Welcome To The Village

[number_2]

Who: Everyone who was signed-up for the excursion
What: The Village December Excursion
When: Dec 1st - Dec 23rd
Where: The Village
Warnings: Involuntary capture and confinement including immobilization and restraints, violence, injury, maiming, possibility of death, torture, coercion, gaslighting, mind control, drugging, scientific experiments, and extremely inaccurate depictions of mental health facilities/hospitals, among other potentially triggering themes. Please mark all threads appropriately.




"Good morning, good morning, good morning!" A voice that sounds very similar to Friday's chirps over a loudspeaker outside your character's home. Yes, their home.

Overnight, all the passengers who signed up for this excursion have been transported to their very own personal cottages. They will awake in a bed that is familiar to them. While this home of theirs does not necessarily have to resemble the place they were born or raised, it will be a perfect replica of a place they truly thought of as their home, down to the most minute details.

The cottages are self-contained, the size of a large studio apartment so, in some cases, they may only resemble the bedroom and living room of a person's home with a shrunken-down kitchenette and bathroom adjoined. But the heirlooms of their past are here. A favorite doll? A treasured family portrait? Trinkets you have long forgotten about? All of them will be here, somehow. (All except for weapons, that is.) They are indistinguishable from the real item, down to the molecule.

After that wake-up call, the voice continues on to express that the weather will be warm and sunny, with no rain forecasted. A brass band concert is announced, to start at noon on the lawn next to the living chess set. And once that bit of news is wrapped up, lively marching band music will begin to play. And it will continue to play. All day. From every speaker...including the ones hidden in their home.

Welcome to Your Village

It only gets stranger from here. Characters may be dismayed to find that they are without any of their original clothes or belongings. They awake in conservative button-up pajamas. The closet in their home is full of the latest Village Fashion to choose from. Everything is The Village label brand, including the tin cans of food that stock the kitchen and any of the groceries you could get at the General Store.

Your ship phone rings. When you answer it, you will be greeted, once again, by the voice of Friday. "Your number, please? Of course, you have a number. Look at your badge." If they look down at their chest, they will discover a small round number badge has been pinned to their pajamas. Was that there before? It bears the symbol of a Penny-farthing Bicycle, with a number in the spokes. This is their number.

"No names here," the voice of Friday chides, "Only numbers. Number 2 would like a word with you at the Green Dome. He requests you come for breakfast. Thank you!" Before they can protest further, the line goes dead.


Some Notes:

No matter how many times your character tries to take off and disregard their number badge, they will always find it re-attached to their clothes again the moment they look away and look back.

Your characters still have their phones but now they can only make calls instead of sending texts. They also do not take or store photographs anymore.

If your character destroys or damages anything in their home, or in The Village it will instantly repair the way things used to on the Serena Eterna.

The noise from the speakers can be muffled by covering it with pillows or other creative items, but cannot be stopped entirely. (Sorry Phil)

Comments

[decohere]

"Well maybe Peter is digging out from the other direction, and you'll meet halfway in a year." She digs her feet into the sand, lazily scoops handfuls to cover them up.

"You already want to go home, huh? Lieutenant Tayrey was convinced you signed up for fun."

[theweakhavepurpose]

"That's because the Lieutenant doesn't listen. I may have a shit memory, but she doesn't seem to understand anything we say. I think maybe the terminology is different. Like maybe she speaks another language and it sounds to us like English? But it isn't it's something else which is why she says insane things like sitting around roasting marshmallows is torture."

He shrugs, flipping the spoon with a flourish and catching it before he does his own listening and turns to her, "Why is Peter digging a hole? He trying to escape too?"

[decohere]

She sighs out in agreement, because it's true that she feels as if intention keeps getting entirely lost in translation. "Torture for the marshmallows maybe. But I worry for her." Because despite all the miscommunications and misunderstandings of each other's motivations, she does think Tayrey's fundamental desire for freedom is pure. It's hard to say she's wrong when their goals align far more than Tayrey is willing to accept.

"Oh." Of course nobody bothered to fill Pratt in. She rubs at her forehead, trying to smooth out the stressed crease. "Number 2. The man that runs this realm. They have a history. And took Peter captive at breakfast, in the Green Dome. No ransoms or demands..."

[theweakhavepurpose]

"If we can get her a space ship she'd find a way to get outta here. I saw her pilot that shit through colors that aren't real when smells had a sound. It was wild." He's not even misremembering that. "So fucking cool."

He groans and closes his eyes because he totally forgot about the invitation, "Right. Breakfast. Fuck."

Not that it would have helped to be there probably, not if Ava didn't rearrange this guys bones in response. "Took him where? Is there a prison?"

[decohere]

It does sound really cool. If only Ava were more in the mood to appreciate it. If only Tayrey wouldn't immediately endanger the rest of them by ratting them out to the first authority she came across... Ava tucks her chin against her knees and stares out across the horizon.

