This is where you sat when you were sorted, each quarter of this balcony painted beachy blue, spring pink, pine green or mahogany red. Once, it was a pain to shuffle past your peers and find a good seat for a show or assembly. Now the way is blocked by toppled tables, broken benches, fallen prom decorations and curtains of vines.
Blue seeds litter every surface, a hall of memories to be explored. Hurry.
[UNMODERATED] [CRITERIA: cramped area, 2 characters max due to size constraints, minimum replies 8]
It's cold outside, but warm in here. The old van is crammed with teenagers, so the windows fog up quickly, making it hard to see outside. The patter of rain on the roof is almost deafening, and aside from two faded yellow dome lights, it’s almost pitch black. They’re sat on a front lawn in the hills of Elflock Falls, that much is evident if you squint out the front windshield.
Within, the van is a cramped mess. Several backpacks are stuck on or between seats. One is open, papers and books jutting out of every pocket. Up front, Lionel Qualls sits in the driver seat, hands at ten and two for approximately six seconds before he starts drumming on the wheel. Beside him in the passenger seat, Percy Potkin's grinning broad, fixing a set of fuzzy dice to the rear view.
“I like them!” Percy announces gamely when El rolls his eyes.
The memory shifts, the watcher doing a turn. In the way back, two teenage Crocketts and a young Gilda Santos are piled up and laughing. Popcorn goes flying when Zed accidentally knocks the cup of it out of Gilda’s hands. A moment of raucous laughter is cut short when Wybie Youngblood climbs aboard from the left, soaked to the bone from the rain outside and announcing himself with a, "Shit!"
Z Gunzenhauser, standing on the right, pushes her way past the mystery memory owner and smacks her shin against one of the bucket seats in her eagerness to get to the front. “Autsch! Why?” It doesn’t stop her long, though. She leans over Percy to fiddle with the buttons and knobs.
Naturally, that leaves few others for the memory holder to be. "Getting any good tunes?" Georgie Trullinger teases as Zelda continues to fruitlessly seek sound from the dead radio.
"The van's not even on yet, Z," Lionel cackles as his friend hits buttons and turns knobs.
“I believe in her,” Percy says with such conviction it’s hard to say if he’s joking.
“Quatsch! Turn it on then!” Zelda snips, slapping Lionel’s shoulder. “What are you waiting for?! Do you see how I’m suffering?”
More laughter fills the tiny space.
"Alright, alright," Lionel concedes with a dismissive wave, then puts his hand on the ignition and turns the key. The lights come up bright, illuminating the sherbet green upholstery and stained faux leather dash. Then suddenly, everything freezes.
This is certainly a tight squeeze. Jupiter does not exactly size up the situation before leaping into the middle of it. "Oh holy shit," she says, half because she bangs her head on the roof of the van as soon as she steps in it and half because, "Ms. G was a total fox."
She slaps her free hand over her temple where she knocked herself. Youngblood's ax still in the other. It's so weird seeing her teachers her age, and she gapes. "Is that Mr. Potkin?"
"I don't have my seatbelt on!" Fred yells in distress when the ignition turns over, still trying to scramble her way off the floor. This isn't the first time she's shrieked since being dumped into this memory and popcorn and a Crockett's foot are crushed under stiletto heels as she tries to wrest herself free of knees and seat backs. More popcorn clings to her jacket and head piece, like the first wave of Christmas decorating.
Everything freezes and her panic momentarily calms.
"Where's Mr. Potkin??" she yells (this is calm), slapping multiple occupants with pom poms and wires (and popcorn) as she whips her head around, not actually freed from the floor but at least in an appropriate upright position, finally. "And you're going to get someone killed!!" she tosses in for good measure, not the first time she's complained since seeing Joop's ax.
[?MODERATED? - we may slip into this memory] [CRITERIA: minimum 3 players, minimum 12 replies] [METAPLOT]
Water laps against a pebble beach. In and out. In and out. Waves climb up shore and retreat again. The stones at your feet are black and sharp, so shiny they look like hunks of glass. Some fine as frit, others as large as a human head, all of them glittering. The water rushing toward you is thick and inky blue, smelling not of algae or salt, but of something faintly sweet, unfamiliar. Above, the sky is gray. You know it's night, though it doesn't look like it. Focus long on it, and your eyes begin to hurt. You realize: it's not gray, it's just densely packed with stars. So innumerable they make a solid tapestry.
Debris litters the beach. Blankets, baskets, overturned boats, what looks a bit like a chaise lounge split in two. There are drying pools of gray goo in places, tide pools that smell faintly of chocolate. But those aren't tide pools. And that's not ocean water.
All around, vines are growing, creeping up toward the sweet indigo sea. Massive purple flowers, bigger than you are, sit dangerously every dozen or so feet, drinking in that endless starlight and singing it back in pulses of purple light. This is a battle lost, but the war still rages on.
Snap.
One approaches, a being of many limbs, many tendrils, many frills. Strangely beautiful, its body all the colors of an exotic fish, but unsettling to behold. It wears lovely adornments, metal bangles, colorful threads woven into nets, a wreath of red crystals in its hair, each one as delicate as the petal of a flower. When it moves, it moves like a spider, pulling itself forward, toward the memory's owner.
Click, click, clack. Pop. Snap snap snap.
Though the sounds have no meaning to your ear, that feeling is unmistakable. Loyalty, devotion, adoration, fear.
The two beings set to work moving pebbles about until a strange glyph has been drawn in the beach. A circle rimmed by symbols unfamiliar even to the top Symbology students at Peckenpaugh. The memory owner walks around the circle, their partner keeping pace beside them, putting their backs to the ocean and looking further ashore. More of these beings are gathered, ready with what little they can carry to flee to somewhere new.
Three of these waiting beings approach and from tendrilly limbs present items: a satchel of fine white powder, a vial of something gray, and a cube of faded gray metal. Everything freezes.
Imogen, who often thinks through movement when she thinks at all, is rendered stock still by the imagery of the scene. She might as well be frozen too, except for the slightest hyperventilation of breath and twitch of the wand hand.
It's a weird sensation, watching these fuckin' frilly-limbs move and gather and make offerings. Her brain keeps trying to categorize them, comes up static. Weirdest of all is somehow knowing they aren't dangerous, despite her inclination to act first and ask questions later: hearing those sounds and, uncomfortably, feeling them, like there's some deep part of her that can comprehend the clicks and pops. Ew. Just ew!!!
Cool girl posturing momentarily shattered, she shudders visibly, tearing her eyes from the tendrils and toward Armani and Aristole. Then, tossing her by now very messy hair as though it were freshly blown-out and styled, she offers a shaky grin.
The grotesque aspects of the scene don't disturb him like they probably should. It's eerie and beautiful but he'd appreciate it more if there weren't the imminent sense of danger and urgency to everything within Hell.
"I'll do the touching," he agrees, bolder and better prepared since they first teamed up together. He has his wand in one hand and his (autographed) hockey stick in the other. There's an ice pack around his neck and it looks like he's tried to disguise it with the cowl of his robes, but it's since come undone and never readjusted.
"Glacius!" he shouts, pointing his wand at the purple flowers. Just as a precaution.
