apocalypsehowcomm | Headline News #4

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Like most cities of a certain size, Gloucester gets its daily news from its local paper. Stories concerning local matters are printed side by side with national and international stories aggregated from other sources. For the most part the news is what one would expect in a mundane modern world: business openings, politics, crime, and human interest stories. Every so often, though, something pops up that could be more significant...or might be nothing more than what it appears on the surface.

The following headlines are items of potential interest that appear in the paper throughout September. Summaries represent one or more articles, editorials, press releases, or letters to the editor on a particular subject. Players are encouraged to incorporate these items into their characters' understanding of current events as well as use them for plotting. If you would like your character to perform deeper research or investigations, please pose any questions to the designated mod comment. Players are welcome to use this post for IC discussion and threads related to these news items, or to create their own posts or messages for that purpose.

➥ More Than Just Ships Sinking
(cw: vehicular collisions; sinking/burial in unstable ground)

Commuters have a new road hazard to keep an eye out for. Not only do you need to watch for foreign objects, pedestrians, and your fellow drivers,now drivers in the Midwest are reporting quicksand sinking their roads. One aspiring photographer even caught a picture of a truck as its back half was claimed by the shifting earth and even managed to help save the unfortunate driver. Scientists have given no official word to the cause, but investigations are underway. Luckily, no loss of life has yet been reported.

➥ Happy Haunts Materialize Early
(cw: auditory hallucinations)

Gloucester residents have been hearing curious tunes around the local graveyards. Some call them soothing, others haunting, and still others a right nuisance. Complaints have been flooding into the police department from residents annoyed by the music and the people found sleeping in graveyards. "It's completely disrespectful!" said Greta Thomas of the Gloucester Holy Light Church. "I will be lobbying the city council to pass a law banning sleeping on public property. Our graveyards are sacred places. They're not meant for naps or for people hoping to attract tourists for their tours."

➥ A Surrealist Painter's Unrecognized Legacy
A previously unknown sketch by the famed M.C. Escher has sold in a New York auction for $2.5M to reclusive millionaire Michael Etcher. The sketch will be displayed in Etcher's home in Santa Barbara, CA. The seller is anonymous, but art historians and other experts have verified that this is one of M.C. Escher's previously-unknown works.

➥ Unsung Sands and Another Puncture in the Epic Tale of His Snakeship
(cw: snakes; (un)natural disasters; human-caused pollution; climate change; poisoning; hallucinations)

The Cape Ann region is well-known for its singing sands, but some of our coastline seems to have fallen quiet. Scientists are blaming pollution and debris that has been washing up on beaches all throughout Massachusetts, but most heavily concentrated in the Gloucester area. Residents have also been claiming sightings of the storied sea serpent, His Snakeship, linked with recent flooding in Gloucester, but researcher Dr. Dale Graft has indicated analysis on the debris points to toxic fumes causing hallucinations. More likely, Dr. Graft said, is that we are facing yet another unfortunate side effect of our warming climate. As the atmosphere and oceans warm, the Gulf Stream is beginning to break down and behave in unexpected ways. This has likely caused the recent rogue wave phenomenon observed along the coast, as well as the dredging up of pollutants.

➥ A Little Town with Big Hopes
(cw: wide scale economic hardship)

Wolf Pen, West Virginia, is slowly recovering after a huge blow caused by the collapse of the FYRE mining conglomerate. However, the Copernicus company, run by Zyrian Steel, has stepped in to pick up the slack. A massive paid retraining effort is underway with Copernicus focused on bringing coal miners into the 21st century economy. Copernicus has pleged to build a manufacturing plant in Wolf Pen within the next 5 years, raising hopes for local residents that good times may be just on the horizon.

➥ She's a Barbie Girl in Her Barbie World
(cw: uncanny dolls)

Mattel is set to release 200 life-sized Barbie and Ken dolls as part of their 60+ years of Everything Barbie. The dolls are being deployed to toy shops around the New England area and will be sold after this month's "Barbie and Ken 4ever 2gether" movie premier. The dolls, which stand at 5'9" and 5'10", feature the classic proportions of everyone's favorite toys and will be sold on a lottery basis. Make sure to sign up in your local toy shop for the chance to purchase one! Once they're gone, they're gone.

