etrayalogs | MISSION 004 (part 1)

MISSION 004 (part 1)

WHO: Everyone!
WHEN: July 19th-July 27th.
WHERE: Moorecroft Village
WHAT: Enjoy life in your new suburban neighborhood!
NOTES\WARNINGS: Potential death.

⏵ welcome home ⏴
Welcome to Moorecroft Village, where the sun casts a gentle glow through soft white clouds. Pavement paths wind around the village, adorned with wildflowers in every hue. Birds sing a soothing melody, while a few content cats lounge in sunspots or on benches along the streets. Cars hum by, ferrying residents to work, the store, or back home after a busy day.

It looks almost perfect. The ideal little village, occupied by individuals from all over. Orcs, elves, faeries, werewolves, vampires, and dhampirs coexist harmoniously, each contributing to their quaint little town. Despite their varied backgrounds, they appear to embrace this place as their own. They take their baby carriages out during the day for a stroll, chatting with friends and neighbors about current happenings, discussing their most recent mission (a ‘game’ of Whodunit, in which one of theirs, Theo, was tasked with killing one of their own each day and they all had to figure out who had killed them before they could come back to life) and the difficulties therein, new job assignments, weird things the teens in their houses are getting up to... generic, neighborly conversations.

The village is full of life. There are numerous facilities to wander and things to do! The library houses a vast collection of books spanning history from countless other worlds and whimsical children's tales. Teens gather at the ice skating rink, while the movie theater screens films spanning generations. An aquarium full of wonders: glowing rainbow fish, miniature great white sharks, a colorful octopus with patterns running over it that almost look like ivy, and numerous others.

In the daytime, everyone can explore clothing stores, indulge in gourmet cakes from the grocers, and partake in leisurely pursuits without financial concerns; just like on Etraya, money does not exist here.

⏵ help wanted ⏴
Moorecroft surpasses Etraya in its development, offering attractions and activities to engage its inhabitants throughout the day. But with these advancements come additional responsibilities. By day, at least one adult from every household is expected to fulfill their shifts at 'day jobs', lasting anywhere from four to eight hours. Meanwhile, the youth are expected to go to school, absorbing knowledge in various disciplines.

Each job duty requires different skillsets, but whether or not those required skillsets are matched to those who are expected to work them... well. They’ll have plenty of time for training, won’t they? Or perhaps they’ll get dropped right into their job and be expected to figure it out all on their own.

For the younger residents, education is structured into two main institutions: "Sandalwood Lower" for those twelve and under, and "Maplewood Upper" for older students. These schools offer a broad curriculum encompassing Language Arts, Mathematics, Science, Physical Education, Technology, Fine Arts, and a diverse array of Foreign Languages. Electives range widely, from specific sports to Survival Training, Creative Writing, Journalism, and Sociology.

At lunchtime, the school cafeteria presents an array of choices. Options range from standard fare like school pizza to other offerings such as vampire's blood, brains, and hearts—just in case an unexpected guest should drop in. After all, one never knows who might show up in Moorecroft.

⏵ honey do's ⏴
But life extends beyond work and school. A structured routine of what is expected of each household is kept on digital calendars, and installed on the wall in the kitchen of each house. These calendars update daily with smaller tasks, and weekly with larger ones, detailing what is expected of those residing within its walls.

Typical tasks include simple activities such as:

Take the child(ren) for a walk outdoors.
Visit the local park.
Bake a pie for the neighbors.
Tell your spouse(s) how important they are to you.
Share a secret.
Shop with your child(ren).
Mow the lawn.
Don’t forget to attend your child’s school’s PTA meeting!
Help with homework.
Take family photos.
Go on a date.

More complex tasks are found under weekly checklists, and may involve:

Host a neighborhood barbeque competition.
Volunteer at the hospital.
Teach your child a sport.
Start a soccer league.
Create a garage band.
Get a part time job.
Join a club.

Eos will check off each task as it is completed. At the bottom of each calendar, a tally records the completion of tasks, providing a visual measure of productivity and community involvement.

