Event - Connectivity

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Connectivity

➥ Misinformed

(cw: theft, home invasion, paranoia)

The years have gone missing. Something's taking the books and papers from homes and libraries, even shops. Tracking it headed your way. -CP

You might be one of those the cryptic message is delivered to directly if you met and worked with Cindy Parsons, a local newscaster from Wolf Pen, WV. They seem to be making good on a promise to help a select few out after the people of ADI stopped an apocalypse ritual on their doorstep. If you didn't get a direct message, you might hear murmurs of it from various sources around ADI HQ. Gossip has a way of spreading, especially when there's some potential supernatural threat in it.

Sure enough, for intrepid researchers, they'll be able to find news reports of a strange series of threats heading from West Virginia toward Gloucester, starting with Cindy's reporting about a town about 20 miles north of Wolf Pen. Every book and newspaper, whether physical or digital, that was published in the year 2020 seems to have disappeared within certain towns. Local police are flummoxed.

And then it hits Gloucester.

The public library puts out a request for any information on the missing materials as well as a request for donations to replace their books and other printed materials. Who would do this? While replacing digital items is time-consuming and costly, the physical copies of things are even harder to manage, especially with so many libraries in the region being hit by this effect. The year 2020 has been wiped out.

Everyone will find that their own personal libraries/information stores have been picked clean, as well. Homes that seem secure will always have some sort of evidence of potential breaking and entering. However safe you thought you were in your home, however safe your coveted knowledge, it can disappear in an instant.

The library has requested volunteers assist in raising money for them to replace everything as quickly as possible, in the event the knowledge fiends who did this can't be found. Community-minded individuals might defy ADI's guidance and take up their own volunteer efforts, interacting with locals to knock on doors, start a bake sale, or start some kind of money-making activity to assist the library.

Those with more caution in their step will be tasked by ADI with searching Dogtown for the missing materials. They have a hunch about this. Maybe it will prove fruitful.

➥ Misplaced

(cw: cuts, wounds, foreign objects embedded in flesh, supernaturally-induced apathy)

un: gracefully
Everyone, this is Neil Grace, Head of Security. We have a problem on our hands. A field agent recently returned to Gloucester with a cursed artifact that shattered upon entry into town. This field agent failed to inform anyone for several days as they tried to fix the problem themselves. They are being dealt with.

What we know right now is that the artifact was a crystal, something associated with the Lonely. It may be responsible for the recent disappearance of printed materials from around Gloucester and elsewhere in the country. I've attached a location pin that should give you the point for where the crystal shattered. We're getting reports that people living in that area are displaying unusual behavior. Please work in teams of at least two. Be careful, and avoid touching crystal pieces where possible.

- Neil

It's easy enough to find the park where the shattering happened. There's an unnatural quiet and emptiness throughout the park with pockets of sound. Eagle-eyed (or just persistent) individuals will be able to track down shards of crystal that have embedded themselves into trees and along the ground. Given the distance they seem to be from the initial shatter point, it's clear some supernatural force was involved in flinging these things.

Anyone spending a decent amount of time at or around the park will begin to note that it's not just the environment that's off here, but some of the people, too. That guy you spotted on a bench, ostensibly watching some squirrels? He hasn't moved. It's hard to tell if he's even breathing, but approach him, and he'll glance up before looking away again. There's no affect on his face, no real engagement. Trying to talk to him will garner painfully slow and mono-syllabic responses. There's just no life or personality to him. And the longer you talk, the more the cold seeps in. It's getting harder to care about what you were doing. Maybe this guy has it right. Just do nothing. Stop trying.

You might still spot the wound on his neck and the glinting shard of crystal that seems to be embedded there. But do you even want to bother? It's hard to summon the will to do so when the important things stop mattering and thoughts of other people slip away.

➥ Missed Connections

(cw: socioeconomic disaster; scarcity)

There aren't further network communications regarding the state of the search for the crystal shards...because sometime in the afternoon after Neil's message goes out, there simply aren't any more network communications at all. As the day goes on, the initial assumption is that ADI's internet provider is falling down on the job, leaving headquarters, official housing, and ADI-networked devices without access. The same is true over at Bonnie's Flophouse, though, and local staff soon realize and reveal that their own home internet and phone services are no longer working. All internet, cell phone, and landline services are down for the count...making it a little difficult to immediately figure out just how widespread the problem is.

