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wildestlogs2021-11-09 09:35 pm
wildestmods) wrote in wildestlogs2021-11-09 09:35 pm
HEARTSTONE TROLLMARKET ※ CAMP
HEARTSTONE TROLLMARKET
The Nightrenders and the Sisters stop following their prey once they get some distance into the woods. The protective aura coming from the shelter up north is full of deep protective magic.
It is a strange place. It looks like a massive cavern underground was somehow thrust up through earth and stone, until the roof and one wall cracked and fell in many places, creating a sort of canyon with rounded inner walls. If they look up they'll see a starry band of the night sky through the cracked roof. The rocks clearly crushed some houses and businesses but seem to have finally settled, so it's safe to wander around.
The way the ceiling opened was a source of far more tragedy than the falling rocks, though. When day breaks, they'll see the band of sunlight that cut through this community. Scattered through this band of light are large figures wrapped in sheets and blankets, tied in place with pieces of bright cloth. Little trinkets lay scattered at their feet. If anyone takes one of the blankets off, they'll see the petrified figure of a troll, their stone face forever etched in fear and surprise. It's clear from the cloth coverings and the trinkets that this is a people that cared for their dead, and that had community and family life. Among some of the trinkets are the drawings of children and dolls left for their lost loved one.
Market stalls have been ransacked, house doors are open, with larders of whatever this people ate empty, like the people here left very suddenly. Perhaps they felt the need to leave because of their sudden exposure - their community not thrust on the surface, the walls and ceiling holding back the sun crumbling.
Or perhaps the were nervous because of what was happening to the great crystal at the center of their world: the Heartstone. This great glowing crystal that got folded into the Wilderlands, was the nexus of magical energy of a world, its lifeblood, the beating heart of all magic. It sustained and protected the trolls.
It is cracked and dying. Dimming to a deeper color, occasionally flickering in a way that shows that someday it will dim completely. But not tonight. Tonight its nourishing, protective magic will keep the monsters away and give them some light in the dark. Even without the torches of the trolls, the Heartstone's light causes gems and crystals in the cavern - now a canyon - to glimmer with its protective light.
❧ Quest magic: Players can handwave that the quest bond magic ultimately tugged the group to the Heartstone, eventually teleporting any stragglers to it. Once the group is gathered there, no one can go far without getting teleported back.
❧ Time Period: The mods will set up a top-level for the night they all arrived, and a top-level for players to post their ongoing threads set over the ensuing days. Unless the group decides to leave faster, they will likely stay there for several IC days. (And the mods will probably allow this rest stop to run 1-2 OOC weeks, but will touch base with the playerbase on their preferences.)
❧ NPCing: No npcs are left in Trollmarket - the trolls have abandoned their now unsafe home. However, gnomes can be found wandering the canyon. The gnomes seem sentient, as they clearly speak a squeaky language that just can't be translated, but they're near feral, once the pests of the trolls. They're small, extremely fast, massively strong for their tiny sizes, and love to steal the belongings of bigger people. Groups of them sometimes gang up to carry larger items. They're also aggressive: prone to biting with their pointy teeth, and taking off their pointy caps and leaping at people to stab them with the pointy horns on the tops of their heads.
❧ Supplies: There is no human food in Trollmarket and the remains of any stalls advertising food make that clear. The trollish writing on the signs is translated by translation magic to Sylvaen, the language they've all gained knowledge of. Apparently the trolls liked to eat rocks and various minerals, socks stolen from humans, and cats. Fortunately, the cages from the stalls advertising the last one are empty, and the feral cat colony around Trollmarket makes it clear they weren't taken as emergency rations. (Occasionally there is a great racket as the gnomes and cats go to war.) However, there are resources like course cloth, woolen blankets, and sewing and cobbling materials. There are also leather goods like satchels, packs, and belts. There is rope. And waxy paper that can be used to wrap food supplies.
