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westwhere2022-09-03 10:23 pm
groundrules) wrote in westwhere2022-09-03 10:23 pm
Entry tags:
plot roll | they walk among us
THEY WALK AMONG US | THE NEUTRAL ZONE
Neutral Zone bridges connect Eidris and Minaras in the two one-hour intervals of each day — 6:00-7:00 and 18:00-19:00 — when both citadel halves are overground. These are safe and shielded spaces — until protesters linked to the Remembrance resistance join the milling crowds.
Protestors rent ’eyes,’ paying exorbitantly to possess the bodies of willing strangers. They are difficult to spot until they’re right beside you, trying to lure or abduct you into the cause of forcibly reuniting Serthica. Both Eidris and Minaras offer bounties for Remembrance members. Remembrance lieutenants are meanwhile actively recruiting, asking an act of fealty to join their ranks.
✘ OBJECTIVE: capture Remembrance members or play spy within the group.
- ■ Shallow inquiries reveal Remembrance members have been infiltrating the Neutral Zone crowds for a week prior. The Eidris and Minaras administration offer 50,000 coin for every member of Remembrance brought in.
■ The job is encumbered by the use of ‘eyes’: Remembrance members make their getaway by abandoning their rented bodies when they face trouble. To avoid this, Minaras and Eidris loan out miniature hand-held body-lock gear that will keep someone’s awareness in the body they occupy for six hours. To activate the lock, touch the bracelet to the subject’s nape. Each body-lock gear can only be used five times.
■ Remembrance members typically wait until you’ve reached a narrow and crowded part of the bridges, before slipping beside you to whisper their pitch: ”Don’t you miss your family? Was only one citadel, once, our Serthica. Could walk free to our mines, then, to our factories, our dragons. What’s division done for you, except make rich people richer?”
■ They withdraw into the crowd at the first sign of hostility, but will entertain whispered conversation, if you appear interested. Some speak of their leader Chrichter — an allegedly honest, stalwart man of the people — as Serthica’s true hope for the future.
■ Remembrance members work in groups, with a scout alerting the others when constables walk by.
■ Characters sensitive to life forces might feel the ‘eyes’ have multiple spirits inside them, or the spirit that occupies the body is very blurred and undefined (because of regular substitution).
■ As Remembrance seeks political leverage, the easiest way for new conscripts to prove their loyalty is to bring a captive or coerced member of the Eidris or Minaras aristocracy or a person ofpassablestanding — …who may be an unlucky NPC, or one of your allies, finally polishing their acting skills.
■ Keep up the act: Remembrance has zero tolerance for those who belittle or question the cause.
■ Some members of Remembrance might abduct you, using chloroform and brute force, and pretending you are their good friend who has taken drunk or ill in the crowd. If you have been kidnapped or are joining Remembrance freely, prepare to be blindfolded and led down a winding path through the Neutral Zone — and into the impoverished underworld of the Mouse House.
■ The headquarters of Remembrance is in a large, now destitute train station. It would have once served the coal train that traverses the Mouse House daily. High-standing Remembrance lieutenants access the station with large, peculiarly shaped keys.
■ Everyone in the group wears a mask — you receive one as you head in, both for privacy and to fend off the stench of pestilential wet and mould.
■ The Remembrance base is dusty, chaotic, brimming with scraps and random tech projects. Here and there, find dissected or repurposed droids, along with several man-sized burlap mannequins and mislaid toys. No child is ever present. On the walls, colourful graffiti writes, OPEN THE WALLS, PLAY WITH YOUR DOLLS, TWO PENCE A POP, WHERE HAVE YOUR DRAGONS GONE?, BRING OUT YOUR DEAD…
■ Remembrance reunites a motley crowd of desperate men and women. Their households were either destroyed by the ‘coal sickness,’ or divided when work obligations confined some to Eidris, others to Minaras. Several group members are tinkerers, devising new protest weapons and gear — including the terror bullets witnessed during the trade summit. Many members work honest jobs overground, with a minority serving the Neutral Zone. They have minimal interaction with the Mouse House.
