FEBRUARY 2021 EVENT: PART TWO

[robbies]

 

CHAPTER TWO, PART 2: THE LIVING ISLAND

Everything you never wanted to see.

YOU CAN’T DO A LITTLE BECAUSE YOU CAN’T DO ENOUGH | JUST A DREAM FROM YESTERDAY | DARKNESS HELD ITS BREATH | YOUR FRIENDS WHEN THINGS GET ROUGH | COME AND PLAY WITH ME

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YOU CAN'T DO A LITTLE BECAUSE YOU CAN'T DO ENOUGH

Perhaps you’ve been on tenterhooks since you woke up to find that your friends, your family, your neighbors somehow went missing in the night. Perhaps you’ve been hitting the pavement and knocking on doors trying to find them. So far, your efforts have been for naught. There’s been neither hide nor hair of the missing, and every attempt to find them has met with a dead end.

Until February 13.

In the afternoon, a strange, unsigned message goes live on the network. What is the meaning of “Living Island”? Does it have anything to do with what’s going on? There’s no elaboration… until midnight, when every neighbor’s television set turns on at full volume, hissing static and garbled noise as the dials turn and adjust. Several disjointed clips follow, ending on a mural that depicts the same words from the post.

“Living Island.”

The following morning, you’ll find that stranger things are beginning to happen. Some of you will be woken up to the blankets and sheets being yanked off your sleeping bodies by a powerful force. Others will find that when they step out of their morning shower, a message has been written in the steam on their medicine cabinet's mirror. Depending on how quickly you shower, you may only be able to see part of the message — but running the hot water longer and allowing the steam to fill the room will reveal it in its entirety:

“LIVING ISLAND.”

As time passes, you’ll find that the same message shows up every time the bathroom steams up, whether you’re in the shower or not. The same force that turned your TV on seems to insist that you pay attention to what it’s trying to show you, and its behavior escalates the longer you refuse. Characters will find that books go flying off of bookshelves, drawers are yanked out of dressers and desks, and breakable objects are smashed. Trying to prevent the spirit from destruction won’t go your way: If you try to catch or grab something that’s about to be thrown, you’ll find it ripped out of your hands anew and smashed anyways. If you tried to take all of your chairs down from where they’ve been stacked on top of the dining room table, you’ll find they’re back atop it the instant you look away.

All that’s to say nothing of the rumbling. It doesn’t start until the end of the first day, but from time to time you’ll feel the house beginning to shake on its foundations, a dull groan as it struggles to keep itself from collapsing in under its own weight. As time goes on, this will get louder and louder until the house seems to roar of its own accord, an unyielding shriek that can’t be stopped until the force causing it backs down.

Attempts to make contact with the spirit will never go well. It does not seem to be able or willing to communicate with you beyond its own tantrums, and characters who try may find that the attempt rapidly goes out of control. Candles flare up and burn wildly, Ouija boards are ripped into pieces and planchettes go flying, offerings of food are knocked over or thrown, and the lights flicker manically in turns. While you may be able to get some sleep at night if you’re lucky, the only thing that will reduce the poltergeist activity is to pay attention to the message it’s sending you and figure out what it means.

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JUST A DREAM FROM YESTERDAY

Living Island. If ever there were a first step to stopping this madness, it’s figuring out what those words mean. But starting is always the hardest part, and with nothing else to go by than two seemingly unrelated, nonsensical words left behind by a force you can’t see much less communicate with, an already arduous task seems even more impossible. This is furthered by the reactions you get when you hit the street and start asking people if they know anything about Living Island. Most of them can only look back at you blankly, as if waiting for a punchline that never comes. Others actually take you seriously enough to consider the question, and to their credit, they do take their time racking their brains to remember where they’ve heard that name before, why it sounds so familiar. But the most you’ll get back from them is a sheepish shrug of the shoulders and a reply that it sounds like something from TV. It gets to the point where their answers blend together, each one more unremarkable than the last. Save for the one you get from the last person you haven’t asked. Living Island. I’m sorry, what was that? What the fuck did you just say? Dale Harding and Rosemary Craven might be as far away from each other as possible, doing things around town that couldn’t be more different, but their reactions are the same. When they overhear you asking what feels like the hundredth person you’ve seen that day about Living Island, they look your way — Harding in the middle of his patrol or lunch break, Rosemary in the middle of grocery shopping. Harding looks honest-to-God surprised. Rosemary simply looks confused, even somewhat concerned. That's such a... strange name. Where did you hear that from? When they hear your explanation, they go quiet, mulling it over. Rosemary’s expression turns thoughtful. Harding’s, suspicious. If I remember correctly, that was a clubhouse the children around town used to play in. I haven’t heard about it in… goodness, I can’t even remember. Years, perhaps. It’s a play on “safety island” — another name for a bomb shelter — and the name of this… stupid kids show that used to be popular. I guess they thought it was cute, calling a place like that something fun. But where is it? Well, most of the shelters in town are still in use, and children aren’t allowed in them unless there’s an emergency. The only place I can think of is… The grade school. Administration ran out of funding before they could finish it, so they just scrapped it. Closed it off and just hoped for the best. Didn’t stop people from sneaking in. I used to bust them for playing down there all the time, the little shits. Harding’s mouth twists into a sneer that doesn’t reach his eyes, which are soft and miserable, while Rosemary waits patiently for any other questions and, when you have no others, excuses herself to go back to her groceries. Now you have something even better than an explanation: you have a destination.