❧ Weapons: There are weapons that can be found in places, but not many. The trolls were not a peaceful people but they settled most of their problems with simple, non-fatal brawling, rather than anything crueler, only fighting against outside attackers. The few weapons that can be found are very large and heavy, clearly meant for war. They're built for a people that averages 8-10 feet tall and only the strongest and largest among the squad will find them anything but unwieldy. However, there are a few "small" knives of crude metal that can be used as short swords, and metal shields probably used as bucklers, that would work as full shields for normal-sized people.
❧ Forest resources: The woods around Trollmarket are safe, especially if traversed during the day. They're full of potential food, for those that know what to look for. There are wild blueberries, raspberries, and huckleberries, and enough flat, dark rocks to dry fruit in the sun. At the edge of a nearby pond are cattails, with edible roots, and reeds and grasses that can be used for basket-making. Dandelions grow everywhere, with edible flowers and roots, and there are edible marigold flowers. There's ample firewood, pieces of flint (though it takes time to find them), and wild game like deer and rabbits. The trolls' cookware, cutlery, and knives can be used to cook and dress animals, but might be heavy to take along. Water can be found in the pond (though it'd need boiling), or in small, cleaner springs in the woods.
❧ Spells: Archivists will find that there are little springs in the woods that they can draw spells from. The mods will make up random spells for Archivist players that request one.
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Obviously. Spencer's Gordian knot of hair and froggy croak of a voice could fool someone into thinking it's actually morning and not halfway through the afternoon.
"I'm..." Spencer wrings her hand into the tartan fabric and bites her lip. "I'm Spencer."
Giving anyone any information at all feels like walking into a trap, but Spencer's so turned around between what she knows and what whoever's doing this to her knows and what she thinks she knows that she's too exhausted of second-guessing herself to be as guarded as she thinks she should be.
"Do you know a lot about plants?"
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"I'm Elle."
She doesn't bring up Spencer's appearance or clear frustration at being awake. She figures she's probably feeling exposed and vulnerable enough as it is.
"Yeah, I studied rare herbs for a while. How to identify them, how to care for them, how to use them; that kind of thing. I was training to take over for someone who specialized in all that stuff."
Elle runs through sources of caffeine in her head.
"Okay, yaupon holly is glossy with serrated leaves and white flowers. Dahoon holly would work too. It looks the same but has thinner, smoother leaves," she's closing her eyes, trying to picture Owen's lessons.
"Plants with caffeine, other than coffee beans, are yerba mate, guarana, and kola nuts. Yerba mate is an evergreen tree that with leaves similar to holly, red berries, and green-white flowers. Guarana is a vine with red berries that will sometimes burst, showing their black seeds. Cola trees are pretty big with long, ovoid leaves, cream flowers with dark purple striations, and green pods that contain large nuts."
Elle recites it as if she's gone over the information over and over again until she had it memorized.
"Any of those should work for you. Some of them need to be prepared, some of them you can just pop in your mouth and start chewing."
Should she enable this girls caffeine dependence? Who knows, but now is probably not the time to go cold-turkey. They can work on trying wean Spencer off in the future, right now being functional is much more important.
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"That's really cool." Spencer feels lame saying that, but she supposes that her rhetorical gifts aren't exactly going to be coming to the forefront in this kind of situation. It is cool. Spencer's special interests were never herbs and plants, but her mother does love her garden and Spencer did spend a lot of her childhood reading seed packets, latin names, recommendations for soil types.
"I just knew the yaupon holly because it's one of the only caffeinated plants in North America." She frowns slightly, thinking that if Elle's banking on plants from further locales, maybe they really are further from North America than Spencer was hoping. Maybe there really isn't any rescue coming.
Maybe the magic here is all real.
"Ilex vomitoria. Supposedly it's no even an emetic, that's just what settlers thought based on their interpretations of rituals by the native people." Spencer's smile becomes a little more genuine when she's getting to be a nerd too.