■ Remembrance offers the train station as a crude, but functional shelter. Best avoid sleeping here overnight — in your wretched dreams, your dark-fingered hands go to your throat, and decay haunts your body, as you attempt to flee a sinister mountain at all costs.
■ Remembrance leader Chrichter is a frequent (masked) sight, seen speaking and planning with his lieutenants. There is word of a coming attack during the ‘Unwinding.’ It is unclear if Remembrance expects to attack or be attacked.
■ Now and then, the headquarters activity shuts down, and you should hide as overground constables conduct Mouse House raids .They never enter the train station — and Chrichter and his men often prepare bribes. But you’re fair game if you’re captured for your own negligence.
■ A locked back room in the Remembrance headquarters leaks rare rivulets of blood or blackened water. Sometimes, you hear fists banging on the door or animal-like howling for a scant few seconds. Everyone studiously ignores these incidents. The door only opens once — when a furious Chrichter exits, kicking a lifeless burlap mannequin off his clawed, bleeding back.
■ You can enter the headquarters freely if you supply the passcode, WAKE UP. You might want to release the forced Remembrance captives on your way out.
NPC ACCESS: CHRICHTER
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Don't worry — plenty of creep-creep to go around. These other folks are focusing on entering the walls, so we may have to saddle Jim and Finn with... everything else. This may be a lot to investigate and observe, so please just cherry pick whatever sounds more exciting — don't feel under any kind of pressure to cover everything. The room setup is the same as here, but the walls wouldn't be transiting between solidity and membrane as much by the time Jim and Finn enter. That's going to gradually worsen, following the below.
Jim and Finn can find:
■ There is a human trashing and strapped to the table. Jim and Finn will struggle to retain the particulars of the person's looks: whether they are male, female, young, old, attractive, tall. Staring too long will start giving them headaches not unlike vertigo. If they come closer, they will see the 'human' is a crass, man-sized burlap mannequin, which shows faint signs of thick grease at its joints. You can take it with you, if you want — just careful with carrying it out. Its 'hand' will lounge to catch that of the closest person and squeeze, before it goes impossibly still.
■ Beside the mannequin is a standard black and white picture of a young woman.
■ A small, scratched, music box (envision it in a worse state than the linked picture). It begins to play a fairly upbeat rural tune, but damage to some of the wires and chords leads to glitches, just as a singer reaches the verse, 'Up the mountain, in the grove, hand in hand to Ke' — the increasing, distorted and slowing repetition of the stuck Ke-ke-keeee-keeeaaaah-keeeaaahhh creates the guttural, croaked sound (content warning: Grudge sound ) that Emilia captured when High Councillor Arabella 'glitched'.
■ If you play the tune inside the room, the walls begin to shift and pulse, starting their slow transition to a membranous texture. The music box itself is not magical, but Finn or others sensitive to life/death/magic/necromancy might find it has the faint 'residual trace feeling' of the previously encountered dark water. Since Finn hasn't had that much exposure to that, as a first impression: the feeling is one of coldness, claustrophobia, faint prickling and a sense of listlessness. It also feels like... death. You are dealing with echoes of it, so don't expect any impairment from making contact.
It's up to you if you decide to take any of these tokens with you, they'll get cleared out by Remembrance members if you don't. Give a shout if you decide to take the music box, as it might play a part in influencing the Unwinding event.
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... meanwhile they'll have it locked in a room right now, so please let us know if they should expect some weird ass shit happening.
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Re: mannequin — do me a solid: have a chat with the Finn player OOCly, and come back to me with your preferred outcome on the following. Basically, we can either have the mannequin come alive, or it can be just inanimate and subject to inspection. Either will bring you some clues & info, but I want to be clear, if you take the animate-mannequin option, you're going to be dealing with something... clingy that can't articulate verbally, with the intellect of a small child. It'll want company, and it's something pretty creepy you have to mom-and-dad-and-uncle-Spock. I mean, it's a burlap sack, it's ugly.
