riverviewlogs | introductory mingle: FEAST OF THE DYING

Entry tags:

introductory mingle: FEAST OF THE DYING

who: everyone in Riverview!
what: Introductory Log and Feast of the Dying
when: Feast of the Dying from October 1st-8th; various other prompts over the whole month of October.
where: Anywhere around the city.
warnings: please put any necessary warnings in the subject lines

feast of the dying

In the days leading up to October 1st, residents new and old will notice preparations beginning, a flurry of activity getting the city ready for the upcoming celebration: the Feast of the Dying. There is an old, widely-known, and widely-believed superstition or proverb in Riverview Quarantine: 'The greater your fear of death, the easier it is for death to find you.' This is a cornerstone belief of a lot of the residents of the Quarantine, most of whom have survived intensely difficult and violent pasts on their own worlds and who are still willing and eager to throw themselves into exploring and settling new worlds, starting their lives fresh. To honor this spirit, the Feast of the Dying is a celebration of the transition between life and death, an opportunity to face death both figuratively and literally, and come out on top.

celebrating the transition from life to death

During the month of October, a particular natural phenomenon on the moon weakens the boundaries between the worlds of the living and the dead, allowing for the crossover of those dead into the world of the living, with ghosts from the pasts of both the residents and the Quarantine itself to take corporeal form. The festivities during this time feature tests of courage in highly haunted places, escape rooms both virtual and physical with varying levels of danger, and the week-long Feast of the Dying itself, between October 1st and 8th this year.

i. ghosts from the past

During the 10th month of every year on the moon, due to a complex series of chemical, electromagnetic, and magical forces that no one has ever exactly distinguished or completely understands, the boundaries between the worlds of the living and the dead are weakened almost to the point of nonexistence. During this time, residents of the moon are able to see and interact with the dead - ghosts, manifesting in ways that run the gamut from being a strange sense of being watched or being visible or audible all the way to more corporeal spirits that can affect the world around them. The barriers are weaker in some parts of the city than they are in others, with some areas experiencing little to no ghost activity, while others are so populated with these ghosts that residents can barely go a few feet without running into one. The ghosts are generally the unsettled dead, people who died violently, or who were lost, seeking a place to call home, and their behavior is as varied as it was while they were alive. Some ghosts are angry and vengeful, some are simply lonely and lost.

While some people tend to interact with the ghosts only a little and as necessary, others avoid them as completely as possible, and yet others actively seek out souls who are suffering and try to ease that so they can stop coming back year after year. There are other people who have found that ghosts from their home worlds have come through with them, following them through the portal when they arrived, even if they did not die on the moon...

Whether facing death or making peace with those who have died, this is a time to reflect.

A Few OOC Guidelines:
● Characters may see or interact with ghosts from the Quarantine's past. These people will be as varied as the NPCs, from a multitude of different worlds, and characters are welcome to either engage or avoid, as players wish.
● Most Quarantine-based ghosts will have died in either the Great War with the neighboring reality or in the Pandemic that wiped out the population of the Abandoned City years ago.
● Characters may also see or interact with ghosts from their own or other characters' canons, providing the character in question is dead in canon and is not currently being played in the game.
● Canon-based ghosts should not be simply transplanted into the game as they were in canon - they are ghosts, and therefore 'not quite right,' and should not be used as an excuse to NPC a canonmate for a month. These ghosts are there to be used as plot devices to open up new avenues of CR, to create angst, to help a character make peace with their past, or other similar reasons.
● Ghosts should not be complete corporeal physical presences indistinguishable from living people, but barring this, how strongly the ghosts manifest and how much they can interact with the world around them is up to player discretion. Ghosts shouldn't be present the whole month straight, but can disappear and reappear at random times.

● Mod questions and plotting regarding this prompt can be found here.

ii. the feast of the dying

The month's holiday is named after a long-standing tradition in the Quarantine - the Feast of the Dying - that starts at sundown on the first day of the month and continues until sunrise on the ninth day. The Feast of the Dying is a costumed masquerade-style party that is continuously available for the entire week. Set up by volunteers specializing in both magic and science, the Feast of the Dying is hosted in a large conference center that has been decorated and magically altered to provide a very formal, intensely creepy atmosphere. The decor can run the gamut from fancy and classy decorations featuring iconic skeletons or ghosts to incredibly realistic catacombs or any other frightening settings that you can think of. Rooms often become more and more foggy the more people enter them to mingle, and in many rooms the air pressure will be slightly played with to make the atmosphere seem more oppressive and spooky. Costumes and masks are required, and anything from a Halloween-style costume to a formal outfit with mask is acceptable.

