EVENT #1: SAY CHEESE

[cursedmods]

SAY CHEESE

The Rundown

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Starting on September 8th, all characters will find themselves transported to White Pines Mall. During this time, the mall is closed to the public for renovations and no one suspects a thing! The power is on and everything is mysteriously functioning, but all the doors to the outside world are locked and no amount of pounding on them or trying to break windows will work. About an hour after arrival, an announcement will come over the PA system:

"Attention shoppers! Thank you for visiting White Pines Mall. We're excited to announce a new line of very special cameras available at Cutting Edge Electronics. For one week only, we're offering them for the low, low price of FREE! Present your photo at the front door to exit the mall, and have a wonderful day."

At Cutting Edge electronics, a row of Polaroid cameras will be on display, one for each character. All you have to do to leave the mall is get someone to take your picture with one of these cameras! Easy, right? Well...

The only issue is when the photo develops, there's something wrong with it. And that's not all: whatever's in the photo starts to come true! Effects from the photo can come on as quickly or as slowly as you like, and will wear off within the week (again, player's choice as to when exactly they wear off). If multiple photos of a character are taken, you have two options: have them be normal photos with no effect until the character's current effect wears off, OR have a new effect that replaces the old one. Characters cannot have multiple effects at one time.

Every character in the mall will need to present a photo in order to leave (and they won't be allowed to sneak out or piggyback with someone else). They can leave right away, or they can stay and try to deal with their new problem away from prying eyes until the event is over. The food court is fully stocked and anything your character orders will appear on the counter in front of them even though there are no employees there, so don't worry about starving.

The opt-out options for this event are as follows: one, say that your character was overlooked and not transported to the mall at all. They can continue to hang out in the city as normal but will not be able to enter the mall until the event is over. Two, have them be transported to the mall and end up with a "dud" photo where nothing has changed. It happens sometimes, lucky them!

Everyone will be kicked out at the end of the day on the 12th regardless of whether they took a photo or not. Any damage done to the mall will be repaired when it re-opens for business the next day.

After this event, the cursed camera item will be permanently available to purchase from Cutting Edge Electronics and can be used at any time. Why would you want to buy that? Revenge, maybe. Or maybe some meddling employee accidentally mixed the cursed stock with the regular stock. TL;DR if you want to play with this effect again after the event is over, the item will be there.

Extra Information

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The effects of the camera are highly flexible. The effects don't have to be tied in to any specific fear they have, but of course you can use that as inspiration if you would like to. Some examples of effects can include:

Characters appear wounded in their photo, and the wounds start to manifest on them. Even wounds that should be fatal won't actually kill them during this event, but they sure hurt like hell and it may feel like they're dying if they keep progressing.

A character appears faded in their photo, and they gradually become intangible, unable to move anything or even let themselves out without help.

Characters who took a group photo to try and cheat the system find themselves fused together, or that they've swapped bodies.

There's a shadowy figure in the background of the photo, and for the rest of the week the affected character keeps seeing someone - or something - moving in their peripheral vision that feels like it's getting closer and closer.

Any of these effects are fair game but they are just examples, so feel free to make your own! Try and keep with the tone of these prompts and not go too big, some degree of transformation is fine but don't turn your character into a kitten or a three-headed dragon.

Characters can choose to leave right away or stay for a while, but they won't actually be told they'll be let go/kicked out on the 12th regardless.

Comments

Alec Lightwood ➵ Shadowhunters

[flatly]

DAY 1-4 SHENANIGANS

At some point Alec clearly raided the mall's sporting goods store, because mixed amongst his gleaming silver arrows in his ever-present quiver are some black and neon aluminum and carbon ones more suited to hunting wild game than demons: he has, by now at least, figured out that he needs to take what he can get in the 80s.

