Welcome to Hemlock Falls

[Craft]

Craft chuckles, "I think a major freakout is more than earned here..."

He's taking the mysterious voices in one's head offering guidance thing in stride. Because, well, it's not exactly uncommon among his peers nowadays. But there's definitely curiosity as to WHO this lady is. Could it be Gaia? Or perhaps some other nature god -- Craft has met more than one over the past few years.

"The Lady who's talking to you. The Green Lady. Does she have any names other than that?"

As for Sarah's questions he thinks for a moment before answering, "And maybe he won't be able to hijack your abilities now that you know you have them?" He offers a shrug, "I'm thinking at least that whatever ...magic... you have is different from whatever Marcos and I have. But maybe not."

He looks down the tunnel and frowns again, "What's down here that Dave is trying to keep us from?"

 

[Sarah Whittaker]

((Holding for Marcos, and tossing a question in...))

Sarah seems thoughtful, and eventually asks - as if somewhat absent-mindedly - "Aaron, have any family stories about someone taken by the woods? Or the falls?"

 

[Atrus]

((I think you meant Aaron there?))

 

[Sarah Whittaker]

((Um ... yeah. Sorry.))

 

[Marcos Medeiros]

((Sorry for the wait! It’s been a bit of a rough week. I’ll edit this with my reply tomorrow. ))

 

[Atrus]

((New reply, please, or I won't get the notification! ))

 

[Marcos Medeiros]

Marcos chuckles as well.

”You are allowed a freak out, yes,” he says. Though he smiles easily, he rolls his shoulders to release some tension. “It’s almost a rite of initiation in our world.”

After staring down the tunnel for a good few seconds — he’s sure that something, or someone, will come running up the moment that he looks away — he turns his attention to Aaron. And to Sarah’s and Craft’s questions, he adds, “The Green Lady, is she related to the old hemlock downtown?” He glances at Sarah. “You said it was very important to this town, yes? That everything was built around it?” A pause, and a wry smile. “Yes, I did actually pay attention to the tour guide.”

 

[Atrus]

Aaron seems mostly stable on his feet now. "The hemlock? No, I told you at Dave's place, it's just an old tree. And uhm, no, no death in the woods or by water that I know of. If there was one, I'm sure grandpa would have told us by now. Seventeen times over."

He turns his gaze to Craft. "She doesn't have a name. The green lady is what I call her because, well, she appears like a green woman. A bit translucent, like a, dunno, what're they called, holograms? I kept asking her how could she not have a name, at the start, but she just said things like 'this unit is a visual interface'. I gave up after a while and just started calling her 'hey, lady'."

Aaron starts walking down the tunnel again, a bit unsteady. "The place where she is, I've never seen it. The passage is too narrow even for me. But it's down here. And if Dave can just do things without her approval,", he says, obviously meaning the supernatural occurrences by his inflection, "maybe he can dig the way open and get to the lady. And that wouldn't be good. I may not like Hemlock Falls, but that don't mean I want it to... whatever happens to crap towns in the middle of nowhere when all the people leave."
He stares down the darkness in the rock passage, suddenly looking younger than his age, and vulnerable. "I want to leave But it would break my parents' heart if they had to move."

 

[Sarah Whittaker]

Sarah makes a small derogatory noise. "Maybe you shouldn't have. Seems like the tour guide didn't know anything." She follows Aaron, and says in a tone that implies that she's quoting. "My dear, your family has lived in Kendrick's Crossing for generations. Your mother was born here, and your grandfather. Your great-grandfather's grave is in the cemetary. How can you want to leave?"

She goes back to her own voice. "Alright. So ... " She closes her eyes and stops moving, and starts trying to think about how it felt to 'exorcise' Dave's ghost. It feels like learning to meditate or some other special kind of thinking. And it feels a little bit silly. How can this be reality?

Stop thinking that. Just find out how to take control, keep control, of my own power. How can I have power? NO, not that line of thought. Control. My power. I control how it's used.

 

[Craft]

"These sorts of things never come with an instruction booklet..." Craft says, though to no-one in particular.

