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goneawayworld2021-03-20 02:44 am
goneawaymod) wrote in goneawayworld2021-03-20 02:44 am
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.
no subject
She can still remember the sound of her skin splitting against her cheekbone as someone stamped on her face, the pop of an eye going blind. Without her magic, she has no defense but bravado, and it is, ironically, that insecure that fortifies her voice from shaking.
"Good. Better for both of us, I believe, if we're here to cooperate instead of compete in this situation. I'm Rowena." She gestures to the picture projecting on the screen of the award-winning teen filmmaker. "And that lad's Jack Nichols. Have you seen him?"
no subject
Throwing her a tight lipped smile and a little nod, he picked the flashlight back up before following her gesture toward the projection, making sure to give her space as he passed and hunching slightly to make himself smaller, as much out of habit as a conscious effort to appear non threatening.
The projection was striking to say the least. The first spattering of color since he woke up here and very clearly not from the 50's. He could tell that much even before he'd gotten close enough to read the date.
"Can't say that I have." The kid's body language and interest in making movies of the Horror/Sci-Fi/Fantasy variety was familiar but only insofar as how similar it was to himself. Trying to think back to the townie's he'd seen, he couldn't think of any that matched up. Then again, this Jack would probably be older by now.
"Man after my own heart though." He quipped, before reading on, his nose wrinkling at the mention of his preference for working on TV. "Or not. Sitcoms? Really Nic-...Oh..." As the pieces fell into place all the nervous amusement in his voice drained away.
"So...This is probably our script writer, isn't it?"
no subject
She keeps her berth from Merton, eyebrows high, knuckles white on the handle of the knife but otherwise looking composed. She can't see any common theme between her and him, anything that would have lumped them into the same sorry lot to be divvied as slave labor for an interdimensional corporation, but she knows power comes in different shapes all the time.
"I always find Michael Schur so saccharine," she says, leaving the microfiche. She slips over to the doorway and looks at the rooms, local history and newspapers. She cracks open the door to local history, pokes her head in and sees what's immediately jumps out. She won't dare try the basement unless she has reason to believe there's something in there. "Is it out of vogue to give your name where you're from?"
no subject
no subject
A person could at least be reasoned with or fought, but a place that ran off the imagination of a guy that might not even be alive, or alive in the way most people understood it? How do you deal with that?
But Rowena was right, it wasn't a lot of information. Not enough to draw any solid conclusions, and definitely not enough to warrant a panic spiral. So he quickly latches on to the new offered topic, watching as she moved onto the doors to the adjacent rooms.
"Wouldn't know. Never heard of him. Maybe he's after my time." Following her lead he took the handle to the newspaper room, cracking it open and cautiously shining his flashlight inside, but stops short of stepping in when she calls him out on avoiding saying his name, startling a nervous laugh out of him before he can swallow it back down.
So she caught that. Great. He'd kind of hoped the distraction of the microfiche would be a good enough excuse to avoid giving it.
"Oh...uh, no. I just can't. This place only lets me call myself by my character name." Couldn't say it, write it, or type it, frustratingly enough. "My last name is Dingle, though. It let me keep that much of my real name."
After a shrug and a brief sheepish smile, he quickly changes subjects by gesturing between the two rooms.
"You want to take that room, I can take this one? Divide, conquer and meet in the middle with whatever we find?" He didn't much care for the idea following her into a possibly smaller space with her hand still on that knife, and the faster the two of them made their way through whatever information this place had to offer, the better, right?
no subject
For someone with as much pride as Rowena has, she doesn't rankle at all by being directed by a teenager named Dingle. In fact, she almost seems glad for it. It's not that she isn't capable, but she is overwhelmed, and is smart enough to know that her brand of academics will likely find only ill purchase here.
How interesting, though, that he can't give her his full name - that by his claim, he can't even write it. As scared and frustrated as Rowena is with this entire situation, she can't help but bask in the feeling of awe at such a complex and comprehensive work of - well, it must be magic. The glitching local history books are hardly a flaw so much as evidence of the artisanship that must have gone into this level of reality-warping, like seeing the tiniest cracks in a statue that boast what a fragile and ambitious material it was to work with at all. She pauses, hating being temporarily blind to the supernatural forces around her, and takes a glitching book and a black and white book.
"What do you make of this?"
no subject
When she pulls out the glitching book and it's black and white counter part though, his cheeky smile falls away and his eyes widen. That's not something you see everyday.
"Woah..." He almost steps closer but remembers the knife and decidedly stays where he is, instead settling for pointing back and forth between the colorful book and the direction of the microfiche. “That’s a pattern. I wonder what's causing that. If a certain object’s significance makes it harder to change, or if something or someone is making that happen on purpose. If on purpose, to guide us or misdirect us?"
no subject
Rowena's as capable of being friendly as of being cruel, and as Dingle here is being friendly with her, she decides she's glad for the company.
"It appears to be accidental, or at least unplanned for. If someone's trying to communicate with us, they're fighting uphill, or it wouldn't be flickering in and out. If it's the other direction, if it's that someone's trying to conceal the natural color of these objects and failing, then that means that it's this sitcom madness that's struggling."
