goneawayworld | DON'T TOUCH THAT DIAL

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DON'T TOUCH THAT DIAL - INVESTIGATION

DON'T TOUCH THAT DIAL

There is a fifth dimension beyond that which is known to man. It is a dimension as vast as space and as timeless as infinity. It is the middle ground between light and shadow, between science and superstition, and it lies between the pit of man's fears and the summit of his knowledge. This is the dimension of imagination. It is an area which we call...The Twilight Zone.

LINKS
OOC FAMILY INFO/WORKSHIPPING
PLOT PART 1
NIGHT EVENT
NETWORK POST

MAP

Click for larger map

Darlington High School: The town's high school, home to various cliques of teenagers, and containing secrets that can only be discovered after dark.

Sheriff's Station: The sheriff seems like a typical sitcom sheriff, neighborly and helpful, but the sheriff's station has carefully guarded files that might be of interest to the New Hires.

Abandoned Factory: In such a sunshiney town, why is there an abandoned building?

Library: Information about the town can be found here, including a section with town records.

TV Studio: The possible source of strange broadcasts that can be found on TVs in Darlington.

???: A completely unassuming house.

Abandoned Mall: Another abandoned building, and one that's outside of time. This shopping mall is a decade or two early for the time period in the sitcom. Perhaps something useful can be found inside.

Murnjgod Appliances: The TV's in the window of Murnjgod Appliances sometimes display cryptic messages that might offer clues or puzzles to be deciphered.

DETAILS

The first night and day don't leave them much freedom. The sitcom scenarios keep them occupied periodically during the day and evening and then whatever brought them there dragged them "home" the first night around 10 pm and then battened down every door and window of the building they were each in.

The second day is much the same. Forced scenarios, some free time in between. It's only at night fall that something relaxes, like the world is letting out a sigh. There is a sense of pervasive fatigue like whatever was pushing them through this has just exhausted itself trying to control all of them at once.

That means the doors and windows stay unlocked that night, allowing some of them to move around.

The streets are empty - emptier than streets often are in reality. There's no one driving home from a late shift or walking their dog. There are no barking dogs for that matter, either, despite them sometimes being visible in yards around the neighborhood.

Sitcoms tend to move to interior settings at night. So the streets are eerily quiet and empty. At 10 pm on the second night, instead of dragging them home and trapping them, every light in town other than their own house lights and the street lamps turns off simultaneously.

Their doors lock once but almost as if it's for show, a bluff to make them think they're trapped again. They can be unlocked and opened this time. The houses all have flashlights, and sheds full of tools that can maybe be used to break into places.

It's time to get to the bottom of this.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

The abandoned mall is definitely out of place in this whole scenario. It's not even an earlier mall like the 1960s. Anyone with exposure to the early 21st century will be able to recognize it as being from maybe the late 2010s. The signage inside is not for Darlington. It says "Clarksdale Mall" - a much more mundane town name.

The windows and doors have been boarded up but there are places with loose boards that can possibly be pried out of the way for them to climb through. Mind the broken glass.

Once inside, they'll see something very unusual - an area in the center of the mall that seems scooped out. It's like something burst through the ceiling and scraped a section of the mall out with a melon baller, digging all the way through the concrete foundation underneath.

Hiccup and Toothless didn't have any experience with the 21st century, but the building had still looked out of place. Especially all boarded up like it was. It was clearly a place the pair wasn't supposed to be in, and their almost incurable sense of adventure had drawn them there.

They'd bumped into Remy and Jennifer outside the mall, and now Hiccup was trying to get them in there. Luckily, he'd had the foresight to arm himself with a crowbar, so pulling the boards away from one of the windows had been fairly easy. So had climbing through the hole he'd made. Pulling Toothless through after him had been a bit more difficult, but they'd managed.

"Y'know, I don't think being turned into a dog made you any less heavy. You guys coming?" he says after he turns on the flashlight he'd also had the foresight to bring.

"Hello." Jennifer greets him with no enthusiasm, sounding feeble as usual. She does lean to pet Toothless, though.

As Hiccup turns on his flashlight and leads the way, she follows him. After reaching the center area, she gasps.

The unlucky girl gasped: what could have made such a massive hole and why?

When the others look around going 'who said that?' - which the audience found hilarious -, 'Guinivere' sighs.

"Oh, I have a narrator, by the way."

Cue the laughter getting louder.

"Hopefully, we won't be needing stealth."

Remy couldn't help but grimace at the laughter and the narrator, but there's nothing to be done. And grimaced more when he banged his shin against a bench that he hadn't seen because his eyes weren't right.

"Should have thought to bring my own flashlight, though."

Still, he makes his way forward, eyes adjusting to the low light after a few minutes, toward the massive hole. "Well, now. What's made this, I wonder."

"Oh, I can think of a few things, and absolutely none of them are something I wanna deal with in an enclosed space."

