[network/open] Receipts 2

[thedoctorsmate]

Who: Donna Noble
Username: supertemp
Warnings: character death, animal (rat) death, arson, hypersomnia, pica

((ooc: Everyone please feel free to threadjack around, have your characters respond to each other, rather than Donna! Her suggested groupings for different phenomenon may not be ICly correct, so please feel free to have your character correct/debate her on anything. She has also missed some events/happenings that she wasn't paying attention to or present for, so please feel free to fill in the gaps!))

Hello and welcome if you're new to Gloucester! If you're not, this is the second one of these I'm doing and we're making a bit cleaner. I've put the full notes I have in an attachment to this post. I'll just be updating with new stuff I've added for the most recent months and requesting everyone fill me in on details from recent months so I can add them to the guide for new arrivals. If you've got an idea what powers they're associated with, I'd love to hear it.

Also, there are notes here referencing Garner Cinderbrook. I'm broken up to bloody pieces about him dying. Wouldn't mind hearing about him from anyone else, if you knew him.

[Everyone will find SuperGuide.txt attached.]

A Guide to Supernatural Phenomenon in Gloucester - It's Kind of Awful

The most important place to know in town is Dogtown, a big park to the north in the city, surrounded by a fence. A LOT of weird phenomena seems to start there. Never enter alone, and try to keep people unaffiliated with ADI out. The place is getting weirder and more deadly by the day. Below, you'll find a header for each of the Entities. I've tried to group encounters with different phenomenon (and avatars) under a specific Entity header. Some of them are more debatable than others. Everything's subject to change with a greater understanding, and I'll be updating this regularly with new info. Phenomenon are listed in the order of the date we encountered it.

New in September:

Desolation

• The avatar Pyre may be back on his way to Gloucester. Or at least some sort of Desolation avatar who wants to circle around the area. Jaeger did some digging into recent news reports and found that there's a new trend of 'fire shots' going around that are causing fires. He's seen a few photos and has been able to track someone in a specific jacket heading toward Gloucester. It's not the same person every time, but the jacket seems to be the same.

End

• Ava's graveyard music came back. Same effects as the year before, but people ended up going into full-on comas this time.

Spiral

• Garner had a previous conversation with Fenix Down (avatar for the Desolation) who said that some drawing by M.C. Escher was actually a cursed object that had hallucination-type effects. The tearabouts of the drawing are currently unknown. Possibly tied to a recent sale of an Escher art piece to some rich guy in California.

New in October:

End

• A few people went to investigate the Better Loaf Than Never bakery, which has been selling tombstone bread. Cortana found that a few rats she fed the bread to died a few days after eating it. She thinks they probably died of fear. Given what we saw later in the month with the place becoming weird and the owner locking himself into the bakery to keep baking... yeah. That bread was cursed.
  
• ADI brought in a specialist from Copernicus to train everyone on lucid dreaming in an effort to combat Ava. This time, the dreams seem to have been focused around turning people into avatars and experiencing the power can comes with inflicting nightmares on people. And probably killing them. Yelena was able to figure out that Ava was probably a girl named Amber from Wolf Trap, VA. The sleep attacks like we've seen started ten years ago after Amber was the only survivor of a house fire. When we finally encountered Ava/Amber in dreams people were able to pull her out of the dreams and discover she was actually a young woman. She killed Garner. ADI killed her.

New in November:

Flesh

• People have been eating weird things. Like, dangerously weird. Don't eat weird things. I caught Jessica in Admin trying to eat her stapler. She told me it was a croissant. Please stop eating anything you didn't get from a vending machine or someone in the canteen.

Comments

[failedpromise]

Really glad that I can't eat right now.

(She may or may not also be mildly tempted to see what people will try to eat if she hands it to them. She will not actually do this, she's just curious.)

[thedoctorsmate]

Yeah, don't get in the habit is all I'll say.
Don't suppose you've got any new info about what's happened the last couple of months? I've been up to my eyeballs in paperwork, mostly.
That bread things with the mice.
Did that get sorted out with the bakery, d'you know?

[failedpromise]

I think so. I wasn't really a part of that beyond the initial testing: I went into the kitchen when ADI got it open but it was effectively an entire extradimensional realm in there. A mass graveyard made of bread.

I suppose you could say I got lost sightseeing ...if by sightseeing you mean getting confronted with whatever graves the entity in charge thought would be most upsetting for me to see.

[bossyboiler]

Has any kind of service been planned for Garner?

