logsinthenight | INTRO LOG: JANUARY

INTRO LOG: JANUARY
ALLES NEU

characters: everyone.
location: the harbor, as well as the rest of town.
date/time: january 1-3.
content: beacon's newest batch of residents arrives on the ferry. the forest spirits engage in some new year's shenanigans.
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 glowing 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.

•••

A small crowd of forest spirits have shown up at the harbor to welcome the newcomers and to ring in the new year! They are very excited to promote and partake in the following traditions:

Making lots of noise! Forest spirits are passing out a variety of noisemakers of all shapes and sizes with which to create a lively ruckus. Happy year!!!

Setting off fireworks! Sort of! More like firecrackers, sparklers, and bottle rockets, but close enough, right? None of them cast light, but they're still pretty glowy things.

Hanging bunches of onions from doorways! And also trees! And fences! And people! Hanging onions on everything! The more onions the better! Where did they get all of these onions!

Smashing stuff! Specifically, the forest spirits are yeeting whole-ass pomegranates into doors and smashing every plate they can get their hands on before sweeping the debris into a pile. In fact, the forest spirits seem to be having small contests to see who can amass the largest pile of broken kitchenware. Hide your fruits and fine china, Beacon bits, because the spirits have a loose definition of "pomegranate" and "plate".

Banging loaves of bread against walls! Maybe the tradition doesn't call for actual destruction or maybe it's just hard to smash a loaf of bread, but forest spirits are definitely running through town whapping hunks of bread on anything (and anyone) they run into. Some of the loaves even have coins and... acorns? Inside? Sure. All the better to bruise you with.

Tossing flowers into the lake! They're all white flowers... mostly? Flowers are tough to come by this time of year, so it's more like white "anything that looks like a flower"s that are getting hucked into the water.

Ringing bells! A couple of forest spirits have been tasked with scurrying up into the rafters of the church and town hall's clock tower, ringing the bells madly. Problem is, the spirits are trying to count and coordinate how many bell chimes peel through the town, but counting is hard and so is coordinating across a distance. So, uh, the bells are just kind of going hog wild for the day.

Melting lead! One forest spirit covered in fur with a long tongue lolling out from their mask seems to be in charge of a lead-melting booth, where lantern-havers can melt bits of lead over a torch borrowed from the bonfire. The molten lead is then dropped into the lake and fished out with the spirits long, long tongue, after which they'll examine the lead's shape and hoot... something at whoever's dropped it in. A fortune for the new year? Tough to say. Even the other forest spirits don't seen to be able to understand this tonguey gent.

Drinking burnt stuff! Be prepared for a forest spirit to run up and shove a scrap of paper and a glass of something bubbly into your hands. The idea, after some miming from the forest spirit, seems to be to write a wish or resolution onto the piece of paper, burn it in a bonfire torch, and mix the ashes with the glass of... something. Maybe you got lucky and it's champagne, but there's no telling what's in that glass. Bottoms up, though. You have to drink your wish to make it come true!

Burning stuff! The forest spirits are making cute little dolls of each other and other folks in town! How cute! Less cute is that these cute little effigies are getting chucked right into the bonfire and swallowed up by the flames. Rastus is moderately distressed by this development, though he won't stop you from making your own effigies to burn.

By the end of the week, the forest spirits will have cleaned up their festivities, but for now, eh, get in the spirit of the holiday. It's a new year, after all.

Luckily for all the newcomers who may find themselves horribly confused by this welcome committee, their tablets 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! We're super jazzed to kick off the new year with a fresh crop of new players and characters.

For these New Year's festivities, you're all welcome to play out your own forest spirit interactions! NPC away, my dudes.

Go ahead and introduce yourselves on the OOC intro, and as you settle in, we'd like to ease everyone's minds with a little spoiler: More housing will be unlocked soon! A location discovery announcement will go up in the next week or so, whenever that exploration wraps up, and a whole crop of new housing options will then be made available. In the meantime, don't stress about finding lodging for your character. So long as everyone's settled by the end of the month, we're good to go!

DELIVERIES

The following packages can be found in the cargo hold:

The monthly store restock
For Midge: A menorah, a seder plate, a mezuzah, and a siddur
For Rosalind: A dozen elegant eyepatches and the equipment necessary for her to construct her Lutece device
For Hux: Equipment and tools to create mouse droids
For Aziraphale: A fountain pen and two bottles of blue ink
For Maes: A large crate full of collapsible cots and sleeping blankets, and an additional crate of various bedding and pillows
For Crowley: A book of prophecies from home, a bottle of white wine, a box of various sizes of PVC tubing, a water pump, the goods, and a variety pack of seeds
For Bucky: Bucky's armored vest from home
For Daylight: A dozen packets of Soldiers' Kisses seeds
For Rosinante: Two newspapers from Rosinante's home published in the months after his death, three bottles of nail polish (red, green, and pink), four cartons of cigarettes, and a crate full of various winter equipment
For Peter: Webware
For Rhys: A froyo machine
For Kol: Kol's daylight ring from home
For Elektra: A make-up case with a full set of make-up, six sets of good quality clothing (three for men and three for women), two bottles of fresh honey, three bags of coffee, and a Braille Bible (which comes in the form of seven very thick volumes)
For Scully: A poster, three sets of medical scrubs, two sets of silk pajamas, and a bag with enough medical supplies to treat 5 major injuries or 10 minor injuries
For Matt: An orchid-scented perfume, twin sai, a bottle of fancy tequila, three classic rock records, and a record player
For Ignis: A violin, two dozen containers of various spices, a dozen skeins of knitting wool, and a dozen spools of colorful thread
For Javert: A dozen outfits comprised of all 19th century clothing and a crate full of bedding materials

If you submitted an item request last month and we've missed it here, let us know!

