasn’t covered in burns, no one was coming for his family.

Dude, it's fine. There’s no burns. See, look at your hands! Just breathe man. Uh….Jake…could you stop choking Martin now? K’thanks.

It was embarrassing on too many levels to count. Jake’s dormmates didn’t give him too much shit about it beyond the occasional joke while playing pool at Dells after work. The casual surreality and death rate of White Crest had acclimated the guys into aimable numbness for long enough that they didn't sweat the small stuff any more. Nevertheless, Jake hated scaring them with whatever these recurring nightmares were, not to mention disturbing the sleep of student-athletes who already didn’t get enough of it most weeks between school, their jobs, and practice. Like with most things in life that Jake couldn’t explain, he focused on forgetting and suppressing it, trying to exhaust himself into dreamlessness through doubling his work out routine and picking up the strongest sleep meds he could afford.

But then Jake found the house in real life, and everything felt like it was falling to pieces all over again.

What’d drawn Jake onto that lonely road into the woods after practice, he couldn’t really say. Jake often felt tugging pulls like this, draws towards random bullshit and lonely places where the air seemed to hum with a subtle energy that made Jake’s blood sing. But sounded weird, and Jake was a normal dude in a normal town who did only normal things. So therefore, he obviously had a good reason for trekking into the woods and across jagged ravines, hair still wet from the locker room shows and gym bag thrown over one shoulder. He’d just forgotten for now. But it was surely a good reason, and mostly importantly, a normal everyday reason that could’ve belonged to anyone.

Not a freak. Please, please, I don’t want to be a freak. Call me basic. Tell me im kinna boring and pathetic. That’s fine! Just anything but a freak. No! This isn't real. This can’t be real.

“This isn’t real,” Jake mumbled helplessly aloud as he looked at the old burned farmhouse that’d already been overtaken by the forest centuries before Jake was even a horny thought in his parents’ brains. But the exact ruined replica of the house from Jake’s dreams rudely refused to stop existing besides an overgrown orchard of apple trees and a vivid woodland meadow of poppies, primrose, monkshood, and henbane. “This is just DeJa Vu,” Jake said to himself more frantically as his physical surroundings stubbornly continued to exist and remain impossibly familiar. “Yeah, shit like…its just…”

The sky darkened above the farmhouse and the light around Jake reddened as the sun became an angry furnace-bright eye in a sky darkened by sourceless smoke. The sun gew bright as the smoke thickened, blazing light and the suffocating scent of char choking out Jake’s surroundings until he passed out on knees while still gagging and grimacing through the searing pain.

The lilting of songbirds in the trees woke Jake from the murky depths of unconsciousness. He stirred with a groan, feeling the polyester of his gym bag against his cheek and the bare unearvently packed dirt of a well-trodden forest road beneath him. Weird like, there hadn’t been a road hiking up here. Hell, there’d barely even been a game trail.

Jake opened his eyes to see a colonial farmhouse with panelled wood walls, a wide-plank deck and exposed wood beams. Smoke wafted into the air from a rough stone chimney. Cows grazed in the meadow while a fluffy cat languished on the deck and watched chickens cluck and pluck at worms in the warm summer grass.

“This…isn’t real,” Jake reminded him, trying to fight back the panic threatening to crash into his brain like an ocean tide.

All she’d wanted to do was go for a small walk before trying a hand at cooking dinner for herself and Ceyda. Aylin knew that, of the two of them, Ceyda was the far better cook, but she also knew that Ceyda was working hard, and even though Aylin was taking classes in order to try and graduate relatively on time with others her age, time to cook was certainly not a bad thing. It kept her busy, too - and keeping her mind occupied was never a bad idea. So she’d set off, and somehow had ended up in a part of the woods she’d never been in before.

Which was very uncharacteristic for her. Aylin liked to plan things as much as possible - especially ever since her sixteenth birthday. Before that, she certainly hadn’t been entirely spontaneous, but she had certainly had more of a spark to her - a curiosity that let her explore the world without risking an anxiety attack.

She tended to avoid the woods, where possible. Open spaces meant she could see everything around her better, which meant things were less likely to sneak up on her, which meant that she would be just fine. Or at least that was what she told herself. Aylin wasn’t certain if this was something she always believed, though - or if it was just something she’d repeated to herself enough times to trick her brain into thinking it was true.

So when she’d shut her eyes for just a moment, she hadn’t expected to wake up and find herself in a place she’d never been before. Aylin pressed her tongue against the roof of her mouth, and did her best to focus on things around her, on how her body was feeling. She pulled out her phone, wanting to text Ceyda - to say hi, excuse me, I got lost and you’re always the best at finding me so could you please do that?? - but there was no service, and so she took another deep breath as she turned around and noticed another figure. “I - um, I am sorry to intrude, but I seem to have gotten super lost?” She wasn’t sure why she phrased it like a question. Maybe because most of this all seemed like one of her terrible dreams.