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"Yaupon holly and dahoon holly, yeah. And it's not emetic, it was just drunken in massive quantities after a period of dehydration and fasting. Plus, the "Black Drink", as colonizers call it, existed in some form in most southeastern tribes. It's recipes and uses may not have been consistent throughout."
Elle's own heritage may be from Northern California, but she loves learning about other Indigenous cultures in North America. It makes her feel more connected with her identity, since she wasn't able to truly explore until she was older.
She's loving the chance to talk about this with someone else her age. She spends so much time with just her pack, or working with killi, that she doesn't get the chance to geek out like this very often.
She starts leading Spencer toward the woods that Elle had been exploring.
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"So are you saying yaupon holly was most common in the southeast, or just that those are the tribes that decided to use it for ceremonies?"
She follows where Elle is leading her.
"And uh, do you have, uh..." Spencer looks at her tattered prom dress that is paltry warmth and far from practical in this setting. "Do you know where I can get some clothes, while we're at it? Just something besides heels to walk in, and, uh. Pants."
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"They both mainly grow in the southeast, and both were used in rituals, but Yaupon has more caffeine so it was used more often. They're similar enough that people often get them mixed up."
Elle looks around as they walk. She tries to subtly use her heightened sense of smell to tell whether anything suitable is in the area. She doesn't want to freak Spencer out, after all.
"Unfortunately not. I already had to borrow a shirt from someone after last night. I'm pretty sure there are some leftover clothes from in the houses that you could make work, but I don't know if you'll have much luck with footwear."
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Much cooler than the fact that she's going to need to stick it out in these miserable shoes.
"The person who brought me here dressed me in this ridiculous outfit." Spencer sighs and turns in a circle as if showing off the dress, which was always pug-ugly, but which is at this point a pitiful mass of stained, tattered rags. Her feet have obvious blisters from running in her dressy high heels. "Trust me, if I could choose what I was wearing today, I'd be in sneakers."
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"Here, I don't mind going barefoot," she off her light brown, faux-suede oxford-style flats and her torn-up knee-high socks. They're not ideal for wilderness exploration, but they're better than heels. "If any place gets too rocky, I can always shift. Might not be a bad idea to have someone wandering around in Sokto anyway," she says, more to herself than Spencer.
She holds out her socks and shoes to see if Spencer will take them.
"What do you mean, person who brought you here?"
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"Sorry...paranoid by habit. Thank you." She should given them back, she knows. She should say oh, you don't have to and hand them over, but her feet hurt so badly, and better to be a little rude with shoes on than a little polite in heels that keep her from moving fast.
"Shift? Sokto?" She starts to fit the socks on. "I was kidnapped before coming here."
She's pretty sure this is part of the kidnapping, still. Like maybe A put them on an island to hunt like in The Most Dangerous Game or some other twisted extension of A's game.
"And when I was kidnapped, we got forced to put together a prom."
Because that makes sense.
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She's glad when Spencer takes the shoes. She thinks back to that other girl who also showed up in a prom dress and wishes she had another pair to offer her, too.
"Oh, yeah. I'm- uh. I'm a shapeshifter. You might've seen me back at the fair, the big cat monster?" she tries to say this as casually as possible. Elle doesn't know if Spencer will even believe her, but the cat's already out of the bag, if you will.
"That's... yikes, dude. That sucks," Elle definitely wants to know what course of events led to that happening, but she figures right now probably isn't the time to pry.
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Spencer pauses for a moment putting on the second sock as she turns that over in her head. Is Elle fucking with her? Has Spencer just finally cracked from the torture? Is Elle delusional?
Is it true?
The only way to find out right now is to play along as if that isn't a bizarre piece of information, so Spencer continues with her sock.
"Honestly? I slept through most of the faire." Spencer gestures at her rat's nest of hair, which still has some straw in it along with ash and twigs.
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"Yeah. It's hard to believe, I know. I could show you, if you want, but it's not super pretty to watch."