If anyone met him before, he seems much more jittery than before, twitching a hand up to the bow perpetually slung over one shoulder every time a shadow moves too quickly, or a corner looks too dark or ominous. The sleep depravation is also clearly not doing any wonders for him, and the closer it gets to the 12th, the more he looks like he's been run over by a modest caravan of semi trucks as he struggles to stay awake without the endless flow of Saturn Cafe's drip coffee or the chaos of home's fun little biweekly apocalypse to keep him busy (or his stamina and endurance runes, which are what he misses the most here.)

In a desperate bid to keep himself awake, by day three he has made his way to the theater and read all the training manuals in the employee areas. He throws on a bunch of the movies that he finds in storage starting with the ones he's had recommended to him: Star Wars, Aliens and Beetlejuice, but he'll take requests and corner anyone who seems like they had a good time after any of the showings with a volley of dubious questions. Human pop culture, he just doesn't get it.

...Except maybe Star Wars. He sees you, 80's Harrison Ford. He gets that.

DAY 5, POSSESSED

After four days without sleep or direct sunlight, Alec would look rough even if he weren't currently possessed by a demon.

But he is, and it's probably obvious to anyone even vaguely genre savvy by the pitch black color of his eyes, sclera and all. He's not very talkative, wordlessly hostile, loosing arrows or throwing knives at anyone he spots alone and looking vulnerable. He aims first for non-lethal areas, because the goal is to claw a still-beating heart out of someone's—anyone's—chest.

CLOSED to WREN

The demon is meant to feed off of hatred, resentment, grudges—but it's starved here, where Alec doesn't really know anyone enough to want to strangle them, and the worst thing that has happened to him so far is vague annoyance at the terrible coffee. So the demon, unfortunately, has to settle for less. Much less. Mere recognition, in this case, which stops Alec. The hall they're in is wide and dotted with the open doorways of empty shops: good, easy places to duck into and hide. Alec wouldn't have chosen it as a hunting ground for his particular weapon of choice, but the demon is so desperate at this point that it doesn't bother with tactics.

As soon as he spots Wren and a sense of familiarity takes hold, the demon nocks an arrow into his bow and lets it fly, just as by luck (or chance, or maybe they noticed him taking aim) they move out of the way and the it sinks without a loud thwack! into the drywall just behind them. Well... shit.

WILDCARD

I'm awfully late BUT plotting comment here, hit me up there if you would like a separate starter and I'll write one! Alternatively if you've got your own idea for a starter you can toss it at me or PM me to chat.

Shenanigans

[ferriswheelsandfootball]

There's really only so much you can do when you were currently a ghost, or at least some approximation of a ghost, and when there was nothing you or Rodney McKay could do to fix it, at least for right now, John figured he might as well go and take a break. And someone at the theater was playing Star Wars?

Yeah, he's gonna hang here for awhile.

After the movie is over, John hangs out near the entrance, or rather, haunts. One can see the mall lights through him. He wanted to meet with the person playing the movies so he can get a few requests in--it's not like he can manage to sleep very well like this so might as well get the 80's experience for all it's worth.

"Hey, are you the one running the joint?" he says as soon as he sees Alec, even though he's pretty much asking that of anybody he sees around here to figure out who's the one he needs to talk to.

[flatly]

Damn. Alec, while looking a bit like death warmed over, is at least not a ghost.

He spends a second processing what he's seeing (sleep deprivation is not doing wonders for his cognitive abilities right now) before deciding that this might as well happen and crossing his arms over his chest. His eyes flick all the way down the man, from messy, translucent hair down to his boots, one eyebrow quirking. He's tall, nice shoulders: he'd be attractive if he weren't see-through.

"I've been playing the movies," Alec replies after a moment instead of just saying yes, because the idea of working in a mall is so harrowing to a guy as neck deep in nepotism as Alec has been his whole life, oops. "Have any requests? Preferably ones that make more sense." Listen. Alec and pop culture just to not get along generally, what really bothered him about Star Wars was: "There's magic in every living thing but only four guys ever bother to use it?" He scoffs! Yes really. Sorry, John.