It's treated as a minor inconvenience around ADI for the first few days. Surely things will get back up and running soon, everyone will get a rote apology from their service providers, and it will turn out to be the result of vandals or some accident taking down a major fiber optic cable–it wouldn't be the first time that's happened in the USA. There's a lot of grumbling around the offices thanks to frustration over lack of access to electronic records and the need to tramp all over the building to track down a coworker and speak face to face instead of shooting off a quick message. Around Gloucester, businesses either close their doors or muddle through on a cash-only basis, reluctantly writing off a day or two of profits while they await the internet's return.

Except it simply...doesn't. Days turn into a week, and then two. What struck most as an inconvenience becomes a quiet, ongoing catastrophe. Hospitals and emergency services resort to whatever handheld radios they can get their hands on to deal with what patients they aren't able to reschedule or send out of town, with pharmacies and medical and veterinary offices scrambling to re-establish lines of communication via overworked staff physically relaying written messages across town. The supply chain all but grinds to a halt, so even after most local businesses reopen on a cash-only basis, shelves begin to go bare, leading to a panicked rush on what remains–mainly, over-the-counter medication and non-perishable food get bought up at accelerated rates and become increasingly scarce within Gloucester. Local banks are swarmed by residents attempting to withdraw what limited stores of cash are available, and even trusted customers who are able to access their accounts face days-long waiting periods. What's worse, the outage makes it impossible for ADI's off-worlders to access their salaries within Gloucester: the prepaid debit cards ADI uses to distribute payments can't be accepted by businesses and cash advance services have been toppled by the outage.

The outage includes Gloucester, Dogtown, and the surrounding small towns that rely on Gloucester for most of their services, but outside a certain radius it seems things are business as usual for the rest of the country (aside from national interest in Gloucester's strange ongoing disaster). It's possible to reach an area with internet and phone service within a day's drive in order to get cash and supplies from outside banks and businesses, but within a week the knock-on effects begin, with panic-buying and panic-withdrawals making supplies and cash increasingly hard to come by in the surrounding area. Within a week ADI begins doing their best to provide cash payment to staff in need, but the company and the banks on which it relies simply don't have enough cash on hand to pay out everyone's weekly salaries in full.

There are, indeed, apologies from service providers, their public statements provided both via the internet for the world at large, and via fliers within Gloucester. At first these apologies come alongside promises that services will be restored shortly, though there's a conspicuous lack of a promised timeline. As the outage drags on, though, the apologetic messages become more and more vague about what's being done to fix it, promising only that they are giving the matter their full attention.

There was a time when the world did not rely on the internet to function, and there are worlds where that's still the case. Here and now, though, it's becoming more and more clear how heavily everyone relies on those connections.

➥ Without a Trace

(cw: reality warping, memory loss, potential for gaslighting or misperceptions of self or reality)

Memory is such a delicate thing. It shapes everything from interactions to perception to sense of self, and yet can be malleable to all sorts of things: our conviction, another’s perception, or even injury.

It might not be noticeable at first, when the changes come. It might be little things here and there, barely worth commenting on like a misplaced pen. Maybe you don’t remember that restaurant being there….yet when you step inside, they greet you like you’ve been a regular for months. Maybe that coworker you’ve been chatting with daily is now a stranger. Maybe your best friend slowly fades out of thought and mind. Even if you knew them before arriving here.

Do you even remember the world you came from anymore? Do you truly?

For other people,it might be instantaneous. Waking up one morning reveals things aren’t as they should be, as friends and worlds simply vanish from your thoughts. There’s no rhyme or reason or promise that those who so adamantly claim to know you aren't simply lying. After all, everyone knows how insidious this place can be. Why….you’ve been here longer than most, haven’t you? You’d surely know better.