➥ Tall Tales or Terrible Turnabout?
(cw: severe danger and injuries to teenagers; victims not being believed)

What started as public outcry from the local youth scene of Gloucester has now turned into an alarming upturn in the number of young people being admitted to doctor's offices and hospitals. What started as innocent demands for attention to the closed space of 'Dogtown' has turned into the stuff of nightmares. What few purported trespassers have come forward in the wake of frightening encounters in Dogtown have offered nothing short of ghost stories to explain very serious injuries. Despite the very real results of these excursions past the park's fences, many claim the stories are nothing but cries for attention from an emotionally volatile and impressionable group.

➥ Resurgence in Flaming Fad Causes Night Life Strife
(cw: death, injury, and property loss from fire)

A string of fires have devastated the East Coast's bar scene. Witnesses state that the mishandling of a resurging trend of 'fire shots' has been the cause for most of the damage and some tragic loss of life. New standards for fire safety are being revisited by Beverage Commision Boards in the affected states and bar owners are encouraging patrons not to add to the dangerous fad request.

➥ Look Who's Loafing Now
(cw: irreverent treatment of grave markers)

The Better Loaf Than Never bakery has come out with a new and morbid product for the season: Deathbed Bread. These loaves are supposedly being baked on old tombstones and come with an imprint of a grave epitaph on them. The bakery owner, Bryn Fletcher, says they're just going back to their roots. This sort of thing was actually common back in the day when bakeries couldn't afford proper slabs for their ovens. They could get tombstones at a discounted price, though. Why not see whose death has left a mark on your next meal?

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Would Cortana be able to acquire a loaf of deathbed bread to run tests on? Is there anything she might find?

She would! They're selling the loaves to anyone who might want to purchase them; though, she'll need to go early in the morning as the novelty loaves seem to sell out quickly. She'll receive one that says:

Here Lies Jessica Strange
Mother, Daughter, Sister, and Cousin
She made you feel Strange, but never a Stranger

Analysis will show that it is a loaf of tasty sourdough. It has a very satisfying flake to the crust. Although... as they're clearing the bread away, Cortana might notice that the epitaph has changed. Just for a moment, she could swear she sees her own name; though, the rest of the words are impossible to make out. A closer examination would show it's just Jessica's epitaph. Maybe. A little more time and a close eye on the bakery leading into October might well be warranted.

Well that isn't creepy at all!

...So if Cortana does some research on Bryn Fletcher, is there anything she can find? (They got anything worth hacking into and taking a look around?)

Edited 2022-09-20 19:54 (UTC)

Bryn is an older Millenial with a business and plenty of social media presence. It's not hard to find info on him. He seems to be a fairly ordinary person. The most notable thing about him is that he's shared on a few of his social media pages a personal story about a 'supernatural experience' he had as a kid. According to Bryn, he was out trick-or-treating with his friends when he was separated from them. As he went to go find them, he discovered that people didn't seem to be able to see or talk to him. At first he thought it was great. He could pretend to be a ghost and haunt people. As he got bored with that, though, the fear began to settle in that no one could see him, he couldn't interact with anything or anyone, even though he could see them. He spent the night panicking, trying to figure out how to fix the problem until he found his friends. Only then did the 'spell' seem to break and he was corporeal once more. To this day, no one really believes him about what happened, but he makes a point of using morbid humor in his life and in his baking to combat that fear.

So ...if Cortana approaches Bryn under the pretense of being curious about this story/wanting to know more, would she learn anything from him or would he tell her to fuck off?

Also, what would happen if she feeds some of that deathbed bread she got to some animals? (Would ADI let her use some lab rats for this purpose?)

Bryn will be wary of her at first, but if she professes an actual interest, he'd recount the story as described above, just with more detail about how he felt at the time. He seems like a pretty normal guy apart from his run-in with a supernatural something when he was younger.

