( march event ) outbreak

[officialnotice]

Greetings, Pinecones! Welcome to our latter March event and the first of our metaplot-related events. As with all metaplot to come, when and how the event ends will be highly dependent on characters' participation and choices, so don't hesitate to get their hands dirty.

Without further ado!




OUTBREAK


ENVIRONMENT EVENT: Foreign Contaminant
EVENT DATE: March 22th - ???

Just when you thought you'd seen the last of the hospital, something like this happens. At first it doesn't seem so severe, maybe just indigestion from that big lunch you just ate, or maybe you forgot to take Lactaid before dessert at Lagomarcino's (but that homemade ice cream? Worth it!). Only it doesn't seem to wear off once you've... eliminated the problem. In fact, it seems to have pretty quickly progressed to full on nausea, complete with sharp abdominal pain.

Okay, so maybe food poisoning. Did you check the expiration date on the ingredients you used for that sandwich? You may need to have a talk with French... If you can make it downtown. By the end of the day, what feels like severe pins and needles ranges down your limbs all the way to your extremities — even your face.

After a couple more days of this there's no mistaking the severity of your symptoms for indigestion. Your mouth stays parched no matter how much water you drink. It's hard to take a full breath, no thanks to the feeling that something is caught in your throat, too. Others may try to speak to you, but you're inexplicably having a hard time forming your words when you reply, and you keep misjudging the distance to the floor when you try to get out of bed. You may want to find another way to the hospital, my friend, because you most definitely should not operate any heavy machinery.

IN CHARACTER

DON'T FEAR THE REAPER

Symptoms begin as early as the morning of the 22nd, or may not start until a bit later in the day. Either way, those exhibiting symptoms will universally experience nausea, diarrhea and abdominal pain.

Within 12 hours, characters will be feeling the aforementioned tingling or burning in their arms, legs, hands, feet, fingers and toes, and even in their face.

Two days after the onset of symptoms, by the 24th, the above have increased in severity and may also include dry mouth, shortness of breath, a choking feeling, confused or slurred speech, and even loss of coordination.

The town doctors seem to be making the expected effort to treat the symptoms of those affected, though they claim to be at as much of a loss as anyone to explain the sudden widespread illness, initially attributing it to likely food poisoning themselves. However, on the 25th they are able to release the information that symptoms seem to worsen with hydration, and the hospital is now requesting volunteers to donate blood in an effort to engineer a treatment. They encourage those afflicted to check themselves into the hospital, though doctors are also available to make house calls.

OUT OF CHARACTER

THE BREAKDOWN

You will find three top-levels below for your plotting needs! Again, the course of the event will depend on you the players, so we encourage you guys to really make use of these. Feel free to start utilizing them right away, though you can also do so at any point during the event.

Top-level #1 is for players to ask questions of mods, both general questions and questions with intent to solve the mystery surrounding these symptoms. Ideally, if you ask a question looking to solve the mystery, we'd prefer that you limit yourself to questions that your characters themselves would actually investigate. This will, after all, be solved ICly. For example, If Joe has been feeling queasy and Barack sits at his bedside to feed him soup, will Barack get sick? Ideally, the mystery will be solved OOCly sooner rather than later so that everyone is on the same page when they're threading things out.

Top-level #2, meanwhile, is where you can volunteer your character to donate blood to the hospital. The doctors will only be needing donations from those exhibiting symptoms. The more volunteers the better!

Top-level #3 is for players to plot with each other. Bring the details you receive in top-level #1 to discuss them with your fellow players here, and plot out your next move (and which further questions to ask). Conversely, if your character has nothing to do with solving the mystery but you'd like to plot out threads involving the symptoms, that goes here too.

Comments

[comic_relief]

I'M BACK AND READY TO TUSSLE WITH CLUES... _{even though I'm so bad at solving this kind of stuff sldkfj.}

Hmm, so if someone were to try and walk it backward and figure out the point of contamination, i.e. if the sick characters were all visiting the same place/interacting with the same thing, are there common denominators to find? Or is contamination happening randomly to all kinds of people, at all kinds of places, at all times of day?

[officialnotice]

We've already revealed one common denominator about who is being affected here. So while it might seem like it's happening at random - all over town, at no particular time or day - if someone looks closely, it isn't. There are a handful of people who got sick first, a couple days before everyone else in the town contracted whatever is plaguing them. There's also been rumors that French's got in a bad batch of something on one of his trucks from the farm, but he insists that's not true, and people who don't frequent the grocery store are still getting ill.

[comic_relief]

So humans are getting it the worst, hydration makes it worse... 10K was one of the earliest sick and he was helping shore up the riverbank, right??? I... don't know, is it the water? Is everyone drinking from contaminated water and that's why it's happening everywhere???

[officialnotice]

Good job! Jack can now figure out that the water is contaminated, and if he could do that by the 24th and get that info to the hospital, it'll probably keep it from escalating...

[comic_relief]

LMAO, STILL NOT OVER THE FACT A WILD GUESS PAID OFF HOURS LATER.....

I'm nice so I say YES, LET'S GET A CURE GOING, so we can def say this happens around the 24th! Just let me know if there ends up needing to be any special NPC interaction or anything, I'm happy to help get this aspect of the plot rolling however I can, otherwise I'll just send him over to the hospital and see where threads take us!

[officialnotice]

There doesn't need to be any special interaction at all, feel free to do whatever you like ICly! If anything else comes up, we'll be in touch.

[comic_relief]

Awesome, sounds good!!

[officialnotice]

Just to follow up, would Jack attempt to discover the source of the contamination?

[comic_relief]

I'd love to play it out if other characters have the interest/means to get to the bottom of it, but once hydrating becomes a real concern and all signs point to the water, yeah, I think it's ICly likely he'd ask around and see where the town actually gets their water, if that would put the characters on the right track!!

