EVENT LOG: GRAVES

[inthenightmods]

EVENT LOG:
GRAVES

characters: everyone.
location: Bonfire Square.
date/time: July 12-19.
content: mysterious shrines appear and bring visions of death.
warnings: likely violence and potentially gore.

time to pay your respects.

It happens when no one is looking, when most of the town is asleep and the rest are inside. A makeshift cemetery has come to Beacon, taking up residence in the middle of Bonfire Square. Each monument, shrine, and altar is dedicated to someone who now resides here, a memorial of their previous life.

Some may be drawn by curiosity, others by fear, and some may simply have to pass through this strange graveyard to get to the Bonfire itself. Whenever a person gets near, the altars beckon with a mysterious urge— an urge to approach, and an urge to leave something behind. They will feel compelled to make offerings at the various shrines, but doing so has a curious effect; it causes one to experience the death of the person whose grave they've honored.

Whether you resist the compulsion or give in willingly (or something in between), you'll also have to wrestle with the fact that a grave exists for you. Will you let your death be known, or try your best to keep it secret? Destroying it sure won't work, as it will return— with a duplicate somewhere else in town.

However you choose to deal with this, one thing is hard to ignore— this a tangible reminder of your death, and the fact that it's probably permanent.

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Comments

[fogey]

[ wade isn't there when five first visits his grave. looks at it the same way wade does later, the two soldier's, medic's graves, side by side. one he recognizes has to be eugene, and the other -- occurs to him after a beat, must be wade's. the one who'd posted, asking about medications from the future, who's been working together with gene to form the clinic.

five's seen his share of battlefield crosses. five's seen his share of war, across time. temporal disturbances can happen anywhere, any time, but there are so many moving parts in war. so many choices that can change the flow of events.

war, the handler had said. such a fascinating concept. a temporary salve for a permanent human flaw. she'd been here, at this very war, probably in her days as an agent. she'd been here, and felt nothing.

five looks like he feels nothing, expressionless in the face of these graves, but he does, in the end, leave a single white candle at each. and what he'll never tell anyone is: he hadn't known, until he did it, what would happen.

he runs into wade later, passing through, pauses at the sound of his voice. we were supposed to have been protected.

"supposed to" has to be the dirtiest words in any language. ]

I've heard about the Geneva Code. [ inflectionless. held no sway at the commission, of course, an organization out of time and accountable to no one. ] Not that should've means much in war.

[ not exactly wry, just -- knowing. he's preaching to the choir, of course, and he knows it. ]

[sulfa]

[ For once, Wade allows himself the small, selfish luxury of a quiet sigh, an expression of weariness and fallibility a man in his position really shouldn't display. ] That's the bitch of it. I think if people cared more about shoulds we might not have to worry about as many wars to begin with.

[ The corners of his mouth barely lift in an approximation of a rueful smile as Irwin watches the smoke he exhaled fade into the black air and takes another drag, even though he's reached a point at which continuing to burn down the cigarette in his mouth is making him feel worse, not better, at least in a physical sense. At the very least it gives him something to do, a worrying stone alternating across perches between his lips and fingers. ]

[fogey]

[ he can't help it -- flashes to the commission, all quiet bureaucracy, white halls, beautifully appointed offices where people brightly discuss the most expedient ways to ensure disasters happen. there's more to history than the bad, of course, but enough of it is; and even the good are preserved with death, just as much as the bad. ]

Goes both ways, [ he says. ] That's a double-edged sword.

[ his job had been all about maintaining the should -- what's meant to be, is meant to be -- though. goes both ways. people shouldn't be killing to maintain the timeline, either. he sighs in turn, wears an expression too old for a teenager. ]

Or maybe you're right.

[sulfa]

You're not wrong, it is. [ Wade concedes that point with hardly any inflection one way or the other. ] In these cases you just have to hope that whatever started it was worth going to war over.

[ Wade lets the cigarette hang untouched between his fingers as he continues. ]

I like to think ours was one of the ones worth fighting. Have you heard of Adolf Hitler? [ Can't be too thorough - he's not sure how much information Five's generation had about the Second World War, especially seeing as the young man standing beside him seems to be at least a generation or two removed from it. ]