AUGUST EVENT.

[silentspringmods]

Event №4 : Aug 2024
Part I; Chapter 8. Silence means security

universe/setting information, role assignment, and FAQs

I. Cruel, cruel summer

August 1st - 5th.

CWs: no warnings apply.

August in Maryland brings with it an insufferable heat in the high 80s that the locals will be quick to remind characters has always been typical for this part of the state. The mosquito man continues to make his rounds to combat the sudden explosion in insect life, and air conditioning units go out here and there, but repairmen are usually easy enough to come by. (Just don’t expect immediate service–a lot of folks have finally decided now’s the time to get A/C installed, you know.) There is no controlled burn on the first of the month, and the weather is perfectly, ruthlessly sunny.

Despite that, early in the afternoon on the second, with seemingly no provocation… the lights go out. Air conditioning units suddenly stop blowing. Ceiling fans slow down until the blades come to a complete halt.

All around town, the power is completely out. There are no fallen branches, no downed power lines. Nothing seems out-of-the-ordinary. As the sun lowers in the sky and generators run out of power, the owners of the supermarket next to the town park wheel out carts with soon-to-begin-melting popsicles as well as ice cream novelties and cartons and hand them out for free - and, mercifully, bags of ice, although that’s not too terribly long for this world, either.

The hospital and fire/police station run on generator after the first day, but nothing else in town does. The heat wave continues, brutal and unrelenting, for two more days.

II. Living in a movie scene, puking American dreams

August 5th.

CWs: noncon memshare.

Power returns the morning of August the 5th. Televisions crackle to life with a loud buzz of static, and characters will find that the ‘off’ switch on the box simply doesn’t work. The screen stays on, lines of static rolling across the display, and then… a memory. But this time diverges from the last similar incidence of the phenomenon, in which a home video sent from an Indian suburb appeared on the screen. This is a memory that belongs to someone here, someone characters know. Maybe it belongs to another member of their household, or maybe it belongs to one of the non-townies across the street. And, if they ask around, they may just find that their own very personal memories have been screened on a household television set a few houses down from their own.

III. Could never tell you what happened the day I turned seventeen

Throughout August.

CWs: abuse of power by police, police raids, nonconsensual drugging, interrogation, gaslighting, auditory hallucinations, injections.

Remember the air conditioning outages? Characters who invited the repairman into their house last month or invite him into their house for repairs this month may be greeted by a knock on the front door and a police cruiser parked along their front yard from the 19th to 21st. Over those three days, the police invite themselves into the homes of said player characters, barging in under the guise of a ‘routine safety check’ based on some ‘concerns the neighbors raised’, assuring them that there’s no cause for alarm.

It is a house search.

The members of the household–and any characters who might be visiting at the time the police arrive–are shepherded to the dining room and kept there by one officer as two more methodically go through their drawers, bookshelves, and desks, keeping anything they find that might be considered ‘subversive’ or counter to the general values of the Sweetwater townies with them. Some characters, but not all, may experience brief flashes that feel a bit like fragments of one of the more developed memories that have seeped into their consciousnesses in the past: staring at papers strewn all over the floor and a half-packed suitcase full of unfolded clothes atop them, although the sight is too blurred by tears to make out what the papers say or even what language they’re written in. The feeling of their legs folding underneath them and sinking to the ground, even though they’re seated in a dining room chair. No, a young woman, or maybe a teenager, screams through her tears from another part of the house. No, no, no! Let go of her! No!

None of the police seem to hear anything in the home, although their housemates or PC guests may have the same auditory hallucination. It is possible–not likely, but possible–for especially perceptive characters to notice that the girl’s voice sounds not unlike Marjorie’s. Not identical. Younger, maybe, or a relative. But similar.

If characters are insistent about going to the source of the voice after police tell them that they don’t hear anything, they’ll be stopped by any means necessary, be it physical force or even handcuffing; if they’re particularly emphatic about the existence of the voice, they may find themselves in Norman’s basement the next time they wake up.

When the search concludes, the findings are brought into the dining room and held up for them to see; characters are asked to explain.