Finding Santa Rosita Elementary is as easy as a fifteen minute drive from North Santa Rosita to Shadyside. Getting in is a different story. By day, the school is open for business and humming with activity, so you can’t very well go barging in and not expect to be reprimanded for disrupting class. This leaves you with three options: go before it opens, wait until school is over, or come in the middle of the night. Each have their own pros and cons, but all of them will get you the same result.

After hours, the school is desolate and still. The wind, the occasional slap of a naked branch against a window, and the squeak of your footsteps on the shiny, clean floors are the only sounds you’ll hear as you navigate the empty hallways. Most of the classrooms are locked, and the ones that aren’t don’t have anything any more unique or worthwhile to them than the occasional lunchbox left behind by a student or the classroom frog croaking in its tank. In a way, this is a good thing — it doesn’t leave that many places to investigate and makes your path that much more linear as you finally, inevitably and silently make your way downstairs into the bowels of the school.

The long corridor that awaits you in the basement is, in theory, not very different from the hallways upstairs. There are lockers lining both sides, dented and darkened with age and dust. The tiles are cracked, dirt and pieces of stone kicked up from exposed areas of the floor. Seemingly, this appears to lead to a dead end. But look closely at the wall and you’ll see the impression of a door, painted to match the walls. The lock is flimsy — in fact, depending on when you find it, someone may have already broken it. All that’s left is to enter and descend down the tiny room’s only feature: a ladder under a rusty steel hatch door, stretching down into darkness.

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DARKNESS HELD ITS BREATH

CW: gore, surgery

Stepping into the old shelter, the first thing that hits you is the stale, uncomfortably moist air. This first room is cavernous and dark, and your footsteps and whispers echo in spite of how quiet you might try to be. There’s a faint smell in the air, a trace of copper and rubbing alcohol that might make your eyes water, making your mouth feel unpleasant as it hits your tongue. As you get your bearings and begin to pick your way through the dark, you’ll notice traces of another smell — something simultaneously spicy and cloyingly sweet, a scent that seems to assault your senses and leaves you with a headache pounding at the base of your skull. Thankfully, there isn’t enough to do more than make you nauseous, but the smells warn of what’s still yet to be found.

As you continue through the labyrinthine warren, you’ll begin to find signs of human presence — some of the trashed rooms may be fitted with tables and supplies one might expect to find in a laboratory, meticulously labeled with typewritten strips. Several of these boxes appear to be old, covered in grimy layers of dust, while others are fresh and clean. All of them contain medical supplies. Eagle-eyed investigators might note that the untouched supplies tend to be the type contained in first-aid kits — acetaminophen, antibiotic ointment, simple adhesive bandages — while the ones that have been opened are for heavy duty surgical work — coiled IV lines and tubing, empty syringes, surgical gloves. One room in particular seems to have been fitted out for someone’s personal use, boasting a stripped-down bed, a chair and desk, and a comfortable recliner.

The trickle of water can be heard in the depths of the shelter, and as you emerge from one corridor that filters into a large chamber, it becomes immediately obvious where you are: This is an operating theater, with a table stationed beneath all manner of lights that can be adjusted and moved. A faucet drips monotonously in the back of the room, over a sink stained with blood with bits of grey, pulpy matter stuck in the drain. A bucket filled with blood and viscera ferments on the ground beside it. There are smears of blood, both dried and fresh, on the cloudy tiles, and a cabinet full of surgical instruments is slightly ajar. Looking at the instruments, characters will find that a couple of scalpels and a pair of tongs have dotted blotches where the metal was cleaned with water; whoever used these tools last didn’t dry them before putting them away. A small table near the operating area has a turntable sitting atop it, with a record already set under the needle: a single of Elvis Presley’s “Heartbreak Hotel.” There are a few other records sitting in the cabinet beneath it, including Big Mama Thornton’s “Hound Dog,” Frank Sinatra’s “Frank Sinatra Sings for Only the Lonely,” and James Brown and the Famous Flames’ “Think!”