[ferriswheelsandfootball]

"Great! You're the one I wanna see because I do have requests. Many requests, because we're in the 80's so I might as well enjoy one of the good things about it."

He's clearly had time to think about this for awhile.

Except.

Except.

"More sense? More sense?"

Please accept some agitated ghost sputtering and gesturing. He's only a few years past the Midicholorians debacle but he's old school, all the way.

"Not everybody can be a Jedi, or a Sith. For one thing, you gotta have aptitude. And another, there are other people out there who can use the Force, they just don't realize it cause the Galactic Empire is out there being all Imperial."

[flatly]

"These are the good things?" Alec asks dubiously, like he hasn't been blowing through films one after another here. Look, he can't just admit to enjoying anything, he's got a reputation as a grumpy stick in the mud to build since nobody knows him yet. He turns towards the storage room with a gesture for John to float on after him to peruse the available movies, or whatever it is he'll do, holding the door open for him without thinking.

Can he walk through doors? Alec is derailed from asking when John actually provides an answer to his question. Enthusiastically.

"Okay," he says slowly, clearly trying to slot that information into his understanding of the movie, but the details are all just sorta sloshing around in his fatigued brain at the moment. Embarrassing "How do you not realize something like that? You can do magic but you just don't notice?" He wonders how long warlocks go before realizing that they can move things with their minds. Not as long as Luke or Leia were old, he presumes (but doesn't actually know for sure, oops.)

['Thriller' by Michael Jackson begins playing]

[shrikesback]

When has started regretting giving in to the demands and taking a photo - those that stubbornly refused to play ball clearly had the right idea. All the injuries their photo depicted have been happening. Not... truly so? At least, they know they should be far worse off by now if they were real, because all these injuries have been real for Wren in the past. Lost fights against supervillains or wanna-bes, or the far more common pyrrhic victory to win but at what cost? The pain though, shit, the pain is very real.

It's partially luck, really - those silver arrows Alec brings with him really catch the light spectacularly, it's enough of a flash even for barely a moment for Wren to take notice, trained to look for the glint of light off of a gun or a sword or some other weapon. Wren doesn't have their danger sense anymore - but there was a damn reason it took years of them having it for anyone to notice. They've always been good, it was a seamless transition into a supernaturally good level of it.

Ducking away, they feel the air current of the arrow passing close enough to be a miss far too close for comfort.

What. The. Fuck.

Wren's ready to demand answers from Alec, but - okay, they definitely would have noticed all black eyes like that before, and their heart lurches to remember when V - their V, back home, Vivienne - when she briefly lost control to the demon that wanted her.

Clearly, they'll have quite a lot of questions for Alec. Later. Right now, it's important nobody else gets hurt. Which is why Wren grits their teeth against their own volley of magic injuries and just bum rushes Alec to start with, aiming to close the distance to make his bow useless and knock him down if possible. All that height doesn't help much against someone with a lower center of gravity.

[flatly]

The demon had clearly been expecting Wren to run and hide, so it's ill prepared for when they come charging instead. The second arrow it nocked clatters to the ground so he can sweep the bow defensively into the space between them like a buffer. Luckily Alec isn't home right now, or he'd be downright appalled at the treatment of his weapon—and also the extremely ineffective way it's being wielded. The bow goes clattering to the ground shortly after, knocked aside easily due either to the demon's distaste for it (its preference is to be up as close and personal as possible, which is decidedly a clash with Alec's specialty not being hand-to-hand), or the body's fatigue after so many days straight spent awake.

But whatever handicaps the demon is working with, Alec is still highly trained and it has all of his muscle memory (and regular memory) to work with. It crouches to lower the body's center of gravity at least a little bit, accustomed to Izzy coming at him from about a foot below with sharp limbs and sharper heels, and throws its considerable weight forward as soon as they clash like it's hoping to knock Wren to the ground and take advantage of their (admittedly less significant) size difference with grappling.