Despite his commentary, he shines the light around and down into the hole, trying to estimate how far the bottom goes and if there's an easy way down to it.

Toothless sniffs at the hole to see if any odd smells are coming from it.

"So, what do you think the odds are on our answers being down there?"

Jennifer looks around nervously.

"We are going to need more weapons. We should explore this floor more before going down there."

"I'd say the odds are better than average." Remy crouches at the edge of the hole, squinting to try to see further down before shaking his head. "It's a good idea, seeing if we can find some weapons. There's likely to be something around here."

He stands, dusting off his suit before tilting his head to the door. "It's a bit telling that the name on the building is different from the name of the town."

There's a mall map nearby. There's a few choices they can make on where to go from here.

They can investigate the spherical hole and see what's around the impact crater on the first floor. They can look into shops one by one. They can check the food court area. Or they can go through one of the access doors to check the administrative areas and back hallways of the mall.

"Shops then? Or we could check the kitchens in the food court for something. Which, come to think of it, would be a much better idea. Knives, pans...worse comes to worse we can always hit someone with chair," Hiccup says as he checks over the map.

"And I'm not exactly surprised by the name change. I don't think any of us thought this place was always like this. Mac might've, but thankfully he's not here."

Jennifer too peeks at the map and listens to his reasoning.

"The kitchens sound like a good idea to me."

It's not like she has never fought someone with a fork. She turns to Remy.

"What do you think?"

Remy seesaws his hand. "Kitchen sounds good. I'd prefer something more like a mop or broom handle, personally, but a few small knives wouldn't hurt."

He's tested it, and he can still throw just fine. But that's always been a honed skill and not part of his powers. "After that, I think I'd like to go up before we go down. Also, keep an eye out for a sporting goods store or something similar. We're going to want some rope if we're going to even consider going down in that hole."

One thing they'll notice as they walk along is all the abandoned shopping bags, dusty from neglect. It looks as if everyone abandoned the mall very suddenly.

When they get to the food court, they'll see more of the same. Shopping bags abandoned. Sometimes purses, like whatever happened was disastrous enough people forgot to bring them. Some of the food on the tables looks like it was once dragged away and picked at by birds, but other tables have black rot in plastic containers that were probably meals left behind.

What kitchen they want to poke into depends on what food place they pick but one of them stands out more than the others. One of the burger places has cans of nonperishable ingredients piled on the counter and a cloth bag in front of the counter filled with more cans.

...and there's the sound of someone rummaging around in the kitchen and supply room of that restaurant.

Toothless hears the noises before they even get to the food court and Hiccup takes his ears perking up in response to the noise as more than enough warning that they aren't alone.

"Keep quiet. Someone or something else is here," Hiccup whispers, a fact which become immediately obvious once they actually enter the food court.

"Okay," he says, still whispering, "grab something you can hit somebody with. They could be one of ours, but I don't want to take any chances."

Jennifer finds a metal tube - her signature weapon, apparently, she already beat the cupids with a steel pipe on St. Valentine's day when she arrived - and then glances at Toothless while holding her brooch.

"Brown is a hard light hologram now, but he can still do everything a dog does withut getting hurt, I could send him before us to open up a path."

"Wouldn't be a bad idea." Remy looks around, but decides against anything for the moment. Nothing he can really grab without making noise at the moment. "I have hand-to-hand training and can move quietly. I can go first and gets eyes on whoever it is."

And he can. That, like his ability to throw, hasn't been hampered by the changes. This is training, not powers, after all.

When he gets closer there's a sudden cessation of sound in the kitchen. Whoever it is must have heard them.

There's very little warning before a teenage girl erupts out of the kitchen and immediately splashes an open container of cooking grease in Remy's direction. Fortunately it came from a sealed container so it isn't rancid but if he doesn't dodge it, it'll both get in his eyes and make it hard for him to run after his assailant without slipping. If he does dodge it, he'll have to dodge wide, giving her space to get over the counter.

Whether he gets some in the face or has to dodge wide to avoid it, it gives his attacker some room. She runs out of the kitchen and vaults over the counter like a track star, grabbing the bag of canned goods on the floor.

She pauses just long enough for them to get a good look. Her face and hair are in monochrome like them, her hair in slight disarray, falling out of a once neat bun. But her clothes are modern and partly in color, flickering a bit, like she got them from some place deep enough in the mall that the monochromatic effect wasn't entirely in sway. It's almost like they're glitching in the black and white environment.

She doesn't say anything or try to communicate. She grabs her bag of food and starts to runs in a direction that goes deeper into the mall. They can either let her run and try to find her later, try to call out to her and hope what they say stops her, or chase after her. She's not going so fast that someone like Remy can't catch up.