Players can feel free to go wild with ideas for decor at the Feast, including linking to inspiration images in their posts - it is, essentially, like having a Masquerade ball inside a disturbingly realistic haunted house.

The venue the Feast is held in includes several large rooms intended for dancing with different themes and decorations that can change off and on throughout the week, two large dining rooms where feasts will be held at mealtimes and snacks or drinks (alcoholic or non-alcoholic) will be promptly served to anyone who sits at one of the tables, and a plethora of rooms meant for mingling and relaxing. Additionally, there are a large number of smaller lockable rooms set up for sleeping or private encounters.

iii. escape rooms

One of the fun and more commercialized aspects of the season are the many Escape Rooms that pop up throughout the Quarantine. Residents are encouraged to test their survival skills by grouping up with friends or strangers to escape difficult and scary situations together by solving a series of puzzles.

Escape Rooms can be either physical, set up inside buildings with realistic decorations, or they can be Virtual Reality, where the players don VR masks and cooperate in a virtual world. While the former can be more challenging and realistic, the latter provides for higher stakes. Physical Escape Rooms are generally set up to avoid any kind of physical harm to participants, but the Virtual Reality Escape Rooms can simulate pain and injury quite handily, and therefore can put participants in more dangerous situations.

While players can make up an Escape Room that uses whatever theme they like, some prompts are below:

● Zombie Attack
● Torture Machines or Traps
● Cannibal Warlock
● Wrongly Convicted: Escape from Prison
● Escape from Sewer Monsters
● Mad Scientist Experiments

iv. tests of courage

As mentioned before, there are certain parts of the city where the ghost activity is much stronger than elsewhere. These are places where terrible things have happened - hospitals that treated the ill during the Pandemic, insane asylums or prisons where inmates were mistreated, homes where terrible murders happened, places exposed to dark magic, and other similar places. Every year during October, these places are shut down or vacated (unless they were already sitting empty) and entrance is allowed to people wishing to partake in a traditional Test of Courage - to enter these deeply haunted and dangerous places, and stay there as long as possible, sometimes even overnight.

In these particularly vulnerable and terrifying places, ghost activity is intense and almost constant. Characters will encounter strange sounds, smells, and visions; will encounter ghosts that are capable of throwing items or people; and most of all, they will experience powerful and realistic hallucinations due to the sheer lack of boundary between the worlds of the living and dead in these areas. Whether the hallucinations are manifestations of their own worst fears, the ghosts retelling their own tortured stories, or any other kind of terrifying vision, they feel very real. While characters will not be injured by the hallucinations, the sensations of pain, pleasure, hunger, thirst, or other sensations will be almost impossible to tell from the real thing until the hallucination subsides at daylight.

While the haunted locations are highly unlikely to kill characters, whether or not they experience serious injury due to physical actions they do while under the influence of a hallucination (eg. falling down a flight of stairs) or attacks from ghosts (eg. an angry ghost throws books at a character) is up to player discretion.

v. roommates or wildcard

Feel free to use this prompt to meet new roommates, for the purpose of getting to know each other, or hit up the mod-posted prompt to create a Communal Housing floor mingle. Or, if you have an idea for a prompt that isn't in this list, set during the Feast of the Dying, feel free to write it up!

visual inspiration

click on thumbnails for larger view; images may contain disturbing themes

Credit: image i: Olivier Le Gall; image ii: John Watkiss; image iii: unknown (wallpapersfan); image iv: signed (pinterest); images v and vi: unknown (pinterest)

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YOU WILL LEARN HOW TO BE AFRAID.

[Taako loves Barry, truly, but he's about two seconds from banishing him just to get a couple minutes of silence.]

I guess I've never met a necromancer who wasn't secretly a fucking drama queen.

[She's just gonna grab Barry's robe and pull him over to her. One good thing about being a lich ghost, at least.]

Babe. Shut it.

[He doesn't seem to see her, but it doesn't really matter in the end.]

From what I could sense with the Lucas guy, yeaaah. I think it's a prerequisite.

[He doesn't see her, but something about what she said seems to get through to him; Barry keeps floating ominously beside them, but he's quiet.

So is Taako, who looks very confused for a second, before his brain makes the right connections.]

Fuck, this is taking some getting used to. I keep forgetting you were there.

[Not fully, but she picked up... enough, and he's spent so long with the rest of the crew here not knowing anything about his time at the Bureau. It's weird, knowing he can talk about the things that happened and someone will understand at least some of it.]

I was ... and I wasn't, at the same time? It took a lot of energy to even think, sometimes. I had to do a lot of meditation to sense what was going on outside.

[She smiles a little, half sad and half relieved.]

I learned a lot of patience. I had to bide my time to be able to send you messages.

[Lup leans a bit to the stupid echo of her lover.]