[officialnotice]

Awesome! We foresee a group of characters being able to learn some definite metaplot deets as well as solving this mystery, but first we have to get them there. We will be guiding you and Jack along this process, but we want to reiterate that anyone who Jack might tell about any of this is welcome to jump in here as well. Whether or not that happens, there's a teamwork opportunity shortly into this investigation. :)

If Jack does any real level of research (examples include the library, town hall, and asking the Main Street shop owners), he will discover that the water stems from the river bordering the north end of town.

What would he like to do about that?

[comic_relief]

Ahhh, that'd be sweet. SCOOBY GANG, YES, PLS.

Jack would go looking himself! Maybe Ibaraki dropped a dead deer in there and it's clogging up the river, we just don't know, better check this shit out.

[officialnotice]

There does not appear to be any sign of a dead animal in the river. However, the construction project intended to firm up the banks seems to have been left unfinished, taped off with yellow warning tape so that nobody trips into any of the holes or patches of destabilized shore their project has created but not yet managed to fix. The water appears to be the slightest bit murky coming off of that shoreline, perhaps because of the quantity of dirt the project has loosened.

What would he like to do next?

[comic_relief]

Put the chocobos on a soda diet, maybe angry cry a bit when no one's watching, debate running into the forest, FUCK YOUR WEIRD ASS TOWN, SHERIFF...

Okay.

Phase 2 of Jack's Super Scientific Research:

• Sift through the muddy parts with a big stick. Maybe there's something in there!!!

• Ibaraki gets into the water. Maybe she finds something!!! Maybe she turns radioactive? We just don't know.

• Jack will fill up a bottle of water from the town's water source and take it back to the hospital to tell the nurses he met his first day about it. :') If the hospital staff don't seem like they know what to do or redirect him, he'll go looking for a more knowledgeable authority in town. To City Hall we go. Someone smarter examine this water and tell him if it's poisoned!

[nockpoint]

(hi this is laure)

as a note, ibaraki has not been consuming water because she loves crystal pepsi now its her new water, nor does she have any human dna, being both an oni and entirely made of magic!

[officialnotice]

The sifting through the muddy parts will largely seem fruitless, until it gets closer to shore... Then, the branch catches on something short but solid.

Ibaraki gets very, very wet.

Should Jack take the water to the hospital, the hospital staff will thank him for the sample and will gladly take it off his hands. :)

[comic_relief]

Welp, that probably doesn't feel like just a rock??? Is this a thing that could be pulled out with a couple of people?

[officialnotice]

Nope! It's lodged firmly in the soil, as if it's one small part of something much larger. Shame the water's so murky or you could get a read on what it is... All you can tell from the poking is that it's "softer" than a rock but harder than the dirt around it.

[dehanded]

THINGS THAT ARE SOFTER THAN ROCK BUT HARDER THAN DIRT: GOLD, POSSIBLY. you have her attention

if ibaraki returns from her fish fetching soak, and sticks her hands in the mud, what will it feel like? can she dig anything out, or try to boil away some water by turning her hair into fire... 🔥!!!

[officialnotice]

It will feel... disgusting, honestly. Her fingers sink in a good half-inch, because what felt solid to a stick actually seems to be covered in something sponge-like and unpleasant. Her hand will now reek immensely, but if she persists, it is tapered like a rounded acute triangle sticking about six inches out of the dirt.

Does she dig or boil first?

[dehanded]

SHE GIVES ZERO FUCKS ABOUT GROSSNESS! SHE'LL attempt to dig for a bit, immediately get fed up with the goop, and then fire up her hair

for spectators, cw: i think this counts as gore? just to be safe

[officialnotice]

The digging will reveal that rather than being a solid triangle, it appears to hollow out in the center, like the joint of a sharply-bent limb.

Boiling away water confirms this suspicion. It's very definitely rotting and waterlogged flesh.

[dehanded]

What a waste of meat... You humans are fools.

She gets a good grip on the joint with her nasty stinky gremlin hands and pulls with her super strength, not bothering to dig or clear the space further. Can she tell what kind of... flesh??? It is yet? Animal or human? Would it still be appealing to a scavenger...

[officialnotice]

Congratulations, Ibaraki. You've ripped off an arm.

• It is distinctly rotting - the way it was poking into the water, this would likely have produced the digestive issues that showed up at the onset of the rampant sickness. Even the most intact parts are greyed. It would probably not be appealing to a scavenger.
  
  
• Some of the flesh near the elbow has been gouged away, as if with tools of some kind. This was a construction site, after all.
  
  
• Upon examination, it's shaped like a human's arm... and yet not. It's too large, and both parts were heavily muscled (the muscles on the upper half are the bulky bodybuilder sort, while the muscles around the forearm are much slimmer and more wiry). The hand, too, seems too long and narrow, with disproportionately short fingers. The few fingernails still intact are thick and jagged where they've broken off.

What do Jack & Ibaraki do next?

[comic_relief]

OH MY GOD, THE BODY WASN'T SUPPOSED TO BE A REAL THING. D:

Okay, let's dig this thing out 'cause it looks weird and you're never too old to want to morbidly rubberneck at a dead body you found.

E v e n t u a l l y either someone with sense (Nyx) is going to suggest a shovel, or someone without sense (Jack) is going to scratch his head for a while and settle on a shovel.

cw: g..ross/gore? lbh if you made it this far it's par for the course

[dehanded]

if digging takes more than 5... no, wait. 2 minutes, ibaraki will sit on the ground nearby and starts picking at the arm flesh because she has no attention span... she'll be trying to peel it from the bones, and is determined to salvage something from this prize.