logsinthenight | INTRO LOG: NOVEMBER

INTRO LOG: NOVEMBER

INTRO LOG: NOVEMBER
OLD FAT BOAT

characters: everyone.
location: the harbor, and around town.
date/time: november 1-3.
content: the ferry's back! yay! and it's piled high with goodies! yay!
warnings: n/a.

welcome to beacon.

It's dim, and the room won't stop swaying, gently rocking you back and forth. A loud sound startles you fully awake, a deep, moaning call: a foghorn. As your eyes adjust, you note faint red light streaking through the room from a tiny, round window.

You've found yourself in a private room, lying on a bed. The last things you remember are the events that led up to your death. Beside you is a folded tablet and a lantern that glows steadily with a healthy flame.

You're on a ship. And that ship is docking.

Making your way to the deck, ~~and eventually the pier,~~ you find only moonlight to greet you, and a dark forest beyond. There are other people here, each with their own unique lantern, and many of them look just as lost as you are. On the ferry you've just disembarked from, the speaker system begins to play a song.

In the distance, across the waters of the lake, you can see the tall silhouette of a lighthouse, its red light slowly turning.

•••

To everyone's surprise, the ferry does indeed arrive on schedule. Right on time, it comes chugging along toward the beach, though its usually noisy engines are silent. And it seems to be sitting quite low in the water... Hmm.

Unfortunately for those unlucky enough to find themselves onboard, there isn't yet a replacement dock for the one that was destroyed last month. The ferry stops right where it would normally anchor, but then... that's it.

Logistically, there's good news and bad news: The good news is that the ferry is only about 25-30 feet from shore, which is well within the safety of the harbor and is a manageable distance for swimming with an open flame. The bad news? It's... 25-30 feet from shore, which is going to make unloading supplies, er, tricky.

The usual monthly stock has also come in, but, oh, what's this? There's an awful lot in the cargo hold. An awful, awful lot. As a matter of fact, the boat is absolutely filled with food and goods. The storage areas are packed tight, but the bounty spills out onto the decks, and even into the cabins. It's entirely possible that some of the newbies woke up surrounded by potatoes, or with a carton of eggs balanced on them. Maybe even in a pile of Beacon's signature standard clothing. In short, the ferry has become a proverbial horn of plenty.

Where all this stuff came from is one mystery, but another is how to get it all to shore. Better unload it before the weight sinks the ferry again! Just kidding. (Or are we?)

At a glance, the only thing out of place on the ferry is that the door to the bridge is welded shut. Seems a small price to pay for this resurrection though, doesn't it? Besides that one door and all these goodies piled high on the ship, it's almost as if the ferry crash never even happened. Maybe things will be okay after all?

Or maybe the new arrivals will have something to say about that. 🤔

And speaking of newcomers, the tablet and the town have some resources available for getting acquainted with their new situation! In fact, as soon as they're prompted to enter a network username, an app containing all sorts of useful welcome information will launch. Newcomers can always check out the weekly bulletins and the records in town hall as well, and everyone's welcome to get in touch with the NPCs through their inboxes.

ooc.

Hey there, wonderful players, and welcome to In the Night! For this intro log, you are officially without a chaperone. Rastus is back at the bonfire, Will is characteristically elusive, and Robin is, well, you know where she's at. It's up to the veteran residents to fill in the new folks.

As hinted above, it's also up to veteran residents (and newbies alike) to figure out the missing dock situation. Some efforts have already been started to rebuild the structure, but until that's done, the logistics are in your hands! Swim for it, fly for it, teleport to the beach, or maybe use one of the rafts or boats built earlier to shuttle people to and fro. Whatever you do, just make sure you get all the cargo (and people!) off the ferry before it departs.

As an additional note: We will NOT be tracking how you do all of that! There's no need to report salvage efforts to us, as by now, we trust y'all players to make things happen. So long as we see these challenges getting addressed ICly, we'll assume the town came together and figured it out somehow. Nice work, everyone!

DELIVERIES

The following packages can be found in the cargo hold:

The monthly store restock
A smorgasbord of other items; though limited in scope to the items typically found in the restock/stores, there's an abundance of everything.
And that's it. With the fate of the ferry uncertain, Rastus was unable to order deliveries last month. :(
...Except for a single box of blueberry Poptarts for Peter Parker.

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Stone makes sure she's steady, then... jumps off the boat into the water. He can't jump high enough to get air here without hitting the ferry with his wings, so he shifts underwater, and swims swiftly towards the surface a little ways out, getting enough momentum to surge out of the water and into flight. It's harder, these days, with his wings being a lot more heavy-feeling than they used to be, with his lungs not at full capacity, but dammit, he's practice this maneuver enough that he's still going to do it.