Players may choose if the NPC police officers seem to accept their characters’ explanations, or if they escalate. If the police don’t buy the explanation, all members of the household are taken down to the station for ‘further questioning’, i.e., interrogation, and separated into different rooms when they get there.

Chief Clark himself is the one to conduct the ‘conversation’ about ‘what we’ve found here’, with Norman Pollock standing silently behind him and one of the character’s wrists handcuffed to the bar at the center of the interrogation table. If characters resist, they’ll be given injections of sodium pentathol, a depressant that makes further resistance and the mental processes necessary for evading questions very, very difficult. If they continue to attempt to subvert their interrogators, they’ll be given a second injection, at which point they will lose consciousness and wake up strapped into the chair in the basement where Norman conducts Sweetwater bog standard brainwashing/sleep deprivation torture.

- Note that some findings, such as overtly Communist literature, would always lead to arrest.
- Characters who cooperate with the interrogations under the influence of sodium pentathol are returned home when the police are done with them, and aren’t further bothered.

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Comments

EVENT QUESTIONS.

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Ask them here!

SETTING EXPLORATION/ENGAGEMENT.

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Event-related setting exploration and investigation goes here.

HOUSE SEARCH RESULTS.

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If your character's home is searched, report that here, along with what was found and what their punishment was.

[wwrench]

I'd like to go ahead and submit that the final pill Wrench took from Marjorie's house turns up in the search. He won't have anything to say to the officers in his home and will instead wait for the interrogation by Dick and Norman.

If he asks where he came by the pill, he'll put on his best surprised face and say that he took them because he had a headache and he's already taken a few of them. (He won't immediately say where he got them.) He'll act concerned and ask if that's some kind of problem.

[ribticklers]

Sans's house was searched. They found some physics books and questioned Sans about it, but he talked his way out of it. He has his taking those lectures down at the college as an excuse, and he's great at talking his way out of things.

Homelander | The Boys | ota

[justanotherjohn]

Cruel, Cruel Summer

This sucks.

It's bad enough that he has exactly zero powers and no one knows who he is, but now this? A power outage, in heat so thick and heavy that he feels like he's suffocating, and no way to escape it? What has poor Homelander done to deserve this?

He is, however, still the head of The Seven, even if The Seven don't exist here and have been reduced to The One, and problem-solving is part of the gig. Homelander doesn't bother trying to actually fix anything; nerd shit has never been his forte, and he has just enough self-awareness to realise he'd probably make things worse if he started tinkering with his new home's wiring. Instead, he finds an old, battered kiddie pool in the basement and drags it up and out onto the lawn. After wrestling a garden hose out of the shed, he hooks it to a faucet on the side of the house and uses it to blast the cobwebs and grime off the pool before filling it up. Then he dumps in a bag of ice he got from the grocery store.

The whole ordeal gets him sweaty and out-of-sorts, his carefully combed hair going all awry and his face red with exertion, but deep down... this is kind of fun. Who knew that doing things the way normies do it and using your hands and mind to solve problems is actually vaguely satisfying?

Once the pool is filled with crisp, cold water, Homelander goes into the house to change into a pair of swim trunks (they're blue with white stars on them, which he also likes), and then settles into his kiddie pool with a six pack of beer. The ice is already starting to melt, but this is the best he's felt since he arrived here.

Puking American Dreams

Homelander is dozing upstairs when the power comes back on. The sudden whooooomp of electricity flowing startles him awake, and he jerks to a sitting position in his bed, suddenly alert and waiting for... what? What could be coming for him, here? He's anonymous for the first time in his life, and the idea that anything would be crawling through the shadows towards him, trying to find him and wrap its cold claws around his neck... well, that's just laughable.

Unless it isn't. Unless this is another one of Vought's tests. And it could be; it could be an insane test devised just for him, to turn him into the greatest Supe that ever was, that ever will be. Maybe the whole point of this is to test him without his powers, to put enough pressure on him to earn them back. It's sadistic, but Homelander is very familiar with the sadistic things Vought will do to make a Supe.

