quietplacelogs | INTRO LOG #1

INTRO LOG #1
Muzzle and Mute
Content Warnings: Disorientation, memory loss, confusion
Themes: Arrival, survival, exploration, horror

You wake, standing. A thick, muddy red dust coats your skin and clothes - it sticks to your tongue and blocks your vision. Inhale and it chokes you, exhale and your breath puffs out in front of your face in a transparent maroon cloud. It tastes of copper, tangy and harsh. Movement is difficult, every limb tingles and aches. Look to your left, your right. Evenly spaced in each direction stands another person indistinguishable in every way from the next. You're disoriented and lethargic, unable to grasp onto a single thought. A pinprick of light blooms ahead and grows steadily larger; a door has opened.

Hands grip your wrists, push at the small of your back and guide you out of the darkness into a room with four walls and a thin, sagging ceiling. The plaster is peeling, the air is musty, and the floor is slick. White plastic piping juts up from the center and curves into multiple spouts, clean water flowing in uneven streams. Those hands pull your clothes off and clear the dust from your body, redress you in handsewn jumpsuits. By the time they’re through, you will have begun to come back to yourself.

A finger is pressed to your lips. Kind eyes meet your own and a single word is whispered - hush.

Led out of the room in a line, you’re taken down a short hallway and into another, much larger room. There’s a woman waiting for you there, a child hugging her leg, and a cloth bag in her hands. She reaches in and pulls out a device, passes one to each of you. Once finished, she begins to move both hands in graceful gestures, a language. One of the people who helped you lifts their device and the screen lights up, tracks the woman’s hands. Letters appear on the screen and you understand the device’s purpose. She tells you what she knows and it’s not much.

This world is haunted. Noise attracts them, so it is not allowed. Communication is through body language, soundless writing, and the device. She tells you that your feet must be light and your mouth never used. There is a community outside these doors, where you can survive together, but only if you agree to one thing: complete and total silence. You'll have time to talk it over. You may ask one question and receive one answer.

Acceptance allows you to journey outside. The ground is marked in pathways of sand, lining the paths to each building and everywhere in-between. You notice that the locals hold their devices always, aloft and glance to it often. It will not vibrate or make a sound to signal a message. Notices appear. Rules. Guidelines. Feet on the sand and never anywhere else. To open a door you brush your fingers along the hinges - oiled and you may enter. If not, take the brush from the can sitting nearby and coat the metal with the dark liquid.

Now, you're to settle into your new home.

The Man in the Hat
Content Warnings: Heavy lifting, following the rules, alcoholism
Themes: Moving in, survival, exploration, horror

Once you’ve claimed a room for yourself, it’s time to acclimate to the community. Natives will ask what you need and take you along the sandpaths to different areas in the city to gather supplies - furniture and the like. Heavier items will require assistance and will take longer. Houses are mostly empty so if you and your housemates need something, you’ll have to carry it and put it inside the home. Do not make any noise or the natives will refuse to help you. Getting to know your housemates is key to a smooth transition. They are going through what you are right now; take the time to get to know them. Make house rules.

As the first day gives way to night, the natives can be seen moving at a faster pace outside. They’re hurried, though not frightened. Some even smile at you. When the sun sets behind the ruins of what was once picturesque Reims, your device will signal that it’s time to meet at the center of the community. There, natives will stop each person and give them a small gift - a trinket, a token to show that they are trying their best to make all the new arrivals feel at home. These are all items from the character’s home or from another character's home (they will not be anything that belongs to anyone else). Small, soundless and either something taken during the application process or something brand new. They will have no powers to speak of and are meant to be a momento. If asked, the natives found them the same way they found each of you.

Then the party starts. Sort of. A soundless, stitled kind of celebration. Fun is meant to be had, but it’s not an overly joyous occasion. The natives simply don’t know how to cut loose. There will be extra food in the form of one and two; Phillipa even brought some of her homemade bread. If you stumble across a man wearing a hat, the only man in town who does, and agree to go with him when he offers to show you his house - he’ll gift you with a jar of hooch; it’ll burn on the way down.

Sound Eaters
Content Warnings: Threat, danger
Themes: Survival, exploration, horror, game plot

It’s the second day of your stay, and the natives call for an emergency meeting at the Town Hall. Everyone is paired off (see below) and are asked to walk the perimeter looking for anything out of place and patching any areas that might have been affected by weather. Once finished, the same is done on the inside, and when the community leader is satisfied, the main hall is opened up so that everyone can congregate. Characters, during this time only, are allowed to make sound. This is so that the natives can explain why silence is so necessary...

The Sound Eaters.

In an effort not to frighten everyone, the natives won’t go into the history just yet, but they will warn that when someone makes a sound, it attracts them. They don’t know what they look like because they are so fast. If you’re too loud, then in the blink of an eye, you’ll go through a room reset. This is because either the natives ‘silenced’ you or the Sound Eaters have. They will explain that the room came at the same time the Sound Eaters did and that it doesn’t work for the natives. Sometimes, it doesn’t work on new arrivals. Death, for those born in this world, is permanent. If you attract them, you’ll get someone killed. Hence the need for no noise. During the meeting, the natives will tell each character of their own experiences. Their losses. The families they have left and how they’d do anything to keep them alive. They don’t know if you’ll be reset, but is that a risk you’re willing to take? The meeting will last a few hours and will end on a somber, ominous note - at the end of the month, they are taking everyone to meet them.