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Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"Warm, huh..." Well, first to find something he can actually work with in this kitchen. He's not sure what dead people eat, much less what they get shipped in, but there's a thing or two he can do in most American kitchens. Chicken adobo comes to mind.

He starts poking around in the refrigerator, searching for food. Yo, is that rice? He picks up the little carton, opens it to smell it. "I can do warm. What do you eat where you live?"

"Raw meat, mixed fruits, and flatbreads," Stone answers. "Groundlings make pastry things that I'm pretty fond of, but we don't have the ingredients at the colony tree. Or the knowledge of how to cook them, though I bet if we brought a groundling or two in who knew how, the Arbora would figure it out pretty quickly."

"Pastries, huh..." Sora closes his eyes, thinking back. "I used to know how to make... Tarte Aux Fruits? It's kind of like this tart with cream filling, and it has fruit on top. I'd need help with it now, but maybe I could find a way to make it here."

Not today, though. Sora turns to Stone. "Do you want something sweet today? I could make rice pudding."

"I don't know what rice pudding is, but I always like something sweet," Stone chuckles. "Now how about you tell me something you'd like to hear a story about, while you work."

Fortunately enough for Stone, Skyler (and Sora) made rice pudding enough at home for his little sister that he knows the ingredients by heart. He'll give Stone a thumbs up and bustle off find a pot to reheat the rice.

"Um... let's see. How specific should I go?" Sora nabs his pot, standing up and heading to the sink. "Can I hear about a friend of yours? And maybe an adventure?"

"A friend and an adventure." Stone considers. "All right. When I was visiting another court, to try and drum up some help for mine, I was flying on my way back when I stopped to rest on one of the floating islands over the eastern plain. Turns out I wasn't the only one. There was this kid, a consort like me, only much younger and smaller, and he was picking around in the ruins there." Stone chuckles. "I startled him, I think. I can't talk in my big winged form anymore, so I couldn't tell him I didn't mean any harm. Kind of chased him around trying to get a better look."

He settles more comfortably at one of the worktables, watching Sora work with interest as he speaks. "He got away from me, but I stuck around. Turns out he was living with some groundlings, but they worked out what he was-- like me, a shapeshifter, a predator, though we don't eat groundlings they don't always believe that. Idiots staked him out to get eaten by some of the local wildlife."

The rice in the pot will need a few minutes, so Sora will rummage around for fruits and nuts in the pantry while that gets going. Hmmm... "Hang on, do you have any food allergies? Do Raksura have any food allergies? Otherwise I'm just gonna put everything I find in." This is a very non-specific statement, but should he cook for Stone again, he would like to know!

He'll wince though, digging around for those ingredients. (Oooh, dried blueberries! Perfect.) "So they were scared of him because they thought he'd hurt them someday... Poor guy. Was he not a Raksura?"

"He was, he is actually since he's still around back home and is now the father of my great-great-great grandchildren, he just didn't know it. He'd been separated from his colony very young and never told what he really was." Such a waste. Stone knows Moon wishes he'd been found earlier; Stone also wishes he'd found him earlier, to be honest. "And I've never found anything I couldn't eat before, so probably not." He does at least know what an allergy is, though only really in reference to groundlings, not Raksura.

"I'll just put in everything I find, then." Nice. This might be a Frankenstein's monsters of whatever fruits and nuts Sora finds in the pantry, but as long as Stone's down, he's up for eating whatever. He's made this enough times to know what tastes good and what doesn't.

Right, that's the dry ingredients. Time to check on the rice. "He must have been really lonely... I'm glad you found him." Sora looks at Stone, quizzically. "Was he stuck where he was? Did you have to get him out, or did you two just... fly off into the sunset together?"

"I got him out, scooped him up and carried him away," Stone says with an amused expression. "And then he spent the next hour, once I set him down again, growling at me and acting like I was going to eat him. Finally convinced him to come home with me, and he paired up with my great-great-granddaughter, who needed a consort to settle her and make us some more royal babies. Of course, we had to do a lot of crazy shit before that could happen. Like kicking out the Fell and tracking down the seed of our colony tree."

Sora snorts. He guesses if I'd never seen anyone like Stone before, that would've been real scary. "That's so much... How old are you? I mean, if you lived to see your great-great-grandaughter have kids, and if you've had that many adventures..." A pause. "Wait, is that rude for Raksura? To ask for an age?"

"It's not rude. Even if it was, I probably wouldn't mind. I am very old. And only sometimes cranky." Stone scratches his cheek thoughtfully. "I don't actually remember how old I am. Several hundred turns, at least. I've seen at least twelve generations of my colony. As far as anybody can tell, I'm the only person in Beacon, here, who died of old age."

Rice seems ready. Sora turns the heat down a little so he can hunt for the milk and butter. "I see..." He has a lot of questions about that, but he's not terribly certain how to ask them. They all have to do with death after all, and he'd, well, just. Does it ever get easier? Do you feel like you're ready?

"Do things seem different? Like, do you remember how the world looked when you were younger?" Sora pauses, then scratches his nose. "I mean, you know, besides being here in Beacon. I mean before you died."

INTRO LOG: JANUARY

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