“Oh! Birdie, I—I definitely lost a contact, it’s—oh god, I think it’s going behind my eye!” Sarah-Jane Dorkins leans in close to the mirror, finger dragging down her bottom eyelid. This color-changing contact lens Birdie insisted she try tonight is definitely working its way under her eye, and she never even wanted to try it in the first place.
“Don’t worry about it,” Birdie Beridze calls back. “I’ve got plenty more where that came from.” Birdie sweeps into the room, two martinis in hand, with all that glamorous confidence Sarah-Jane could never even dream of having. Even her apartment here felt so much more exciting than her own; she had a rack of designer cocktail dresses where Sarah-Jane kept her good vacuum cleaner, she had costume jewelry that looked stolen from a movie set, she had an autograph from—okay, a lot of people that aren’t all that familiar to her, actually, but still!
Sarah-Jane lets go of her eyelid, but doesn’t relax, and there’s no way she’s going to stop worrying about it. “Okay, well, does it come out eventually?” she asks and grabs for her purse, upending it all over Birdie’s vanity. Junk scatters across the glassy surface, three chapsticks roll to the ground, an airpod and bottle of Wizine roll behind the vanity altogether. “Am I stuck with this thing buried behind my eye forever while it just, like, detaches my retinas for me?”
Birdie sips at one of the martinis, but Sarah-Jane doesn’t need input to spiral out, and she also really doesn’t want to lose that airpod. Also that Wizine! Do you know how much of that she’ll need after finally ripping this stupid contact lens out? She grabs onto the vanity and pulls it outward, sending more of her purse contents all over the floor. It doesn’t matter, because she can get all of these things, she can fix it all herself, she can clean up any mess, because she is Sarah-Jane Dorkins, goddammit.
Or, well. Sarah-Jane Grossweiner now, probably.
She stops, kneeling on the floor, surrounded by her purse shit. “Goddammit, I don’t want to be a Grossweiner again,” she wails and throws her hands to her side. Birdie sets a martini glass on the vanity, leans against it, and… stops there, frozen completely in time.
“Then don’t,” Birdie says and holds the second martini in her hand out to Sarah-Jane. Her voice is so resolute, Sarah-Jane wonders for a moment if there actually was an argument against that. Of course there was—she’s not stupid enough to go through the trouble of changing her name for no reason!
“But it’s not really mine to keep, and, and his family gets all weird and possessive about things and I don’t want them—” Birdie shakes the martini glass at her, and Sarah-Jane finally plucks it from her fingers, not even breaking her stride in her tizzy. “— I’ve just had enough trouble from them, you know? And like what if then Gary starts to think that this means I still want him back and that’s a conversation he is not equipped to handle and—”
“Honey,” Birdie interrupts. “You earned every right to keep whatever you want from him the first time you swal—” The rest of her words are drowned out by a gasp and the sound of glass shattering as Sarah-Jane drops the martini glass. But you get the picture.
Up on the vanity, the mirror glows blue, and it no longer shows a reflection, but an auditorium.
[UNMODERATED - player memory] [CRITERIA: find the linchpin, minimum 12 tags]
The bakery is quiet and all of the lights but one are low. On the street, it's cold enough to make a person hunch their shoulders in, just a little, and late enough that the sky is black. The street is too. Black like the metal of the lampposts and the paint on the bench out front where there's a boy with his gaze fixed down the street, skinny and small, fidgeting with the hem of his sweatshirt, plucking at a loose thread and winding it around his finger.
It isn't startling, the black of the sky the asphalt the door behind him. Maybe because of the dark or maybe because that's how it's always been. That is how it's always been. All the world in contrasts of bright and dark and the shades of grey between them. The boy digs his teeth into his cheek and leans forward. Sucks in a breath and leans back almost as quickly, pulling a sneaker up onto the bench and retying his shoelace. Someone's late. (It isn't you. You're here. You're waiting. You're supposed to be here. To be still. To be waiting. It'll be fine. She'll be back if you can just—)
Behind him a bell jingles, chiming sound that startles him into straightening, toes of his sneakers skimming the floor and shoulders rocking back as a woman steps out the front door of the shop with her arms full and her wand tucked behind her ear. The slow build of panic in the air quiets like a candle that somebody's gone and taken a snuffer straight to. All covered up and choked.
"You still out here, honey?" she asks, all bright and polite like she hadn't seen him through the window all day, holed up between her pansies. Her voice is warm (warm like the cup she'd placed down on the bench that morning, like the brimming-full paper bag folded over in her hands right now) like he's a pleasant thing to see and she has a smile that makes her eyes crinkle closed.
Desmond nods. "Yes, ma'am."
There are splotches of white on the dark of her shirt, one streak of it left high on her forehead. She misses it by half an inch as she reaches up to run her fingers through her hair. "And you're sure you won't stay inside?"
For a moment, she looks like she might argue when he dips his chin and mumbles out a sheepish, "No, ma'am." Her lips turning down in a way that makes something squirm guiltily in his stomach. But she drops her paper bag onto spare bit of space next to him instead, her fingers skimming the tops of the little gray flowers in the pot next to the door.
"Alright," she says. "Well, you know where the key is."
Initially, this memory seems pretty boring - a quiet street, a quaint bakery, a normal bench. The black and grey-ness of everything is atmospheric but not immediately noticeable, though as the woman appears it strikes Patrice that oh, yes, there really is no color here. The boy on the bench looks something like Des (maybe, it's hard to tell with his chin tucked so much and his hair so un-bleached), but the greyscale of the area and the twang of an accent are confirmation enough for him. The nervous energy in the air of waiting, of someone else's tardiness, is a little uncomfortable, but only enough to make Patrice roll his shoulders as he looks at his two roommates.
"I'm glad no one is roaming around in my head," he says, almost casually, before he moves towards the boy on the bench.
Everything is huge. Everything. The trees, the grass, the looming shoe of an incoming teenager who isn't looking where they're walking and oh no this can't be the end this can't be— Tiny mushroom legs hurry away from the crush of size 11 sneakers, rolling into the shadow of an enormous duffel bag for safety.
"SPOREZ-UM!" the little one shouts, using a pair of lost Mothgarden sunglasses as a ladder to climb up on the bag and shake an itty bitty balled up fist in the direction of the sneaker-holder. "GIBBUM VIZZUS, GIBBUM WUTFORZ." The teenager, however, doesn't hear, and they continue on their merry way. The muscheron crosses his arms and plops back onto the bag for a good pout.
But then there's a sound. Is that… purring?? The mushroom-shaped fairy gulps and turns to see a cat, five, ten, a MILLION sizes larger than him, stalking toward the bag.
"GIBBAK! GIBBAK!" The muscheron grabs the sunglasses ladder and holds it up defensively, the winged frames jabbing right into his chest. He starts to swing wildly, barely able to control the shades, momentum swinging him around in circles. "GIB SPAAAACE!"
"You have to be kidding me," Ramona says as she steps into this memory. Go find memories, the freshmen had told her. You'll save students. It's easy. They're probably off cavorting around in some ridiculous cat pageant with Valkyrie and kitten-aged Free Cat and she's stuck here with a colossal and frankly mean-looking russian blue and her second least favorite mushroom in the world.
