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

[pointofhonoria]

"Really don't need to hear all about how the bastard's spent his time whining about how spendin' a year lyin' weren't the way to win a girl over, if I'm bein' frank."

How parallel and utterly opposed their experiences have been, her trying to move past the damage he did as he spends all this time clinging to something built on lies. Christ.

[crushed_pearls]

"Suit yourself. Thing is, we're both stuck with him for the time being. Hey uh, warning in advance, don't be in my kitchen while I'm cooking. You'll live, but I've mastered arts of hitting people with a spatula normally only known to grandmothers and cartoon characters." 44 opens her front door and welcomes Number 9 into her home. Once her guest is inside she beelines for the kitchen, plucking up cans and spices.

"I do appreciate you joining me. I don't get to cook for other people a lot, can't imagine why no one wants to hang out."

[pointofhonoria]

Crabb's face wrinkles at the room alone. "Oh, yeah. Can't imagine."

She scrubs a hand over her face. Christ, she's not in the headspace for any of this, right now. She should've just punched Cragen outright the second she clocked him proper, Rovers be Damned.

She drops down into one of the chairs, away from the kitchenette. "He tries to do more than watch me like the slimy bastard he is, and he'll learn real quick I've not lost my touch with my fists."

[crushed_pearls]

"And on this day I was forced to admit that Number 23 has excellent taste." 44 sighs, even as she fills a pot with water and gets to chopping ingredients. "I hope you like stew and bread 'cause you're getting stew and bread. Wasn't kidding about the grandma thing. You doin' okay, Number 9? I can't keep him off you long but that gaslight gatekeep girlboss routine of his infuriates me."

[pointofhonoria]

Crabb laughs emptily. "And why the Hell would I actually trust you with an honest answer? You can play the hospitable one now all you like, but I ain't here for niceties."

She slumps in the seat, arms folded across her abdomen.

"I'll live."

[crushed_pearls]

"Of course you'll live. That's the point. Everyone here lives." She lights her stove, and gets the water on it.

Looks up from her cutting board. 44's face is suddenly very, very serious. "Would you care to guess what happens to people here who won't, or can't, comply?"

[pointofhonoria]

"You got somethin' to say, say it. I ain't in the mood for guessin' games, right now."

[crushed_pearls]

"What I've got to say is I'm in charge of making sure it happens, and we've got a common interest in it not fucking happening." 44 stabs her knife into the cutting board and leans on the counter with her hands flat on it. "Now, you and that damn dog, Number 7, both said you love her, or at least 7 used the girlfriend word. But here's the thing: she broke into my fucking house, 7 did, so fuck her running. Now you get the offer - care to keep 23's sanity intact even a little? If I let her lose it it's my fucking head."

[pointofhonoria]

It's almost hilarious how little 'that dog' would have narrowed it down if literally any of Erin's other girlfriends has been here. Valdis, though. That sounds like a story, but one she'd rather get from Valdis and not 44.

"Right, so now I'm s'posed to just believe you're gonna be helpful? On your word only? At least bleedin' explain what you're offerin' properly, here."

[crushed_pearls]

"Excuse me for setting the table on the offer first. There's some tight conditions on this." 44 goes back to chopping vegetables.

It is, how you say, Angry Chopping.

"...Listen. I don't like 23. I would love to see her dead, but I'm not gonna preside over her madness. That's one of those 'professionals have standards' moments, I'm sure you can appreciate it given your history. So here's the deal: you write her a letter. Yes, I'm going to read it. Yes, an undetermined number of other people will read it. Will it be censored? Probably. Your odds go up if you avoid things like using names or other forbidden topics. You write the letter, I'll get it to h -"

She pauses.

"...You can write Braille, right?"

[pointofhonoria]

Dry as anything, "I've been with that woman over a year. If I hadn't made sure t'pick up things like that, I'd be a pretty crap partner."

[crushed_pearls]

"Listen, 9, I say this as one gay girl, to another, about another: that is not traditionally an obstacle."

[pointofhonoria]

Crabb snorts and shakes her head. "I can write in bleedin' braille, arrite, so I can write a bleedin' letter."

[crushed_pearls]

"Good. The key thing to get across is that there's a life outside of her current circumstances, that it's not just her and the staff forever. Gotta claw it back some..." 44 returns to her cooking with a relieved sigh. "...I'll get you the supplies here in a minute. Number 2 damn near broke me beyond repair because he didn't appreciate what he was working with. Not doing that again. That was..."

"...The toll for heaven's gates gets high."

[pointofhonoria]

"Every time you say 'heaven', the less the word makes a damn lick of sense for you to bleedin' use," Crabb grumbles, rubbing her face. She isn't at all enthused about having to do this around the Village's rules, feels like it'll come across so false and the opposite of helpful.

[crushed_pearls]

"What, does Gallery not believe in a stern and wrathful God?" She sounds...

...Tired. So very tired.

"Whatever. Point is, it'll help. And I realize damn well you're not doing it for me but it's still my hide you're saving, so. Thanks."

[pointofhonoria]

Crabb doesn't know where her relationship with God sits anymore, she fell out of true faithful observance long before the boat but being in this expanded universe where everything is infinitely more complicated than home will ever know only makes things less clear.

But she does know that she doesn't care for a God that would call somewhere like this heaven, and that this woman's been worn down to a shadow of whatever she was before.

"Sure." She sighs and sits up a bit straighter. "Just hope it actually does some good."

[crushed_pearls]

"Mm. Lemme focus a bit."

44 cooks with an expression of intense concentration. Far more intense than the activity warrants, honestly; though it smells delicious, there's a lot of "hurry up and wait" with stew. By the time she gives her guest a bowl with buttered bread, she's looking...

Odd.

"Tell me, 9, did you take up strategy games during your cruise? You know, game games, chess or war games or trading cards."

[pointofhonoria]

"Played some chess, here and there. Not something new for me, mind. Even been using an old set."

A set not technically hers, but that feels like it. One of those tenuous threads of connection to home, to a past you'll never see the future of.

[crushed_pearls]

44 pulls up a chair for herself and then gets her own food; she sits, and takes a few sips of the broth. She seems disinterested in it. "Before...everything, some friends got me into this game. Magic: the Gathering, like if poker and chess had an illegal love child raised by loan sharks. A literal drug addiction is cheaper than that game and I'm not joking."

"The game goes like this: everyone has twenty life, and a deck. Life to zero, or deck to zero, and you lose. My strategy involved a lot of burning my own life to pay for cards and abilities. Riddle me this, O handsome one: why?"

[pointofhonoria]

It takes Crabb a minute of thinking—she still doesn't consider herself a strategist amongst any of her groups of friends and family, after all—during which time she idly stirs the broth.

"...y'only need to keep the one life to stay in the game and win, yeah?"

[crushed_pearls]

44's smile is sharp and pleased. "That's exactly it. Only the last point matters, and the rest is just resources."

"Something to think about."

[pointofhonoria]

"Mmm." There's a thoughtful wrinkle in Crabb's brow, though it's hard to say how much she's comprehending and how much she's thinking about how she keeps being surrounded by people who enjoy being a bit cryptic. "Ain't such an easy trick when you don't know what numbers you're playin' with, mind you."

[crushed_pearls]

"Sure you do. You know your own, right? So you spend what you can afford."

[pointofhonoria]

Crabb snorts. "In a game, yeah. But real life, that ain't ever that simple."