The library had been especially busy lately, with people filing in with all sorts of research questions that ranged anywhere from King Henry VIII’s 6 wives to how to tame an Ustra to become a house pet. Leah’s mind should have been swirling from the questions, but instead it was somewhere far off, thinking of everything that had been happening with the people she loved lately.

She was looking down at the desk as she was filling out some paperwork, when a sound from the back of the library distracted her enough to make her look up from her work. It was the strangest thing, because it was almost as if she’d heard a bird- it was a sound that one would usually only hear if they were outside in the open. When she looked up, she had to squint, because instead of the library in front of her, she was surrounded by a setting she didn’t recognize. Old buildings, old fashioned clothing from people (who were looking toward her with the sort of strange and accusing looks one had nightmares about in high school, and, worst of all, no books in sight. If she didn’t know any better, she would have sworn that she somehow transported herself to the 1700s. She looked down at her desk to realize it had disappeared, though until then, she swore her arms had been resting on it.

This was bad. It was bad for a million reasons. The first, and probably most pressing, was that the accusing whispers of the people that surrounded her were a lot more dangerous than just high school embarrassment. If she was right about her time period, then even her odd outfit would have been enough to convince those around her that she might have been a witch that needed to be taken care of. And what was worse, if she actually had traveled back in time, she didn’t have access to the scribe journals to figure out how to get herself back. She huffed, looking around herself with wide, panicked eyes, trying to find an out.

To Leah’s surprise, her eyes landed on three other people who seemed, based on their clothes at least, to be from the same century as her. She even recognized one from the library, a sweet regular who had sometimes reminded her a lot of herself.

Thinking quickly, Leah walked double time toward the other woman, trying her best to not draw attention to either of them. As she did, she tried to wave toward the two men near them, gesturing toward a clearing not to far from where they were all standing. “We need to get out of here”, she said when she reached Aylin, grabbing her arm gently. “We need to get out of here quickly”.

Leah was smart. Leah knew all the best book recommendations and was always nice to talk to whenever Aylin came by the library. Which gave her a small bit of comfort - or at least as much as was possible, given that she still had absolutely no clue as to what was going on or why she’d ended up in a place that very much didn’t feel like where she’d started out on her walk. There weren’t any planned historical reenactments in the town that she was aware of, though it was always possible that she’d missed some sort of memo.

So her hand on Aylin’s arm was welcome and steadying, and she nodded, “yes, I - but how?” She glanced over to the two others who appeared to be just as out of place as she and Leah were. “I don’t even know how I got here, and knowing how you got somewhere’s usually the first step to knowing how to get out of that somewhere.” She sighed, gaze finally drifting to the people who looked more at place where they were. People who also were looking increasingly irritated, the more she observed them, and she twisted a strand of hair around her fingertips.

“What are your names?” She asked, nodding towards the two men, “I - I’m Aylin, and I know her,” she nodded to Leah, “I also - well, I was just walking and I don’t really know how I ended up here. Which I know is sort of me repeating myself from earlier but the point still stands and…” she trailed off, squeezing her eyes shut for a moment, “my aunt’s going to be worried if I’m not home for dinner.”

Jake had run from the farmhouse and down the hill. Even in his panic and confusion, Jake had been unerringly drawn to the only people around here that’d dressed normally. As often happened when Jake was disoriented or indeperate need, he got these strangely intense vibes that often drew him towards those something or someone close to the need that was in his brain. One might’ve called it clairvoyance if such a thing was possible, but obviously a normal dude like Jake only had the eerily precise sense of direction we all get when stranded in a strange land with no landmarks we recognize.

So Jake didn’t find it odd that he’d somehow dodged around wagons, horses, alleys, dock workers, and latrine pits to find the only three people here who looked at all familiar. That is just how jogging works. Coach called it ‘visualizing the goal.’

Oh look! The Librarian!

In fact, Jake was so good at visualizing that he’d already figured out how all these archaic surroundings were normal actually and going great.

“Woah! Miss Ramirez this is aaaaawesome,” Jake effused, cheeks still flushed from his sprint down the hill from a farmhouse that hadn’t his dreams. “Damn this art thing is going great,” he commented about an art exhibition he’d talked with Leah about months ago, seamlessly deciding that it was definitely today and featured colonial architecture on a massive scale. “Oh hi!” Jake rounded on the other two people here doing Art for books or reading or something. The young man beamed with a solipsist bliss that ignored the stares and troubled murmurs around them. “Is this your guys first Ren Fair with the Library! Its mine! Aw shit? Are you gonna fight with lances Miss Ramirez, are you good with lances?”

“As much as I hold confidence in the fact that the White Crest Library would be able to put on such an artful, accurate production, that is not what’s going on here.” Leah hadn’t recognized Jake until he was closer, but she couldn’t help her little smirk of pride at the fact that he knew the library could throw quite the party. She’d have to remember to make him patron of the month sometime soon. The people around them were getting increasingly braver with their whispers, and though accusing glances were being shot their way, people were avoiding going near them like the plague. As if being a witch was somehow proximally contagious. Leah wanted to roll her eyes, but the issue was much to pressing to be annoyed with. At least their distance would give them all a chance to talk. She would survive being burned at the stake. Heck, it wouldn’t be worse than a regular Tuesday for her. But she couldn’t say the same for her three companions.