At least the memory freezes before the cat has the chance to bat her or Presley into next week. She lifts her beater bat in a precautionary way anyways, looking around the tableau.
A musty smell hangs in the air, just the scent of an old building finally getting a breeze after months of every window and door being sealed up for the winter. It's dark and dusty here, all shadows except for the triangles of orange-gold light glowing from lamps positioned around the room. It's difficult to say if the house is genuinely this dark, or if that's just how it's being remembered. It's all sort of big, the way everything seems a little big when you're still just a kid, before you've stopped growing completely.
This place is somehow both empty and cluttered, and finding the linchpin is sure to be an ordeal. The floor-to-ceiling shelves are packed full of books, some titles legible — with titles like Devil's Heat and Renegade Yeti Love Affair — others gibberish. Between those there are portraits and art, families and individuals, all of it old and ugly. A massive tapestry hangs on one wall, the design looking a bit like a coat of arms. There's an empty bottle of wine sitting on the low table in the center of the room. Another bottle of merlot, still half-full sits, on a side table along with a gramophone spinning a vinyl. Rhapsody in Blue fills the air.
"Things are about to be very different," says a hawk-like woman grimly. At her words the memory's owner turns his head and stares at the massive orange cat seated beside him on the overstuffed red sofa. "I know it's frightening, but—"
Zedekiah Crockett shoves himself up off that uncomfortable sofa and the old orange cat climbs to its feet and follows after.
"—But we'll all need to adjust."
"You're going to lock him up, aren't you?" Zed protests, turning to face the hawk-like woman, his mother Healer Zipporah Crockett. The more he speaks, the more panic and anger rise in his young voice. "You and dad are going to shut him away and—"
"Of course not. We don't have to. There are advancements in—" his mother tries to explain in that crisp clinical tone of hers. When she speaks, it makes everything seem darker and colder than it is, but Zed's not really listening. He’s scooping up that empty wine bottle. The music swells, and then everything stops.
The music crackles back to life, but it’s drown out by Zed’s angry shouting.
“Don’t have to,” he echoes, angry and mocking, before he flings the empty bottle of wine across the room. It shatters against the gramophone, which topples to the floor, an unruly cacophony. “He’s a person not an object. If you try anything, we’ll run away!”
“Monty! We can’t stay here! We have to go.” Zed sprints away from his mother, throws open the door to a side room and disappears.
His mother chases after. “Zedekiah, please. Keep your voice down. He’s not even awake, yet.”
That heavy side door stands open, and beyond the dim light of Peckenpaugh’s auditorium.
Everything is huge. Or, more accurately, everything looks huge from the perspective of the little russula muscheron. The shoebox is lit with a birthday candle in the middle of a table made from one of those plastic separators that comes in a pizza. It's a fire hazard, but you have to take chances when it comes to romance. The table is set with thimbles for cups and bottle caps for plates, filled with scavenged human delicacies. Cheez-it chunks, bacon bits, and squished tater tot pieces served in half of a sunflower seed shell. Peach schnapps from an airplane sized bottle almost as big as the muscheron. Dessert will be a surprise, chunks of Twix served on new pennies.
The musheron checks their reflection in the back of a shined up spoon. The bad luck human spore had given them face paint and adornments, and it makes them glow with pride. They are ready to woo.
Merlin has never been the type to willingly lean on others, so the knowledge that he'd been captured and that his friends had risked themselves to save him has yet to stop rubbing him the wrong way. It probably won't for a while. He feels guilty and frustrated. Angry. Restless. Eager to rush into the strangeness and the danger that the others had told him about, both because it needs to be done and because he now has something to prove.
But...this isn't what he'd expected.
Bristling, he glances around and quickly registers that they seem to have become muscheron-sized. Real fucking funny, universe. He shakes his had and approaches the petite table, asking, "So we just need to find this...'linchpin' thing, right?" He reaches out to touch the candle thoughtfully and examines the impossibly still flame perched atop it. "That shouldn't be too hard. There's not that much here."
The Mayor opens her eyes, blinking into the dimly lit office. Hm. There's no sunbeam here. Earlier, there was definitely a sunbeam.
Ah—there it is. The furry, four-legged mayor stretches her front paws out in front of her, digging her sharp claws into a thick manila folder on the desk. There's something big and red stamped across the front but Mayor T-Bone was elected to lead, not to read, and also she can't read. Looks important.
Mayor T-Bone ignores it and wanders over to the sunbeam's new location. There's a pen shaped like a soft serve ice cream cone in her way, and the civil servant knocks it onto the floor.
"Mr. May—Mr. Zebrowski, where are you going?" Voices in the hall threaten to disturb the Mayor's continued rest.
"Jonathan, it's Zippy now. I'm a private citizen!" They're coming closer to her office, large humans looming just outside the doorframe. The one with the long hair she likes, the one who feeds her cold food. The other one she will never like, and she doesn't have or need a reason.
"Okay, but—Zippy, who's actually in charge now? We can't—" Jonathan gestures at the desk. Mayor T-Bone keeps an eye on him.
"T-Bone is!" Zippy replies brightly. He crosses into her office and everything goes upside down as T-Bone rolls onto her back, exposing her belly for him to rub.
"You're—that's not an option, that's not actually an option." Jonathan follows him in and T-Bone tenses slightly. This belly is not for him to rub. "She's a cat, and we have actual human business to manage."
"I know, a cat managing human business, it's genius!" Zippy joyfully announces. He plops down in that old seat of his behind the desk, tugs at one of the old drawers lining either side, and takes a moment to give the Mayor a scritch on the belly. She lolls onto her side, bringing everything right side up again. "She's the only one of us truly unfettered by political bias."
"There's still a significant communication barrier, sir." Jonathan absentmindedly follows Zippy's lead, reaching out to rub T-Bone's belly. In seconds, her claws are out, and everything freezes in that moment before he realizes what a mistake he's made.
She realizes first how small they are. It's disorienting. As the memory goes on, it is, at least, clear who it must belong to. Weird. Chanel moves about the room, looking a little feline herself, as she brushes near and not on the ankles of the men in the room. "...Hey, have we ever made you watch CATS?" is her first thought, to Eddy, even as she checks to make sure she doesn't have a tail or strange feet all of a sudden.
She's almost a little disappointed to discover she does not. Just a cat-sized human.
Edited (they were cat sized I'm an idiot ) 2020-06-07 02:51 (UTC)
[UNMODERATED - player memory] [CRITERIA: 3 replies per player minimum]
Someone’s arguing next door, muffled voices rising in anger behind paper thin walls, but Kermie isn’t worried about them. He’s in a kitchen, surrounded by food smells. It’s warm and it’s clean and it’s comfortable, and it feels so big to his six-year-old eyes. He spins through the room, arms out, soaking it all in.
There’s a grubby little stove against the wall by the door, every burner firing. The sound of onions sizzling fills the room, while a deep pot boils away, and he wants to know what’s in there. The kitchen table is already overloaded with foil-covered dishes and steaming tupperware and Kermie’s never seen this much food in his life, how can there possibly be more?
A gray-haired woman in a floral apron paces the living room behind Kermie, chatting amiably on the phone in what’s probably Polish, but he pays her no mind as he grabs a chair from the table and drags it over to the stove. No one’s ever told him to watch out for hot stoves before. No one’s ever really cooked for Kermie before. That’s okay, he can use the microwave! But boy would he like to eat like this sometimes.