Sometimes I drifted in and out, like when you weren't out on the missions. I had to rest.

I get it.

[His voice is gentle, in a way that's mostly reserved for Lup, because he doesn't want to force her to explain too much of this when it must be hard to talk about, after years of being trapped and alone.]

Gotta say, I can't believe it took this bullshit to finally teach you some patience.

[Taako was always better at just stopping. Maybe they should've swapped places, maybe things would've gone better, for both of them.]

[A few minutes ago, she had been fine. Now she's this, with memories of being so damn lonely and trapped that it makes their house almost feel too small.]

Doubt anything else would have! Can't get cha gal down too much.

[She smiles, but it's hard, remembering struggling for consciousness and sometimes wishing she didn't have one so the loneliness wouldn't eat her so.

Then again, she's glad it was her. She's grateful for her stubbornness. Lup doesn't think she'd be here if she hadn't been that kind of person.

It was a good thing that it wasn't Taako.]

If there's anything in the entire universe that can get you down I don't wanna meet it.

[He still can't touch her, but he reaches up to rest his hand against her firey cheek, because as much as they can pretend and joke, this... isn't okay.]

What do ya need, Lulu?

[To help get through this.]

[She snorts at his words, smiling a little. Yeah, what could get her down?

Not even this.

Still, Lup is a bit lost like this, and she needs his 'touch' just as much as he needs hers, leaning in a bit to the point where she's slightly passing through him.]

I just need to be close to you and the people I love. It keeps me together.

[She needs her heart.]

We're not going anywhere. If you, uh, if you want Lucretia to stay with us for a while that's cool? I mean, it's not my ideal fucking scenario, but I can suck it up.

[Most of the time, he firmly believes that his own feelings are the most important ones to consider, except where Lup concerned. In this, she comes first.]

Nah, don't be dumb. Making you two uncomfortable is not gonna help me.

[Taako needed Lucretia more than he probably understood, but Lup did not have the strength to shove them into one room until they got along right now.]

You're my heart, Taako... and neither Maggie nor Luce are too far away to make this an issue. I'll be okay.

[She was one again, a conscious and a being that could see and hear and get out. Because she loved and was loved.]

No velvet curtains and no fucking small spaces and were cool.

[He accepts that easily, not just because it's better for him, but because he trusts Lup to be honest with him about what she needs right now.]

You wanna ditch the city for a few days? We can camp out, like when we were little shits?

[Camping trip!!]

[It's serious twin time, loud Barry aside.]

Oh, fuck yes! That would be amazing!

[She pumps her fists, raining little embers everywhere. Drama queen.]

You, me, the stars and maybe a few monsters to fuck up.

You're gonna set half the fucking forest on fire and I'm super into it.

[Fuck the forest.]

Free charcoal.

[Fingerguns!]

Pack the shit you need, we're off as soon as possible.

Like, right now?

[He's not bothered by the idea, but he wants to make sure because there's probably a few things he'll have to take care of first, beyond just packing.]

Fuck yes! Maybe Barry will leave you the fuck alone out there, too!

[...and it was kind of bothering her to see him like this, so win-win.]

You wanna teleport our asses home then, Ms Super Powerful Lich?

[He's already getting his phone out to start sending a couple texts, trusting Lup to do her thing.]

Hold on to your ass, bro!

[Now that she can actually cast teleport, it doesn't make her as nauseous any more.

That, or the fact that she doesn't have a stomach.

She teleports them home easily, so Taako can pack stuff that living people needed.]

[Teleporting's never really bothered Taako, so he moves fluidly from one moment to the next as Lup takes them home, only looking up from the text he's composing to check which direction to walk.]

You think Lucretia and Magnus can last a couple days without us?

[They're adults, they can look after themselves.]

[Lup is floating around their living room, looking for where she stashed the blankets from the last blanket fort time]

They can babysit eachother for once!

[She agrees, and pulls up a blanket with mage hand from behind the couch triumphantly.]

[From the bedroom:]

But they're babies, Lulu. They're babies, though.

Gasp! Who is going to feed and change them while we are gone?

[She's grinning, floating over to open the fridge.]

Oh, look at that. Leftovers? They'll live.

You know what, I regret this joke.

[Lup brought diapers into it and that's! bad! when he's sleeping with Magnus.]

Youuu started iiiiit~!

[She says in a sing-song voice, throwing another blanket in the bag.]

And I'll fucking finish it when I get back down there.

[Despite like, his everything, Taako is a quick and light packer, used to years of living on the road and the constant need to be Ready To Leave, so he's almost got everything together.]

You wanna text Lucretia? I've hit up Mags and we'll be good to go.

(no subject)

umbrastaff - 2017-10-15 21:52 (UTC) - Expand

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