SO LATE THAT IT'S EARLY

[peckishmods]

a frigidly cold night

what's up?

The unrelenting icy cold sends most everyone inside early tonight. Even with magical heating, it’s hard to keep the chill away, almost like the holler, itself, wants you to stay snug under the covers, safe in your bed.

Sleep comes quickly and heavily tonight, and students dream of singing bugs and dancing birds…

Not a collaborative routine but two performances at odds, each vying tonight for your attention, dear child. The dancing of the birds beckons — follow and find truth and memory — but the buzzing insect song vibrates in your very bones, too: they are home, they are warmth, they are safety. Stay, stay, stay.

You are pulled in two directions in a forest of old maples. Beneath your feet the ground grows warm as vines creep up from strange dark cracks in the ground, climbing over each maple until they are overgrown with ivy leaves that look like fire — that are fire — and the maple seeds that fall from the dying trees as they burn are the singing bugs, their music fading until only one insect’s song remains.

Tonight, four pairs of feet climb from their beds and follow the birds.

Tonight, four different pairs of eyes open at the sight of the burning forest. Merlin Pletcher, Howdy Stoppelbein, Presley Mondragon, and Cicero Cook each wake with a start, each with a feeling of terrible dread.

And from there as more students wake it quickly becomes clear that something is very wrong:

It is late, so late as to almost be early, and Gertrude McGilliguddy, Xenia de Bourgh, Patrice Tang and Atlas Quigley are gone from their beds, nowhere to be found…

how this works!

⬥ Welcome to Peckenpaugh’s second major petition event! The primary winners of this event were Trudy, Xenia, Patrice and Atlas!

⬥ Petition winners please check your email again. we've sent a message to you all with more information. You can then refer to the “SOMEWHERE CLUTTERED” header for post-dreaming details!

⬥ Xenia de Bourgh has lost her journal and can’t find it! As soon as she realizes, Mr. Stirling provides her with a new one. It’ll take about 48 hours to get her properly added to the journal network, so for the next two days any of her journal posts or comments will be signed “UNREGISTERED USER”, rather than with her own name.

⬥ Merlin, Howdy, Presley and Cicero all woke with a start ahead of everyone else in the school. We assume y’all got the word out to staff that students were missing, eventually! Feel free to play these portions out in threads or journals, just put a descriptive timestamp in the subject of your posts.

⬥ There is no magic at work obscuring the location of the four missing students. They should be easy enough to find with the right tracking magic.

⬥ Classes are canceled for Thursday, January 30th, but will resume again on Friday. The scheduled party at Mothgarden is still on — if asked, the staff just doesn’t want the kids to worry too much. Also they have all this cheese and chocolate to deal with.

⬥ For the next few weeks, each House will have a faculty member staying in the chaperone’s room on the first floor over night. This’ll make shenanigans a bit harder, but (hopefully) disappearing kids less likely. The schedule is rotating, though usually it is your Head of House.

⬥ Mr. Purcell and Mr. Stirling can be seen around campus for the next week or so double checking magical locks and wards on all the dorms.

⬥ There is a sense that Peckenpaugh staff is taking this very seriously. Even the most immature faculty members aren’t making jokes about it, and it’s clear that most staffers have been given additional work investigating what’s happened. The four disappeared students can expect regular check-ins from their heads of house, and TAs may find their workloads increased as teachers hand off paper grading and other small tasks to them for the next few weeks...

locations!

⬦ AWAKE ON CAMPUS: After the first four students wake, it doesn’t take long for the rest of campus to start stirring. From there, word quickly spreads that four students are missing. This is a space to thread any on campus scenes before the students are located.

⬦ SOMEWHERE CLUTTERED: Dark and cold and musty. There’s so much junk in here, you can probably guess where you are without too much brain power…

⬦ SO LATE THAT IT'S EARLY: Returned to campus, the four missing students are held in the infirmary overnight, checked for any injuries, any signs of strange enchantment or forbidden curses. Aside from some reddened skin on their backs, there’s nothing. Their parents are informed via owl immediately. You may have slept like the dead earlier in the night, but for the rest of the night sleep proves fleeting for everyone...

