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

(Her eyes close and she leans gently into Lucretia's hands, grateful for the comfort.)

He came back. Jack. I'm sorry I didn't tell you.

It's okay.

(Lucretia very much wants Beverly to know this, that she understands why this would have been difficult to talk about. She hesitates.)

I saw you dancing.

(She opens her eyes again, for a moment surprised, but of course it makes sense. They were hardly a typical pairing. Lucretia was hardly the only person who would have noticed.)

He... he needed to say goodbye.

(She ducks her head, her feet shuffling worriedly.)

Do you think...do you think he's been following me all these years and I haven't heard him?

Of course. (She drops her hands from Beverly's face, linking them together in front of her and twisting her fingers as she considers exactly what to say.)

I... I'm sorry, Beverly, but I don't know. (Death is one of those tricky subjects Lucretia has never sought to delve into: death has always been very final for her. She's never thought particularly hard about the existence of an afterlife, or of ghosts. So she doesn't want to outright deny Beverly's question, but doesn't want to cause her concern by agreeing with it, either.)

(It's always been something very final to her too - until now. Maybe she believed in one in only the vaguest sense, but nothing so specific as this, which only makes this whole situation more difficult to come to terms with.)

I never believed in ghosts, before. They were just... a spooky story you told around the campfire. Nothing so real as this. But it was him, or at least... a part of him.

Same here. I've found it especially difficult to discern. (She hasn't had an experience quite like Beverly has: her ghosts haven't tried to talk to her or touch her at all. She isn't quite sure why. It's contributed heavily to none of this feeling at all real to her.)

Was it good to see him?

In a way... the accident - we never got a chance to say goodbye, but....

(She takes a deep breath and looks up at the night sky, trying hard not to cry again.)

I don't know how to feel.

Yeah.

(It must be so complicated for Beverly; Lucretia can't even begin to imagine the pain of it. She touches Beverly's arm gently with her hand.) Would you rather be alone?

(Beverly looks back down at the hand on her arm, shakes her head, then meets Lucretia's gaze again.)

I don't want to be here any more, but I want to be with you.

(Lucretia nods, letting her hand drift down to loosely clasp Beverly's.)

I can teleport us both, to yours or mine. (Probably doesn't matter at this point, since they're around at each other's places often enough. Has Beverly teleported before? Lucretia vaguely remembers her talking about something to that effect.)

(Beverly has definitely teleported before. Granted, not via magic, but the effect is probably more or less the same.)

Either one.

(She bites her lip.)

Maybe yours.

(Beverly's apartment may still be too full of Jack's presence.)

Sure.

(She's good for anything. She gives Beverly's hand a little squeeze, and next second teleports them straight inside her apartment. If Beverly blinked, she would have missed it. Lucretia gives her shoulders a little roll, then lets go of Beverly's hand so she can slip her shoes off and leave them by the door; they're both still in their fancy dress!)

Feel free to borrow things, if you want to change.

Oh. (She looks down at her black cocktail dress, belatedly realizing she left her mask on the sidewalk outside the dance hall. Oh well. She slides out of her flats and leaves them next to Lucretia's.) Right. We probably should just start keeping extra changes of clothes at each other's places, hmm?

It's not a bad idea.

(She smiles, suddenly sheepish.) I like borrowing your things, though.

(They're comfy and smell nice? Sue her.)

(It's hard to keep being sad when you're so cute, Lucretia. Gosh.)

I have been wondering where that one sweater of mine disappeared to...

I've only borrowed it. (Who, her? She is the picture of innocence.)

You can have it back any time you like.

I suppose I can part with it for now. You do look good in it.

Why thank you. (She loops her arm around Beverly's waist and gives her an affectionate smooch on the cheek.)

Now, can I get you anything?

(Lucretia's still concerned for her, despite the cheerier atmosphere.)

(She leans into the kiss, grateful for Lucretia's steadying presence.)

Something more comfortable than this dress. I don't know what I was thinking.

(What she was thinking was that she wanted to give Jack a beautiful night. Or as beautiful as a Halloween party can be anyway.)

(Well she certainly looks beautiful, that's for sure. Lucretia's a little flustered with the silhouette that she cuts; it makes her want to draw.)

Gotcha– let me find you something. Make yourself at home. (By now Beverly knows where to find things if she wants a cup of tea, a glass of water. Lucretia wanders into her room and hastily kicks half the floordrobe into the hamper by the door. Junior is lurking in its tank, surprisingly quiet and well-behaved tonight. She wiggles a finger at it as she finds a worn in long-sleeved shirt and comfortable slacks for Beverly, and brings them back out in her arms to hand over to her.)

Here you go.

(Indeed, Beverly does make her way to the kitchen to get a glass of water. Until she starts drinking, she doesn't realize how thirsty she was. Crying has a way of doing that she supposes. She drains the glass in one sitting.

When Lucretia returns with the clothes, Beverly sets her glass down.)

Thank you.

(She turns around and lifts up her hair.)

Would you help me with the zipper?

(Lucretia nods, and sets the clothes down on the kitchen counter, coming around behind Beverly to help. For a moment, Beverly brushing her hair out of the way to expose the nape of her neck distracts her utterly and completely. Lucretia pauses with her hands on the zipper.)

It's gorgeous, (she manages eventually and eases the zip down, but it's quite hard not to stall herself again as this only reveals the curves of Beverly's shoulder blades, the back of her bra.)

The dress, I mean. And you, uh, in it. (help!!!!)

(Her shoulders are one of the features she likes to show off most and for good reason. In fact, even with the softness of age, her entire body remains lithe and strong. She may not dance as much as she once did, but she stays active, especially with her mok'bara training. And she'd be lying if she said she wasn't a little pleased with Lucretia's reaction. Turning back to Lucretia, she smiles softly, one hand pinned to the front of her dress to keep it up - for now.)

So are you. Gorgeous, I mean.

(Her smile fades as she continues into her next thought, though she still regards Lucretia with loving warmth.)

I told him about you, you know.

(Lucretia can feel her ears growing hot as Beverly turns back to face her, holding her dress to herself, and isn't sure of what to do with her hands for a moment. Eventually, she just lets them drop lamely to her sides, tipping her head to regard Beverly's expression (one that makes butterflies erupt in her stomach).)

... You did? (Oh, she's burning with questions right now and it's probably obvious. But she doesn't want to push for information, not this soon anyway.)

I think... what he needed was reassurance that I'd be okay. That he didn't abandon me.

(Her eyes are watering again but she's determined to get through this.)

He asked about Wesley and about the Enterprise, but he asked about here too. If I was happy and... I told him I was, when I was with you.

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