The TV downstairs is on. Homelander slips out of bed and creeps downstairs, looking all around him for traps, for something to spring out of the shadows. Nothing does, and he finds himself standing in the middle of the living room, looking down at the fizzing and spitting TV.

He tries to turn it off, but nothing changes. Homelander frowns, and clicks through the channels, seeing if anything comes across the screen. On the third channel, something does, and his eyes widen.

"Well, well, well." He walks backwards, unable to take his eyes off the screen, until the back of his legs hit the recliner he pulled in front of the TV a few days ago. He sits down, and watches with rapt fascination at what's happening on the screen in front of him.

[pharadyne]

Norton is wandering the neighbourhood to see how far the power outage goes when he spots an unfamiliar blond, muscular man sitting in a small pool of ice water. The sight is...very appealing. And not just the pool. If he were still in Soho, this would give him all sorts of opportunities for double entendre. Even dipped in ice water, you're still hot. But this is Sweetwater, where he absolutely can't say those sorts of things openly in public and has to try to act at least slightly heterosexual, challenging as that is.

He minces over to the man to introduce himself.

"Hi there, I don't think we've met before. I'm Norton Folgate, one of your neighbours."

[justanotherjohn]

Homelander is used to being stared at; he's been literally designed to be hot, after all. So when one of the neighbours wanders over and checks him out, he's not offended. If anything, it's reassuring. Still got it.

He raises the beer he's nursing in a salute.

"Hi. I'm Homelander." He gestures the remaining bottles floating next to his legs. "Want one?"

This is what normies do, right? Sit around and share beers? That sounds like something suburban guys would do, so he's going for it.

[pharadyne]

"Thank you, Mr. Homelander." He assumes it's a surname. Norton slinks closer and plucks one of the bottles from the water.

"Still haven't got used to American beer, but on a day like this I can almost appreciate that it's served cold."

[justanotherjohn]

"Just Homelander. No mister." He knows he'll probably have to get used to it being considered his last name, but that means acknowledging a first name, and that isn't something Homelander is willing to consider yet. There's far too much baggage attached to John, and he doesn't want people calling him that.

"You're British." Interesting. So far everyone here has seemed very American. "How'd you end up here?"

cruel, cruel summer

[requel]

Sam has been in a bad mood since the 4th of July party. She's been on edge - avoiding looking at any reflective surfaces because she's afraid she'll see Billy's face looking back at her. She doesn't need this, being here was bad enough the last thing she needed was that part of her psyche telling her to stab people.

Especially when deep, deep down she did kind of want to.

The heat doesn't help and the power going out just makes everything worse. She's also furious with herself for being tipsy enough to actually talk about her hallucinations. She hadn't even told her sister about them back home. So when she spots Homelander in his yard in a kiddie pool she doesn't hesitate to leave her house to go talk to him.

When she gets to the pool she looks down at him and crosses her arms over her chest.

"We need to talk," it isn't so much a question as it is a demand.

[justanotherjohn]

Homelander has always appreciated a woman who goes after what she wants and doesn't fool around and hide behind euphemisms, so when Sam comes stomping over and demands to talk to him, he looks up at her benignly.

"Sure." He fishes a beer out of the water and offers it to her. "What's going on?"

He has a pretty good idea; he told her about John, after all, and she told him about her dad. That was bonding, they are besties now, and he feels friendlier towards Sam than anyone else in Sweetwater.

"I think there's a lawn chair in the garage, if you want it."

[requel]

She takes the beer, cracking it open and already drinking from it. Maybe that will calm her down a little - or not. Honestly, right now Sam feels like she might be a few breaths away from losing it. She hates it. She hates being here.

Maybe Billy had a point.

Maybe she should just start stabbing people.

Sam sighs and shakes her head about the lawn chair.

"What I told you at the party. ...how much do you remember?"

Norton Folgate | Torchwood | Husband | OTA

[pharadyne]

I. Cruel, cruel summer

When the power goes out, Norton swears loudly, checks the fuse box, then steps outside to the front drive to see if he can tell if anyone else's power is also out or if it's just them.