Elle snorts. "That's impressive, it was a loud mess out there.
"Do you need help with that? I don't have a comb, but I can help untangle it and I've got some hair ties."
She pulls out a couple of rubber bands from her skirt pocket. She's impressed that they survived the fight.
What can she say? Elle is a girl who likes to be prepared.
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Because Spencer is so curious, but she doesn't want to put Elle through something painful just to sate Spencer's fascination. Not when Elle has been kind enough to give Spencer her shoes.
"I was sleep-deprived." It would sound facetious, except the expression on Spencer's face and the deadness of her tone indicates that it's not just a teenage girl up late cramming for a winter final or with boy trouble insomnia. It's the kind of blank, ugly tone that war prisoners take on when discussing torture. "And starved."
Dehydrated more than starved, actually - but it's not like Spencer's eaten much since getting here, just some berries here or there, because she doesn't know how to catch a rabbit and she's scared of everyone here. Water's at least been easier to find, and Spencer's one summer of Girl Scouts equipped her to make a little fire to boil it.
Spencer reaches for the rubber bands and gingerly takes them. "What don't you have on hand?"
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Elle sobers a little at Spencer's confession. She's seen that expression before. Hell, she's worn it more than a few times herself.
"Have you eaten anything yet? I can catch you something and cook it up, and I know a couple people have been grabbing berries and stuff. We all need to take care of ourselves as much as possible while we can, we don't know what's going to happen next."
Elle laughs. "I have a bad habit of getting stuck places I shouldn't, so I started carrying small useful crap like rubber bands and bobby pins."
She empties out her pockets to show Spencer. They're surprisingly large, especially for a shorter skirt.
Along with the aforementioned items, she has a small, matching pink notebook and pen, a crumpled receipt, a couple of unused tissues, a half pack of gum, and a novelty fridge magnet.
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Or maybe they're in virtual reality, like Kon speculated.
"I've been getting handfuls of berries here or there. I, uh. I don't mean to be rude or self-sabotaging, but I don't want to eat anything that I didn't see caught or taken off the vine." Tampering with Spencer's food was one of the first threats in an escalating campaign of stalking and kidnapping.
She laughs at the contents of the pockets. "Cute notebook. I always carry bobby pins on me for lockpicking. The person who kidnapped me just stripped them off me along with everything else."
Spencer remembers waking up naked under a blanket, being grateful that at least she still had her kidneys. She doesn't think anything was done to her, but she doesn't know and probably never will.
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[It's not that Elle even trusts any of these people, except maybe Stacia, but being friendly and showing good faith puts her in a much better position in a group than visible distrust does.]
"Well, if you find yourself in need of one, you can come to me."
Elle takes a step back.
"Okay, you probably want to back up. I can shift into a few forms, but I'll go for the big scary cat monster this time."
And she begins to shift. She takes it a little slower than usual, wanting to let Spencer observe the process as much as possible. She goes from a 5'6" teenage girl to an 8-foot monster in a handful of moments. She has the coloration and markings of a North American mountain lion.
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But she also realizes that she's seen this before, and the a-hah! tempers the anxiety.
"Puma concolor." It's a mountain lion. Elle's a mountain lion. That means that the wolf she saw grow into an eight-foot monster was probably also a person undergoing the same transformation. "Can people do that to become wolves?"
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"Yeah, we've got a few of them out here with us."
It's a growly, unpleasant sound, but it's understandable.
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Spencer looks for a word that doesn't sound accusatory. By now, she should know how to sugar up distrust, but maybe it's the fear or how confusing everything still is.
"Okay to be around?"
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"Oh, yeah! The werewolves are great. I mean, I don't know them all personally, but I do know Stacia, and she trusts them, and I trust her," she tries to reassure Spencer.
"They're no more dangerous than anyone else here, especially not to us," okay, that's technically a lie, but she knows that they would never purposefully be a danger to an ally.
