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

[Whatever lingered from the ghosts in the library isn't enough to stop Mordred from laughing at that.]

I'm sorry. Should have known better. [Still amused,] Then again, who would enforce any of that, really?

I guess there might be some appeal to a bakery that's only open on the owner's whim but I'm pretty fucking sure people would get bored of it eventually.

[And would stop coming.]

You could be the kind that only stays open until they sell out of the fresh baked goods. Or, one of those posh places that is only open for three months out of the year. Or on full moons.

[He is not at all pressing the issue; he's just being silly about it now.]

Taako's Bakery: 9 - 5 every lunar eclipse.

[Taako almost seems to be considering this, looking thoughtful for a moment, before:]

One minor issue with that, how does it work when we're on the moon?

[Maybe he's a little on edge, but for some reason that question strikes him as being really funny.]

Planetary eclipse, then? You and your relentless logic.

[Taako hums, half a laugh and half a consideration.]

Oh, for sure, that's what I'm known for, everyone in all the planes talking about Taako's logic

[They've reached the cafe, so Taako lets go of Mordred with a wink.]

What can I get ya, pumpkin?

It's hard to get past, sometimes.

[Feeling better, he redirects and grabs the first open table outside that he can steal.]

What's the baker's specialty?

Can I tell you a secret? [He doesn't wait for a response before continuing:] I'm actually like, way fucking better at savory than sweet shit, but they should have these ginger cookies I do that are still pretty choice. How about your coffee?

[Taako's either forgotten that he started the adventure insisting that Mordred was buying him coffee, or he just doesn't care.]

I'll expect you to prove that at some point.

[Also, Mordred has not forgotten.]

No, I'll get the coffee, you handle dessert. My heart is set on those ginger cookies now. What would you like?

Again, all you gotta do is ask.

[He's very easy, seriously.]

I'll just stick with a cappuccino, they get kinda judgey at these places if you ask for over the top shit.

[Mordred snorts, because seriously, what's the point of having a skill or a talent if you can't be over the top with it from time to time? Not that he had any special plans, the most he usually does to his coffee is put too much sugar in it (which he won't this time). But he's indignant all the same.]

Fine. But I'm telling them to do one of those designs anyway.

[Either one of them could probably do it themselves, of course if that didn't defeat the purpose.]

You're spoiling me.

[Taako's grin is a little sharp, but he's only teasing, and he holds up a finger in a one moment gesture before slipping up to the counter to get those cookies. The waitress recognizes him, but he's fairly good about staying on task (difficult, sometimes) and manages to extricate himself from the conversation after about a minute, with two cookies on two plates.

He's not sure if it might be seen as kinda weird to pay money eat his own baking but like - he knows it's good, unlike whatever else the cafe is selling, so once he's seated and the plates are set down, he breaks off a bit of cookie to pop in his mouth.]

[He gets them both cappuccinos, because why not, although his own is brown sugar cinnamon because he doesn't have his best self control around sweet things. As soon as they both settle at the table and the drinks are in place, he promptly plucks up his own cookie and takes a bite that he was very much looking forward to.]

These are amazing. You only got me one? [Hello??]

[Taako takes a moment to roll his eyes, then reaches out to tap a finger against the napkin on Mordred's plate.

There, two cookies.]

The mark up they charge on these is stupid as hell, I'm not paying that much for my own shit.

[He gestures with the half of his first cookie that remains.] That's more like it. [After all, who said anything about paying.]

So. [There is a small part of Mordred that feels like he should say something here, to the effect of "sorry about back there" or "thanks for waiting outside and not asking questions about what you heard/saw/etc". But that would invite questions and he doesn't want to answer any of those. He takes a different tactic instead.] I hope your ghosts don't whine as much as mine do.

[The second won't be as good; transmutation magic works better on raw ingredients, not something made.]

Depends on the day and who's come for a visit, I've gotta real fucking tired of my-- [Brother in law? Family? There's not really a good word for Barry.] My friend being an over dramatic asshole, mostly cause that's my schtick. And if I have to see Barbara one more fucking time I'm gonna astral project to punch him in the face, you'd think he'd be over it by now, all we did was cut him in half.

[All they did!!]

[He is going to eat the hell out of it anyway.]

Some people just can't let things go. [The way he says this might suggest he isn't being entirely ironic about it.] The veil thins a little bit and they get all excitable about it.

This isn't even how ghosts should work, they're dead in my reality, they shouldn't be able to rock up here just cause the veil is thin or whatever. Kravitz is kinda shit at his job, but not this bad.

[Sorry, boo]

Ghosts are notoriously inconsiderate. [Taako being irritated about the general logistics of everything is weirdly endearing.] Who's Kravitz?

[At some point he's going to remember to just refer to Kravtiz by his job position, rather than name, since it cuts out the middle man.]

Grim reaper, works for the Raven Queen, very handsome, kinda shit at his job, but basically the fucking prison warden for ghosts.

[In Kravitz's defense, people messing around with grand relics wasn't exactly in the job description. He's probably fine at the other stuff, that doesn't involve cute elves threatening to tentacle his dick.]

[Mordred has finished his first cookie and is trying to wait for five seconds before inhaling the second, not-as-good one.]

That's really the kind of position you wouldn't want understaffed or underqualified.

[Not that he's applying. He plays gatekeeper in a few unsavory situations already and they are more than enough.]

[Taako's grin is wry, a little crooked.]

Oh, I'm just being nasty cause he got Merle's arm lopped off, I'm sure after... however long he's been doing it, we were the first assholes to really give him trouble.

[He's allowed to make fun of Kravtiz but no one else is allowed to doubt him??? Science.]

I do not find that remotely hard to believe.

[He's already eating the cookie.]

That's the nicest shit you've ever said to me.

[He even puts a hand on his heart! And then ruins it by immediately getting distracted by his coffee. He put like four sugars in it. He's an animal.]

[Oh, sweet summer child.

Mordred really shouldn't say anything since it is only by the grace of god and Taako that his cappuccino isn't one of those unicorn frappuccino things, but he does anyway.]

You know, if you want, we could throw these out and just go get some ice cream.

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when u type a whole tag and then forget to hit send

the worst thing

tru :(

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