“I know this sounds absolutely insane, but I think, it seems… we might have actually…” It was hard for her to say it. She never choked out the truth to strangers or acquaintances. She barely told friends about how much she knew about the supernatural. But desperate times called for desperate measures. “We’ve traveled back in time.” There. It was out there. “And the three of us either need to find somewhere to hide, or some conveniently placed and sized clothing before we’re all put on trial al la ‘The Crucible’.

Back in time? Aylin shook her head - but of course, it made sense. She remembered others talking about ending up in different places, and she could feel her heartbeat quicken as she thought more about it. “Hiding, that I’m a fan of.” That’s what I’m a natural at, anyhow. “But if, while hiding, we find outfits, even if they are not the best fit, I vote we take those anyhow, and we can always pay someone back later, ‘cause I don’t want to get arrested for robbery.”

She blinked a few times, rapidly, “Oh, I’m Aylin - uh, Aylin Kaplan, if we’re doing full names. I go to the university and live with my aunt and I would very much like to get back to where she is, because I don’t want to worry her.”

“Oooooooooh.” False comprehension dawned over Jake's face, lighting up his blue eyes and bringing dimples to his smile. “Back in time,” Jake said with farcical slowness, before looking over his shoulder to give a passing puritan fellow a knowing wink and finger-guns, to show that Jake was definitely in on the joke of these very hard-core renaissance fair workers.

“We should steal clothes from a clothesline or something,” Jake suggested. “It’s how it goes in movies.”

“Leah. The librarian”, Leah said, mostly to Sam since Jake and Aylin knew who she was. She didn’t expect any of them to take to her theory so quickly, mostly because to a layman it must have sounded ridiculous, but she was a bit concerned that Jake seemed to still think this was a bit. Would he act with enough haste if he didn’t know their lives were really at stake?

“I don’t think clotheslines exist yet”, she mused, looking around them to see if she could find any just in case. “Maybe we should just… start walking? Together, of course, and away enough from everyone else. If we see any spare clothes we should grab them. I’m sure we can pull something presentable enough together, right?” She was completely grasping at straws, and completely panicked.

“Someone told me about time being a bit weird,” Aylin looked between the others, “and I don’t think this is the same town I woke up in, so I guess if I ever end up in a physics class I’ll have to ask about the mechanics of time travel.” She giggled, in an attempt to lighten the mood.

“I vote for the starting to walk, and maybe not speaking unless spoken to? Just to be extra safe, since we don’t know if these people will support us and I’d super rather not get into trouble.” Aylin took a few steps forward, “and yes, I think we’ll find at least something.” Or at least that was what she’d tell herself again and again - because if she said it enough times, it had to become true, didn’t it? “How does this way look?”

“I think I saw some back that way yeah,” Jake claimed, despite not having come from anywhere remotely in the direction Aylin had indicated. “I’m Jake by the way! Hi!”

“Oh wait,” Jake said as he progressed down a path of mud interspersed with erratic patches of cobblestones. “I should have an Amishy name now …like…Jake-a-diah!”

Jakeadiah led the way through colonial White Crest as if he’d been born there, led by a wordless knowing that he didn’t bother to question. He wove around thatched houses, rancid stockyards full of animals, and warehouses of stacked crates whose wooden sides were branded with seals from all over the vast British empire.

Somehow Jakeadiah knew a local washerwoman had abandoned her work to attend to a dispute at the marketplace. He pivoted at the end of an alley to a small cobblestone cul-de-sac where a wooden wash-bin stood beside many sets of clothes in various states of questionable repair. “Fuck yeah! Oatmeal Guy hats,” Jake explained as he seized a broad-brimmed black hat that apparently reminded him of the Quaker Oats mascot.

Jakeadiah. Right. Leah watched her companions and the strangers around them carefully as they made their way through the town, led by Jakeadiah himself. Somehow, by a miracle of luck, he lead them to a pile of clothes, and it was just the luck they needed. “Oh my god, Jake! Way to pull through!” She grinned and pulled Aylin over, perusing through the clothes until she found one that might just fit. Step one was done, and at least they’d be out of the townspeople’s prying eyes for the time being. The thought made her much less panicky. Things like this happened all the time in White Crest, and she couldn’t help but be fascinated by their surroundings now they the present danger was at bay.

“I’m almost positive we’re still in White Crest”, she said, holding her arms up. The sleeves on the dress were a bit too long, so she pulled them up to rest on her wrists. “I think we should waste the rest of our time here figuring out exactly what year we’re in. You’d be surprised by how far back the town archives go… anyone up for going to find them now?”

