Round 2 [open]

[pure_havoc]

characters: Cao Pi and everyone who wants to show up
location: town hall
date/time: Dec. 8, starting at moonrise
content: Community meeting, take 2! After the Dreamer/Defender incident, there's a lot to talk about and Cao Pi has encouraged everyone to come and publicly share what they learned while asleep or what ideas they have to make the next massacre less massacre-y. Feel free to handwave catching his post or hearing about it from a friend.
warnings: none likely but lmk if that changes. Threadjacking likely; if you don't want to be threadjacked, make some sort of indication.

As before, Cao Pi arrives ahead of time to ensure the town hall is ready for a session, righting any chairs that might have been thrown about in recent melees and checking the logbook for recent information. When a fair amount of people have arrived and he can see the waxing moon rising through the leafless trees outside, he rises to begin with a short intro.

"By now we know that those who succumbed to the food at the feast had a strange experience - they shared dreams with each other, in which they found themselves seeing Beacon as it was in the past. I encourage all those who dreamed, and remember it well, please tell us all what you saw. There may be considerable clues to our purpose and progress in even the smallest detail.

"The rest of us, well. We managed to make it through and I believe those who were killed are whole again, but for our part we can go over what worked and what didn't. Defending ourselves isn't merely a matter of being trained to use weapons. The spirits which attacked were formidable, powerful. We will need more than just our strength to outlast another attack. Ideas are welcome, as is any new information we have on everything from communications to threats."

That's all he'll ramble about this time, he'll take a seat and allow others to have the floor before he makes any more grandiose speeches.

Comments

[webshoots]

[ the information about the layout and area around beacon is interesting, and peter's attention is focussed on the maps almost entirely as maes explains and comments on his group's discoveries and thoughts. the medical centre will be useful, particularly given what he, bruce, and villanelle had found at the church; the furnace, too, maybe—

but then maes mentions an amusement park and peter glances up at him sharply, eyebrows knitting together into a frown. it could be nothing — they're all from entirely different worlds, all from different universes, there was nothing here to say that any of what they were dealing with had anything to do with anyone from his delightful gallery of rogues.

but that doesn't mean one of them didn't end up here, the same as him. ]

—Troubling how? [ he'll circle back round to everything else in due time. ]

holy shit i just read the filename for this coaster

[dadandgone]

[Maes flips to another page and slides a different illustration over. Again, it's drawn from memory, but that dream had been too damn vivid to be just that. So he feels it's fairly accurate. The illustration is of a roller coaster, though Maes doesn't include quite as many spirals.]

The flier mentioned that the coaster would propel them and their loved ones into a better tomorrow. It also mentioned something about being peaceful and humane...and the only time I really hear those words used is generally in relation to killing someone.

[There's a beat and then he adds.]

And in this case it would seem those riders were children.

[callada]

[The horror sinks in slowly and turns to anger, visible in his eyes and the way his fists tighten around his tablet turning the knuckles white.]

They saw the end coming long enough to compile and print advertisements for that thing instead of trying to put a stop to the problem. They had lots of time.

[That's valuable to know, though, probably. Their end was slow, not immediate. They had time to do other things too - to put into action whatever it is that happened to this world. Shrouded it in darkness to shield it from view, perhaps. Killed themselves in order to save a few. The bleakest, cruelest sort of hope he can imagine and he's just not sure it could possibly worth it. Not if they had to slaughter children with something dressed as an amusement park.]

[webshoots]

[ whatever peter had been expecting, that wasn't it. his reaction as realisation hits isn't entirely dissimilar to rosinante's: horror, then anger that feels like it sits somewhere between his stomach and his chest, and his expression tightens.

he doesn't joke; he doesn't comment, not at first. the world eaters, as a concept, are horrifying and frightening, he gets it, he does, but he's not convinced that alone would have led an entire population towards okaying an amusement park designed to kill its children. he wonders where the idea came from — as far as schemes go, it's grand and not entirely unlike something he'd have expected from arcade, but it lacks the drama, the — god help him — illusion of grandeur and excitement that comes with a villainous murderworld, so the question is: what was so bad that they'd have chosen this.

there had been the bodies in sheets beneath the trapdoor; there had been the smell, the foul, pungent mix of tar and what villanelle had disgustedly exclaimed as sickness. not for the first time, he wonders if a plague had been brought back through the portal. a sickening disease they'd had no idea of how to combat.

maybe it wasn't just the one thing.

he glances at rosinante. his expression says that he doesn't disagree, but there's not a whole lot to say to that — they had time and this is what they chose. he thinks of the note bruce had found in the church: we're all going to die. ]

They'd lost all hope. [ a pause. ] —I'm really not trying to sound flippant when I say this: but do you think that the furnace might have been used to dispose of the bodies?

time for some hallucinations aftermath 8D

[dadandgone]

[After years of being a soldier and then working investigations, Maes was able to compartmentalize these things. That and he'd been mulling over his dream experience for a few days now. He hadn't had time to process the flier and its implications until later, staring at the drawing until he felt dizzy once more.

He doesn't verbally reply to Rosi, instead ignoring the sudden screaming in his ear. Pawlina's mother screaming What have you done? What have you done with the children? and for a moment he swears he sees her at the edge of the crowded meeting. He looks quickly, but all the faces in the town hall are non-canine. He forces his shoulders to drop, refocusing on Peter. He swallows, mouth dry.]

It's possible. We could find out more if we made it there I would imagine. Although the furnaces were on the map, so perhaps they weren't so nefarious at first.

[After all, the amusement park hadn't been on the map as far as he had been able to glean. He taps his finger against the flier.]

These were all in the mayor's office in Town Hall, hundreds of them, scattered everywhere. I feel I should mention that what led us there was a series of notes, supposedly from one of the mayor's own children or at least that was who had signed them. They weren't exactly reassuring either, but could offer some insight into the bigger picture we're trying to grasp here.