ADI would allow it. Absolutely nothing will happen to the rats for the next few days that she can see. We will follow-up more on this after the TDM goes live, though. :3

Oooh I look forward to any and all potential disasters that could come of this.

Not only is she interested, her experiences so far have made it clear that something like this is entirely possible, so she actually believes him. He might be able to pick up on that.

So, Cortana will get some advanced warning about the Deathbed Bread that appears in the TDM that just went up. Essentially, the rats she fed will show no particular symptoms... until they do. She'll arrive a few days after feeding them to find two of her rats dead and one that is bloody and terrified as it seems to have chewed off its own tail.

She'll also discover that a day or so after her conversation with Bryn, he seems to have disappear into the back rooms of the shop and hasn't come out since.

She's gonna treat the remaining rat's wounds and after notifying ADI she'll for sure want to keep it under observation, as well as dissect and run tests on the corpses.

She'll tell ADI about Bryn too.

The two rats seem to have both died due to heart attacks. She might be able to surmise, based on the third rat, that they were scared to death.

ADI will take note of Bryn and will put resources toward investigating that during this month's event!

Cortana is definitely going to want to keep an eye on that remaining rat going forward-even if there aren't any more effects from the bread, she's also curious about things like whether being exposed to the supernatural really does increase the likelihood of it happening again and whether that's true for animals, how well it recovers and does it have any lingering issues, etc.

There was someone else who was keeping rats, yeah? Cortana might want to keep it with those rats or in a similar arrangement.

There will be no lingering effect for the remaining rat. The ones that Ade had are, indeed, being kept as sort of office rats in the area he used to work. She'd be able to put her rat in with the rest, but people around might tell her she needs to help with taking care of them, if she does that. Congrats on acquiring a pet you helped to traumatize, Cortana?

She'll help take care of the rats. Cortana could use a pet anyway, she's been kind of bummed about ADI not allowing them in the apartments since she discovered how nice they can be.

George would want to show up at that city council meeting to protest the proposed ordinance about people being disallowed to sleep in public places, pointing out that it would place undue hardship on those with nowhere to live and that the dead shouldn't be valued more than the living.

George's words would go over well with some, and very poorly with others. There seems to be a contingent of more affluent residents strongly advocating for the new ordinance about banning sleeping on public property. Eventually, the council will table the idea as something to come back to in the future; though, they are not ruling it out if the issue persists. They promise there will be increased enforcement of existing loitering laws, though, to try to placate the affluent residents in the meanwhile. Characters may begin to observe more light harassment from the police if groups of people are hanging around anywhere for too long. Greta Thomas Will Remember This...

George will also find himself approached by a community organizer who is part of the Helping Hands advocacy group. They'll encourage him to check their website and join in their monthly meetings if he'd like to do more to help unhoused people in Gloucester, especially as they head into the colder months. Should George wish to pursue anything with the community group beyond checking the website and offering some basic monetary support via donations, please shoot a note over to the Mod Contact as there will be potential Consequences. :)

hello friends i have (3) questions here across my 2 characters I'm sorry for all this:

1. For Martin, if he hears 'tunes that make you fall asleep' he will once again feel like he's going to die but will be investigating exactly what is being heard. And also, has anyone seen a little girl that matches the description of one Ava, The Lullaby Girl from last October?

2. For Beau- she's been very, very in on Entities in combination with architecture and visual media, so I think the MC Escher thing would make her take notice. Is there any way to find out info on the seller and try to trace the painting back any further if she does some digging? This can either be by asking technologically-advanced friends to do so, or just flexing some of those Eye powers of persuasion she isn't supposed to have (and still doesn't especially know she does, oops).

3. Also for Beau- quick one on the fire shots thing. Anyone at those scenes that looks like Pyre/reports of a wax person? Just since it's been on her mind since everything in Wolf Pen.