The mention of a visual interface does give Craft a moment to thing. He's been approaching this as though something supernatural was occurring in the town, but it's starting to seem that it's more technological. Could the 'Lady' be a byproduct of some third age tech or something else? Figures that the only two secret worlders without the ability to sense the dead would be the ones deep in this possibly haunted mine.

"I'd like to meet this... 'Lady' sometime..." Craft says quietly, "But I think that can wait until we find Dave and figure out what he's up to down here."

 

[Marcos Medeiros]

“Ah, yes.” Marcos rubs the nape of his neck and smiles somewhat apologetically at Aaron. “I must have been soaking up the rain when you said that.”

Holograms, though? That piques Marcos’s interest. Maybe his pirate senses are tingling. Maybe he needs to get his grubby pirate fingers all over whatever this fancy tech is. Or maybe he’s excited that he’ll see a thing that he only sees in Star Wars in real life.

Ah, there’s yet a place for wonder in the secret world.

“I can try to make the passage bigger once we find it,” Marcos says, idly floating a few pebbles above his open palm. “And, ah... if Dave did not get there first.”

 

[Atrus]

Once they had collected themselves a little, the group continued down the tunnel, holding their torches high. Aaron seemed stable on his feet now, but he lamented not being able to direct them precisely as he could before, so they were paying extra attention to where they put their feet, and any signs of creaking wood and falling dirt.

Eventually, after a few turns and bifurcations, they started to hear a sound again, as of moving dirt. Following the sound thy eventually got to a light source, and a half-collapsed section of wall, that Dave, down on his knees, was scrabbling at with his hands, trying to get rocks and detritus out of the way. He didn't acknowledge or turn to them, but his sottovoce babbling turned louder: "She is here. She is here. The dark voices don't like the sound of her light. They want to meet. They want to flee. Maybe she can make it stop. Maybe we can eat up all the golden, golden light. Maybe she can burn away the bad, bad dreams."

 

[Sarah Whittaker]

Sarah's initial attempt to get control of her own mind is distracted by the pebble-floating pirate. But when people move on, she goes with them. Scraps of half-forgotten mantras come from her direction, occasionally.

I shall not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that ... does something.

The time has come, the walrus said, to speak of many things. Of shoes and ships and ... some sort of wax. Damn.

Ba weep gra na weep nini bon.

A pause, then.

And about when they encounter Dave, she smirks a little. If that fiction book from way back when is right, if she really focuses her thoughts on something that makes no sense, a telepath has a lot of trouble getting past that nonsense. So maybe if she focusses her thoughts on nonsense, Dave can't get past the nonsense and use her power.
So she starts thinking 'loudly', trying to think at him. Thinking numbers. Out of sequence numbers. Including fractions.

9. 32. 5. 33 and a half. two thousand six hundred fifty four. 3.14159. 6. eight by ten to the negative three hundred and sixteen.

 

[Craft]

Craft follows behind Marcos quietly, trying to keep aware of his surroundings despite the near pitch black. As he eventually begins to hear the muttering of Dave and see his shadowed form in the light, Craft's made to pause by the words he's uttering:

"She is here. She is here. The dark voices don't like the sound of her light. They want to meet. They want to flee. Maybe she can make it stop. Maybe we can eat up all the golden, golden light. Maybe she can burn away the bad, bad dreams."

He looks from Aaron to Sarah to Marcos and then takes a step forward, looking down at Dave as he 'works'.
His mutterings don't feel like madness to Craft. Golden Light. She is here. He wonders if Dave has some how stumbled across an opening to the Agartha, or had been touched by Anima.

"Dave..." Craft starts, speaking softly, "We want to help you. We can help you."

 

[Marcos Medeiros]

‘The dark voices’? Ooooh boy.

Marcos tries, with difficulty, to summon a flame so that he can take a better look at Dave.

And then he remembers that he brought a flashlight. He fishes it out of his bag and points it in Dave’s direction.

‘Please no tentacles. Please no tentacles.’

Marcos isn’t feeling brave enough, at the moment, to approach Dave as Craft is. Instead, he stays with Aaron and Sarah, staying alert for anything that might try to sneak up behind them.

 

[Atrus]

There were no tentacles or dark tendrils sprouting on Dave ('yet', Marcos' probably well-founded paranoia added). He was drenched, dusty, his hands starting to bleed from the scrapes he got trying to remove the stones, but still looking very much human.