"Yoohoo!" He calls out in a high-pitched voice and waves. "Hello! Trouble with the electricity? Because our power's out and I can't work out why. Wondering if it's just us or if the whole neighbourhood is in the dark." He squints up at the hot sun. "Metaphorically."

II. Living in a movie scene, puking American dreams (cw: implied reference to nonconsensual experimentation and discussion of death by fire in the linked clip)

On a television set, somewhere, a video comes on. It looks at first like it could be a scene from war drama. There's a utilitarian hospital room and a man in the hospital bed covered in bandages. In the few places the bandages don't cover, horrible burn wounds peak through. Norton is seated on a chair nearby, one leg elegantly crossed over the other and a small paper bag of grapes in his hand. Then the man in the bed speaks, rasping and tight with pain but remarkably coherent for someone who looks as if he ought to be on death's door.

If someone asks him about it, he'll grow pale.

sam carpenter | scream | wife | ota

[requel]

𝑪𝒓𝒖𝒆𝒍, 𝒄𝒓𝒖𝒆𝒍 𝒔𝒖𝒎𝒎𝒆𝒓

[ sam was already on edge when the power went out and her mood isn't helped at all by the suppressive heat. her mind keeps going back to the hallucination of her father in the punch bowl. his words about just killing everyone here echoing in her head like a taunt. so it's fitting in a way that she takes out his knife that she had arrived with, the knife she had stashed in the dresser and goes out into the yard.

she needs to do something, anything to get the edge off.

sam ties up her hair in a messy pony tail and then throws the knife towards a nearby tree. it bounces off the bark. she grimaces, gets the knife and does it again. and again. and again. until finally the blade pierces the bark and stays there. ]

𝑳𝒊𝒗𝒊𝒏𝒈 𝒊𝒏 𝒂 𝒎𝒐𝒗𝒊𝒆 𝒔𝒄𝒆𝒏𝒆
𝒊.
cw: for graphic violence, blood, murder/death

[ when the channel flicks on it's a shot of a wall and an umbrella stand. an unseen voice says:

'what are you gonna do now huh? make a scary phone call to me?'

the camera pans to the mirror. but there is nothing there.

'pop out of the closet with that ghostface mask?' the unseen voice laughs.

the view then pans down to the floor, where there is a knife. it's obvious this is someone's first person perspective.

'no because you're the VILLAN. and the villain DIES at the end.'

back to the mirror, then it seems like who ever this memory belongs to is crawling on the floor, soft grunts of effort are heard. bloody hands come into view as they crawl.

'those are the rules.'

and then another voice, one that is unmistakably sam's...

I'm introducing a new rule.

[ her bloody hand closes around the knife.

'and what would that be? huh?!'

and then she's forcibly flipped over. the person who had been speaking before comes into view as he gets on top of her, his eyes are manic and his expression is mocking as he presses a gun up against sam.

'well?'

the man laughs, completely and utterly unhinged. ]

Never fuck with the daughter of a serial killer.

[ his brow furrows, mouth still open from laughing. the knife comes into view as sam stabs him through the cheek, the knife going through his mouth to the other side. the man gasps and falls back in pain. sam begins to stab relentlessly and gets on top of him. blood splatters everywhere. sam keeps stabbing. one, two, three... ten, twelve... eighteen, nineteen, twenty... twenty two times.

and just when she's about to do the final blow the man who is gasping and choking on blood gasps.

'wait. what about my ending?'

sam leans close to him, knife at his throat. ]

Here it comes.

[ she cuts his throat, blood gushes out as he breathes his last breaths. sam leans back and then holds up the knife, wiping the blood off with her hand. ]

𝒊𝒊.