So, pro/con this, let me know — and if you're thinking this is way too much to handle in one go, but you do want your mannequin child at some point, we can stagger the awakening.
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Okok, I'll do that! Just to make sure I got it, they can take the inanimate mannequin and have it come to life later at some point? Because I'm all for it turning creepily clingy and needy later on.
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Also: this is a lot that just got thrown at you. Please take all the time you need to decide.
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After the initial shock and getting used to it being around (and clinging to Jim apparently??) both Jim and Spock would attempt to communicate with it. They would try a number of different things, like basic touch/tap communication like Morse code or basic sign language, and Spock... has posted just below here asking about it, haha.
EDIT: Jim would also give it drawing supplies, should it be able to communicate or express itself that way.
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I'm going to combine everyone's question answers here, hope okay:
■ As we're going with it being able to reanimate, Finn and anyone else who visits the mannequin and has a life/magical sensitivity will be able to feel there is a pulse of life inside it. Infrequently, this can flicker out at first, but it should stabilise as living.
■ The mannequin will take a few days to fully animate, even once it starts to awaken. Initially, it will need help with basic functions: movements start very stiff and uncoordinated, but ultimately gain precision. It will need some help holding itself upright and moving at first. It also becomes stronger and faster with time — let's say it takes three days to be reliably mobile, and three weeks to Hulk up.
■ From time to time, it will fluctuate into states where its burlap is closer to normal human skin and its features are more carved out and humanoid. It never reaches the fully human state, unfortunately. You can get it there if you bathe it in dark water longer.
■ The mannequin has been socialised by Chrichter & Co, and Jim, Finn, Spock and whoever visits it will find it cooperates and even expects the feeding and exercise routine described on the tattered sheet.
■ It will be very docile towards them, but it will have highly negative reactions, including violence, towards what whoever and whatever tries to harm the person whose hand it squeezed (Jim, if I read you right). It has a very animal, unsophisticated read of situations, so even if someone just looks to be inflicting violence against Jim, or raises their voice at him, it might... feel a certain way. And Hulk smash.
■ Behaviourally, the mannequin is not unlike a young child (think age six or younger), suffering from amnesia. It is very touch and affection starved, and it will often try to cuddle up or be in the same room as Jim and Finn. If they are in separate rooms, it will probably
stalkfollow Jim.■ Communication is primitive, but the mannequin is an extremely fast learner. The troubler here is you are picking it up before it developed vocal chords, so you may need to build it some mechanically, if you want it to talk. It cannot write. It can tap yes/no. It doesn't know MORSE, but it can learn, if you teach it — assuming you do (or teach it binary), its name is ANNE KELLAWAY. It has basic preferences you are welcome to handwave about food, colours, etc.
■ Spock's touch telepathy does work, but be aware you're working with a very young, immature mind. The mannequin can confirm it was very cold, very lonely, it's very happy to be out and alive, and it was like this before. It remembers being humanoid on at least another occasion, but its memories are very diffuse, because the process of 'birthing' in the walls is very painful. It can explain it likes Jim, because he made the cold go away.
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Actually, does Spock's touch telepathy let him interact with objects? I'm thinking, read recent residual memories or emotions associated with that item? If so, I can give you something even if the mannequin is inanimate.
If not — is he going in the room? Because there's... other stuff to touch.
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And to go with the question above, would Finn sense life from this thing? If not now, then after they get it out of the room?
Finn wont be reading minds, just sensing for a living thing/consciousness, even if its not organic.
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sob okay another extremely important question you might have addressed somewhere that i totally missed
How big is the mannequin? Is it like adult-sized, child-sized, etc? I'm basically asking if they can pack it around on their hips like a kid, that's what I'm asking, that's why I'm here.
"If they come closer, they will see the 'human' is a crass, man-sized burlap mannequin" NEVER MIND I FOUND IT THANK YOU
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(and oh no Spock likes Jim, too. the bb mannequin has good taste in friends ;_;)