Though at first he didn't seem to have heard Craft's words, his frantic digging slowed down and, eventually he turned to face them, eyes a little vacant, but the mind behind them still there. "Help. Help? Can you help? Can you take me to the place of wonders? They want to go there. They-"

Dave's eyes set on Sarah, and they snapped back on focus. His voice seems calmer now, composed: "I used to just have bad dreams. The explosion. The deaths. The world breaking... open. Just for a second. Enough for the voices to burn their words into my head. But you- you made the dreams real. When they're outside, they're not in me. When they're outside they stop shouting in my head."
Dave licks his lips, not in hunger, but anticipation: "You can let them all out. Take the bad dreams away. She listens to you. Please."

 

[Sarah Whittaker]

Sarah - for a fraction of a moment - forgets to keep mis-counting.

Her voice as she speaks is a but stuttery, as she tries to continue counting while saying what she thinks she needs to say. "Dave, I ... I think I will need Her help, or Aaron's, or maybe these other two."

51. Seven hundred ninety six. twenty three and a fraction. Square root of negative 1.

"We don't want the dreams to be outside, hurting people. But we do need to stop them from shouting in your head." She looks at Aaron. No words, but the expression is clear 'help me?'

Ninety eight thousand, five hundred sixty three.

 

[Craft]

Craft looks back to Sarah and Aaron for a moment, wondering exactly what other dreams Sarah might have made real. With Dave's mention of explosions and death, his mind instantly went to the filth and Kaidan. Could there be a wellspring of the black stuff around Hemlock Falls? He wasn't sure, but if there were two opposing forces at work here, and Dave was somehow infected with the filth, it would likely mean the lady Dave spoke of was Gaia.

But that didn't seem right.

He kneels beside Dave, "We want to help you. But we need to know more. When did the dreams start for you?"

 

[Marcos Medeiros]

While Sarah and Craft are busy coaxing answers out of Dave, Marcos approaches the half-collapsed wall. He gingerly places a hand on the damp stones and focuses, tries to sense if there is anything at all on the other side.

 

[Atrus]

Aaron was pinching the bridge of his nose when Sarah turned to him for help. It looked like the headache was back, and he wouldn't be much help right there and then.

"There was..." Dave was looking between Craft and Sarah, furrowing his brow, as if remembering was difficult, or painful. "We were on our second tour. Everything seemed regular. We were just patrolling. Then a bomb exploded. Not just a mine. Something big."
As Dave talked, grains of sand started slowly rolling around the floor of the cave, and a dry heat began to spread - subtly enough that the group would not notice immediately.

As Dave talked, Marcos extended his senses beyond the rocks and... felt. There was something beyond, that was for sure. Something powered by anima. He didn't feel it properly before because, now that he knew what to look for, he could feel it all around them. A stretched lattice, permeating the rock, and the air, and probably the trees and the grass and the water and the whole land around Hemlock Falls. A projection framework, a scaffolding of sorts that someone - or something - could use to exert their power anywhere, anywhen, altering the world, creating things. That was the thing that allowed Aaron, and Sarah, and Dave to project their thoughts into reality. That was how the green lady exerted her protection over town.
Marcos had the slightly disturbing feeling that some of this information had just been pushed into his head.

"Our truck was slammed off the road. The armor held, barely, but we were all jostled up inside. I was the first to get up, get to a window, look outside. There were... stars. Not the distant ones, at night. The air had broken. It was just looking into space, if space was bright as day. Rocks, planets, orbiting around one another. All dead. All barren. But still on fire, burning forever like dark suns, and then the voices looked out of that hole in the air, and they started whispering. Then the hole closed, and the stars disappeared, but the voices remained. They never left my ears. They come in my dreams. They never stop."

They all heard the same overlapping voices now, nudging directly the back of their brain, without doing anything as mundane as pass through their ears first: "We see you. You are all made of stars."

Aaron collapsed to his knees, crying. Sarah's random numbers and whatever Aaron had been doing to counteract Dave had evidently failed, as the small cave was suddenly filling with pouring hot sand, and the ceiling started reflecting the turquoise of a non-existent desert sky. And the air was rippling, as if a hole was about to open.