⬦ OOC - QUESTIONS, COMMENTS, CONCERNS!

Comments

SOMEWHERE CLUTTERED

[peckishmods]

Faint blue light is what finally wakes you, an eerie glow splashed across your face. Or, not your face, the mask you are wearing. It’s cold here, and musty. A basement, probably. You are not alone. Each of you is lying on a poured cement floor, positioned around a hatch covered in glyphs: Atlas above it, Patrice below, Trudy on the right, and Xenia on the left. You are all in cowled masks, lying still with hands at your sides. You cannot move. Around you, ghostly figures stand, glowing, translucent in their hooded robes. That is where the light is coming from. They are murmuring that chant they murmured in your dreams, louder and louder, clearer and clearer. That dim light grows brighter, and now seems to be coming beneath you as well. A glyph etched in chalk on the floor starts to shine. Hot as a griddle, it quickly grows uncomfortable, but you are awake and you are free and as you move to get away, it sputters and dies. The light fades. Then the hooded figures do, too.

The four of you are alone in a cluttered room wearing cowled masks fashioned from white plaster. Intricately molded eyes on the mask give way to a flat lower half and a mouth shaped like a keyhole. Beneath you the hatch is still warm to the touch, and it gives a bit if you pull on the handle, like maybe those locking glyphs drawn all over it aren’t holding it so fast, anymore. Around you there are shelves stuffed with boxes, stacked with broken bowling pins, old bowling balls, advertisements and decorations from yearly events at Elflock Lanes. It’s not hard to guess where you are, and though you have no clue how long you’ve been down here, it’s not long at all ‘til you’re found.

Lir Liu arrives with Mr. Youngblood and Ms. Kwan, the three of them showing more emotion on their faces than you’ve maybe ever seen. There’s no interrogation, no assumption that this was a prank, the two teachers just usher you hurriedly back to Peckenpaugh, to Healer Greatheart, to have you checked out.

SOMEWHERE CLUTTERED: Pre-Rescue (Open but optional to rescue kids??)

[bigshoulders]

Ah. Good old sleep paralysis. Atlas has heard about this,though he's never experienced it before. You think you're awake and there's something in the room with you, but it's just because your mind is trapped in its last stages of dreaming, and your body is trapped in its REM state; unable to move. It explains everything. The weird setting. The shadows. The fact he can't run away. So Atlas just lies there. And he blinks. And the light fades, eventually.

His arms can move again, and they do, up to his face, where it isn't his face, but cool plaster. He yelps loud, in a way he'll absolutely deny later, and pulls the mask from his face. He sits bolt upright, staring at the face that was on his own, and only then realizing there's other people in this circle. In this basement (?) He feels cement on his legs and the fading heat from the door and it's not a dream after. Not even the worst kind. "What the hell." is the only thing to demand out loud, in the hiss of a whisper that carries further than he'd like.

SOMEWHERE CLUTTERED: Pre-Rescue (Open but optional to rescue kids??)

[champlified]

A muffled metallic sigh sounds from somewhere to the left: Xenia de Bourgh, white mask poking out from under messy hair. She's awake, breathing nervously in a shallow, distressed shiver, but remains unmoving for a long second until Atlas' voice rouses her from playing possum. Not rational, in spite of the uncomfortably hot floor. But Xen is experienced, after all, in the things that can go horribly, horribly wrong if you move too quickly in the wrong environments. Also, she's often a total coward.

For this reason, her fingers are shaky when they pull the mask from her face. (Where did it come from? Why?) She sets it gently on the floor, noting its strange features, and sits up slowly, methodically, as if frightened of setting off a trap or tripping some invisible wire. Her head is full of odd words still, fluttering intrusively at the edges.

Something about keys.

"I don't know," Xen murmurs, staring blankly at the hatch as she tries to memorize the fading dream. The look of it brings her back to earth, and her head cocks inquisitively. "Oh. Those are locking glyphs."

