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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Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I killed a man from cycle sixty five. I've seen him a few times now.

(If either of them were going to talk she would have expected that one too: but perhaps it doesn't need to. Maybe it knows that Lucretia replays that encounter over in her mind enough to know what was said and done off by heart.)

And my mother.

[Taako moves without really thinking about it, stepping up to Lucretia and linking his arm through hers, so that they can walk and talk. He's leading her back to his place, but mostly on autopilot.]

I saw some of the students, from Legato, you know? Some of mine. [They'd seemed... quiet, at peace, and hadn't really bothered him. One of them managed to pick up an apple from a nearby stall and handed it to him, but he hadn't felt any malice in that.] You holding up okay?

(She nods, dropping her hand briefly onto his forearm as they start to walk.)

I'm fine. It's... uh, I don't find it as upsetting as I probably should, if that makes sense. (Sure, noticing ghosts out of the corner of her eye is unsettling but the silent presence of her mother doesn't bother her, and neither does the adjudicator. Sometimes her mother just sits nearby and watches her and in a strange way, she takes a small modicum of comfort from that.)

You?

It makes sense.

[Most of the ghosts don't really bother Taako, they're either angry at him but he doesn't care (Barbara) or they have no real beef with him (his students), so either way it's water off a duck's back.

Except for... one set of them, and he goes quiet for a moment as he considers his answer.]

The ghosts from Glamorsprings are here. The ones Sazed killed.

Sazed, (she echoes, and has to take a moment to think of where she's heard that before– back, during the fight, a month ago now. He had asked her if she had hired Sazed, and she had said no, and that had been the end of it.

She knows of the man Taako had come to be travelling with, but had never known him by name. Lucretia glances at Taako, trying to gauge where exactly she stands considering the circumstances.)

Do you want to talk about it?

[It hasn't occurred to him that she doesn't know, he got so used to feeling like everyone did, because how could they not have heard? And then he kind of just... assumed that he told her at some point, since he told Lup. He's forgotten that Magnus doesn't know, either.]

I dunno. [That's probably a no.] Rin, uh, he saw, so that's super fucking great. Now he knows I got forty people killed.

(She stops in place, making him stop beside her with a tug of the arm that's linked through hers.)

I– Taako, what are you talking about? Forty people? When did this happen?

(She knows Taako has been blasé in the past about murder but never to this extent.)

[That sudden halt makes it click, and Taako just looks at Lucretia, without the usual hesitation that comes with this revelation. In a way, he realizes he can lay the blame for this at her feet.]

Six years ago, give or take a couple months as a wanted murderer.

(Uh oh, she doesn't like the look on his face. Can't stop now that she's started, though.)

During Sizzle It Up, you mean? (Forty people dead. An accident with the food, perhaps?)

What... what happened?

Sazed wanted in on the fame, I didn't wanna share the spotlight, so he put arsenic in one of the dishes. Guess I was supposed to eat it, too, but he fucked up one final time.

[Sometimes that particular details still haunts him, the what if and the why. It's the only time he didn't taste test one of the meals for Sizzle It Up.]

Jeezy creezy, (she says after a moment's stunned pause, exhaling sharply as she drags a hand over her hair. No wonder he'd asked if she had hired him.

There's a cold little ball of anger in her stomach too; she's so horrified, to know how close she came to losing him.)

Taako I– I don't know what to say. I'm so sorry that happened.

Yeah, so am I.

[If there's no protests from Lucretia, he's going to start walking again, because he definitely just caught the red robe popping back into existence about twenty feet away, and he doesn't want to deal with Barry right now.]

(Yes, Lucretia heard the telltale shriek on the wind and hastened to match his pace, resisting the urge to glance over her shoulder.)

You know you didn't murder those people though, Taako. If– Sazed was the one who added the arsenic that's on him, not you.

I'm-- I was a chef, I should've known.

[He shouldn't have let anyone handle the food he was going to prepare without thoroughly checking it, he should never trusted Sazed in the first place, he should've been more careful about how he let Sazed down.

There are a lot of things he should or shouldn't have done, and it all just leads to guilt.]

Okay, but... I don't know, Taako. I know it's easy to take all of that onto yourself, but you didn't murder those people.

(She feels so badly for him; of course he feels guilty. Nothing she can say right now is going to help that.)

Listen, I don't-- most of the time it's real easy to not give a shit. Sazed's a piece of shit and I'll kill him if I ever see him, all that crap, but it's kinda hard when I'm literally being fucking haunted.

[Even after all their fights, Lucretia still gets his honesty over more lies.]

Yeah.

(Is it too late for her to try and change this? Lucretia glances at him briefly, then just throws it out there, casually, before she can stop herself; it's a reflex, a knee-jerk reaction to the expression on Taako's face. If she can take some of that turmoil from him, she will, no matter what.)

You asked me before, if I hired him and I said that I didn't. I lied.

[The look Taako gives her is flat, unimpressed.]

Here's a fucking idea for ya, if you ever get to that therapist, ask 'em about this martyr complex you've got going on.

[He knows her too well to think she'd have lied about Sazed, there would've been no reason to, before she knew.]

Edited 2017-10-04 08:19 (UTC)

(Lucretia blinks, startled and suddenly unsure of what to say. Well that hadn't gone at all according to plan. Whoops.)

Uh– (she glances away, embarrassed.) Sure, I– um, yeah. I guess that I should.

Also, I'm not fucking stupid.

[It's almost insulting that she keeps doing this, that she keeps trying to control him in various different ways.]

(She hates how warm her face feels.)

I don't think that you're stupid– I'm stupid, if anything.

Sorry.

I mean, I'm not gonna argue that, but this is a fucking pattern with you.

[In a way, it just makes him sad, the way she holds herself apart from the rest of them, the way she tried to take all their burdens onto herself because she thought she knew better.

But it also makes him angry.]

(She nods, looking at her hands very carefully. As much as she wants to try and explain herself she's not sure that it's wanted, so she just chews the inside of her cheek instead.)

I know. It's– uh, a bad habit.

[He's so tired of this; he knows that the anger is his own, but that doesn't change the fact that it rears its head every fucking time he talks to Lucretia, that he can't seem to get a handle on it despite the time that's passed. It always ends like this, awkward and uncomfortable because he can't help getting frustrated at her.]

Has Lup talked to you?

[It's a change of topic, obvious, but it's the best he can do.]

(Fine with her: she seizes on it immediately.)

Yeah. That uh... whole situation is pretty wild, huh. (The whole lich thing, that is. Lucretia privately feels quite melencholy about it.)

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