[ sam is even more on edge than she was before. having a billy hallucination had her feeling like she might spiral. but after seeing everything on the tv, knowing that they were memories of the people here - realizing that meant someone could see one of her memories. the idea of what that memory could be makes her feel sick.

so she goes for a walk, billy's knife tucked into her pants. since the vision she had barely gone without it. hiding it under her clothes, which wasn't as easy with the provided fashions.

maybe it wouldn't be so bad, maybe it would just be some innocuous silly memory and not... literally anything else. ]

𝑾𝒊𝒍𝒅𝒄𝒂𝒓𝒅

( ooc: literally anything else, want to just run into sam or seek her out? also down for things related to prompt 3! give me all the things. )

As the power goes out

[pharadyne]

[Norton is writing when the power abruptly shuts off. He's been writing for weeks now, working on a lurid spy thriller involving London intelligence analysts and a hint of homoeroticism and bringing pages to discrete weekly meetings with Dr. Pollock. But the fountain pen ink beads on the paper as his hand stops, smearing the end of the word "henchmen."]

Balls. [He swears and sets his writing pad down.]

Sam, I say, how much do you know about electrical wiring?

[requel]

[ she's honestly getting tired of the heat, it's making her already bad mood so much worse. just once could they catch a break here?

she groans at norton's question. not that he's asking it, that he has to ask it in the first place. ]

Not enough to fix the power.

[pharadyne]

Bugger. I suppose I could try to fiddle with it. [That seems like the sort of thing husbands are suppose to do. Fix things.]

Sans | Undertale | OTA

[ribticklers]

(If you'd like to have viewed a Sans memory, your options are here!)

A; cruel, cruel summer

[Sans thought he was getting used to this human body. That was before the power went out. Specifically, it was before the air conditioner went out. Having lived for years in a snowbound town, and having lived his whole life until recently in a body that doesn't react so dramatically to the temperature, it's not long before Sans is wondering just how much heat a human can take before something bad happens to them. Inside, outside, it doesn't really matter.

So that's why Sans is under a tree in the front yard on a pile of mostly melted bags of ice, eating a popsicle. He's probably cutting it close with looking weird, but even Sans has his limits on how much he cares about that.

When he spots someone looking at him, he holds up his popsicle box like a peace offering.] Want one?


B; living in a movie scene, puking american dreams

[It doesn't matter what Sans saw on the TV. Okay, it does, a little--he gathers information by habit, and he isn't letting any of it slip away--but really what's more important is that now instead of videos of the lives of the people already from here, they're getting videos of the lives of people who were brought here.

Like Papyrus. Like him. He wouldn't be recognizable on sight, but his voice--

There are better or worse things for people to know about, but there's a lot of Sans that hates anyone having learned anything at all. It's none of their business, and it's too many questions he can't answer. (Won't answer.) Better to ignore it, or to search around?

Better to search around. So Sans is outside, looking casual. He's very good at looking casual. And he can't forget that he's in public, so any discussion of specifics is out of the question. That's part of why he's asking around in public.]

Seen anything interesting on TV lately? [Like, very lately? Sans is putting all his considerable observational skill into looking for even the slightest twitch of a sign that someone might have seen something about him. Expressions and out of place statements--well, spotting those are his specialty.

But even if it's not about him, it might be worth leaning about. It could be about Papyrus, too.]

B

[longwillows]

[What a loaded question. But then, she recognizes this man, and already knows that he's not from around here. Despite the return of the power, she's dressed as immodestly as reasonable caution will allow—which mostly means mostly-bare shoulders. It's still hot outside, after all, which is where she's run into him.

Despite her own simmering paranoia, Kalmiya gives a winning smile and a conversation-greasing laugh.] You know, I did catch a program I was just enthralled by not too long ago!

[Then she tilts her head in knowing curiosity. This is obviously about the television broadcast, but she wonders if it pertains to something more specific within that.] But I'm not sure what you consider interesting.

[ribticklers]

[Kalmiya. She's seen him in a--less than ideal situation before. Not as bad as the memories, but enough to make him wonder what she might put together if she learned something that way and could pair it with his reaction during the fireworks show. Not that these thoughts show on his face; he keeps the casual grin on.]

Well, you know TV, [does she? Doesn't really matter,] it's mostly all the same stuff. But it was somethin' new this time, so I figured, hey, that kinda thing's good water cooler talk.

[longwillows]

[She actually doesn't know TV. At least, not before she showed up here. She still doesn't really understand how it works without magic.

Her eyes go a little wide in excitement, showing nothing of her tech-related ignorance.] Oh! So you caught something interesting, too?