SOMEWHERE CLUTTERED: Pre-Rescue

[shoulderdevil]

As they lay immobile and helpless, Patrice tries with every ounce of energy he has to summon up some sort of wandless magic trick to knock away at least one of the figures. He knows this isn't a dream. Or thinks he knows, anyway. This has a different feeling than when he was wandering through a forest just moments before, and he's willing to stake someone's safety on it with his attempts at magic. It doesn't matter though. He's not skillful enough to do anything, leaving him only capable of action once he can actually move again.

He's quick to rip off his own mask, his attention turning to Atlas at his utterance, and then to Xenia. This attention to the others is fleeting, though - he starts trying to scrub out a line of the chalk sigil on the floor with his hand to break it, not liking it still being around even if it's not glowing and has possibly already served its purpose.

"'Set him free,'" he says under his breath, recalling what he'd heard in his dream. Then, louder, "Everyone alright?"

SOMEWHERE CLUTTERED: Pre-Rescue

[themurderbird]

Unlike Xenia, as soon as Trudy can move, she does, scooting away from the heat source first. Then she sits up properly and yanks the mask off as she squints around her. She pats the concrete around her for her glasses, even though she's sure she's no where near her room. No luck, so though she can see people moving around her, she can't tell who they are. "Who's there!" she demands, "Identify yourselves!" Her voice is pitched up, but not in fear. It's much closer to the sharp irritation she displays when she's forced to deal with the band freshmen's chaos, the kind that suggests consequences for disobedience.

Too proud to crawl around on the floor, Trudy gets to her feet, even if it means stubbing all her toes. "And where are we!" She puts her hands on her hips, feeling the familiar fabric of her night gown under her fingertips. They put weird masks on them, but left them in their pajamas? Their kidnappers clearly have no eye for aesthetics.

SOMEWHERE CLUTTERED: Pre-Rescue

[bigshoulders]

Atlas stays sitting, soaking up the fact that his classmates are here. But no one in robes is. And the little boy (boy?) isn't either. The ground is no longer shaking. He didn't burn up. And that hatch looks...sort of locked. "They left." He tells Trudy, voice a little shaky, and clutching his mask like an anchor. "Right? The robed guys."

SOMEWHERE CLUTTERED: Pre-Rescue

[champlified]

Xenia makes a sound of assent. The robes faded, just like the light.

"We're okay," she says unconvincingly, patting her arm woodenly, distracted in thought. "And I'm Xenia, if you can't tell. I'm" --she pauses to confirm-- "missing my wand."

It isn't holstered in her sleeve, where it should be, and the pink fabric with its pattern of cheerful Kneazles seems pitifully childish in this situation. She doubles down on her observation of the hatch to make up for it. Those glyphs are knowable. She'll write them down with everything she remembers as soon as possible. Four of us, four keys... Fire, water, earth... Something... And forget. Something said...

SOMEWHERE CLUTTERED: Pre-Rescue

[shoulderdevil]

Despite the fact that it's definitely not Trudy's fault that she's blind (and possibly concerned), Patrice rolls his eyes, slowly sitting back on his heels. He looks around, one hand still gripping his own mask a little tightly.

"It's just the four of us now. Patrice and..." He squints, thinking. "Atlas too. Somewhere with bowling alley crap. Do you normally sleep with your wand, Xenia?" He pauses, frowning as he realizes something and pulls a book from his pocket. "...I don't sleep with my journal, though, and I've got that."

SOMEWHERE CLUTTERED: Pre-Rescue

[champlified]

Xenia nods, blushing. She wipes at her eyes with the back of a hand, then refocuses on the glyphs. They're far easier to take in than everything else. It's so cluttered in here.

"Yeah. Always. But... not my journal. Also." Her words tangle themselves under Patrice's attention. "And that isn't with me either."

SOMEWHERE CLUTTERED: Pre-Rescue

[themurderbird]

"Thank you, Patrice," Trudy says, tone approving like he gave the correct answer in class. At this conversation, she pats herself down. "No glasses, no wand, but I do have my journal," she confirms. It does not occur to her to contact anyone immediately. Instead, she approaches the hatch in the center of the room. "Free him?" she ponders, then gives it a tug. It won't open, but it does budge a little.