In a separate area of this room, an oversized desk is piled with books and empty food containers that look as though they’ve been repurposed for one reason or another. These books are chiefly on anatomy and the medical sciences, though there are a number of books on psychology and how the brain functions. Though some of these books are water-spotted and dog-eared, there aren’t any notes written in the margins, nor are there any papers to be found. You can turn this area as much as you'd like, but all you’ll find is a couple empty cigarette boxes and some broken and bitten pens; the trash can next to the desk, filled with soggy ashes, seems to suggest that any papers that might have given you a lead were destroyed before you got here.

But the lab, with all its instruments, isn’t what you came here to find. There’s still at least one more room to be found…

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YOUR FRIENDS WHEN THINGS GET ROUGH

CW: gore, surgical trauma, amputation, lobotomy, brainwashing and interrogation, mouth trauma, eye trauma, ear trauma, body horror

The missing are being held in small, sturdy cages in a single room connected to the back of the operating room, dim and dank. The cages are placed equidistant around the room, ensuring that even if you try, you can’t reach out and make contact with your neighbors. The missing will find that they wake at approximately the same time, curled up on the ground in uncomfortable positions. Unlike your rescuers, your nightmare began far earlier than when you first awoke in this room, sore and disoriented. In fact, you could argue it started the moment you went to sleep on February 9th, leaving empty beds and concerned family members behind.

With no clocks or watches available to tell the time, you may not be able to tell how long you’ve been here. You sleep and wake, sometimes to a bowl of what looks like sticky rice lying in your cage that wasn’t there before. Sometimes, an overpowering smell will fill the room, faint at first; by the time you register it, it’s already overwhelmed you and sent you into a deep sleep. And when you wake, one cage will be empty. The inhabitant will be returned the next time you go to sleep and wake up, but not quite the same as they were before. They seem heavily drugged, discombobulated — or perhaps there's something visibly different about them. Whoever has taken you is doing a lot of work in their lab — and from the smell of things, meat work — and before long almost all of you will be sporting dressings of some type or other, fresh red seeping through the sterile cloth within a matter of hours.

Maybe you should try to keep each others’ spirits up. You don’t know how long you’ll be here, after all.

All of this goes on for a while — days, although it won’t be easy to count them given that there are no windows in the room. But nearly a week later… you wake to find that the front of your cage is unlocked. Unlatched. Open just an inch. Looking around the room, you’ll find that yours is not the only cage to have been opened — all of your cages have been unlocked.

Is it a mistake? Or are you really free?

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COME AND PLAY WITH ME

CW: blood and violence

Whether you’ve released yourself from your cage, or were discovered by a well-meaning friend before you could, or you’ve simply had your fill of exploring the shelter-turned-laboratory, the time has finally come to leave. Unfortunately, if things were that easy, you wouldn’t even be around by the time the scuttling sounds begin — somewhere down the hall, in the room behind you, fleeting and sly. It’s not an animal sound, a creature picking its way through the garbage and debris littered around the shelter. No, with the way it stops and starts every time you start and stop walking, this is a very deliberate, human sound. And if you don’t believe that, you’ll see soon enough when you see the naked, bone-white figure walk into view at the end of the hallway as casual as you please, their body smooth and sexless like a department store mannequin. They turn (your) their head and stare directly at you with (your) their wide, glassy eyes crinkled in thousand-yard delight. You hear your voice echoed back at you, airy and chirpy and so indescribably wrong it makes your blood run cold.

"Hi!"

Much like the Doppelgangers you encountered in January, these ones look and move like dolls, their limbs connected with ball-joints. However, whereas those ones were near perfect imitations of you and your friends, these ones look like they just fell off the assembly line. Their faces are unnaturally flat and plastic, like all the imperfections have been ironed out of them, but they are unmistakably yours. And when they open their mouths to squeal at you before running with all the unnatural speed not having a pair of lungs affords them, you’ll find that even their voices are perfect imitations — and not necessarily of your own either.