Kermie clambers up on the chair and leans over the pot while the skillet spits oil and butter just beside him. Little pockets of dough sit in the boiling water, a few of them bobbing along the surface as the water roils. His eyes go wide, because Kermie doesn’t know what these are but they look delicious, and he reaches into the pot to take one. No one’s ever told Kermie not to take things without permission. In fact, sometimes his mother encourages it and he’ll do anything to make her proud.
Before Kermie can douse his hand in hot water, the pierogies in the pot begin to swirl, twisting up, up, and up out of the water. He counts the little dumplings as they float—one, two, three, four, five, dancing around his arm. He doesn’t know how this is happening, he doesn’t know that this is magic or even that it’s out of the ordinary, but boy is this cool.
The voice in Polish gets louder, closer, right behind him as she sweeps into the kitchen. Kermie jumps, shouts, the pierogies orbiting his arm jump and splash back down toward the water, and everything freezes.
“Oh, resourceful are you?” the Polish woman scolds, but there’s no anger. She scoops Kermie up and drops him back on the ground, pushing the chair back toward the table with the casual air of someone who’s had to shoo many mischievous children from the kitchen.
“What are those things?” Kermie asks in awe as the woman pokes at the pot with a wooden spoon. “How did they dance?”
“They’re called pierogies, little frog, and they’re dancing because they’re almost done.” She spins from the stove and smiles down at him, a moment that fills his veins with something warm and bubbly. “I will get you one that is for real done, and they will make you dance instead.”
As the woman forks a pierogi from a container onto a plate for Kermie, the apartment door just behind them pops open. On the other side of the door, something glows blue.
Oh. This is strange. Everything in this memory seems darker than it should be, a tinted film thrown over the entire scene. It takes a minute to adjust and catch the details, but it’s not like this is an entirely unfamiliar place—everyone who’s ever been to one of Pocket’s parties has some idea what her cave looks like. What more is there really to see beyond the spray of the Falls at the mouth of the cave and some rocks jutting out of the wall, a fun obstacle for the drunkest of teens. In the back, far behind the memory owner, something blinks. A dull whir sound echoes along the cave walls.
“Ohhhhhmigod ohmigod ohmigod, you guys!!” the memory owner, the drunk party bug herself, claps and hops in excitement as a trio of teens pushes past the curtain of water. The shadowy overlay slips for a moment as her signature sunnies nearly bounce off her face. “I am sososoooo excited to show you guys the PONIES!”
“Pocket!” a blonde girl in her finest athleisure claps and hops along with her, and it feels like glitter is exploding in Pocket’s thorax. Or whatever those cute humans call it. “So you got someone to explain them to you? Did they show you pictures and… ?”
The blonde girl looks behind Pocket, her mouth slightly agape. The other two haven’t said a word the entire time. They’re just as captivated by Pocket’s amazing display as the blonde is. She can tell.
“C’mon, c’mon, c’mon!” Pocket waves her hands and flutters her wings, waving the kids along to follow behind her. “You’re the very first ones and I can’t wait to show you everything!!”
Pocket pivots. On the other side of the cave, not nearly as hidden in shadow as it should be, is an enormous horse head. The eyes are wide and bulging, the mouth thrown open, displaying every single tooth in that long mouth. The closer the quartet gets to that face, the more horrifying details jump out; the warm breeze of the pony’s breath, the squishy sensation as they step on the tongue, the flashing lights at the back of the throat.
“Uh… Pocket?” one of the other teens asks, the boy this time, and Pocket can’t wait to hear his glowing review of her super realistic pony already!! “How are we, uh, getting to the party?”
Pocket grins so wide it almost splits her jaw right off. “We jump!”
[MODERATED - player-run NPC memory] [CRITERIA: defeat NPC, get linchpin]
Siobhan O'Malley stomps through the Wildgulch cavern, wet shoes squelching every step of the way. Ugh. Just—UGH!! Stupid seniors throwing her in the stupid springs (and not even WILDGULCH seniors). Stupid Mary Grace not even noticing or looking at her. Doesn't she get to listen to her dad's race too?
"Gonna put these shoes in her BED," the freshman grumbles under her breath. She leans against the walls to kick off her wet sneakers, balancing herself on one of the heating pipes snaking through the house. Something rattles inside the pipe and she yanks her hand away. Oh. If this is broken she'd rather not deal with it.
Or if it's haunted.
There had been talk of haunted things.
Siobhan takes a very deliberate step away from the pipe and freezes, one dripping shoe held up, possibly as a weapon.
Siobhan removes her other shoe and scoots further away, both shoes in hand.
"I'M NOT AFRAID!" she shouts, then jumps when she backs straight into another pipe. God!! There's too many of these things!!
"Who's calling you a maid?" Siobhan squeaks at the sound of another voice from further down the hall—another freshman, poking her head out of her dorm. "'Cause that's just dumb."
"YOU'RE dumb!" Siobhan snaps and storms down the hall toward her room, a trail of water in her wake. The roommate blinks once, then steps away from the door. On the other side of the door, it looks an awful lot like a dance gone very awry.
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peckenpaugh2020-06-01 11:18 am
THE SECOND FLOOR
Blue seeds litter every surface, a hall of memories to be explored. Hurry.
MEMORY: Test Drive
[CRITERIA: cramped area, 2 characters max due to size constraints, minimum replies 8]
It's cold outside, but warm in here. The old van is crammed with teenagers, so the windows fog up quickly, making it hard to see outside. The patter of rain on the roof is almost deafening, and aside from two faded yellow dome lights, it’s almost pitch black. They’re sat on a front lawn in the hills of Elflock Falls, that much is evident if you squint out the front windshield.
Within, the van is a cramped mess. Several backpacks are stuck on or between seats. One is open, papers and books jutting out of every pocket. Up front, Lionel Qualls sits in the driver seat, hands at ten and two for approximately six seconds before he starts drumming on the wheel. Beside him in the passenger seat, Percy Potkin's grinning broad, fixing a set of fuzzy dice to the rear view.
“I like them!” Percy announces gamely when El rolls his eyes.
The memory shifts, the watcher doing a turn. In the way back, two teenage Crocketts and a young Gilda Santos are piled up and laughing. Popcorn goes flying when Zed accidentally knocks the cup of it out of Gilda’s hands. A moment of raucous laughter is cut short when Wybie Youngblood climbs aboard from the left, soaked to the bone from the rain outside and announcing himself with a, "Shit!"
Z Gunzenhauser, standing on the right, pushes her way past the mystery memory owner and smacks her shin against one of the bucket seats in her eagerness to get to the front. “Autsch! Why?” It doesn’t stop her long, though. She leans over Percy to fiddle with the buttons and knobs.
Naturally, that leaves few others for the memory holder to be. "Getting any good tunes?" Georgie Trullinger teases as Zelda continues to fruitlessly seek sound from the dead radio.
"The van's not even on yet, Z," Lionel cackles as his friend hits buttons and turns knobs.
“I believe in her,” Percy says with such conviction it’s hard to say if he’s joking.