➥ Mod Notes

• GENERAL - Players are welcome to play background NPCs for themselves when they are needed in a thread. If you need more information on general behavior for these types of NPCs, please feel free to ask! In general, the information provided in the prompts should be sufficient and ordinary people will act like… ordinary people! Although, the people of Gloucester seem to be becoming more and more aware of supernatural phenomenon and they are frightened by it. You're welcome to make up any details beyond that for your specific scene. Also, please remember that character deaths are permanent and plan accordingly!
  
  
• MISINFORMED (16 January - Ongoing) - The books/newspapers/printed materials are simply gone from Gloucester. No amount of searching will dig them up, unfortunately. It's clearly some supernatural force that's removed them. The evidence of a break-in to their residence/wherever they're keeping their things will vary from very obvious to subtle, depending on what might invoke the most dread in a particular individual. ADI personnel will be particularly on alert at HQ as there seems to be evidence of a break-in there, as well, even if they can't trace the source.
  
  Characters will need to reacquire things if they lost them from their personal library, and the Gloucester (and ADI) libraries being short on materials from 2020 will be an ongoing issue for the foreseeable future as replacements are tracked down. Characters who wish to volunteer are free to create whatever money-making endeavors they see fit. ADI leadership will be disapproving due to the potential danger associated with community outreach like that, but they're not going to actively stop anyone. Players are welcome to say their efforts are successful, but they should not be raising tens of thousands of dollars here. The locals of Gloucester are middle class for the most part, but they don't have that kind of spending money. Those who wish to investigate Dogtown, instead, are encouraged to submit search requests on the Dogtown Search page.
  
  
• MISPLACED (17-31 January) - The shards have been flung improbably far afield with characters able to find them all over the park. It's not just people in the park at the moment who seem to have been hit with the shards, either. Teams might find themselves knocking on doors after spotting shattered windows or the like, only to find people who can't seem to be bothered to do anything about the damage or their situation. The apathy effect vanishes once the shard is removed from a person, but holding it will produce a lower grade apathy as well as a sense of emptiness in the person holding it. Smashing the crystals into smaller pieces will just scatter low-grade apathy across the ground for anyone to track into their homes.
  
  
• MISSED CONNECTIONS (17-31 January) - Any access to internet or phone services during this period will require a long drive out of town to reach an area beyond the spread of the outage. There's no physical cause for the outage to be found–anyone who travels out to find out what's happening with the effects to restore the internet will find the service providers just as baffled and frustrated as anyone else.
  
  
• WITHOUT A TRACE (17-31 January) - Any memory can be lost, from the details of a person’s world, to their friends and family, or even lovers. How quickly the changes take is up to player discretion, but the changes can be reversed through reminders of attachments to other people, places, or things. Help from those close to people is encouraged! On the other hand, players are welcome to keep any memory losses they would like; however, any formative memories that are lost that would drastically change a character's personality from their canon presentation will be returned at the conclusion of the event. Permanent losses can be important memories, but please refer to Rule #4 in Apocalypse How's ruleset. "Characterization must be consistent with canon/the original story the character is from, when taking into account in-game developments. Characters should be recognizable as the character throughout their tenure in the game."
  
  

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Comments

[worthallthis]

"So we should ask around," Winter suggests. "Use the network maybe." Winter is not using the network, himself, he almost never does. That's up to one of them. But he's got plenty of people he can ask in person, including non-offworlders from work and around town.

[bossyboiler]

"Is the network back up? The last time I checked, it was down. We should definitely ask around," Kate says as she takes out her phone to check the internet status. She has no bars and no signal. "It's going to be a little more difficult without the network."

[musicdied]

"Still?" Yelena asks, glancing back to where her own phone sits. "I don't like this."

It's probably noting. Someone probably sat on the wrong button somewhere, or a shark chewed through a fibre optic cable, or one of the thousand other things that can temporarily disrupt service.

But if she were planning a large-scale attack, cutting off communications, hampering the ability of her targets to effectively organize - that would definitely be an important preliminary step.

[worthallthis]

"It's out?" Winter frowns, and retreats to his room to find his phone. Look, he hasn't checked it since last night, and even then it wasn't to check the network. Or anything at all, really, it was mostly to check the battery and that he didn't have any alerts from the office.