There’s no way to tell how many of these Doppelgangers are down here with you, hiding in the dark. They’re stealthy and sneaky, only coming out to attack when they’re sure you’re alone. Even if you’re not, they’re intelligent enough to come up with ways to separate you from your group, calling to you from another part of the shelter, mimicking a voice from someone they know you’ll listen to. Even if there’s no possible way they could be in Santa Rosita.

"Help me!"

"Is that you...? Oh thank God, I've been looking everywhere for you!"

"Please, don't leave me!"

Other times, they’ll take a more aggressive approach, allowing their limbs to pop out of place so they can sprawl on the ground, imitating a heap of discarded doll parts. Once you get close enough or turn your back on them, they’ll pull themselves together and attack, speeding towards you on fours like a crab.

There are two ways out of the shelter. The first one is the hardest: go back the way you came. With the low visibility, the number of Doppelgangers, and the confusing layout of the area, you’re more likely to get turned around and go in circles than you are to find your way back to the ladder — a location made even more difficult to discern since the hatch door has been lowered, blotting out all light from the room above.

The second way is the longest but also the easiest: head deeper into the shelter, past the operating room, through the rooms filled with broken furniture and ruined floors that are very easy to trip on — especially when you’re in the middle of running away. Eventually, you’ll come to another ladder, this one leading to an open hatch that deposits you into a dark passageway. The air up here is more fresh, but not necessarily pleasant smelling. There’s only one way to go — forward.

After what feels like an hour of walking, you’ll see a light at the end of the passage. Follow it and you’ll find yourself exiting a storm drain that drops you into the heart of Old Growth, just outside of West Santa Rosita.

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OOC INFO

Welcome to the second part of February’s event! You can use this entry to top-level for the event, but feel free to utilize the log and network communities as well.

There will be a top-level posted for NPC interaction tied to the second prompt below, wherein you can request to play out your character’s interaction with Harding or Rosemary. If you would like to have your character interact with either one of them, comment to the top-level with the name of the NPC you would like to thread with. You may only thread with one NPC. The mods will respond to NPC tags until February 28th.

Any questions can go in our FAQ thread below. Try to check and see if your question has already been answered on the plotting thread first here.

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SETTING INFO	calendar | setting | housing | npcs | death and tranquilizing | the story so far | event suggestions/engagements

Comments

[m1895]

"I have not met them. I am EMT. Emergency Medical Technician. I came to help with wounded."

Briefly, Vasiliy puts his hands on his hips, regarding the narrow spread of refreshments. They look like they've been pretty well picked over by now, and of course there's no tea; neither of these findings particularly surprises him. It isn't what he's used to, but Vasiliy doesn't mind coffee, so he opens a few different cabinet doors until he finds a mug and pours himself what's left of the pot, then sets it to the side and rinses the clear glass receptacle out in the sink.

"Does this Daylight have the coffee..." He squints, trying to think of the word, but he's too tired for his mind to successfully generate anything other than an image and a smell and the ghost of a damp grittiness against his fingertips. "Crushed beans. It looks like soil. For that machine."

[fanoperator]

"Oh!" Huaisang's eyes widen, impressed. He doesn't recognize the strange title, but it sounds important and the important word is medical. "Are you a real physician?" As compared to him, a mere field medic with almost no field experience. He lives in dread that he might be called upon to do one or more of the increasingly necessary surgeries to be done in the community.

Blinking briefly at the question and the description, Huaisang opens a cupboard and pulls out a bag of ground coffee. There's a design on the front of a coffee bean looking ready to burst into song, and in its hand is a steaming cup of coffee. Huaisang finds cheerful sort of cannibalism to be deeply alarming and yet completely expected for the world they're in.

[m1895]

Vasiliy rubs the back of his neck with one hand and takes the bag of grounds with the other. "No, no, not at all. I do not have skills and education to be doctor."

He was 27 years old when he learned algebra.

(But also, unlike the average American, he was raised to be humble, and this situation is hardly about him.)

"I am like... basic nurse. For emergencies. I ride in back of ambulance, I keep the patient stable until real medical providers come. It sounds more important than it is." He breaks eye contact then, returning his attention to the coffeemaker as he carefully removes the wet filter and saturated grounds. For a few moments his dark irises dart from surface to surface in search of a trashcan; he tosses the paper filter and opens up a new one upon finding it.

[fanoperator]

"Ah." Huaisang's hope deflates at learning that Vasily is not an experienced physician. "I am an artist, and much of my knowledge of anatomy is based in my knowledge of art. I was raised in a martial sect and so I know some field medicine, but I have very little practice with using it. I have also only ever been a support to the real physicians, and rarely that."