Then he circles overhead twice to let the water sluce off him and for Elle to get ready, and swoops down to snatch her up off her box tower in one hand. Claws carefully sheathed, so nobody gets scratched.

Ellever watches this with complete fascination, though she feels vaguely bad when Stone jumps into the water. She's shivering just thinking about it. He doesn't seem bothered by the cold, of course... which is good... or she would feel terrible about this.

She watches him pitch into the air with wide-eyed fascination more befitting someone three decades younger, making a lot of notes on his wings and how they seem to work. They don't have a lot of flying creatures back at the Facility; finding things that can fly just tends to be more difficult, in general.

And then -- the hand comes out for her, and Ellever freezes so that she's an easier target.

A nervous laugh bubbles out of her as she looks at a landscape that's suddenly going much faster by her, and a shoreline that's coming closer. She's not nervous, her body just doesn't know what else to do and fills the space in with vaguely joyous sounds.

"Haaa!" she manages, willfully adding one, now. "This is so cool!"

His tail scoops up his lantern on the way out, and then they're gliding the short distance to shore. It's chilly, and there's a lot of wind, but it could be worse. It helps when Stone tucks her up against his chest, shielding her from some of the wind with both hands and letting her soak up the warmth of a very large creature, using the muscles right there to control his wings and so generating even more heat.

At her shaky laugh, he makes a rumble in his chest that's hopefully reassuring. He can't speak in this form, something about its size screwed up all his throat muscles, but he can still make dragon-y sounds.

The flight isn't long, and Stone drops down lightly a little ways inland, next to the bonfire-- just far enough back from it that his wings won't disturb the flames. He sets Elle down gently.

There's a lot to process when Ellever is set down, and she lands on the ground with the grace of someone who's spent a lot of time climbing and being active. But usually, she isn't being flown around like this. She looks around for a long moment, absorbing the sights around her -- and the bonfire -- before she turns back to look at Stone.

This is... going to be a challenging night, she can tell. There's a lot to learn, a lot to see. Normally, this would be exciting. She'd be leaping at the chance. But part of her mind is still in a haze of trepidation, recalling what she'd seen before she'd awoken here.

Still, the cold air of the flight seems to have done her a world of good. Some of the fog is gone.

"That was so cool!" she gushes, grinning broadly. It's the first real grin she's had all night; she feels energized. "Thank you. Being able to fly around here must be convenient."

Stone changes back to his groundling form, this time right in front of her, a cloud of dark mist enveloping the dragon-like shape and then coalescing down into the old man she spoke to before. He looks a little winded, now. That water-shift and launching into the air was surprisingly tiring. He might need to come up with an easier way to take off from the ferry.

"It's not as nice as it could be," he admits. "It's so dark I can't see very far, which makes it less safe to fly around when there are hostile spirit-things in the forest, and going above the level of the trees is more exhausting than it used to be. But it's useful for some things."

Ellever watches him shift between forms with fascination. She's only met a handful of other people -- or creatures -- who could do something like that. And none of them had done so with that flair, the mist, which is downright magical to her. She isn't sure if that's the proper word for it, but that's the one she's going with.

"It... really is crazy dark here, I'm not surprised it makes things difficult for you," she has to agree, unconsciously tightening her grip on her wrought iron and amber glass lantern. But something he'd said tugs her attention away from the impressive night around them. "Wait, did you just say 'hostile spirits'?"

This would be her second time talking to someone about a hostile spirit in as many months. Last time things had ended messily, but okay. The Will o' Wisps had been friendly to her, if rather inscrutable otherwise, and she'd managed to turn the situation around. But this time...

"They're just following me around now," she notes, with both confusion and vague amusement.

"Following you around?" Not knowing her history or life, Stone can't make any context for that. "Pretty sure they were here before you, kiddo. They seem to be native to this place. I haven't seen very many, except the little ones who kept trying to steal things yesterday. But if you see something with a mask, then probably it's a spirit."

"Masks..."

That's an interesting detail. It pricks at something in the back of her memory, but she's honestly too cold and nervous about the entire situation to summon up any knowledge on the spot. Probably nothing. Maybe in the morning, it would come to her.

"Oh!" Elle smiles and shakes her head. "Sorry. Rambling out loud. Not something I usually do," she apologizes. This whole night has brought it out in her. "I met Will O' Wisps back where I'm from a month ago. We have a couple of them living where I... used to."

Speaking about the Facility just makes her think of -- things she'd rather not, at the moment, but she presses on.

"They're spirits, supposedly. And I've known a lot of other creatures like that. We haven't been able to do a lot of study on them, though, they're very demanding of attention."