“I don’t think there’s a way to turn a Turkish name Amish-y,” Aylin bit her lip, “but yours works nicely!” She couldn’t hide her grin as he led them to a place that did, in fact, actually have clothing that it appeared nobody else was using. Thankfully Leah was willing to help her find clothes, and she quickly pulled a dress over her head and replaced her shoes with the era-appropriate flats. She still wanted to get back to Ceyda as fast as was possible, but she didn’t dare pull her phone out - she knew that the people, whoever they were, would likely be on her about that.

“Yeah, some of this looks familiar and -” she nodded enthusiastically, “books. Books are very good and something you can rely on.�� Aylin took in a deep breath, “I vote for finding any sort of archives or record rooms that we can.”

Jakeadiah, now clad in a farmer’s simple linen shirt, beige breeches, boots, and a broad weathered hat after a polite dip behind a corner to change, watched his companions confer amongst themselves. Jake’s eyes flicked between their features. A naturally social guy, Jake picked up on the interpersonal vibes here even if his brain still blocked out the obvious.

They weren’t taking this like a game. They were concerned, tense even. Jakeadiah decided to put it down to them being serious method actors, but his heart knew that wasn’t true. Something was very wrong here, and though Jake refused to think on why, he felt the need to help these folks nonetheless. “Probably won’t be too hard to find books, not sure most people around here have books that aren’t bibles or farmer almanacs in their house,” Jake affirmed ‘in character’ with a touch less blitheness than before.

Leah nodded affirmatively, pleased that they all seemed to be on the same page about finding some literature. If there was any luck left for them, they might even find some old Scribe writings amongst the towns typical archives, and maybe something there might help explain the whole thing. “The bank by the Common was supposedly once the site of some old town Archives before they were moved to where they are today. Or… not today, in 2022. Because where we are, today, is not…” She held her head, getting confused. “You get the point.”

She looked around them, trying her hardest to locate anything that looked familiar. “Problem is, I have no idea where we are in relation to that…”. She looked between them, biting her lip. “Do you think any of the familiarity you see might lead us to the future Common?”

“Today as in the today we came from, not the one we wound up in.” Aylin nodded along, “I mean, I’m still relatively new to the town, so I don’t know if I know my way around most places, but uh -” she squinted, “I guess we’d need to find an open space? Do you know if they tore anything down to make the Common?” Her gaze flicked over to Jake, “oh, she means like history books and stuff that not everyone has, I think.” She felt her cheeks flush, “not to put words in her mouth or in yours, but I think like - news clippings? History about the town? People’ve valued that for years, I think.”

Aylin took in another sharp breath, lest her anxieties lead to too much rambling. “But Leah’s the history-slash-book expert, here. I can tell you a bit about rocks, but as far as this town goes, I’m still a newbie.”

Their path toward the Archives came to be blocked by a cluster of townsfolk, who had a lot of difficult questions in where exactly the four strangers had come from. The commotion inevitably drew more curious onlookers and snatches of the conversation being bandied began to make Jake deeply uncomfortable. No consent forms had been signed for some of the old timey punishments being mentioned here.

But he could tell this growing crowd to chill, a shout I’d warning from further down the road was followed by the sight of an out of control carriage. The driver had been thrown from his seat and the carriage now careened down the street, the panicked horses sending the carriages’ bulk slamming through storefronts as bent wheels carved deep groves in the muddy street.

“Charity!”

A cry from a man in the crowd drew Jake’s eyes to a girl that was running to join the angry crowd out of curiosity. The crowd had been so focused on the strangers that they hadn’t seen the approaching coach until too late. The girl's bonneted head turned towards the coach without time to comprehend.

The adrenaline of the moment surged into Jake, the thudding in his temples and deadly urgency of the moment left no room for the lies he believed for safety. Jake the store clerk hesitated, and Jake the summoner stepped up in his stead.

Jake raised a hand and made a twisting motion, as if he were turning a door knob, but the fabric of space twisted instead.

The girl seemed to collapse in on herself, shattering into glassy fragments in a horrifying millisecond of spatial distortion. The shards that’d once been Charity Florence were sucked into a hole of blue fire that’d appeared in the air, like the fragments of a broken mirror swirling down into a burning drain.

The carriage slammed into the space where Charity had been an instant before. Shattered pieces of the deck and coach door mingled in a thunderclap of broken wood and screaming horses.

The crowd that’d gathered to admonish the outsiders were stunned by the tumult for a good half a minute. Wide eyes flicked from the ruins of the carriage collision site across the street, to whimpering young woman whose shoulder was now held by Jake, his hand still alight with flickering blue radiance that gave off no heat.

The hush was broken by the wailing of Charity, whose cries mingled with the screaming horses still struggling to disentangle themselves from the carriage wreckage. In between bouts of gasping hyperventilation, Charity tore herself from her rescuers gasp and began tearful rambling about fire, strange hellish vistas, and other half-coherent phantasmagoria. Mr. Florence rushed forward to take his daughter in his arms, and wary eyes narrowed at the young man who was still lit by the fading blue glow of magic around him.