[Obviously he must have, or he wouldn't be bothering to ask about what's on TV. But she's delighted to have an excuse to return the question now that he's elaborated out loud, curious (and not entirely unworried) about what he might have seen.]

B2

[spaghettimonster]

[The interesting thing on TV could have been a broadcast about Papyrus, it was true. That was an option the TV didn't take, for some reason. He for one wouldn't mind seeing himself on screen, generally speaking! Not even now, with worries of it giving entirely too much about himself and who (and what) he was... It would have been flattering, at the least!

Instead, what he remembers seeing... There is a guilty twitch to his face as he steps closer, something even more forced about his smile than the already forced baseline from being in public here. His eyes are shifty, too, in a mix of wanting to study his brother sidelong and trying to avoid looking like he is.]

A-As it happens, yes. A real, uh, sci-fi extravaganza.

[Sci-fi, because that's Sans all over. Sci-fi because that memory-like broadcast was fictional, surely. Everyone knew the human had departed the underground with the hearts and Asgore dus-disappeared, behind them. There was no way that Sans would have gone and murdered them in a now-familiar hall before there, and surely no reason he would have after the human had come around, at least a little bit, to Papyrus's cajoling for living better.

And yet... That broadcast. Some of it was absurd in its vivid horror, attacks flung with remarkably unlikely power, but some of the techniques - the details of the depiction... How could whatever made that broadcast have known so much?]

[ribticklers]

[Reading Papyrus is always different from reading anybody else. Papyrus isn't actually an open book to him. He's a familiar book, sure, but he's a book that's also familiar with him. They're mutual books, sitting right next to each other in a library, which means getting enough distance to open the book at all can be kind of tough. This metaphor is getting away from him. The point is that sometimes Papyrus is very easy to read and sometimes Papyrus is more difficult than anything else.

Today, Papyrus has the unique experience of being both at once. Because he sees the twitch, the unusual strain to his smile, the shifty expression. He sees Papyrus studying him and finds that it's not all that different from how Sans looks when he's studying someone, really. He sees all that, but he doesn't know what Papyrus saw. A thousand terrible options fly through his mind and he can't figure out which is the worst option. Every bad day, every moment spent working uselessly on that machine, every second looking at timeline readouts--every instant of the final day of Papyrus's life, before and after Papyrus died. There are too many options and too much Sans has to answer for.]

Hey, I like sci-fi. [Sans's ability to keep his voice rock solid is just one more thing, probably. But his jaw clenches, and his eyes tighten. They're the same tells Sans has back home, made more obvious on a human face.] We could talk about it back at your place.

[That decision was rapidly calculated. Sans has someone else at his house right now and Papyrus doesn't. Having someone else there would keep Papyrus from directly addressing anything, Sans is sure--but the idea of a third person listening in is even worse. (It was a close calculation. Sans doesn't like how close it was.)]

[spaghettimonster]

[It's always uncomfortable to see his brother's discomfort so plainly on that human face, and another added discomfort to be reminded of how obvious his own expressions are now. There's just so many muscles to keep track of, it's awful!

Past that discomfort, though, is the sheer notion of describing... anything of just what he saw. But if Sans is asking around, in public, then that means Sans saw something and wants to know if the others saw it too. And... if it was the same thing... then Papyrus will barely need to mention anything. His brother can laugh it off, or... not, and then it'll be resolved. Hopefully.]

...We could. [The pause before he replies is just a little longer than he meant it to be, the better to try to get the wariness out of his voice.

Yes, they could talk about it at his house. They could just, talk, about unpleasant things - things that nobody knows what to do about. Things of the past better left behind, things of the present that everybody really wishes would stop - if they admit those things are happening at all - and whatever things the future might have. Sure. Anything's possible.]

Yeah, we should. Better than talking about it here, and, giving away the story! [It's not an outright raised voice, but there's a little more of that stage whisper quality as he scrabbles for reasons for them to go skulk off to talk about weird things that the community leaders don't want anybody hearing.] I know I'd hate to hear spoilers for a good show while mowing my lawn.