He watches Vasily moving around, and curls to sit down on a kitchen chair with a tired sigh.

[m1895]

Vasily questions the realness of these physicians, especially seeing as this Huaisang seems more archaic with every additional word he has to gauge his patterns of speech from. He doesn't know exactly where in China he's coming from, let alone what era, but he suspects even an artist's knowledge of anatomy would be limited— religion and mysticism have always interfered with the study of anatomy, even before the Catholic and Orthodox churches established their chokehold on the general populace. There was so much even they didn't know back in the thirties.

"I can show you what I was taught if you would like. I will be here for... long time, probably."

Undoubtedly, he'll need to default to his own language to explain some of it - but it's not like Huaisang has any frame of reference by which he can identify what a Chinese man from the 1930s sounds like any better than he, Vasiliy, can pinpoint a time in history for the other party's Russian analog, so it's a lot safer a gamble than it would be with a lot of these people.

[fanoperator]

"I'd..." He starts to say I'd like that, but it's not true, not even as a polite pleasantry. He doesn't want to know medicine. He doesn't ever again want to see blood, to stitch a wound, to feel rent flesh beneath his fingertips.

"That's probably for the best," he says instead, relentlessly practical so that he doesn't start screaming or sobbing. He's trapped in a nightmare and he's so tired. "I'm sure I'll pick something up as I assist you. There are plenty of injuries to tend."

Closing his eyes for a moment, Huaisang breathes deeply, fighting back the impulse to sob and scream and curl up. If he closes his eyes, none of this will be real. He'll be a child again, and everyone will be alive, and there will be nothing to fear.

Rising to his feet, he offers a pleasant smile. "Let's drink this coffee and get started, shall we?"

god sorry for the delay. also cw for brief soviet imperialism

[m1895]

Vasiliy doesn't miss the trace reluctance in his answer, the reality that seeps through the gap between the first attempt at a sentence and what Huaisang concludes with. It's a familiar inflection, accompanied by something unscientific he can't place but acutely feels, a sort of knowing that borders on the backwards mysticism of the most outlying oblasts.

He's spent most of his life around people at their breaking points, when he thinks about it; ironically, the perhaps unintentional expression of weariness and stoicism is the most familiar thing about this peculiar individual. The artificial smile and lack of complaint have always been a feature of his landscape: his parents, during the World War and the Civil War, everyone during the shortages and unbelievable overcrowding that came with the fits and paroxysms of a new way of life being established, his fellow interrogators in the early hours of the morning, when the sun was up and they still weren't on the metro home.

And he does feel sympathy for him, in the shallow sort of way he's able to allot to potential class enemies. Vasiliy glances down at his hands, at the face of the watch he's barely able to see. It's still incredible that there's so much of everything, that Daylight is able to offer food and commodities like coffee this freely.

"It gets easier."

[fanoperator]

Huaisang's lips lift and his eyes crinkle at that statement, but it's a wry, sad, barely-there sort of smile. He's still for a moment, eyes lost in the middle distance, before he turns that sad smile on Vasily. "No. It doesn't."

Huaisang's face is young and fresh, barely into his twenties, but there's something older and deeper in his eyes. He carries himself like a man twice his age, someone who has had time to learn self-control.

Lies like Vasily's are pleasant, but Huaisang's had too much tragedy in his life. It never gets easier. You only learn how to carry on anyway.

cw transphobia

[m1895]

"Maybe." The coffee's still too warm to drink, judging by how the ceramic wall of the mug feels against the backs of his fingers; it's a pity, as he could really use a natural excuse to pause and arrange the thoughts in English. "Some things, they become ordinary. They are sad but ordinary. You see it so many times, there just..." He gestures with the hand that isn't holding the mug. "...is not shock."

This, of course, is different. But the things he'd seen in Chicago just hadn't affected him like they seemed to hit the American trainees. Modern life, with all of its amenities, hadn't toughened them, hadn't built any mental strength. Their wars of imperialism were far away, not outside of the homes where they slept; he suspects the same can be said for this man—he's concluded that's what's going on here, that he's simply a gay man who likes to wear women's clothes, not transgender, which he did see a few times in Chicago—even if he has seen war, he hasn't seen war with guns, which tools specialized to end human lives in minutes. He wasn't a contemporary of factories with the kind of machinery necessary for a traumatic amputation.