“He’s one of those folk from the Rainer farm,” noted one elder in the crowd, surveying Jake’s face with narrow eyes. “Look at his face, hair, eyes, he’s the spitting likeness of them…”

Sinister consensus spread amongst the crowd, apparently connecting Jake to a certain Rainer family of questionable repute who has a suspicious habit of knowing things they shouldn’t.

Remembering the farm he’d seen in both his dreams and upon first landing here, Jake turn to his companions, shaking the last glow of himself. “Hey uh guys…let’s uh…do books now.”

If Leah weren’t horrified by the potential consequences of what she and the already angry townspeople just witnessed, she would have been fascinated. Jake was a spellcaster, or she assumed he was, and phasing people in an out of danger like some sort of modern day super hero. Was his belief that the library was putting on an elaborate historical event all an act? Or was he like Regan, so naive to the world of the supernatural despite being smack dab in the middle of it. None of that really mattered, she supposed, since people like Jake were the very people that the village around them were hoping to eradicate. Their growing agitation was evident, and Leah worried they’d soon strike like a swarm of bees.

Distraction… distraction…. They needed a distraction if they planned on getting enough of a headstart to find anything together. She looked past the crowd that was now growing even more, toward a tree standing alone on the side of the road. “Uhh… look over there!”, she said, pointing in its direction. By the time the townspeople looked over, she had already made it burst into flames, but all it did mostly was cause another wave of panic amongst the townspeople.

“Books. Right!” She grabbed both of their wrists, finding a small hole in the wall of anger and led them out of it, running as fast as she could with the outfit and the mud at their feet and the panic rising through her. She thought she might have saw a clearing like Aylin had suggested up ahead, but she couldn’t trust her eyes. If they stopped running for even a moment, the village would have caught up with them. “Anyone see a clearing? Or anything that looks like The Common?”

She felt sick to her stomach. Aylin watched with wide eyes as someone seemed to fall into herself, and then explode into flames - and if she’d had any doubts about her desperate need to get back to Ceyda (which she hadn’t) they would have entirely flown out the window by now. This was very much not the way to stay undercover, because Aylin was fairly certain that exploding things was going to draw attention, even if they were dressed era-appropriate.

She felt herself gasp as something else caught fire, though she was grateful that Jake and Leah seemed to have a handle on the distractions, because she didn’t know what she had to offer in that regard. Aylin nodded, feeling herself relax just slightly as Leah grabbed her wrist. “Yes, let’s go. Books. Now.” She kept easy pace with Leah and Jake, “I - there’s maybe a space over there? Given that it’s away from everyone in town, I vote we maybe possibly try it? If you both want.”

Jake ran alongside the others, droplets of sweat beading down his forehead in a weariness that had nothing to do with the exertion of running. The athlete was accustomed to the wear and tear of exercise, but the tiredness uncoiling in his chest didn’t feel like that. It was a different kind of exhaustion, going far deeper than tendons and panting lungs. Jake recognized that feeling. It came over him alot weird shit went down, like part of himself had been burnt as fuel.

As always happened when Jake had unwelcome realizations about the world, he instinctively shoved the thought away. A lifetime of mental barriers, denial, and determined ignorance attempt to bulldoze these the last five minutes into some dark of his brain. As he had so many times before, Jake stubbornly decided nothing he had seen was real. This feeling wasn’t real. None of this was real.

Yet the unwelcome thoughts remained. Magic hummed in Jake’s veins like the lethal current of an exposed ground-wire, set free in a moment of stress.

Jake’s breaths grew heavy as he ran with the other time travelers…no no…they were just at ren fair…no wait isn’t that a lie?…this is some production they have gong here…stop stop you know that isn’t true…fuck how did these ren fair get the blue fireworks to work like that…that stuff was me, it was always me…and that woosh fire pyrotechnics right after! Awesome…god this hurts, please stop fuck my head…Y’know. We’re kinna tapped on this ren fair? Like, shouldn’t we probably head home after this whole chase skit and…

The sides of an alley collapsed behind Jake, imploding as walls rippled with jello-like wobbles, stretched across the alley to merge with the other wall, and together blinked out of existence entirely. The two neighboring houses collapsed behind the group in a cloud of mortar and shingles as the roof caved in where entire walls had been a second before.

“Yeah sure! That clearing, awesome,” agreed Jake with a tense note of panic starting to infect his normally calm tenor.

“Jake, this is just a ren fair, remember? You need to relax, okay? I think for everyone’s safety, you need to be calm.” There was no chance he believed this was an act anymore, but maybe if he could pretend to believe it long enough for them to find some literature, they could get out of here without the whole town imploding before they all had a chance to be born. Leah looked into the direction Aylin was indicating, deciding it was good enough for her and doing her best to lead the others in the direction.

By a miracle, or maybe just by sheer dumb luck, Aylin’s guess happened to be right. Even luckier, they had somehow outrun the angry mob, at least for now. They came to a building that she recognized fully- she knew it in her time as ‘the bank by the common’, never bothering to learn it’s actual name or even what branch it was a part of. Now that she thought of it, she briefly wondered if it was part of some elaborate cover up. Either way, if her calculations were correct, this building should have just been for record keeping at this point. She looked between her companions, then, and reached forward to knock on the door. “Do you think anyone’s working? Maybe everyone’s gone to see the commotion we caused.”

