peckenpaugh | SO LATE THAT IT'S EARLY

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!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Cicero hasn't stopped moving since he woke up, and he hasn't stopped talking much either. He spoke so fast relaying information to the teachers and upperclassmen that he had to repeat himself a couple times, with each interaction growing more and more frustrated.

Clearly, he needs to take things into his own hands.

The moment Ms. Altizer's eyes are off him, Cicero is gone. In short order he's amassed a crew of like-minded sophomores, whom he paces in front of in a sharp peacoat. He's commandeered somebody's white board, and on it written the names Atlas, Trudy, Xenia and Patrice is lovely cursive. Other sophomores have provided possible places to look for the missing students.

"...but before we start our search, I want to make sure we're fully prepared. One last check. I have the first aid kit, water for re-hydration, a fully charged cell phone."

Cedar has a fannypack. The fannypack is supposed to be full of useful items like snacks and compasses and extra pens for journal communication, but, somehow, it never is. What's in there depends completely and totally on what they need and how panicked they are. Which means right now it's mostly full of rubberbands.

"I have feet!!" Cedar shouts, breathless as they unzip pocket after pocket after pocket full of rubberbands. "They're in here—I know I have them!"

Hawthorne assists Cedar by intervening and moving their hands to a particularly overstuffed pocket that he's pretty sure they keep their feet in.

"We should bring weapons," he suggests, and then pauses, "In addition to wands."

Okay, yes, Skip might've been taken to a random hell dimension back on Halloween, but that was him. Well, him and Scarlett. And a bunch of upperclassmen. Point was, it wasn't a saxophone playing nerd who had disappeared, so this was Much Worse.

"I've got a pocket knife," he offered up to Hawthorne's suggestion. "And we can always transfigure sticks into weapons if we need to." Careful planning wasn't really his forte exactly. "What're we thinking, check some of the places people have already gotten stuck this year, or try somewheres new?"

"No weapons!" Willow insists, and her voice doesn't come out demanding like she had hoped, but instead it's squeaky. "I'm sure there's a reasonable explanation for all this. We don't need to turn into a mob yet." Even she can admit there's a yet. "The dream... I dreamed... Trees! There were trees, right, so, maybe we should look places with trees?"

"The mind is a weapon!" Cicero interjects, and by mind he probably means his wand, which he deftly spins in his bony fingers. "The last place people got lost was up the tower, but there wouldn't be such a panic if it were merely a case of a few students being in the main building after hours. No! Clearly they're somewhere more difficulttotrackandweneedtoreadbetweenthelinesifwewanttolocatethem!"

He points towards the trees. Willow was right. He's dreamed of trees. And then there was the dread, thick and inky, making his mouth feel dry. "Willow's right. Let's search where no one else would."

"Where did I get so many RUBBERBANDS?" Cedar shouts, more of them spilling out with every pocket they open. "Should I shoot them at the woods???"

Hawthorne looks a little put out by the no weapons rule, but it doesn't stop him from considering their objective. He satisfies his need for offensive tools by picking up one of Cedar's fallen rubber bands and wrapping it around his fingers into a ready-to-shoot gun, chewing the inside of his mouth, pondering. What place would no one else search? After a few seconds and a lot of very thoughtful expressions, he suggests, "The old stable remains by the Astronomy Silo?"

"Makes sense. Middle of the woods, plenty of loud bugs, creepy aesthetic. If I were going to kidnap random high schoolers, an old stable would definitely make my list of places to hold them hostage," Skip muses. He grabs a few rubber bands for himself, just in case, and then starts walking in that direction. Not quite running, but definitely at a good clip. He’s better with the action than the talky-talk, even if he winds up eating a few leaves.

SO LATE THAT IT'S EARLY

SOPHOMORE RESCUE MISSION

SOPHOMORE RESCUE MISSION

SOPHOMORE RESCUE MISSION

SOPHOMORE RESCUE MISSION

SOPHOMORE RESCUE MISSION

SOPHOMORE RESCUE MISSION

SOPHOMORE RESCUE MISSION

SOPHOMORE RESCUE MISSION

SOPHOMORE RESCUE MISSION