⏵ night watch ⏴
As the sun lowers over the horizon, everything shifts. Every long-term resident understands the consequences of curfew and the threats within. They retreat to their homes, urging those unfamiliar to them who may not understand the rules just yet that they, too, need to return indoors for the night.

Within the confines of their houses, life continues under a fragile veil of normalcy. A peek into some of the homes of long-term residents will find them playing board games with their family units, completing homework or work assignments they were unable to finish during the day, watching a few family-friendly shows on their couches, or enjoying a late dinner. Eventually, they’ll return to their beds and wait for the sound of their alarms.

In Moorecroft, no friendly companion bots roam the streets during the day. In their place, highly advanced robots emerge to enforce curfew once the time comes. They silently make their way through the streets, sweeping away anything that isn’t part of Eos’ design: trash left out on the street, bugs left by suspicious men wearing cowls that have ears on them, graffiti, new decor that Eos decides she doesn’t like. No winds shake the trees, there are no cars on the road, but noises can be heard coming from outside that don't sound... normal by any means. Croaks, whispers, scratches against doors and walls alike.

Those who defy curfew will be asked, once, to return to their homes. If they opt not to listen, they are met with force: physically restrained, subdued, and dragged back to their homes. If they decide to fight, the bots are not above killing them and dropping their limp bodies just inside the front door of their houses. They will revive after 48 hours but not without cost. Each return carries an absence—a missing memory, a lost skill, or a fragment of their very essence, stolen away in the process of their revival.

Even those who manage to evade capture will awaken in their beds with no recollection of their death or what they may have witnessed before dying. They will instead have a vague feeling that something horrifying happened.

⏵ NOTES ⏴

Daily and weekly tasks can be chosen by players! We won't be listing these out for each household, but relying on players to choose what's most fun for them to play with within their households.

As noted on Mission Plotting, we're open to one group successfully staying out past curfew, but would like to keep this to one thread.

We have a separate log for NPC interactions for this mission!

For any questions relating to the contents of this log, mod queries thread on the initial plotting post to assist us in keeping all mission-related information in one place. All other questions can be directed to the FAQ.
⏵FULL NAVIGATION⏴

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[Shadowheart reflexively reaches out to grab the front of the cart as it bumps into her, frowning until she recognizes who's pushing it.]

Careful. [She means it as a mostly good-natured tease.] You're liable to inflict injuries with that thing if you don't look where you're going.

[Given that the last time she saw this young man involved a fight over a stuffed toy, she feels she ought to say something more.]

I haven't got any hard feelings about the toys, you know. Neither of us were exactly thinking clearly, and it would hardly be wise to make enemies of one of the few people here who's from a world even remotely like mine. [It's an old, ingrained habit to appeal to a similarity they share; in this case, the fact that they're both half-elves in a place where most people seem to think that elves are fictional creatures.]

[ ...

Oh.

As exhausted as Fabian has been with the entire situation here during this mission, this certainly isn't something he expected to encounter along the way. There's something kind about the way she goes out of her way to actually say that, even though the two of them could just have ignored the entire situation that went down before and pretended it never happened.

Even more so when the young man definitely is not used to people going out of their way to say things like these.

At first it makes him look surprised, but then the surprise droops into something a little softer. Maybe borderline flustered, just a little touched by all of it. ]

Of course not. What happened back there-- It is not either of our faults. If it's anyone's fault, it's the fault of this dumb place. [ Apparently he's not afraid of saying that, not even now they're in another place under a different being's control. ] A place that just continues to be dumb, given what it's doing to us this time around. This is not what either of us are supposed to be doing, is it?

[ Especially when she says a world even remotely like mine.

Given that she's a half-elf, surely she must be an adventurer too then. Like him. He saw the way she fought last time around. ]

[It's a little surprising, how moved he seems. Shadowheart isn't quite sure how to react. She's looking for allies, or at least to avoid needlessly making enemies, and has the wholly practical goal of ensuring that she hadn't unintentionally made an enemy of him while not under her own control. But he seems to have taken her words as a kindness.

Perhaps she should offer him some. He does seem like he might need it.

And so, without ulterior motive, and despite having no real idea how to make friends or be nice for the sake of it, she says earnestly,] It certainly isn't. You look to be doing well at it, nonetheless.