Jake seemed to be worried now, too, which certainly didn’t do much of anything to quell Aylin’s anxieties. “Yes, being calm’s better. Good, if possible. Even if it can be hard.” Aylin took in a deep breath of her own. “Try to name five things you can see… four things you can touch,” she scrunched up her nose, “three things you can hear, two things you can smell, and one thing you can taste.” Aylin reached into her bag, “I’ve got these sour candies that I bring along for when I feel panicky, and they work. I like the lemon or black cherry best. But blue raspberry, apple, and watermelon are also pretty good, I think?” She held out the bag to Leah, too. “If you’d like one, you’re welcome to them.”

She didn’t think that her actual knowledge of the town had played any sort of role in their happening upon the clearing. “I don’t think anybody’s working, and I mean, they don’t have cellphones so even if someone is, they won’t know that the rest of everyone’s after us.” Aylin unwrapped one of the candies (black cherry) and placed it on her tongue. “I’m ready whenever you both are.”

Jake could feel the edges of this dimension as his hands wear running along the folds of origami. The world he knew, a single reality with firm boundaries, was a lie. Born with the ability to feel and rip holes in the fabric of space, the young summoner’s dimensional awareness seemed ratcheted to a fever pitch after being suppressed for so long.

Jake felt as if he were walking on a ceiling made of glass, the endless worlds and abysses between dimensions yawning out in layers upon layers beneath. One wrong step, a stray thought, one second of this energy building without him being released, and Jake felt like he mind plunge though the brittle surface of reality, falling through layers of alien universes that seemed stacked atop each other like a stuffed crust four meat pizza with a delicious sauce of lightless void.

“Oh uh thanks I uh thanks,” Jake stammered as Leah and Aylin offered comfort in their own way. He accepted Leah’s explanation and the candy from Aylin with a nervous swallow and more breathless gratitude. Candy and a fantasy weren’t necessarily comfort by themselves, but it was the caring behind those gestures, the assurance that in all this chaos and overwhelming sensation there were strangers who cared about him, that seemed to shelter him from the storm inside.

Jake tried to focus on his three companions, watching their expressions, listening to their voices, and letting the current problem distract him from the vertigo and gut fear of falling through this world like a glitching video game.

Jake walked up to the door with the reckless courage of a desperate man, and pushed the door open inward. “I don’t see anyone,” he said tentatively after ducking his head inside.

Leah happily took one of the watermelon candies, making sure to remember this trick for the next time something was going incredibly wrong in town. Maybe White Crest should invest in some bags of candy at every corner, if only to make people feel more at ease. “These things turn my tongue colors”, she said to them, her mouth tripping over the candy as she spoke. It was a lame attempt to lighten the mood for Jake’s sake. She wondered how much he knew about what he was, and how much he knew about everything else.

Leah was surprised at Jake’s courage, but not disappointed in it. It was more than she had been able to muster, anyway. She looked at Aylin with a grin before she ventured inside, looking around at the shelves and shelves of books lined up behind a vacant table. They looked old and new at the same time- the same charm of some of her oldest tomes without all the dust and disrepair that normally accompanied them. “I don’t even know where to start”, she muttered in awe. In a moment of weakness, she forgot completely about their mission and rushed toward the books to start reading, pulling one down immediately. “There’s so many of them!”

“They do that to my tongue too. Also would not recommend putting four in your mouth at a time, that gets overwhelming.” Aylin put on her best smile, because for once, she was fairly certain that someone else was more out of their league and comfort zone than she was. So long as no werewolves showed up, she was going to do her best to put on a brave face for as long as she could.

“There are so many books,” Aylin stared around the room - it was incredible, and she couldn’t help but smile. It was comforting to know that no matter what, books were something that had that sort of effect on her - one of wonder and amazement. “There’s a local section here, I think.” She said, wandering over and grabbing a book, “though I think there’s a lot of local sections,” she scrunched up her nose. “I guess we should just start reading?”

Jake was not a scholar or even a big reader in general. His parents had militantly instilled an intellectual disinterest in their children, emphasizing the uselessness of impractical knowledge. Knowledge was a danger, for it was often the key to the deepest parts of oneself and the Rainsbottoms desperately wanted that to stay locked.

But danger and stress had been lockpicks despite all that repression, and now Jake walked amongst the rough-hewn shelves, colonial boots shuffling occasionally against the wood floor as he struggled with detertixy in these cramped archaic shoes. He ran his fingers over leather book covers with spines that were ridged from the raised cords they’d been sown over. In a moment of light piercing his tunnel vision, Jake was struck by just how much he didn’t know. It was a frequent thought honestly, but…

For the first time, that unknown excited Jake instead of scared him. Something dormant in him had finally stirred and it was starving in a way that Jake had never allowed himself to feel.