“Quatsch! Turn it on then!” Zelda snips, slapping Lionel’s shoulder. “What are you waiting for?! Do you see how I’m suffering?”
More laughter fills the tiny space.
"Alright, alright," Lionel concedes with a dismissive wave, then puts his hand on the ignition and turns the key. The lights come up bright, illuminating the sherbet green upholstery and stained faux leather dash. Then suddenly, everything freezes.
MEMORY: Test Drive
She slaps her free hand over her temple where she knocked herself. Youngblood's ax still in the other. It's so weird seeing her teachers her age, and she gapes. "Is that Mr. Potkin?"
MEMORY: Test Drive
Everything freezes and her panic momentarily calms.
"Where's Mr. Potkin??" she yells (this is calm), slapping multiple occupants with pom poms and wires (and popcorn) as she whips her head around, not actually freed from the floor but at least in an appropriate upright position, finally. "And you're going to get someone killed!!" she tosses in for good measure, not the first time she's complained since seeing Joop's ax.
MEMORY: Test Drive
MEMORY: Test Drive
MEMORY: Test Drive
MEMORY: Test Drive
MEMORY: Test Drive
MEMORY: Test Drive
MEMORY: Test Drive
MEMORY: Test Drive - COMPLETE!
Re: MEMORY: Test Drive - COMPLETE!
MEMORY: Test Drive - COMPLETE!
MEMORY: Test Drive - COMPLETE!
MEMORY: Test Drive - COMPLETE!
MEMORY: Test Drive - COMPLETE!
MEMORY: Test Drive - COMPLETE!
MEMORY: A Distant Shore
[CRITERIA: minimum 3 players, minimum 12 replies]
[METAPLOT]
Water laps against a pebble beach. In and out. In and out. Waves climb up shore and retreat again. The stones at your feet are black and sharp, so shiny they look like hunks of glass. Some fine as frit, others as large as a human head, all of them glittering. The water rushing toward you is thick and inky blue, smelling not of algae or salt, but of something faintly sweet, unfamiliar. Above, the sky is gray. You know it's night, though it doesn't look like it. Focus long on it, and your eyes begin to hurt. You realize: it's not gray, it's just densely packed with stars. So innumerable they make a solid tapestry.
Debris litters the beach. Blankets, baskets, overturned boats, what looks a bit like a chaise lounge split in two. There are drying pools of gray goo in places, tide pools that smell faintly of chocolate. But those aren't tide pools. And that's not ocean water.
All around, vines are growing, creeping up toward the sweet indigo sea. Massive purple flowers, bigger than you are, sit dangerously every dozen or so feet, drinking in that endless starlight and singing it back in pulses of purple light. This is a battle lost, but the war still rages on.
Snap.
One approaches, a being of many limbs, many tendrils, many frills. Strangely beautiful, its body all the colors of an exotic fish, but unsettling to behold. It wears lovely adornments, metal bangles, colorful threads woven into nets, a wreath of red crystals in its hair, each one as delicate as the petal of a flower. When it moves, it moves like a spider, pulling itself forward, toward the memory's owner.
Click, click, clack. Pop. Snap snap snap.
Though the sounds have no meaning to your ear, that feeling is unmistakable. Loyalty, devotion, adoration, fear.
The two beings set to work moving pebbles about until a strange glyph has been drawn in the beach. A circle rimmed by symbols unfamiliar even to the top Symbology students at Peckenpaugh. The memory owner walks around the circle, their partner keeping pace beside them, putting their backs to the ocean and looking further ashore. More of these beings are gathered, ready with what little they can carry to flee to somewhere new.
Three of these waiting beings approach and from tendrilly limbs present items: a satchel of fine white powder, a vial of something gray, and a cube of faded gray metal. Everything freezes.
MEMORY: A Distant Shore
Imogen, who often thinks through movement when she thinks at all, is rendered stock still by the imagery of the scene. She might as well be frozen too, except for the slightest hyperventilation of breath and twitch of the wand hand.
It's a weird sensation, watching these fuckin' frilly-limbs move and gather and make offerings. Her brain keeps trying to categorize them, comes up static. Weirdest of all is somehow knowing they aren't dangerous, despite her inclination to act first and ask questions later: hearing those sounds and, uncomfortably, feeling them, like there's some deep part of her that can comprehend the clicks and pops. Ew. Just ew!!!
Cool girl posturing momentarily shattered, she shudders visibly, tearing her eyes from the tendrils and toward Armani and Aristole. Then, tossing her by now very messy hair as though it were freshly blown-out and styled, she offers a shaky grin.
"Ummm, you can do the touching here."
MEMORY: A Distant Shore
"I'll do the touching," he agrees, bolder and better prepared since they first teamed up together. He has his wand in one hand and his (autographed) hockey stick in the other. There's an ice pack around his neck and it looks like he's tried to disguise it with the cowl of his robes, but it's since come undone and never readjusted.
"Glacius!" he shouts, pointing his wand at the purple flowers. Just as a precaution.
MEMORY: A Distant Shore
MEMORY: A Distant Shore
MEMORY: A Distant Shore
MEMORY: A Distant Shore
MEMORY: A Distant Shore
MEMORY: A Distant Shore
MEMORY: A Distant Shore
MEMORY: A Distant Shore
MEMORY: A Distant Shore
MEMORY: A Distant Shore
MEMORY: A Distant Shore
MEMORY: A Distant Shore
MEMORY: A Distant Shore
MEMORY: A Distant Shore
MEMORY: A Distant Shore
MEMORY: A Distant Shore
MEMORY: A Distant Shore
MEMORY: A Distant Shore
MEMORY: A Distant Shore
MEMORY: A Distant Shore
MEMORY: A Distant Shore
MEMORY: A Distant Shore
MEMORY: A Distant Shore
MEMORY: A Distant Shore
MEMORY: A Distant Shore
MEMORY: A Distant Shore
MEMORY: A Distant Shore
MEMORY: A Distant Shore
Re: MEMORY: A Distant Shore
MEMORY: A Distant Shore
MEMORY: A Distant Shore
MEMORY: A Distant Shore
MEMORY: A Distant Shore - TOKENS!
MEMORY: Girls Night!
[CRITERIA: Minimum 6 Replies]
“Oh! Birdie, I—I definitely lost a contact, it’s—oh god, I think it’s going behind my eye!” Sarah-Jane Dorkins leans in close to the mirror, finger dragging down her bottom eyelid. This color-changing contact lens Birdie insisted she try tonight is definitely working its way under her eye, and she never even wanted to try it in the first place.
“Don’t worry about it,” Birdie Beridze calls back. “I’ve got plenty more where that came from.” Birdie sweeps into the room, two martinis in hand, with all that glamorous confidence Sarah-Jane could never even dream of having. Even her apartment here felt so much more exciting than her own; she had a rack of designer cocktail dresses where Sarah-Jane kept her good vacuum cleaner, she had costume jewelry that looked stolen from a movie set, she had an autograph from—okay, a lot of people that aren’t all that familiar to her, actually, but still!
Sarah-Jane lets go of her eyelid, but doesn’t relax, and there’s no way she’s going to stop worrying about it. “Okay, well, does it come out eventually?” she asks and grabs for her purse, upending it all over Birdie’s vanity. Junk scatters across the glassy surface, three chapsticks roll to the ground, an airpod and bottle of Wizine roll behind the vanity altogether. “Am I stuck with this thing buried behind my eye forever while it just, like, detaches my retinas for me?”