1. The tunes are similar to what was linked in the TDM. As he's checking with other folks, though, he'll get some reports from people who have fallen asleep that they vaguely remember seeing some sort of little girl in their nightmares. It's hard for them to articulate what those nightmares were about or what she was doing, though. They haven't seen anyone like that while they were awake, they don't think. Although, Martin may find more than a few people backing off from him or telling him to mind his own business when they have a grown man asking after a little girl. Congrats on becoming one of the town creeps, buddy. He MAY earn himself a bit of a reputation and be recognized, if you'd like.

2. Unfortunately, there isn't a WHOLE lot of information on the seller, even when hacking or Eye-based manipulation is involved. It seems to have come from nowhere. Not even the auction house knows who the seller really is. The money goes to an offshore account with no traceable owner. In terms of everyone else surrounding the painting? Beau would be able to discover that the art historians and other people involved in verification of the sketch have gone missing over the past several months in seemingly unrelated incidents. The best info she can find is a social media post from one of the art historians that is virtually incomprehensible. It's a word salad that many people on their page seem to have been confused by. It's the last thing that art historian ever posted.

3. No one that looks like Pyre has been seen/photographed. However, splashes of candle wax have been found at nearly every scene. Not so odd for some of the bars, but others don't have candles at all. It's left investigators puzzled.

thnak you for the first response i am crylaughing, martin get dunked on. He will likely start lying pretty quickly that she's his niece or something but please feel free to have NPCs think he's some fucking weirdo it's the funniest thing in existence

as to the other two, noted! she'll be making reports on those for sure.

Jaeger would like to look into the fire shots incidents, looking at the locations where the fires took place, the extent of the damage and any fatalities reported. This will include TikTok/whatever videos of "fire shots" to get an idea of what's involved. He and Donna are tracking reports of fire/arson in the area in the hopes of finding a lead on Pyre, and this seems suspicious enough to bear further investigation.

Jaeger will also be keeping a close eye on the reports coming out of Dogtown, and the nature of injuries to try and get some sense of what exactly is happening in there. Animal attacks are the obvious, but he'll also be paying attention to reports of bodies found, anything like that. As a member of the Security team, he patrols the outside of Dogtown fairly regularly and does his best to stay familiar with what's going on in the area.

Jaeger's general research into fire shots will yield generally available information: that the drinks shots or cocktails with high-proof alcohol, that they're set on fire for show (and sometimes to alter flavor), and that one is supposed to blow out the fire before drinking the shot. The fire damage, injuries, and fatalities reported at the sites of the incidents are devastating but there isn't any indication that the fire itself was supernatural. Four individuals have died across all reported incidents, none of them with any apparent connection to each other. However, several incidents include a report of an unknown patron who went missing in the fire, with bar staff reporting that the individual in question had ordered multiple fire shots before the fire broke out. One bartender even claims that the man had drunk a still-flaming shot right in front of her. The incidents seem to be tracking north along I-91 and started somewhere around New Haven, Connecticut.

Regarding Dogtown, reported injuries and teens' claims about how they occurred are so far consistent with phenomena recently observed in Dogtown. So far there haven't been any bodies found in or near Dogtown, but in his digging Jaeger will come across several reports of missing Gloucester teens that have been dismissed as runaways.

Thank you, this is helpful!

Another question on the topic: Would Jaeger be able to gain access to any security footage and scene photos, or is that something that would require the services of a hacker? Jaeger is gathering as much publicly available information as he can to add to his file and will potentially subcontract out further investigation to skilled ADI co-workers.

There are plenty of social media postings of the start of some of these conflagrations, given the trend with the fire shots. It wouldn't be hard to get ahold of those based on some of the people interviewed in newspaper articles. For actual police investigation photos, that would require the services of a hacker. In either case, there will be some photos and videos that show the familiar distortion/tearing that Jaeger's likely come to associate with the supernatural, but that most people would shrug off as a bad photo.

There's no single person that appears in multiple pieces of media, but he might be able to pick up a throughline in that the photos that have the tearing always seem to have some piece of a person who's wearing an old-fashioned jean jacket. There's never a good or clear shot of this person, but they're there in the background. Jaeger might need to do a little Where's Waldo hunting to locate them, though. It definitely doesn't look like the same person wearing the jean jacket in every piece of media, but that's about as much as he and any fellow investigators would be able to glean.