OOC
From your mods:

Please be mindful of content - if something triggery comes up or if it goes up a rating to say, something sexy, mark your threads in the subject line. We're very flexible and allow any material; we just want our players to be respectful of each other. If you have questions, pp the mod account, use the faq or comment to the appropriate post below. Have fun!

NAVIGATION

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[That admission is enough to rouse some sympathy in Lu Li. Though they're made of completely different materials, they're both unique cases, aren't they? She offers the snitch back, holding it captive between two metallic fingers.]

THEN WE ARE THE SAME. CURIOSITIES. ODDBALLS. HERE. YOU MAY HAVE YOUR FRIEND BACK.

Really? Who made you?

[Carpet carefully accepts the snitch back, loosely knotting his tassel around it to make sure it stays put. He's never seen anything that looks like Lu Li before--she's like some kind of strange, living metal statue--, but he hadn't realized she was unique! It's kind of exciting to think that he might be meeting someone, something like him!]

["Made" isn't quite the right word. How does she put this...? Since this is a "magic" carpet, maybe she can borrow some terminology from fairy tales?]

NO, NOT MADE. I WAS ENCHANTED.

[Honestly, that's a stroke of genius. Carpet may not understand technology in the slightest, but put into those terms? He can immediately grasp the situation. She's either like him, or..... not like him in the slightest, and more like when Jafar had turned Abu into a toy. If that's the case, he should probably be more sad for her than excited. Humans generally seem to like being human, after all.

It definitely tempers his enthusiasm, at any rate, as he asks the important distinguishing question. Was she always a statue, or was she a human first?]

Enchanted to be alive, or enchanted to be metal?

[It's funny how that impulse led her to the right way to "speak" to the carpet. Lu Li feels some relief. She hasn't been able to properly convey the specifics of her situation before and to think that it could be boiled down to a fairy tale metaphor - it'll actually be funnier to her when she thinks back on it later.]

THE SECOND. IS IT THE SAME FOR YOU?

[Oh. Right...]

DO YOU HAVE A NAME?

[Oh..... Carpet droops in midair at the sight of that message, a full-body expression of sympathetic dismay. That's awful! Who would do such a thing? What about the life she was living, and the people she loved? Did an enchantment like this take her away from those, too? Carpet shakes his 'head'--no, he's always been a rug, never a human--and shows Lu Li his device before gliding over to swirl around her, the gesture somewhere between a nuzzle and a hug. Cuddles help make everyone feel better, right? Even if she's metal now and probably can't feel it as well, hopefully the gesture will make her happy.]

You can call me anything you want.

[Though the carpet doesn't have a face, he's remarkably expressive. His dismay is conveyed loud and clear, as is his cuddling close. She can't help herself. Her eye shutters halfway, her own way of smiling without a mouth.

Lu Li reaches up with her hand. She hesitates - she's trying to figure out where his "head" would be - before she gently touches the top of his trim with the surface of her palm. It's difficult to give a headpat when the receiver has no head but... she tried.

She raises her device with her other hand.]

YOU'VE A BEAUTIFUL PATTERN. I STUDIED SOME OF YOUR SIBLINGS WHEN I WAS IN SCHOOL. I THINK I REMEMBER THE TIME PERIOD, SO... DOES "SAFAVID" SOUND FINE TO YOU?

[Close enough! Carpet nuzzles up into Lu Li's hand, peering curiously at the device. Siblings? Does she mean other carpets? He guesses you could call them something like that..... So he's being named after a time period? Interesting! Especially interesting, given that the term doesn't ring a bell to him at all, even if it's possible he might have lived through that time--or at least, the Disney world's equivalent of it.]

Thank you! It sounds pretty.

[She doesn't expect him to know. He is, after all, a carpet! And Lu Li doesn't think carpets were made to go to school or to study the particulars of their origins.

... he really does remind her of a dog...]

I'M GLAD YOU LIKE IT, SAFAVID.

CAN I ASK WHERE YOU COME FROM? DID YOU BELONG TO SOMEONE?

I live in Agrabah! It's a kingdom in the middle of the desert. I used to have masters but I don't anymore. Now I live in the palace with my friends.

[Any former masters of his probably would have considered the idea of him going to school or being educated laughable. What does a servant need an education for, anyway? All he needs to know how to do is obey--and to submit to others' will is a deeply ingrained instinct.]

[It paints a magical - almost romanticized - picture in her mind's eye. How could she not think of it that way, when she was conversing with an enchanted carpet?]

OH, A KING'S CARPET. SHOULD I CALL YOU "YOUR HIGHNESS?"

[Who knows how much her mental image is right? In some sense, an exotic desert kingdom from the far distant past must surely seem idealized and romantic, full of mystery and intrigue and superstition, the simpler days of a bygone era. After all, why wouldn't it seem magical, especially thinking of the opulence of palace life?

In another..... well, the slums were a vast and sprawling place, full of dirty, ragged, broken, wretched things and people, desperate and impoverished. Without modern conveniences, there was very little mitigating the squalor and misery that so many lived in

Safavid waves a tassel, as though playfully dismissing the suggestion. Even if he actually was a king's carpet, he certainly wouldn't be called Your Highness!]

If I belonged to anyone now it would be Aladdin. He's marrying the princess so he'll be sultan someday, but not yet!

INTRO LOG #1

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