Birdie sips at one of the martinis, but Sarah-Jane doesn’t need input to spiral out, and she also really doesn’t want to lose that airpod. Also that Wizine! Do you know how much of that she’ll need after finally ripping this stupid contact lens out? She grabs onto the vanity and pulls it outward, sending more of her purse contents all over the floor. It doesn’t matter, because she can get all of these things, she can fix it all herself, she can clean up any mess, because she is Sarah-Jane Dorkins, goddammit.
Or, well. Sarah-Jane Grossweiner now, probably.
She stops, kneeling on the floor, surrounded by her purse shit. “Goddammit, I don’t want to be a Grossweiner again,” she wails and throws her hands to her side. Birdie sets a martini glass on the vanity, leans against it, and… stops there, frozen completely in time.
MEMORY: Girls Night!
“But it’s not really mine to keep, and, and his family gets all weird and possessive about things and I don’t want them—” Birdie shakes the martini glass at her, and Sarah-Jane finally plucks it from her fingers, not even breaking her stride in her tizzy. “— I’ve just had enough trouble from them, you know? And like what if then Gary starts to think that this means I still want him back and that’s a conversation he is not equipped to handle and—”
“Honey,” Birdie interrupts. “You earned every right to keep whatever you want from him the first time you swal—” The rest of her words are drowned out by a gasp and the sound of glass shattering as Sarah-Jane drops the martini glass. But you get the picture.
Up on the vanity, the mirror glows blue, and it no longer shows a reflection, but an auditorium.
MEMORY: Just Wait
[CRITERIA: find the linchpin, minimum 12 tags]
The bakery is quiet and all of the lights but one are low. On the street, it's cold enough to make a person hunch their shoulders in, just a little, and late enough that the sky is black. The street is too. Black like the metal of the lampposts and the paint on the bench out front where there's a boy with his gaze fixed down the street, skinny and small, fidgeting with the hem of his sweatshirt, plucking at a loose thread and winding it around his finger.
It isn't startling, the black of the sky the asphalt the door behind him. Maybe because of the dark or maybe because that's how it's always been. That is how it's always been. All the world in contrasts of bright and dark and the shades of grey between them.
The boy digs his teeth into his cheek and leans forward. Sucks in a breath and leans back almost as quickly, pulling a sneaker up onto the bench and retying his shoelace. Someone's late. (It isn't you. You're here. You're waiting. You're supposed to be here. To be still. To be waiting. It'll be fine. She'll be back if you can just—)
Behind him a bell jingles, chiming sound that startles him into straightening, toes of his sneakers skimming the floor and shoulders rocking back as a woman steps out the front door of the shop with her arms full and her wand tucked behind her ear. The slow build of panic in the air quiets like a candle that somebody's gone and taken a snuffer straight to. All covered up and choked.
"You still out here, honey?" she asks, all bright and polite like she hadn't seen him through the window all day, holed up between her pansies. Her voice is warm (warm like the cup she'd placed down on the bench that morning, like the brimming-full paper bag folded over in her hands right now) like he's a pleasant thing to see and she has a smile that makes her eyes crinkle closed.
Desmond nods. "Yes, ma'am."
There are splotches of white on the dark of her shirt, one streak of it left high on her forehead. She misses it by half an inch as she reaches up to run her fingers through her hair. "And you're sure you won't stay inside?"
For a moment, she looks like she might argue when he dips his chin and mumbles out a sheepish, "No, ma'am." Her lips turning down in a way that makes something squirm guiltily in his stomach. But she drops her paper bag onto spare bit of space next to him instead, her fingers skimming the tops of the little gray flowers in the pot next to the door.
"Alright," she says. "Well, you know where the key is."
MEMORY: Just Wait
"I'm glad no one is roaming around in my head," he says, almost casually, before he moves towards the boy on the bench.
MEMORY: Just Wait
MEMORY: Just Wait
MEMORY: Just Wait
MEMORY: Just Wait
MEMORY: Just Wait
MEMORY: Just Wait
MEMORY: Just Wait
MEMORY: Just Wait
MEMORY: Just Wait
MEMORY: Just Wait
MEMORY: Just Wait
MEMORY: Just Wait - LINCHPIN FOUND & CAPPED!
MEMORY: Just Wait
MEMORY: Just Wait
MEMORY: Just Wait - COMPLETE & TOKENS!
MEMORY: Move-In Day
[CRITERIA: Minimum 6 Replies]
Everything is huge. Everything. The trees, the grass, the looming shoe of an incoming teenager who isn't looking where they're walking and oh no this can't be the end this can't be— Tiny mushroom legs hurry away from the crush of size 11 sneakers, rolling into the shadow of an enormous duffel bag for safety.
"SPOREZ-UM!" the little one shouts, using a pair of lost Mothgarden sunglasses as a ladder to climb up on the bag and shake an itty bitty balled up fist in the direction of the sneaker-holder. "GIBBUM VIZZUS, GIBBUM WUTFORZ." The teenager, however, doesn't hear, and they continue on their merry way. The muscheron crosses his arms and plops back onto the bag for a good pout.
But then there's a sound. Is that… purring?? The mushroom-shaped fairy gulps and turns to see a cat, five, ten, a MILLION sizes larger than him, stalking toward the bag.
"GIBBAK! GIBBAK!" The muscheron grabs the sunglasses ladder and holds it up defensively, the winged frames jabbing right into his chest. He starts to swing wildly, barely able to control the shades, momentum swinging him around in circles. "GIB SPAAAACE!"
MEMORY: Move-In Day
At least the memory freezes before the cat has the chance to bat her or Presley into next week. She lifts her beater bat in a precautionary way anyways, looking around the tableau.
"Watch out for bugs," she tells Presley.
MEMORY: Move-In Day
MEMORY: Move-In Day
MEMORY: Move-In Day
MEMORY: Move-In Day
MEMORY: Move-In Day
MEMORY: Move-In Day
MEMORY: Move-In Day - COMPLETE!
MEMORY: Move-In Day - TOKENS!
MEMORY: Move-In Day - TOKENS!
MEMORY: After An Accident
[CRITERIA: minimum 8 replies]
A musty smell hangs in the air, just the scent of an old building finally getting a breeze after months of every window and door being sealed up for the winter. It's dark and dusty here, all shadows except for the triangles of orange-gold light glowing from lamps positioned around the room. It's difficult to say if the house is genuinely this dark, or if that's just how it's being remembered. It's all sort of big, the way everything seems a little big when you're still just a kid, before you've stopped growing completely.
This place is somehow both empty and cluttered, and finding the linchpin is sure to be an ordeal. The floor-to-ceiling shelves are packed full of books, some titles legible — with titles like Devil's Heat and Renegade Yeti Love Affair — others gibberish. Between those there are portraits and art, families and individuals, all of it old and ugly. A massive tapestry hangs on one wall, the design looking a bit like a coat of arms. There's an empty bottle of wine sitting on the low table in the center of the room. Another bottle of merlot, still half-full sits, on a side table along with a gramophone spinning a vinyl. Rhapsody in Blue fills the air.