[thedoctorsmate]

I'm not sure.
I'd like there to be one.
Even just some sort of wake?
I'd be more comfortable organizing that.

[bossyboiler]

I think it'd be a good idea to have one. Let people get it out of their system.

[bloodalwaystells]

[He's been very quiet this past week, all but hiding in his grief and in recovering from his own injuries, but he's still here. Still paying attention.]

Thank you for this. It's very helpful to have it all gathered and organized.

[He stares at the screen for a moment more. Words, what are words.]

Garner was able to critically injure the shade of Ava we fought. I think that was crucial in weakening her, the same way Katie Dunn's shadow clones had to be killed.

He saved my life. I was able to stay with him at the end, so he wasn't alone. But I think he went the way he chose, and that means something. He went fighting, and protecting others.

[thedoctorsmate]

I'm glad you were there for him.
That he saved you.
he was a good man.
A silly, weird, charming man.
I don't want anyone else to die.
None of us should have to die here, so far away from home.

[bloodalwaystells]

He was, and I'm happy to have known him. He was one of the best, and he'll be greatly missed.

It's a terrible sort of war that we're fighting. We make the best choices we can, but there's no such thing as real safety and it's not fair. It never is, but it's even more true here.

All we can do is take what comfort we're able to, where we can, and believe that we're doing it for a good cause. It's not very reassuring, but...it's what we have.

Are you doing alright?

[haircaring]

Wow.

You're like CRAZY organized. There's so much stuff in here.

[thedoctorsmate]

There's a lot of stuff that's happened!
You see anything strange the last little while?
Oh!
I should've put something about that thing we had to deal with in the bog.
Eugh! How could I forget?

[haircaring]

Who could blame you? It sucks to remember.

I did have to deal with some like
evil twin stuff? Last month. Me and a friend of mine. Super weird.

[outofthepast]

I'm really sorry to hear about Garner. He was a good man and he'll be missed.

I happened to do a little digging on the fire shot incidents, by the by... witnessed one trying to go off, too.

[thedoctorsmate]

Yeah.
He went down rescuing someone.
Think that's how he'd have wanted it.
I guess we're lucky in a way.
He's the only person I've known here who's been confirmed dead.
Everyone else is just missing.

[Probably dead, but she can hold out hope.]

About those fire shots, though.
See anything interesting?
People made of wax?
Or maybe some person in a jean jacket?
Jaeger said he'd been able to pick up a jacket showing up across multiple news reports.

[outofthepast]

No better way to go out if you're going, I suppose.

[He wonders if that also applies to somebody like him, "alive" only on a technicality.]

Well I saw a young man light himself on fire, for sure, but he wasn't made of wax. Managed to help put him out and extinguish the fire before the whole bar went up.

Didn't see a jean jacket, unfortunately. But maybe I just didn't notice one.

[musicdied]

It's not just our people who are trying to eat stupid things. We might need to do some media work to get people to keep an eye out to make sure their friends and family aren't eating glass.

[thedoctorsmate]

Bloody brilliant that.
Agh...
I'll see what I can do for spinning something up with the PR boys and girls.
Maybe we can say it's a... pica-causing pollen or something.

[musicdied]

It mostly seems to be concentrated near Dogtown right now, so something environmental is very plausible.

[clavesregni]

[Caitlyn has been dutifully adding all of Donna's notes to her Clue Wall. The map is more pushpin than map, at this point.

She's sticking a pin in the bakery with a very serious look on her face when she responds.]

I didn't know Garner well, but he seemed a good man. I was sorry to hear of his death.

[thedoctorsmate]

Me, too. He was an odd duck, but a good one. It's just another reminder how dangerous this place is, even when we see things that seem to be children. Reckon even if Ava had been a little-little kid, she'd have been just as dangerous.

[clavesregni]

It makes it all the clearer that we can't underestimate the Entities or their servants, no matter what guise they may come in. We've got to get to the bottom of all this before anyone else is killed.

un; mkblackwood

[lowficharm]

Thank you for recording everything. It's good to have this available.

I wish it hadn't gone that way. For Ava and Garner, I mean.

[thedoctorsmate]

If wishes were horses...

[Donna sends that and sighs to herself.]

Kate thinks having a wake at a bakery might be a nice idea, if that's something you'd like to join in on?

un; punchgirl

[lesbeau]

He shouldn't have gone looking by himself. Leave it to the blind guy to run facefirst into danger. Figures.

I dunno why he didn't tell anyone.

[thedoctorsmate]

Jaeger was with him.
That's something, I guess.
He wasn't alone.