Stone has never heard of a Will O'Whisp before, but that doesn't mean much, there's a lot Stone hasn't heard of, and she's probably not even from his own world. Her scent isn't human, or not all human, but she seems more human than groundling.

"Demanding of attention?" Reminds Stone of the spirits here, too, actually. Or of their antics the last couple of days, anyway. He makes a thoughtful rumble, looking around, then asks, "Didn't like to snatch things away, did they? And return them later, as if it were a great game?"

Ellever nods in response to the questions. "There are some stories of them doing that, yeah. They're known for mischief. Sometimes people would see them in swamps or the woods and follow them, and they'd lead them down... perilous routes."

That's a nice way of putting it. Near as she can tell, the Wisps aren't malicious. They probably have a different definition of what is and isn't safe, because they have very different physical states of being. And they do seem to be very intrigued by humankind in general.

"They look like... well, like floating lights. They're very beautiful," she adds, with a smile. Most would probably describe them as eerie, but Ellever has never been 'most people'. "Do the spirits here come into town a lot?"

"There are a few who live in town," Stone says. "The one in the library, and the one in the store, a couple in the Invincible-- that's the inn, over that way." He gestures towards a big building beyond the bonfire, vaguely visible through the gloom, mostly because of the people passing by it with supplies for the store. "And probably the one in the church, but nobody's seen that one to know for sure. The other ones mostly stick to the trees, but sometimes they throw little events that bring them into town."

The concept of spirit neighbors is visibly exciting to Ellever, whose face lights up -- though this getting more and more difficult, as there's an unhealthier flush from the cold starting to settle in. She nods.

"That's so cool," she gushes, smiling.

If she has to be dead, at least she's dead somewhere she can observe, and hopefully interact with, spirits. Right? There are far worse places.

"I'm so used to having to pretend creatures like that don't exist, I almost don't know what to do now that you've told me that they live in a town with everyone," Ellever chuckles. She pauses. "I don't want to take up too much of your time, though, you've been very kind."

He chuckles at her expression. Cute kid, she is. "Ah, I don't mind. Though I guess I should probably go help carry more people off that boat, and some of those boxes. Someone has to, with no dock. Here, let's get you to the store first so you can find a coat, then I'll let you off to find a place to stay."

He tosses an arm around her shoulders briefly to guide her towards the general store. Also, because if she's that cold, he ought to share warmth. He's a very big dragon-thing in his other form. That generates a lot of heat.

They're cold shoulders, and Ellever is reminded just how much when Stone puts an arm around them. She's acclimating to the cold fast, as she always does, but to not have to do so would be great. So she nods.

"No complaints here," she chuckles, allowing herself to be guided.

Exploring is something that she'd tackle head-on and with gusto, of course, but maybe with a coat. Just maybe. She makes a note of the path and the other structures she can make out, clutching her lantern.

"Are we going to be able to fix the dock? Seems like something that we should probably... take care of, at some point."

"We're already working on it," Stone promises. "A few of us have been knocking down trees for wood, and we're going to get started on actually building in the next few days." A few of them including Stone. It's been fun, but tiring work.

Ellever smiles as she tentatively opens the door of the store, still feeling like a fish out of water. How long that's going to last, she can't say. It isn't a problem she normally has. She walks right into abandoned houses with gusto.

"Oh, cool. I'd offer to help with that, but I don't know a thing about construction," she says, shaking her head slightly. "But it's good to know there are on-the-ball people here in... Beacon, right?"

That's what she's read, but it's the first time she's said it out loud.

"I don't know anything about it, either, I'm just knocking down trees and maybe holding things that are too big for everyone else," Stone chuckles, and lets her head inside. "You find something for your feet and a good coat, now, all right? If you want to find me again or you're having trouble with anything, I'm at the Invincible-- the inn, over that way. I'm on the top floor. And I'm usually hanging around where the people are."

It's more than she can do. Or more than she feels comfortable telling people she can do, for right now, because she could certainly hold very heavy things in place. She bites her lip, debating whether she should offer up information like that, but then Stone talks about the Invincible and she pauses, glancing in the direction he nods in.

"Okay. Invincible, top floor. I'll keep that in mind!" she says, smiling.

There are a lot more questions she has -- but there are also a lot more people around who can answer them, and she feels as though she's been something of a time drain on Stone. A grateful time drain, of course.

"Stay safe out there. And thank you again for giving me all this information."

He'd stick around and help her out more, but he really is one of only a handful of people who can get new Beaconites and supplies off that ferry, so he'll really be more useful elsewhere right now. There's plenty of people who can help a kind young not-human lady out when it comes to clothes and answers.

"My pleasure. I like new people, you know," he says with a grin, then turns to head back to the shore, form disappearing and reforming into the bigger, winged one as he goes.

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INTRO LOG: NOVEMBER

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