[The baby seems happy. And from her perspective, having no memories of ever buying food before, he looks like he knows what he's doing: carefully perusing the shelves to consider his options, as opposed to her haphazard grabbing of random wine bottles and the first meat she saw.]

[ It'd be so easy to take that compliment. Fabian desperately wants to, especially after having spent so much time feeling like he had no clue what he was doing, feeling way out of his league. Like he can't do something that seems so simple to other people.

.. but it feels unfair. He's not sure he deserves that compliment, just because his fake baby happens to not be crying for once during their grocery shopping trip. ]

It's.. [ He pauses, hesitates. It's like the young man - for some reason - has great difficulty even admitting to something as simple as: ] It's not that easy.

[ Fabian's gaze looks away from her, dropping towards the baby in his cart. ]

I have never done anything like this before.

[She wants to say that of course he's never done this sort of thing. It's difficult to tell with half-elves, she knows – she herself could be twenty or forty or seventy, based on her appearance, and she has no idea where in that range her true age falls – but he looks to be a teenager. Almost certainly too young to have raised a child before.

But the way he pauses before his confession – and it is a confession, she realizes, whether to her or to himself – makes her rethink the flippant remark she was about to make.]

I don't even remember my own parents, and now I'm expected to be one.

[The only mother she's ever known is, well, Mother. And the few vague memories she has of the Mother Superior... Suffice to say, that isn't the sort of mother Shadowheart would want to be, were she to ever actually have children. And gods, part of her desperately wishes she could remember her real mother, but following that train of thoughts would lead to a pit of regrets so deep she'd never find her way out if she were to begin wallowing in it.]

I suppose I'm lucky. At least my 'sons'-- [Heavily audible quotation marks.] --are old enough to look after themselves. I can't say I envy you the baby.

.. you don't remember them?

[ Fabian asks it almost instinctively, only realizing after the words have already left his mouth that it's kind of an insensitive thing to ask. But-- He just can't help it. It's nowhere close to his own case, but there definitely have been rougher edges to his relationship with his own parents lately, and maybe it makes him a little bit more interested in how other people deal with it.

Especially when one of those people is a half-elf. Fabian doesn't really know any of those back home, only full humans or full elves. It has made him figure that people like him aren't common. That humans and elves getting together enough to have a child together is rare.

And yet there's another half-elf standing in front of him right now, in this weird otherworldly supermarket.

Slowly, he thinks of the one other person he knows who could never remember his parents. ]

Were you-- [ He says, stumbling over his words a little, though trying to sound a little more polite about the words. He can't help but ask them, as curious as he is about this specific topic. ] Were you adopted?

[Until very recently, Shadowheart had assumed she was the product of some passing curiosity, and had been discarded as the unintended consequences of that curiosity once it had worn off. She's been called 'mongrel' and 'half-breed' and worse often enough to make the idea of an elf and a human purposefully choosing to have children together seem strange, and the idea that she herself could ever have been loved or wanted has always seemed a stranger prospect still.

Now she knows that she is loved and wanted, that her parents are alive and together, and she hasn't got the faintest idea how to talk about them. 'My mother is human and my father's an elf – oh, and a werewolf, of course – and I don't know anything more about either of them and my only memory of my father's voice is his screams of pain' is not exactly good conversation. Nor is it anything she's especially keen to share.

At least she's used to people asking about her memories at this point, and doesn't take offence beyond her normal distaste for sharing personal details.]

In a way, I suppose. I was taken from them when I was young, and the woman who raised me was not exactly the maternal sort.

[She glances down at the baby in the cart again.]

Not the sort of person whose parenting I would want to emulate.

[ Taken. A bad parent. Different from his friend's situation in a lot of ways then. It sounds a lot more complicated and messy, and Fabian knows that he doesn't want to dive too deeply into that. If Shadowheart wanted to provide more details, she would have. Fabian knows, because he's like that too.

.. and-- well, maybe the middle of some sort of store in this weird town isn't the best place to discuss the details of that in the first place, anyway.