He'll be back out in a minute, frowning even more, phone in hand. "Why would the whole network be down. At the same time as things are going missing." If this were their own universe, he might say it's coincidence, but in this place? Probably not.

[bossyboiler]

"Still. And I don't like it either because apparently it's effecting more than just the ADI phones and systems. I've heard that the internet is out at Bonnie's too."

Kate doesn't have the world experience that Yelena and Winter both have. She is going to defer to their judgement.

"Normally, I'd say it could be down for any number of reasons like the provider messing up or some loose wirings but it's odd that it's effecting more than just us. Do you think it could be Entity related?"

[musicdied]

"Not that odd, if they're using the same provider," Yelena feels compelled to say - concerned though she is about the possibility of the vulnerability being deliberately inflicted, and about the vulnerability itself, it could still be a mundane incident.

"But with things going missing, and the artifact in the park, I think there is a very good chance it's Entity related. A retaliation from the Church of Holy Light, maybe - we blinded them, they blind us."

[worthallthis]

"But why only those things. Cookbooks. Things to do with Ava, from you." Is that some kind of hint that the creepy church was working with her Mr. S? Is it all connected?

Maybe it is. Hell, maybe all the entities are working together. Which would be very inconvenient. (And terrifying.)

[bossyboiler]

"The Church was the Eye related, right? Maybe you stumbled onto something about Ava that you weren't meant to?" But why are her cookbooks missing? Why her books? "It just doesn't make sense that the other things were taken."

She sighs. "Do you think we should find out who ADI's internet service provider is and find out if Bonnie's uses the same?"

[musicdied]

"Unless whoever took them was trying very badly to make it seem like it was random," Yelena suggests. And then pauses, considering. "Or they did it with magic, but didn't quite do it well. But I think we should definitely look into who provides internet service to ADI and to Bonnie's."

[worthallthis]

"Probably the second one," Winter says. "If it's a person. And not an entity directly." He figures an entity could take whatever they felt like, without it seeming strangely random. "I can go to ADI after breakfast and ask," he offers, since he'll be going there anyway. "If one of you check Bonnie's."

[bossyboiler]

"I can go to Bonnie's to check. It's not like I can do much in Administration anyway with the internet being down."

[musicdied]

"I'll check the library and a few of the shops around town," Yelena says. "To give us a better idea of how widespread this thing is. If it's something like a major provider being out, it won't just be places associated with ADI that are hit."

[worthallthis]

There's a pause, then Winter asks hopefully, "Will we have breakfast first?" They're all together at the same time, so really... why not eat together? Right?

[bossyboiler]

"That's a good idea, Yelena. I'll see what I can find out from around Bonnie's too." She turns her head to look at Winter. She smiles a little. "Yes. We can have breakfast first."

[musicdied]

"It only makes sense, since we're all actually here and awake," Yelena agrees.

Also, if there's a chance they might wind up running from or fighting monsters later - and here, in Gloucester, there's always a chance of running from or fighting monsters - they may as well do it well-fed.

[worthallthis]

He tries not to look too pleased, and fails. For now, the network and the missing books don't matter as much; they have a plan in place and they can worry about that once they have more intel. "Is the coffee started? I can start the coffee," he offers.

[bossyboiler]

"I haven't started the coffee." There is a distinct lack of the delicious aroma in the air. "Um. I don't even know what make for breakfast. What would you guys like?" She's not picky about what she eats for breakfast. Dinner, however, is a whole other story.

[musicdied]

"I think we still have bagels. We could have bacon and eggs on those. And I will slice up some fruit to go on the side." Yelena smiles a bit crookedly. "I have a feeling we may be having a very long day."

[worthallthis]

"It probably will be," Winter agrees, moving to the coffee to get that going. "Most days around here are. But it doesn't have to start quite yet." Food and friends first.

[bossyboiler]

"I'll get started on the bacon," she says as she reaches up to cover a yawn. Look. It's early and she hasn't had her coffee yet. "Any preferences on your guys' eggs?" Their comradery and how well they work together is what makes apartment unit C2 the best.