Jake started retrieving books for his companions to read. Occasionally Jake would lose focus, and his unconscious intention would cause a book to teleport from the shelf straight to the table in a flash of blue light and a dull clap of displaced air. Jake flushed a progressively darker shade of sheepish red as it became ever more undeniable that the summoner himself was the source of these yeeting books “Sorry uh, like uh maybe it’s like magnets or uh….,” Jake rambled reflexive explanations as he brought Leah and Aylin whatever they needed, believing his own lies a little less each time.

Leah appreciated Aylin’s presence. It was a calm brightness, filled with an innocence that she wasn’t always sure she could muster in such a circumstance. She smiled at the girl, then took down a few books of her own. When books starting flying seemingly of their own accord onto the table, she chanced a glance at Jakeadiah himself. “Maybe it’s something more special than magnets, who knows. Jake…”, she chanced, hoping he’d look up at her. “Once this… renaissance fair is all over, you should come by the library. I have a couple of books I think you might be interested in.”

She started to glance through the books, and all of them were incredible and otherworldly. But none seemed like the scribe tomes she had hoped would have made their way there. It wasn’t long before she felt like they had been reading for hours, but to no avail.

She felt safe in libraries. Aylin figured that this was a good portion of the reason why she’d clicked with Leah right away, and for all his apparent confusion, Jake also seemed to appreciate the library, which made any lingering doubts she’d held about him (of which there’d been maybe half a doubt) dissipate “Leah’s basically the smartest person I know,” Aylin affirmed to Leah’s comment to Jake. “Besides, the White Crest library is super pretty and a fun place to hang out in!”

They settled into reading, and Aylin allowed herself to be lost in the books, pouring over them in some attempt to find anything that could help. She didn’t know what exactly she was supposed to look for, but she figured that coming across even half of an answer would be an improvement over knowing nothing at all.

After what felt like it had to be a few hours she came across something that seemed familiar - oddly so to what she’d seen people mentioning back home. Aylin scanned through the page - yesterday, the houses shifted and ones I’d never seen appeared - one part read, and as she continued to read, it became more clear that shifting buildings were not the only similarity. Fish smells too, time repeating itself, and much more.

“Uh…” she began, “Leah? Jake? I think I found something.” She motioned for both of them to come over. “Seems like whatever oddness that’s happening back - now? Back wherever we belong apparently has happened before.” She held out a book towards Leah. “I haven’t finished reading, so I don’t know how they made it stop but…” Aylin took in a shaking breath. “This gives a whole new meaning to the idea of history repeating itself, right?”

Jake hadn’t had many willing trips to the library that weren’t part of a scavenger hunt or to humor a date more intellectual himself. Twenty four hours ago Jake would have met Leah’s offer to visit the library and Aylin’s affirmation with an aimable shrug and self-deprecating comments about him not being a books kinna guy, the same explanation he used for sleeping through classes and quickly counting cracks in ceiling while peers debated morality or politics.

But today Jake’s world was unraveling. He was confused, exhausted, and afraid, but somehow these new fears had replaced the old. Jake wasn’t at all who he’d thought he was and though that uncertainty was painful, that pain made him forget the same old bonehead script. “Uh i mean, if you have books on um…. magnets,” look Jake was making progress but we definitely were not ready for the other m-word yet. “And stuff that be really uh…oh holy shi..!” Jake let out a yelp before self-consciously clearing his throat as the large almanac he’d been looking at on the shelf vanished and materialized on an abrupt thud and flash of blue on the table next to him. “That’d be awesome,” Jake concluded belatedly while eyeing the latest mischief the awesome and terrible power of magnets had wrought.

Jake listened as Aylin explained that the future and past were connected. Jake’s mind told him that was insane, but the summoner’s instincts, the primal part of him that had felt the wild magic and spatial distortion that’d brought them here, knew it was true. “So like, is this like…a bad thing,” Jake asked tentatively, not quite ready to accept the full implications of what’d been said, “like we gotta warn White Crest to quit the torches and man-tights or we’ll keep making the same mistakes kinna deal?”

Leah looked up when Aylin called her and Jake over, and immediately dropped what she was reading (an admittedly useless archive of the known local arsonists, but she couldn’t help herself). She walked over to stand behind her marveling at what she had found. “Wait, Aylin, this is…” daylight savings repeating following whispers coming from seemingly nowhere… it matched up completely with what had been happening in their White Crest. “History is repeating itself… literally”. She looked between Jake and Aylin’s book before she continued reading, responding to Jake at the same time. “It’s only bad if the outcome is bad, I think. I mean, cyclical happenings are actually a lot more common on earth than you think. Some even think there are some species who have cyclical lifespans.” She tucked hair behind her ear, knowing all too well about that particular subject. “Sometimes you just have to wait these sort of things out.”

She continued reading down, trying to find some sort of indication where the circle started itself again. “I don’t… all of the writings seem to just… stop”, she said, pulling away from the book.