The fake baby in Fabian's cart seems for once content - or at least, quiet, which is more than Fabian can say of most other moments he's had to care for the child. It's almost like the baby is also listening, or understands the conversation is important enough to stay quiet. (Except-- of course it doesn't, it's a baby. And not even a real one.) ]

Sorry. [ He says.

Despite the fact that it's so brief - just one word - Fabian does seem to mean it. If anything, he's keeping it brief because he isn't sure of what else to say that wouldn't just get awkward, and he's sure Shadowheart herself wouldn't want to get into it further either.

Instead he pauses for a moment, idly rocking his shopping cart back and forth very slightly, and then says: ]

It is just-- You don't see a whole lot of humans and elves get together, huh? [ Even if she may not necessarily be from Spyre, Fabian can't imagine that being different anywhere else. Especially when she, too, seemed so surprised to run into a fellow half-elf. ] My mama-- She's an elf, and even she is getting remarried to another elf now.

[ A bit more hesitantly, like Fabian isn't sure how to bring this up, or maybe just entirely not sure if he wants to bring it up at all: ] .. as if she's already forgotten about papa.

[ Like she's leaving the human side of things that she never quite understood entirely behind her. ]

[Nothing so laconic as 'sorry' could possibly account for everything she's lost. Her family. Years, perhaps decades, of her life. Her memories of her parents and of all that time. But she takes his condolences as kindly as they're meant.]

Human lives are brief. Fragile. Hardly any live to be even a century old, but to an elf that's merely the blink of an eye. Is it any wonder proper relationships between humans and elves are rare? Of course your mother would forget your father.

[Shadowheart realizes as soon as she's said it that that's what Shar would want her to say. Love will always give way to loss, in the end, and only a heart that has never known love is safe from breaking. Why, then, when loss will be swift and inevitable, would an elf ever love a human? Why would they choose to have a child with a human, when that child's lifespan will be a fraction of their own?

And the answer that comes from somewhere deep inside her, that little part of her that Shar tried and tried and tried to snuff out, is because love is worth the pain it leaves behind.]

No, I don't suppose it is inevitable to forget, is it? [Her father's love must run very deep. The same can't be said, it seems, of Fabian's mother. Some elves do just get curious, have a fling with a human and then get bored with the result, and perhaps that's what's going on with Fabian's mother.] I'm sorry that she has.

[ Though Fabian doesn't have some huge emotional reaction as she speaks, there's some little signs that definitely point to something being there - though the topic would be something that would make most people feel something if it was about their family, even just objectively speaking. The corners of his mouth twitch a little, and Fabian tries real hard to look just about anywhere else in the store that isn't Shadowheart's face directly.

He isn't used to talk about this. At least she kind of gets it, which makes it feel a little better to talk about than with non half-elves who wouldn't understand this, but-- it's still a little awkward. ]

.. no, maybe it is. [ He quietly says, actually agreeing with the other's former sentiment. Not that he isn't appreciating the fact that she's saying sorry, but it's just--

It's like his mother was even forgetting about him in a way. Not on purpose, he knows she loves her, but-- maybe that's just it. Maybe it's just inevitable that his mother wouldn't understand that Fabian wouldn't be in her life as long as she assumes he will. ]

She acts so flippantly about time in front of me. All the time. I don't think she's.. stopped to consider it at all.

[ If he thought less of his mother, he'd assume she maybe just straight up doesn't know that Fabian won't live as long as regular elves, but-- surely she'd know. ]

I suppose it's harder for us to understand. Since we're not elves, and all that. [ They don't get that natural feeling like decades are nothing, like a year to them is like half an hour to your average person. ]

I understand a little, perhaps. [Even if her friends survive everything they're going through now, most are shorter-lived species. Tadpoles and infernal engines and Netherese orbs not withstanding...] I'll live long enough to bury most of my friends, and most likely their children as well.

[Still nothing next to an elf's lifespan.]

But you're right, of course. It isn't the same. People like us are always going to be trapped in between. All we can do is enjoy what we have for as long as we have it, I suppose, and not worry about those who don't wish to share our days with us.

[At least, she's guessing that's the case. She really is stumbling through all this as best she can, never having really thought about friends or the future before.]