"Like, they're big and scary, don't get me wrong, but they don't just... hurt people for no reason. Not this group, anyway. I can't speak for werewolves as a whole, because some of them are dicks."
Elle is making sure to keep her body language as casual as possible to show that she has no issue with the wolves. She's also trying to be fairly transparent. She's gotten the impression that Spencer wouldn't trust half-truths.
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"One of them drove me here. Up north. I was trying to run south." Spencer states that neutrally, even though in her head it's an accusation. She wanted to be getting away from this by any means necessary, and she got rounded up with this group, and she's scared of what that might mean no matter how nice Elle is to her.
She starts to run her fingers through her matted hair and yank knots out.
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"I can't say for sure, but I would imagine they were trying to keep you with the group. Going any other direction was a bigger risk, and people falling behind would've been more vulnerable to those creatures. Sticking together is probably our safest bet, for now.
"If something happened to you, no one would've known, and no one would've been able to help. I'm not a huge fan of anything that's been going on. I don't like not knowing what's happening or why, and I certainly don't like being yanked from my life without permission."
This is the most intense and unhappy Elle has been so far. She's kept her attitude fairly upbeat, overall, but Spencer needs to know that people here are just as lost as her.
"Some people have more experience with this kind of mystic bullshit than others. I'm not saying you should trust everyone here, not by a long shot," that would be extremely hypocritical if she did "but you'll be able to get much better idea of what's happening and who did it if you stay with a consistent group. If they're all out to get you, you can start learning their weaknesses. If they end up being on your side, you have a large set of allies with varied abilities and strengths."
Elle is sharing a glimpse of what's been going through her mind since they all got here. It seems Spencer isn't going to trust anything that looks like altruism, she needs utility and strategy.
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It's because, Spencer knows, she's hungry and underslept and confused and wearing clothes that reek of smoke and body odor and yanking knots of her hair out so hard her scalp's going to start bleeding, it's because she's talking to a shapeshifter and has had to quickly accept that that's even a thing someone can be, it's because she just jumped out of being tortured into a situation where she isn't sure she isn't about to get suckered into more torture, it's because the one solace she had during the worst of the last two years - her friends - has been taken from her. It's because all these things, but that doesn't change the fact that the only thing Spencer can think about is how she's fucked this up.
There was an opportunity to take advantage of the resources and expertise in this group, but Spencer was too scared to engage and now she's made a terrible first impression. Mona's probably already got half this camp wrapped around her finger, and Spencer's fear hasn't gotten her any useful information or protection.
"I'm sorry," she whimpers, bursting into tears.
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"It's.. a lot. Believe me, I know. But there's nothing you need to apologize for. You've been doing the best you can in a shitty situation with the information you had. You can't expect yourself to be able to rationalize when you're in the middle of a crisis," Elle says gently.
"But you're not alone, right now. I'm not asking you to trust me, but try to trust that I have nothing to gain from hurting you. We're in a relatively isolated spot in the woods, I could've hurt you at any point, but I didn't," she hopes that she's making the right call in how to comfort Spencer. She doesn't think Spencer has felt safe in a long time, and she wants to help her start on that. "So right here, right now, you're not in active danger. We'll get you some food that you can watch me prepare, and we'll both eat it so you know it's safe, and we'll do that same thing with water, and we'll find you a safe, out-of-the-way place where you can rest some more."
Elle always does better with a plan of action, and hopefully this one is straight-forward enough for Spencer to process, and has enough safeguards for Spencer to feel safe.
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She nods at the proposals, and she wishes she had it together enough to be as strong a person for Elle as Elle is being for her. "Please. Yeah. That sounds good. I'm okay."
Spencer's not okay, but Elle's doing everything possible to get Spencer there, and that's going to have to be enough. Spencer finishes sobbing and wipes her face with her hands.
"Okay. Sorry. Let's find food."
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/wrap?