Hickey wants to go fight a monster. Are there any details unique His Snakeship that don't fit the standard Nessie/Champ/insert-your-favorite-ocean-cryptid-here mold?

The main thing that sets his Snakeship apart is the creature's sheer size. Where Nessie or Champ would be within the realm of what's possible in nature, His Snakeship is so incredibly large that it's unlikely to even notice a single human attacker (to put it in perspective, a human to His Snakeship would be as krill to a blue whale). Local legends say the serpent could encircle all of Essex Bay if it wanted to. Some say its home is a bottomless pit from which His Snakeship has never fully emerged, and if it did it would end the world. Whether or not Hickey saw the serpent himself in August, it's common knowledge around ADI that last month's massive floods were a direct result of His Snakeship being unusually active. The general consensus among higher-ups, if they are asked, is that they're just sort of hoping His Snakeship will go back to sleep under the ocean.

If Hickey still intends to pursue a confrontation with His Snakeship in light of this information, please message us on the mod contact page with more information on what he's doing, as there will be consequences. As a reminder, character deaths in this setting are permanent unless arrangements are made for a character to escape a brush with death in exchange for aligning themself fully with an Entity.

If Yelena cross-references the mentions of music around the graveyards - and especially reports of people in the graveyards - with the attempts to pin down last year's haunting music, would she be able to narrow the location(s) down any further?

Also, are there any cases elsewhere in the New England area over the past, say, 5 years of an uptick in somnambulism, sleeping in public, or accidents caused by people falling asleep at the wheel that coincide with strange music in remote locations or graveyards?

Yelena will discover in her work that there seems to be one graveyard that isn't being affected by the music for some reason. The Holy Light Church, of which Greta Thomas is a member. if she's not immediately stealthy and seems to be lingering around the graveyard, she will be told to leave by members of the church pretty quickly. They don't seem to be interested in lookee-loos. Playing at being some sort of potential convert would gain her access to the church which appears to be set up like a standard Protestant Christian affair. Though... the stained glass and painting in the church seems to have an unusual concentration of eye imagery. Not that this sort of thing is unheard of in Christian iconography.

She will find that the entire north eastern seaboard has reports similar to what they're seeing in Gloucester over the past five years. The notable incidents always seem to crop up from late September to early December.

While she's pretty good at being stealthy, getting a read on the people involved in the church would strike her as the more useful starting point, so she would definitely be up for playing the potential convert. Attend a few services, get a feel for who the influential members of the congregation are, note the security and which areas are off-limits in case she decides she needs to do some B&E later, that sort of thing. ETA: Steve Rogers and Kate Cordello will be joining her in her adventures in religious conversion, since they all have different backgrounds and so would probably notice different things.

Is it possible to pinpoint where or when the Lullaby Girl-like incidents started? If it's not clear, she'd continue working backward from her initial 5-year timeframe to try to narrow it down.

Edited 2022-09-28 21:28 (UTC)

Greta Thomas is one of the prominent church members. There seem to be a lot of older women in the congregation, and the general make-up of the church skews toward the gray-haired crowd. There's only one priest, a white man named Father Mark Sullivan, and a pair of deacons who also seem to be identical twins, Eren and Aaron Schüttmann. The services are definitely of the fire and brimstone variety, warning the church that they mustn't fall to sin, lest the eyes of god be upon them and their kin. It's not... a FRIENDLY church. More the sort of place where everyone is concerned with saving their own and their loved ones souls, even if that means telling them they're terrible sinners who must repent to be saved. As far as security, there are some video cameras, but there's nothing like guards. The main areas that are off-limits are the room where the priest and his deacons prepare for each service, and whatever is further beyond that. Presumably, some sort of living area. Father Mark does not appear to have a house out in the wider Gloucester community and doesn't actually leave the premises from what they can see visiting the place intermittently.