Have you tried telling your mother how you feel? [Not that she would necessarily be receptive to it, but at least if he tries, he can be certain.]

.. no.

[ It's a fragile answer. Something about the way he says seems fragile, at least - like he isn't sure whether he wants to elaborate on that one or not. Even though she seems to understand this entire topic better than most, there's something that feels a little bit too hard about saying that he's worried about just being a burden to his mother because of what he is.

So.. he doesn't. It's not like Shadowheart doesn't seem to have an equally difficult - probably even more difficult, honestly - concept of family in the first place.

Instead Fabian inhales, and then shifts the focus of this conversation before his heart will buckle under the pressure of this spotlight on him. ]

Have you had people who wanted to share your days with you?

[She lets it be. If Fabian wanted to elaborate, he would. This isn't the easiest thing to talk about under the best of circumstances, and they're barely more than strangers, after all.

Instead, she opts to answer his question.]

I suppose I have. If we manage to save the world – entirely aside from whatever Aurora wants us to believe is going on here, of course – who can say whether any of us will stay together? But... I would count them as friends. [Which still feels strange. She's never had friends before.] They don't seem bothered by what age any of us will live to, though I suppose the perpetual looming threat of death makes the average lifespans of our respective species less relevant than they might otherwise be.

I mean, I imagine it is not exactly the sort of topic anyone discusses with their friends. [ .. mostly because Fabian has never discussed it with his friends.

Even with the trouble he's feeling by being the only person in his family who won't live into what feels like eternity, he knows it's the opposite with his group of friends - where he will outlive all of them except one. It must be the same or similar for Shadowheart, given their similar heritage. ]

It would put a real bummer on any conversation.

I wouldn't know, really.

[Did she have friends in the cloister? What would their conversations have been about?

Torture and death and other such pleasant subjects, probably.]

What about you? Have you had people who wanted to share your days with you?

[ .. oh, sheesh.

Even though Fabian's head is dipping into a nod when she asks him that question, he definitely winced a little bit before it. Mostly because he feels for her, really. If she really didn't have friends back home.. That must have sucked. No matter how many times Fabian's father had told him that he didn't need friends, it was the one opinion of his father's that Fabian could never agree with, no matter at what age. ]

Yes, the other members of my party. Sure, we are technically stuck together due to the way things work at the Adventuring Academy, but.. We're more than that. I know they would have my back, no matter what would happen. [ He pauses. Fabian isn't sure how much to say here. As much as he loves to boast, and as rad as he thinks his friends are, it's not like he wants to make her feel bad either.

It takes a second, but then something comes to mind that he can say. ]

And-- I really dislike this place, but the people in it aren't so bad. Even if we obviously may not be able to share our days forever, given that we all come from different worlds, I don't think it is such a bad thing to forge bonds while we are here. No one should have to be alone.

[ .. There's a beat, like he's hoping she'll pick up on the implication here, but then he adds, a little more purposeful: ]

By which I mean-- You know. I wouldn't mind sharing my days here with you, if you would have me.

[It takes her longer than it should to pick up on the implication, because the idea that someone would want to spend time with her without any sort of life-threatening circumstances forcing it – especially someone who seems, well, really nice – is still so new. What had Aerith said? You make friends just by being yourself?

Is that what she's doing? Being... herself? What an uncomfortably vulnerable notion.]

You want to be friends? [Her instinct is to evaluate the benefits of an alliance, and there are several. But that instinct is just a brief whisper of a thought that is quickly buried beneath what she really wants: just to have a friend.] I... I'd like that.

[ Fabian may have been a touch more insecure - or just worried - about his answer if she wouldn't have added that last part, but the fact that she does settles it for him. He can just continue to smile as he replies. ]

Yeah, of course. I would not be saying that if I didn't mean it!

[ He wasn't entirely sure how she'd feel about it, given that she seems a little more prickly than him, but he can't see the way she says she'd like it as anything other than genuine. ]

I mean, imagine having to deal with this annoying place without any friends by your side. I would only wish that sort of thing upon my worst enemy!

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MISSION 004 (part 1)

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