"Things are about to be very different," says a hawk-like woman grimly. At her words the memory's owner turns his head and stares at the massive orange cat seated beside him on the overstuffed red sofa. "I know it's frightening, but—"
Zedekiah Crockett shoves himself up off that uncomfortable sofa and the old orange cat climbs to its feet and follows after.
"—But we'll all need to adjust."
"You're going to lock him up, aren't you?" Zed protests, turning to face the hawk-like woman, his mother Healer Zipporah Crockett. The more he speaks, the more panic and anger rise in his young voice. "You and dad are going to shut him away and—"
"Of course not. We don't have to. There are advancements in—" his mother tries to explain in that crisp clinical tone of hers. When she speaks, it makes everything seem darker and colder than it is, but Zed's not really listening. He’s scooping up that empty wine bottle. The music swells, and then everything stops.
MEMORY: After An Accident
“Don’t have to,” he echoes, angry and mocking, before he flings the empty bottle of wine across the room. It shatters against the gramophone, which topples to the floor, an unruly cacophony. “He’s a person not an object. If you try anything, we’ll run away!”
“Monty! We can’t stay here! We have to go.” Zed sprints away from his mother, throws open the door to a side room and disappears.
His mother chases after. “Zedekiah, please. Keep your voice down. He’s not even awake, yet.”
That heavy side door stands open, and beyond the dim light of Peckenpaugh’s auditorium.
MEMORY: Dinner Date
[CRITERIA: Minimum 9 Replies]
Everything is huge. Or, more accurately, everything looks huge from the perspective of the little russula muscheron. The shoebox is lit with a birthday candle in the middle of a table made from one of those plastic separators that comes in a pizza. It's a fire hazard, but you have to take chances when it comes to romance. The table is set with thimbles for cups and bottle caps for plates, filled with scavenged human delicacies. Cheez-it chunks, bacon bits, and squished tater tot pieces served in half of a sunflower seed shell. Peach schnapps from an airplane sized bottle almost as big as the muscheron. Dessert will be a surprise, chunks of Twix served on new pennies.
The musheron checks their reflection in the back of a shined up spoon. The bad luck human spore had given them face paint and adornments, and it makes them glow with pride. They are ready to woo.
MEMORY: Dinner Date
But...this isn't what he'd expected.
Bristling, he glances around and quickly registers that they seem to have become muscheron-sized. Real fucking funny, universe. He shakes his had and approaches the petite table, asking, "So we just need to find this...'linchpin' thing, right?" He reaches out to touch the candle thoughtfully and examines the impossibly still flame perched atop it. "That shouldn't be too hard. There's not that much here."
MEMORY: Dinner Date
MEMORY: Dinner Date
MEMORY: Dinner Date
MEMORY: Dinner Date
MEMORY: Dinner Date
MEMORY: Dinner Date
MEMORY: Dinner Date
MEMORY: Dinner Date
MEMORY: Dinner Date
MEMORY: Dinner Date
MEMORY: Dinner Date - COMPLETE!
MEMORY: Dinner Date - COMPLETE!
MEMORY: Dinner Date - COMPLETE!
MEMORY: Cat Mayor
[CRITERIA: Minimum Replies 8]
The Mayor opens her eyes, blinking into the dimly lit office. Hm. There's no sunbeam here. Earlier, there was definitely a sunbeam.
Ah—there it is. The furry, four-legged mayor stretches her front paws out in front of her, digging her sharp claws into a thick manila folder on the desk. There's something big and red stamped across the front but Mayor T-Bone was elected to lead, not to read, and also she can't read. Looks important.
Mayor T-Bone ignores it and wanders over to the sunbeam's new location. There's a pen shaped like a soft serve ice cream cone in her way, and the civil servant knocks it onto the floor.
"Mr. May—Mr. Zebrowski, where are you going?" Voices in the hall threaten to disturb the Mayor's continued rest.
"Jonathan, it's Zippy now. I'm a private citizen!" They're coming closer to her office, large humans looming just outside the doorframe. The one with the long hair she likes, the one who feeds her cold food. The other one she will never like, and she doesn't have or need a reason.
"Okay, but—Zippy, who's actually in charge now? We can't—" Jonathan gestures at the desk. Mayor T-Bone keeps an eye on him.
"T-Bone is!" Zippy replies brightly. He crosses into her office and everything goes upside down as T-Bone rolls onto her back, exposing her belly for him to rub.
"You're—that's not an option, that's not actually an option." Jonathan follows him in and T-Bone tenses slightly. This belly is not for him to rub. "She's a cat, and we have actual human business to manage."
"I know, a cat managing human business, it's genius!" Zippy joyfully announces. He plops down in that old seat of his behind the desk, tugs at one of the old drawers lining either side, and takes a moment to give the Mayor a scritch on the belly. She lolls onto her side, bringing everything right side up again. "She's the only one of us truly unfettered by political bias."
"There's still a significant communication barrier, sir." Jonathan absentmindedly follows Zippy's lead, reaching out to rub T-Bone's belly. In seconds, her claws are out, and everything freezes in that moment before he realizes what a mistake he's made.
MEMORY: Cat Mayor
She's almost a little disappointed to discover she does not. Just a cat-sized human.
MEMORY: Cat Mayor
MEMORY: Cat Mayor
MEMORY: Cat Mayor
MEMORY: Cat Mayor
MEMORY: Cat Mayor
MEMORY: Cat Mayor
MEMORY: Cat Mayor
MEMORY: Cat Mayor
MEMORY: Cat Mayor
MEMORY: Cat Mayor
MEMORY: Cat Mayor
MEMORY: Cat Mayor
MEMORY: Cat Mayor
MEMORY: Cat Mayor
MEMORY: Cat Mayor
MEMORY: Cat Mayor
MEMORY: Cat Mayor - COMPLETE & TOKENS!
MEMORY: A Feast
[CRITERIA: 3 replies per player minimum]
Someone’s arguing next door, muffled voices rising in anger behind paper thin walls, but Kermie isn’t worried about them. He’s in a kitchen, surrounded by food smells. It’s warm and it’s clean and it’s comfortable, and it feels so big to his six-year-old eyes. He spins through the room, arms out, soaking it all in.
There’s a grubby little stove against the wall by the door, every burner firing. The sound of onions sizzling fills the room, while a deep pot boils away, and he wants to know what’s in there. The kitchen table is already overloaded with foil-covered dishes and steaming tupperware and Kermie’s never seen this much food in his life, how can there possibly be more?
A gray-haired woman in a floral apron paces the living room behind Kermie, chatting amiably on the phone in what’s probably Polish, but he pays her no mind as he grabs a chair from the table and drags it over to the stove. No one’s ever told him to watch out for hot stoves before. No one’s ever really cooked for Kermie before. That’s okay, he can use the microwave! But boy would he like to eat like this sometimes.
Kermie clambers up on the chair and leans over the pot while the skillet spits oil and butter just beside him. Little pockets of dough sit in the boiling water, a few of them bobbing along the surface as the water roils. His eyes go wide, because Kermie doesn’t know what these are but they look delicious, and he reaches into the pot to take one. No one’s ever told Kermie not to take things without permission. In fact, sometimes his mother encourages it and he’ll do anything to make her proud.