"-why do things always have to be so difficult? Bud, mind trying to head her off?" Hiccup asks, before going to after the girl himself. Toothless takes off at a run in an attempt to overtake her.

"Hold on!" Hiccup calls out. Toothless will probably catch up, but he won't. Not on a leg he's not used to, anyways. "We don't wanna hurt you, we're just here for answers!"

"We just want to talk." Jennifer confirms, though while still holding her trusty metal tube. "What happened to this place?"

Because trusty metal tube is going to be so comforting to the girl.

Remy had just enough warning to be able to get his head out of the way of the grease, the suit jacket catching the worst of it. While Hiccup and Jennifer shout, he shucks it off and starts running after the girl. Which is probably not any more comforting, but they need answers.

At the end of the day, he's probably in slightly better shape than she is. He doesn't tackle her, though. The last thing they want is injuries. Instead, he reaches out, catching at her upper arm. "Slow down there, kiddo. We're new here."

He isn't very winded, but he will need a moment to get his breath back to say more than that.

[It's enough to make her slow down, because whatever she's running from wouldn't want answers. Even Remy catching up but not tackling her is enough to make her realize they're not here to do what she fears.]

[It's Jennifer that she seems to respond most to, though. Another girl, only a few years older.]

[She stills swings her bag of supplies at Remy to get her arm free, but she stops running.]

You're not trying to drag me back?

[She frowns.]

Did they trap you here too? The soldiers promised to take us to some kind of zone that kept out the Stuff but it was a lie. They brought us to this town instead.

"Gosh no. I wouldn't wish what's going on in this town on my worst enemy.." HIccup replies as Toothless walks back over to him.

"And we're definitely trapped here. Although we're not exactly 100٪ on the who, how, and why. Little bit vague on the when too, come to think about it."

Jennifer nods, and does pick up on the girl's glance. She seems young, maybe Jennifer looks like the one who can empathize the most with whatever is happening to her. She slowly puts the tube on the ground. Not that she looks threatening in any way, sure she is tall but she looks like she's going to faint in the next three minutes - which she usually does - and her overall demeanour points to everything but threatening.

"They assigned roles to us. Looks like there is a response from a disembodied audience."

Guinivere points out with surprising intelligence.

She squints at the narrator's remark, which causes laughter.

"...And overall, very strange things keep happening."

Remy takes a step back, hands up to show he means nothing. Giving her space.

"Somehow, my entire way of talking was changed when I got here. I'm from Louisiana." Which really just sounds wrong when he says it like that, if the grimace is anything to go by.

"How about we find some place to sit down and you bring us up to speed on what's going on? Anything you know could be a help here. Not just for us, but for everybody in the town." Her parents were likely out there, somewhere. People she loved. Helping everybody would be a good idea.

No. [She shakes her head, her distrust obvious.] I want to go back to my hiding spot. I can't -

I'm sorry.

[She takes in a deep breath.]

Look, all I know is we were out there surviving, you know? It was a group of us. We'd go through the ruins and scavenge. Some of us had guns we stole from an abandoned gun shop. To fight the monsters. We'd hide in buildings during the Stuff storms.

And then we met those soldiers and went along with them because they promised we'd be safe. But they lied.

They brought us here and there were these scientists. They talked about an experiment or something? That had to do with the Stuff. They wanted us for something. They said they needed us under control of something they called "The Anomaly" to get what they wanted.

They would...they would talk about us and what they wanted to do with us like we weren't even there in the room.

[She shakes her head.]

I didn't find this place right away. I wish I had. All the others...they started turning. Either into people from the TV show, or if they fought it, they sometimes turned into..something else.

[Her eyes tear up as she thinks of the people who were watching her back.]

I think I'm one of the last ones left. They don't deserve this. We always had each other backs.

[Now a few tears drip down her face and she quickly wipes them away like she's used to trying to act tough.]

And I couldn't even do anything.

[She sniffles and shoulders her bag of supplies.]

You can stay in the mall. It'll help you not turn. I'll even share supplies if you help me find stuff. But...it's just safer when I'm alone. I'll stay in my section, you stay in yours.

[It's a gracious offer from someone used to surviving in a wasteland.]

Edited 2021-03-27 03:29 (UTC)

"It's fine, we get it. This would be a rough situation for anybody."

Especially for someone on their own. At least the New Hires had each other.

"Just a couple more questions though?" She looked ready to run off again any second one, but they still needed answers.

"Do you know who the scientists were working for, and do you have any idea what's going on with the giant hole in the floor?"

Hiccup had a very definite theory about the former. It just needed confirmation. However, he wasn't holding out hope for easy answers about the pit. He was still pretty sure if they wanted those they'd have to go down there themselves.

DON'T TOUCH THAT DIAL - INVESTIGATION

ABANDONED MALL - Remy, Jennifer, Hiccup

Re: ABANDONED MALL - Remy, Jennifer, Hiccup

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