Pinpointing it precisely would be a challenge just because she can't be sure every instance is being reported. There are some years without any reports, some with more. The very first instance of anything like this is from 10 years back, though.

Before I dive even further down the church rabbit hole, it occurs to me to ask: where is it situated relative to the other graveyards? Is it far to the edge of town, or is it more central?

Regarding the Lullaby Girl incidents, where did the first report occur, and are there any reports in the area in, say, the 6 months prior of accidental or intentional deaths or comas involving a girl who would fit Ava's description, between the rough ages of 6 and 12? (Yelena is not great with determining children's ages in the middle of absolute chaos and doesn't know if Avatars grow up, so she'd be casting a wider net in an attempt not to miss anything.)

We’ll answer these in the reverse: Yelena’s digging will reveal that the first incident occurred in Wolf Trap where, a little prior, a 10 year old girl named Amber was pulled from the burning wreckage of her family home. While both of her parents died in the fire, Amber was unharmed and placed in foster care shortly after. At that point, the papers are either sealed or lost as all trace of Amber seems to vanish.

In the interest of transparency for the church, characters are welcome to snoop around, but there will be very limited information that can be found beyond what’s already been shared in regards to it at the present. However, there will be a chance to dig more into the odd atmosphere there as we move toward November and December! In the meantime, a sharp eye will uncover the tie the church has to local happenings in the form of Greta Thomas and her push to make sleeping in public illegal.

Is Wolf Trap separate from Wolf Pen? Just wondering how much of an "oh, shit" moment this should be.

And that's fine, Yelena will use the time to burrow in and acquaint herself with the congregation, try to soak up gossip and get a solid read on people. She's good at patient. And at pretending she doesn't want to shove some horrible nimby types down a hole.

Wolf Trap is in Virginia near the town of Vienna! Wolf Pen is in West Virginia. They are geographically unrelated areas. Wolf Trap is a major music venue and National Park.

Edited 2022-10-05 05:34 (UTC)

Oh good. I think.

Is it possible to dig up a picture of Amber, and/or her parents?

Yelena will be able to find a family photo with some of the news reports. Little Amber looks remarkably like the girl calling herself Ava from last October.

Another question, because it occurred to me that Cortana would try to find out: did the NPC Ethan survive his injuries he got during the event? If so, how is he doing now?

Ethan has survived his injuries, but at enormous cost. He's incurred vast amounts of medical debt that have sent him into bankruptcy, and he is permanently disabled, requiring tubes and the like to feed himself as his mouth and throat are a wreck. He's... not doing good is the short answer.

Given that ADI is already helping Wolf Pen, she'll probably try and see if anything can be done to help him specifically. She might suggest that, with him being exposed to the supernatural like that and now in such an awful situation she's worried he'll be targeted in the future either as a victim or for recruitment to a cult.

If Cortana would like to advocate for Ethan, then ADI can look into finding a new direction for him. A few weeks after her efforts, she would be able to learn that Ethan has found a new job with the company Copernicus, a place known for its development in medical equipment and a source of support and stability.

Suuuuuper late because I am always late to the party, but Steve plans (planned? XD) to check out some of the local bars to keep an eye on whether that fiery fad was a concern or not. Is there anything he might observe/have observed or not?

For the local bars around Gloucester, Steve will definitely encounter a few people being more reckless with the fiery drinks than they should be. No one is melting their faces off, but there are certainly a few near-misses for fires starting. As the month goes on, he'll note that bartenders are less and less enthused about the trend and a few bars are even putting bans on fiery drinks for fear of injury to their employees and property. If you'd like to take this idea and run with it for a thread, we can suggest Steve might be able to help rescue one of the bars from an unintended conflagration (feel free to make this bar up), perhaps with help from another PC. They'll be able to garner some general good will from the regulars and bar owner for their service.

Ooh, excellent! Thanks so much; I think I just might set up something to play that out. :3

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Headline News #4

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cw: animal death, animal injury

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cw: medical debt, severe injury and disability

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