Before Kermie can douse his hand in hot water, the pierogies in the pot begin to swirl, twisting up, up, and up out of the water. He counts the little dumplings as they float—one, two, three, four, five, dancing around his arm. He doesn’t know how this is happening, he doesn’t know that this is magic or even that it’s out of the ordinary, but boy is this cool.
The voice in Polish gets louder, closer, right behind him as she sweeps into the kitchen. Kermie jumps, shouts, the pierogies orbiting his arm jump and splash back down toward the water, and everything freezes.
MEMORY: A Feast
“What are those things?” Kermie asks in awe as the woman pokes at the pot with a wooden spoon. “How did they dance?”
“They’re called pierogies, little frog, and they’re dancing because they’re almost done.” She spins from the stove and smiles down at him, a moment that fills his veins with something warm and bubbly. “I will get you one that is for real done, and they will make you dance instead.”
As the woman forks a pierogi from a container onto a plate for Kermie, the apartment door just behind them pops open. On the other side of the door, something glows blue.
MEMORY: We Don't Talk About The Pony Party
[C̴̙͙̤̈́̇̈́͝͠R̵̢̙̤͉̙̰̓̉̀̑́͝I̸͙̥̗̣̜̘̟͉͛̆̎̿T̶̡̻̥͇͒Ȩ̴̧̛̪̌͐̀R̴̼̀̾̓̇́I̴̖̲̦̩͊̈́̄A̷̡̛̗̲͔̣̮̞̎͆̀͒̊̎̀͜:̸̡̤͈̻̪̩͑̈͒̑͛̚ ̷̳͙̥̭̰̥̄̄̾̕M̶̝̜̖͚̥̖͔̈́̿͊ì̸̢̭̙̖̥̘́̚ṉ̵̐̌͝ȋ̸̛̟̭͉́͌m̷̨̃̈́̽͑̈́u̸̲͍̾m̸̱͇͖̙͚̝̘̈́͑̑̈́̅ͅ ̶̢̺̱͍͐̃̈́͘1̵̞̱͉̬̲͎͎̓̑̏̇̐̊̕0̸͎̖͓̮̗̩͚̇̄͑͐̊̽͘͝ ̴̧͚̘͚̈R̸̫̆͒̀ë̸͔͉̪̳̣̗́̇́̆͑̆͒͛p̵͓̝̞͌̒͐͒͘l̶̗̱͛͆̕ï̶̢̧̻̖͎̳̘̻̍ḙ̷͖̝̬͙͗̽͋̂͛̂̍s̴̟͈̖̫̏]
Oh. This is strange. Everything in this memory seems darker than it should be, a tinted film thrown over the entire scene. It takes a minute to adjust and catch the details, but it’s not like this is an entirely unfamiliar place—everyone who’s ever been to one of Pocket’s parties has some idea what her cave looks like. What more is there really to see beyond the spray of the Falls at the mouth of the cave and some rocks jutting out of the wall, a fun obstacle for the drunkest of teens. In the back, far behind the memory owner, something blinks. A dull whir sound echoes along the cave walls.
“Ohhhhhmigod ohmigod ohmigod, you guys!!” the memory owner, the drunk party bug herself, claps and hops in excitement as a trio of teens pushes past the curtain of water. The shadowy overlay slips for a moment as her signature sunnies nearly bounce off her face. “I am sososoooo excited to show you guys the PONIES!”
“Pocket!” a blonde girl in her finest athleisure claps and hops along with her, and it feels like glitter is exploding in Pocket’s thorax. Or whatever those cute humans call it. “So you got someone to explain them to you? Did they show you pictures and… ?”
The blonde girl looks behind Pocket, her mouth slightly agape. The other two haven’t said a word the entire time. They’re just as captivated by Pocket’s amazing display as the blonde is. She can tell.
“C’mon, c’mon, c’mon!” Pocket waves her hands and flutters her wings, waving the kids along to follow behind her. “You’re the very first ones and I can’t wait to show you everything!!”
Pocket pivots. On the other side of the cave, not nearly as hidden in shadow as it should be, is an enormous horse head. The eyes are wide and bulging, the mouth thrown open, displaying every single tooth in that long mouth. The closer the quartet gets to that face, the more horrifying details jump out; the warm breeze of the pony’s breath, the squishy sensation as they step on the tongue, the flashing lights at the back of the throat.
“Uh… Pocket?” one of the other teens asks, the boy this time, and Pocket can’t wait to hear his glowing review of her super realistic pony already!! “How are we, uh, getting to the party?”
Pocket grins so wide it almost splits her jaw right off. “We jump!”
MEMORY: We Don't Talk About The Pony Party
MEMORY: We Don't Talk About The Pony Party
MEMORY: We Don't Talk About The Pony Party
MEMORY: We Don't Talk About The Pony Party
MEMORY: We Don't Talk About The Pony Party
MEMORY: We Don't Talk About The Pony Party
MEMORY: We Don't Talk About The Pony Party
MEMORY: We Don't Talk About The Pony Party
MEMORY: We Don't Talk About The Pony Party
MEMORY: We Don't Talk About The Pony Party
MEMORY: We Don't Talk About The Pony Party
MEMORY: We Don't Talk About The Pony Party
MEMORY: We Don't Talk About The Pony Party
MEMORY: We Don't Talk About The Pony Party
MEMORY: We Don't Talk About The Pony Party
MEMORY: We Don't Talk About The Pony Party
MEMORY: We Don't Talk About The Pony Party
MEMORY: We Don't Talk About The Pony Party
MEMORY: We Don't Talk About The Pony Party
MEMORY: We Don't Talk About The Pony Party
MEMORY: We Don't Talk About The Pony Party
MEMORY: We Don't Talk About The Pony Party
MEMORY: We Don't Talk About The Pony Party - TOKENS!
MEMORY: Wet Shoes
[CRITERIA: defeat NPC, get linchpin]
Siobhan O'Malley stomps through the Wildgulch cavern, wet shoes squelching every step of the way. Ugh. Just—UGH!! Stupid seniors throwing her in the stupid springs (and not even WILDGULCH seniors). Stupid Mary Grace not even noticing or looking at her. Doesn't she get to listen to her dad's race too?
"Gonna put these shoes in her BED," the freshman grumbles under her breath. She leans against the walls to kick off her wet sneakers, balancing herself on one of the heating pipes snaking through the house. Something rattles inside the pipe and she yanks her hand away. Oh. If this is broken she'd rather not deal with it.
Or if it's haunted.
There had been talk of haunted things.
Siobhan takes a very deliberate step away from the pipe and freezes, one dripping shoe held up, possibly as a weapon.
MEMORY: Wet Shoes
"I'M NOT AFRAID!" she shouts, then jumps when she backs straight into another pipe. God!! There's too many of these things!!
"Who's calling you a maid?" Siobhan squeaks at the sound of another voice from further down the hall—another freshman, poking her head out of her dorm. "'Cause that's just dumb."
"YOU'RE dumb!" Siobhan snaps and storms down the hall toward her room, a trail of water in her wake. The roommate blinks once, then steps away from the door. On the other side of the door, it looks an awful lot like a dance gone very awry.