"Underground, though a tunnel in the floor, and left after him." To do only god knows what. She knows Pratt's been horrifically tortured before too. Her stomach churns unhappily. "We were all held to our chairs by force. I couldn't move. Couldn't... do anything. My powers don't work here." She shows him her busted knuckles.

[theweakhavepurpose]

"Oh shit, this place just.. turned them off? That's fucked. Like seriously fucked up." He's never had powers but it was pretty unsettling at the lodge when he stopped being able to hear anything, and this seems kind of like that. Something that's intrinsic to a person has just stopped working.

"So underground somewhere." Looking at his spoon he's well aware that it isn't actually going to help them, he's not digging his way out of here, or to wherever Peter is, if this place has the tech to strap people to chairs without them knowing or turn off their cool no-clip powers.

"I'm sorry man, all of that fucking blows. But there's more of us than of that guy, so we can probably take him."

[decohere]

"Yeah. I think mine more completely than some. Like he anticipated me being a problem, and made sure I'd have no advantage." But she knows there's other ways through obstacles than physically. She has to keep reminding herself she's not as helpless as they're trying to make her feel.

"Underground, or... connecting to another building." The tunnel probably comes back up somewhere. Because there has to be multiple points of exit for emergencies... "I need a map."

[theweakhavepurpose]

"Right right." He kneels down in the sand and flips the spoon around so he can use the flat end to draw with. "So there's the green dome here. And these little buildings here, then the store, a street here.. and here..."

And he does a pretty good reconstruction of the town without much effort. If he actually concentrated he could probably get the whole thing to scale too. Some things are hard to turn off, and always being aware of all the exits is one of them.

"So if you guys were here, unless theres levels below, he's probably in these shops or whatever they are over here."

[decohere]

It's an impressive skill, one that Ava suspects Pratt doesn't get properly recognized for often enough. She knows how that is.

"You've been exploring, huh," Ava comments appreciatively. She's not certain she agrees with the guess, but taps her chin in thought while surveying the map.

"You know, I haven't checked out the shops yet. If you'd like to come along?" Maybe there's supplies, if nothing else.

[theweakhavepurpose]

"Yeah well, anything to get me out of that house." said with a wry smile because he can feel himself on the edge of snapping almost every morning, and wrestling it down daily is exhausting.

"I went to the grocery store, looks like something out of an old movie. But there is something satisfying about walking around with a paper bag of groceries with a big baguette sticking out the top and the carrots that still have the green stuff at the end."

[decohere]

Ava gets to her feet, less smoothly than usual. There's a sway before she manages to stabilize, and she doesn't bother to brush sand off herself. "Yours bad too?" She hopes it's not somewhere he associates with his cult torture, but...

She continues to stare down at the map thoughtfully. "Maybe they'll have poptarts." Been awhile.

[theweakhavepurpose]

"It's Jacob's office." He makes a disgusted face, "I've been sleeping on the floor and my back is not thrilled about that. I think I've aged ten years being here." Said from the ripe old age of 27.

"I... I didn't look. Maybe? They didn't have doritos so it was a bust for me."

[decohere]

"That's messed up..." Seems like some of them have been treated far worse than others when it came to 'home' selection.

"Want my cot? It's not great, but it's better than the floor," Ava offers. It's at least a bit easier to offer a solution to a back problem than the rest of it.

And she makes a bit of a face. "Ah. Right, it's probably all stuff from the 60s." Which both poptarts and doritos are according to google, but, alas. The Village does not like fun.

[theweakhavepurpose]

"Nah I don't wanna make someone else sleep on the floor. Like technically.. there's a bed in there. But it's uh.. Jacob's. And sleeping in his bed..." There's a complicated expression on his face that's mostly revulsion and a little wanting to die.

But then they're talking about food again and he brightens up, "Doesn't that mean all that shit in jello?"

[decohere]

She scrunches her face and shakes her head in agreement, no, that's not a good option at all. She saw how much just wearing the man's jacket messed him up. Maybe she can offer to burn the cottage down too...

"Oh don't worry, haven't been doing much sleeping," Ava laughs sadly. "Peter offered to let me stay at his place... so." She'll spend every evening getting dragged away from it until Number 2 finally relents as some gesture of pity.

"... Put what in jello?" Ava's oblivious to this aspect of aspic food crimes.

[theweakhavepurpose]

"Oh." Yeah he doesn't know what to say to that, knowing that Ava is sleeping in Peter's empty bed every night is heartbreaking. And it's not like she shouldn't do that, but it's still just sad.

"Those 50's cookbooks of horror recipes. My mom used to have a bunch of those and they're full of the most gnarly shit ever. I think it's something like refrigerators had just been invented so they wanted to use them all the time for weird shit. Like salmon ground up and mixed with mayo and molded into shapes. And then clear jello full of those olives with pimentos in them. Nothing ever says if any of those things are good or not."