“Man-tights?” Aylin looked over to Jake inquisitively, “but uh, I’m not sure.” Leah began talking, and though Aylin was grateful to have found something of potential use, she figured that Leah, being someone who worked in a library, was the defacto expert in this situation. “There’s a jellyfish that never dies, but - that’s not the point, sorry.” She swallowed at Leah’s next comment. “They can’t,” she took the book from her hands, “no - there’s no way, we’ve gotta have some other book somewhere else.” She flipped through the pages. “Why would someone just stop writing?”

Jake wasn’t sure how the immortal Jellyfish fit into this whole cycle and bad writing thing fit with these stupid vanishing books and this freaky renaissance fair, but the seriousness of their situation had fully pierced his brain. The adrenaline rush of danger heightened Jake’s awareness, both wonder and anxiety pushed onto his brain’s backburner by the primal need to be present in the perilous moment.

Jake followed muted sounds of stirring outside and a growing sense of unease. The athlete made his way to the archive’s door with quiet strides, not wanting to distract his more intellectual companions from putting all this together. Jake eeked open the door open in a cracked he hoped wouldn’t be perceptible from the outside.

The course wood grains of the door and frame obscured Jake’s vision with annoying splinters that blocked details, but he caught vibes nonetheless. Fiery lights were emerging around the edge of some thatch houses. A crowd of locals carrying torches and long-barreled muskets were peeling off the town’s main road into the curving cul-de-sac the archives occupied. Many boots clomped with steady wet steps in the muddy path and torches were flailing pillars of light in the dimming evening.

Seriously

Fuck Rennaisance Fairs.

Official Score 0/10

“Um, sorry to interrupt but like, we might be running out of time here,” Jake cautioned his companions.

Leah knew what might make a whole world of someone’s stop writing, and the more she looked through the books, the more the outcome was clear. There was a pattern that was being followed, one that always restarted after White Crest people just seemed to… disappear. She looked at Aylin, pressing her lips together but not sharing her assumptions. She didn’t want to scare either of them, especially not before they got the information they needed.

If Jake’s concerned words didn’t catch her attention, the commotion outside would have. The warmth of fire coming toward them, something that normally brought her so much comfort, sent a wave of panic whirling through her chest. She looked to Aylin again, and then starting grabbing as many of the papers they were reading as she could. Maybe if they got back with enough of them, they would have some semblance of an idea of what to expect before their eventual demise.

“Jake… do you think you could…make those magnets work well enough to flash us back to the future?”, she asked in a huff, still collecting all the pages she could.

“My aunt is going to be worried if I don’t come back soon.” Truthfully, Ceyda was probably worried the moment that Aylin’s phone didn’t register when she went to check on her location. But thinking about that too much right now wasn’t going to do anyone any sort of good. She watched Leah grab some of the papers, and began to do the same herself - she didn’t know what good it would be, but if this was anything akin to her family’s hunter journals, they would be worth saving, ten-fold.

“Anything to get us back to the future would be super duper welcome, and like, if you want a thanks for it, I’ll buy you pizza or cookies or anything.” Aylin squeaked. So much for not freaking out.

Jake was about to reply that the magnet stuff was just some weird thing that yanked people and books, when an axe plunged through the door he’d just locked behind him. Wood chips exploded out into the space Jake’s head had been just a few seconds earlier. Demands to come out in the name of god and crown thundered across the square outside, rising over the sound of barked orders and softer voices lilting together in prayers against evil.

Jake had always been the shortest guy on his sports teams, and thus was well used to putting up a fiercer from then his stature probably warranted. However, he had no action hero delusions about his chances against an entire armed crowd.

Jake turned to his companions, and saw his fear mirrored in their eyes.

They were all going to die. Everyone in this room was going to be chopped up, hung, or burned to death. Leah and Aylin were going to die because they needed something from Jake he could not give, needed him to pull his weight with a strength he didn’t possess.

Shame felt like tar in Jake’s lungs as the door collapsed inward in shards of wood. Faces and voices flooded into the room. Fingers pointed at Jake and once more shouts and insults about those ‘Rainer folk’ were flung his way. Cruciform icons and worriedly pious hand gestures were followed by demands for Jake to repent for his family’s crimes, to come with them.

In a surreal moment, that hush before chaos, Jake realized that these people were afraid of him.

Relatable, Jake was afraid of Jake these days.

The many times great grandchild of Elijah Rainer looked on the people who’d hunted his ancestors into hiding. The word ‘witch’ was hurled at Jake by a red-faced minister whose voice thundered out the almighty’s command that his kind shouldn’t be suffered to live. It was ridiculous. Insane. Yet, something in Jake knew it was true. Had he always known?

The charging crowd halted mid-step as the room heaved, solid matter buckling as if were waves on a turbulent sea.

“Yeah dude like….fucking magnets, how do they work?

A nova of blue light drowned out the fire screams, and prayers, consuming all light and feeling until the only sensation in the sapphire void was the steady clicking of a clock.

#potw #season 4 #season 4 plot #potw writing #aylin #jake #leah #wickedswriting

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