cursedrp | IC INTRO #1

IC INTRO #1

A Blood Offering

You wake up cozy in bed at the Saturn Motel. As you observe the room you may realize that it looks a little dated. Or, perhaps from your point of view the lamp and TV are wildly futuristic. Or, like Goldilocks, it may seem just right: close to the world you just left behind. Either way, you just had a very strange dream (see the arrival scenario) and now you're here. And you're not alone: there's a bed next to yours and someone else is waking up just like you are.

You can chat for a while if you like, but if you try to leave you'll find the door is firmly locked and no amount of kicking, punching, or hitting it with an object will do you any good. Instead, there's a letter on the nightstand which reads:

"Good morning and welcome to your new home!

You may be wondering why you're trapped in this room. Fear not, the door will open easily if you offer a bit of blood. More than a few drops but not enough to be a serious wound. A handprint's worth will do, let's say, and it only needs to come from one of you.

I'll let you sort that out yourselves. See you on the other side.

Sincerely,
The Mayor"

And indeed, a handprint's worth of blood pressed against the door will unlock it and let you out into the world. Do you volunteer your own blood? Do you take it from the other person by force? It's up to you! But there's no food in here, so you better figure it out eventually.

Roller Rink

As a celebration of your new lives here (and an apology for the whole blood offering thing - they were just testing something out, really) the Mayor has invited everyone to the Crazy Eight Roller Rink for a private, after-hours party.

Attendance isn't mandatory, but it is heavily encouraged so that you can meet your fellow Cursed and know who's in on the whole secret. It'll help you down the line at some point if your Curse gets out of control and you need someone to wrangle you.

As a reward, everyone who shows up and completes at least one lap around the roller rink (you must be wearing skates, but you can crawl the lap if you can't get the hang of them) will receive a free walkman with a mystery tape inside. The color, style, and mystery tape your character gets are up to you.

Mallrats

Everyone loves the mall! Right? Right! And this group of newcomers is lucky enough to be here for the White Pines Mall Grand Opening celebration! Feel free to walk around the mall and partake in sales galore, check out the attractions, or just get to know the layout of the place.

The Mayor has given everyone a gift card for $100 that can be used anywhere in the mall as long as they attend the Grand Opening.

They also strongly suggest that you familiarize yourself with the mall and its layout, just in case you ever get stuck there for a while and have to compete with others for food and resources. But that probably won't happen.

Extra Info

All the same guidelines from the TDM still apply. You can continue your TDM threads here or start new ones! And of course, you can start making your own prompts in the log or network communities at your leisure.

Our first event will be going up in about a week!

Please do not add character tags to any posts just yet, we'll add them to this post manually.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Wren needed to swing by the motel - they used the gift card to get a reusable water bottle and had maybe horded every single bit of non-perishable food they'd been given access to since they arrived. They do get a small thing of pre-packaged trail-mix and only with great reluctance allow Daryl to get it. Wren only has the money they had on them when they arrived, which as a college student isn't much at all. Even so, they're absolutely mentally noting down exactly how much that trail mix is and will be finding a way to pay Daryl back for it once they secure some method of getting money here where it doesn't matter that their ID says they're supposed to be eight years old right now.

"Oh yeah I've totally got this huge social engagement to be to, actually," Wren says blandly as they walk, making their way to the edge of town and beyond, double-checking the map as they go. "No, I also got nothing. Was it dark when you came back before? Anything weird in the woods?"

Daryl offers a flat look for that. Who knows!! There could be an ice cream social, or whatever it is people do. He doesn't know Wren's life.

"Nah, it was late morning." When does this guy sleep. (Like, never.) "Woods seemed normal. Saw a couple possums. Deer tracks. It's a stable enough ecosystem and remote enough that there's likely to be big predators somewhere, but I didn't catch signs of nothing."

Which is almost weird, but despite his adept eye, he'd prefer not to run into anything he's not perfectly used to, given the circumstances. Black bears are just big furry bullfrogs, but cougars are trouble— and he's never actually seen one before. Rare enough in Georgia to be dismissed as non-native. It's fine if the woods decide not to throw anything terribly interesting at them.

Quiet for a while, which is fine, they don't need to make smalltalk for the entire trip. (which will be a long ass walk) (i did not google how long it talks to walk 30 miles until it was too late) (they'll just be very efficient speedwalkers it's fine). But then he remembers:

"Some other folks on the uh," he gestures, as if holding something in his hand, and for a moment it seems like he might actually be out of touch enough not to be able to remember the word phone, "little cohort reddit thing," oh thank god he was just fumbling on what to call the network, "said they're gonna look, too. Reckon we should all compare notes in a couple days."

Wren is an efficient speed walker. While they haven't done a lot of hiking specifically it's very clear very quickly that Wren is in shape enough to at the very least probably be an athlete of some kind? Yeah probably just that. There's also a lot of practicing how to use their IntelliPhone for pictures, which can also be inferred through observation - Wren has never used a smartphone before.

"Oh-? Oh! Yeah, this can take pictures, think I could just upload one of the map so far? If we could get a good solid idea of how far out we can go - well, multiple people trying different directions will be faster than just trying it all myself," Wren says as they think aloud, like the idea that they could get help with this hadn't really occurred to them before now in spite of having more or less asked Daryl for help. Then, after a moment, "... What's reddit?"

Very surreal to be asked 'What's reddit' by someone who looks infinitely younger and more hip than he is. Weird of you, White Pines.

"Like that." He points at Wren's intelliphone. (The files are IN the computer.) "A message board." A more in depth explanation isn't coming, because Daryl doesn't have one— too old to have grown up with the internet, but on the fringes of society enough to have used a modest burner phone or library computer private browser tab or two in the immediate years preceding the outbreak. The internet held no fascination for him, but every so often, it was nice to scrape through the fledgling r/hunting for new camp recipe ideas.

"Mm. More eyes on it the better. We'll see what we see, but... nobody sees everything."

Crowdsourcing escape potentials. Maybe there's a magic barrier expert among them yet. Seeing things gives him an uncertain thought, however:

"Dunno if 'the Mayor' can see shit on there, though. 'Sides turning the thing on and reading, don't know what I'm doing on it."

Before Wren can ask 'a phone?' Daryl thankfully adds the part about the message board and Wren gives an understanding oh. They know digital message boards. Admittedly they're thinking more like BBS or Usenet, but it gets the point across. They could have easily been without those touchstones too, but for living within walking distance of a library.

"I assume everything that goes on here is viewable by the 'the Mayor'," Wren said with a small shrug, nodding to their phone. "Want anything private I'd say keep it in-person, or one of those write it on paper and burn after reading type deals. Probably outside the motel if in-person too. I haven't found any kind of surveillance things hidden yet but I'm assuming that means they're hidden better than I can find."

Which ... makes them sound really paranoid, now that they've said it aloud. Oops.

"Don't trust nobody without a name. Or that can kidnap people to other dimensions, I guess."

Maybe they really are all cursed and this is for the good of each of their homes, but Daryl thinks it'd go over better with them to be a little more transparent. Figuratively transparent— the Mayor doesn't appear to have a body, and that's like, whatever. Different strokes. But the kidnapping shit, the blood on the door shit, the mystery, it's all bullshit.

"Tore up my room, couldn't find shit."

Doesn't sound paranoid, it sounds reasonable. Daryl expected surveillance from the start, and has been consistently weirded out at not finding any.

"If folks can come together we should probably pitch in for a room somewhere on the other side of town. Some place to leave shit. Intel. Dunno."

IC INTRO #1

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