She cracks open the colorized book to see the table of contents.
no subject
The town history is refreshingly honest:
Clarksdale was incorporated in the 1700s, there was an iron foundry that created metal products and ammunition used in the Revolutionary War. At one point there was a bloody clash between rebels and Tories that resulted in the tragic loss of innocent life as the civilian members of two Tory families were killed.
The history goes on to explain the discrimination in the town and the efforts of the civil rights movement in the 1950s.
The town is flawed. The town is normal in having a flawed history. Some books gloss over the bad points of a place's history but some modern history books try to be honest and unflinching. Certainly a modern history book could gloss over the worst parts, but a book that doesn't can only potentially exist in the normal modern world, not the brushed over world of a sitcom.
The black and white book, a history of Darlington, is super rosy. It depicts the town as unflinchingly noble and rebellious against the monarchy during the Revolutionary War. There is no mention of bloody clash against Tories and the resulting loss of life.
There is no mention of a civil rights movement that had to fight against injustice in the town and in fact goes on to state that people of all types were always accepted. Everything is neat and tidy and devoid of any cultural criticism or implication anything was ever wrong there.
This could just be the result of normal historical erasure - but given the town name is different, it's also a possible attempted assertion of a painless, flawless reality.
Where he looks in the newspaper room, Merton will see the only article in color already on a counter top.
The article - an unflinching local editorial critical of a proxy war being raged - discusses rising tension in a country called Addeh Katir, where a man named Zaher Bey has been leading a violent resistance against the foreign powers fighting there there with a group insistent on being considered pirates rather than terrorists.
The article asserts that the foreign forces have been disrupting the region and points out all the civilian deaths of the Katiris, as well as the fact that all Katiri resistance has been internal, and only against military targets. Tensions between different countries - all vying for control of the region's oil deposits - has the editorial writer concerned about the potential for the conflict to erupt beyond the local conflict, especially because of rumors of use of agents like nerve gas.
The writer fears the possibility of the war spreading into a third World War.
The article was written for the Clarksdale Gazette and there is a note written on it, like someone was researching this before them, but was forced to run without what they'd collected. The note says:
Darlington = Clarksdale, NJ
Clarksdale + Katiri War = the Clarksdale of our world!!!
no subject
Nodding at her theory about the glitching, he mutters "Good point", chewing the edge of his lip thoughtfully, before turning his attention back to the newspaper room as Rowena cracks open one of the books. Giving it a quick sweep over with the flashlight again before stepping in, he finds the lone article in color and skims it over.
The contents shook him a little. It was one thing to hear about the war this world had been through in books or from people on the sterile rig. It was something else to see it talked about so plainly in a paper. It somehow made it feel more real to read about it from the words of someone living through its inevitable beginnings.
It wasn't too surprising to find confirmation that "Darlington" was a town transformed. Added credence to his theory about the place having possibly been hit during the war, or having gotten brushed by a Stuff storm. But then, if Rowena was right about the glitching being a sign that something was struggling with its hold on parts of this place, maybe something more was going on. He'd never heard of Stuff struggling to transform things.
But the note on the paper, that worried him. Maybe one of the others from the Rig had somehow found this before them, but that felt like something they would have brought up in the network post if that was the case.
"Check this out." Holding the paper up for Rowena to see when he rejoined her, he gives a quick jab at the headline and the name of the paper. "Think you were on to something with that last theory." Then turning it to the note scribbled on it, he gives that another jab before offering the paper for her to look over for herself.
"And it seems like we're not the only ones who came here looking for answers."
no subject
"It appears not. Good eye." She plucks the note from Merton's hand. "This group of us, all us slaves to the Jorgmund...do we tend to cooperate, or are we a relatively disorganized unit?"
Because if everyone can be trusted to alert the others when they've explored somewhere or found something, the way they'll report this back to their communicators will be very different.
Rowena takes the colored photograph off the microfiche and tucks it into her purse.
no subject
"Not sure from experience. I'm pretty new here. But from what I've seen from the network archives, we seem to be a mix. Disorganized, with no set structure or leader, but cooperative about it. Hard to believe anyone would have found something like this and not reported it to the rest of the group." He lets his assumption that the note-taker wasn't one of them go unspoken. Partly because it feels obvious, and partly out of a fear that if it isn't obvious, it will make him sound paranoid.
"Was there anything useful in the books?"
no subject
Covens are nasty hives of cattiness and backbiting, and the only thing you can trust a Winchester about is that they'll always protect each other before anything else.
"Only enough to determine that the Darlington we're in appears to be a fanciful cover-up for the mundane horrors of American history." The whole country's younger than Rowena by a wide margin, and she'll never be able to imagine it as anything but a squalling baby of a nation anyway. "So, Dingle. How long have you been under the Jorgmund's thumb?"
no subject
The question of how long he'd been on the rig gets him to worry at the edge of his lip, brow creasing at the realization that he actually has to think about it. That was...kind of unsettling.
"Three weeks I think. Time gets kind of funny when you don't see the sun and every day is pretty much the same. I've been mostly keeping track of the days based on our training schedules. If I have to be in the gym by five, it's a day that starts with a T and we begin by getting drop kicked into heck." It didn't take being on the Rig long to figure out he wasn't a fan of their training sessions. Never again would he complain about a vanilla gym class. He'd always had the opinion that physed teachers were sadistic but Planker really took that to a whole new level.