(no subject)

[helloneighbor]

living island





["Living Island." That's it. There will be no responses from the source of this post, though characters may discuss as they see fit.


At midnight, however, long after all the stores in Santa Rosita have closed and all the houses in Shadyside have turned off their lights... all the television sets across the neighborhood turn on, volume at full. Blaring garbled noise and static, their dials move as if guided by invisible hands. It doesn't take long before the picture settles into something watchable as a series of strange images begin to play:]

[Grainy and soundless, a camera travels down a dark hallway. At the end of it, a light can be seen, dim, at a fork that branches off into another hallway. The operator moves slowly, one step at a time. When they reach the end, the image cuts out. Opens to another.

There's a metal sign bolted to a grey and featureless wall. Through the washed out color and fuzzy quality, the symbol comes into focus as the camera slowly zooms out, as if the person holding it is moving backwards: three inverted triangles stacked within a black circle. The sign looks old, rusted. Another cut.

The camera is sitting stationary at a low angle, possibly the ground. It faces the door in a dark but not completely pitch black room. The door is cracked open just enough to see the distinct shadow of a person moving behind it, only the outline of their shoulders and one of their arms visible as they pace back and forth. Eventually, the shadow disappears entirely. The camera remains trained on the door for a few long moments before another figure walks into view behind it, stops, and crouches low like an animal. Half of a face, distinctly human but with a strange mask-like quality to it, sways back and forth as it tries to peer into the room. Crawling on all fours, they push the door open. The footage skips.

An out-of-focus light bulb in a dark room. The footage is blurry and made nearly incomprehensible thanks to the light and the way the footage keeps popping and skipping, but there's audio this time. Distorted and low, a voice croons a song as a louder, shrill noise layers over it that sounds a bit like a bell, ringing over an intercom. The camera, slowly moving backwards, manages to catch the impression of a mural on a wall that simply says, in sweeping, childish yellow and red cursive script:

LIVING ISLAND

The broadcast ends there.]

Comments

un. gallica / ota

[apodictic]

[ that broadcast is interesting, because angelo feels like that is something akin to his experiences before arriving here. the half of a face that he sees reminds him of his captain, who was the void made flesh.

he feels drawn to it. it is a mystery; something for his brain to gnaw on while being far away from home. a home can be a person; a home can be the existential dread of an experience beyond time. a home needs only to be a person who was so absolute he filled your soul with the emptiness of space.

he's missing that, but seeing this strange apparition in the television feels like an experience so close to it. so this is a taste of the strangeness everyone speaks of? curiouser and curiouser. ]

"Living island" is such a bizarre phrase.

How many buildings in this place can feasibly house all the features that were in that broadcast? A few abductees? There can't be that many. That certainly wasn't a house.

[ long enough to have two hallways which is expansive enough to be travelled on. a strange plaque that looks like it's been there forever. a large impression of a mural on a wall. there's about four buildings in this place that can house such features. ]

@wuxian

[weifinder]

Nothing to say the building's above ground, or a building at all on the outside. Still, you're right, the houses here are far too small. So what's possible? The department store, anything underground, possibly in a cave system, or the Sans was saying that symbol indicates a kind of shelter against bombs. I'm not sure what that would look like, but maybe that means more to you than me?

[apodictic]

[ something that angelo unfortunately knows about because his side has uh, committed mass genocide on its spare time, though if pressed he'd say the feddies did it first, ]

A fallout shelter would need to be at the basement level of building in order to be effective, and the building would need to be at least ten floors in order for the basement to be protected. It's possible to be above ground in the middle of a tall building, though the biggest ones I've seen - capable of having multiple hallways as we saw there - wouldn't be an individual shelter above ground. The best ones make use of a natural shield such as a mountain, where something like a tunnel can be built to accommodate tens of thousands of people and protect them from a nuclear blast.

Those who have to make use of the shelter have to plan to remain there for at least two weeks, and gradual exposure outside occurs four hours at a time. We are at the era for it, where such things are more common in this country. Realistically, however, most civilians wouldn't know how to build an effective one. I wouldn't be surprised if whatever this building, or buildings - I'm being generous in the definition here - featured in the broadcast turned out not to be what they are displayed as.

All of this is to say that it's possible. But what is also notable to me in these footages is that something has been kept in it. The sign is rusted, which means it's been there for a while. The shelters are meant to be temporary housing in case of a nuclear or chemical attack.

Assuming all of the footage is from the same place, of course.

[ with regards to that thing, that was moving on all fours. if that had happened here surely the citizens would've taken notice and the cops have taken that thing in to the precinct for some stern ... lecturing or whatever on how to act human, or whatever it is that they tell or do to non-conforming people to do here. ]

I think what would be more illuminating is to see what the police would do the following day regarding the broadcast. If they know of it and acknowledge it is out of place, the broadcast is for everyone. If not - then it's only for us.

[ just like that time, he thinks, with the movie theatre displaying all of my memories on the screen. that seems to be how santa rosita works. ]

[weifinder]

( okay this is a lot of information and not all of it makes sense to him concretely, but he can get enough of a sense of it to just... accept what's said. what it lines up to doesn't make as much sense here, but with the nature setting around town, maybe it does? he scratches at his nose, then taps out a response. )

Or be proactive now and go slipping over to the normal acting neighbours, see if anyone's up and in their living rooms. This wasn't all that subtle. Check tonight, confirm tomorrow, maybe.

Is there any reason you have right now to think the footage is from multiple places or one place? These kinds of moving images are so new to me I don't know if I'd pick that up.

[apodictic]

[ sorry ordinarily he'd be putting this in a brief but that's not available in this time, just imagine that in his best angelo phase he will have put all of this information in a 5-min powerpoint instead entitled FALLOUT SHELTERS AND YOU: A PRIMER FOR CIVILIANS by Lt. ANGELO SAUPER. ]

I'm not opposed to it, but our neighbours aren't exactly the most aware. [ which is his most generous assessment of their friendly neighbours. ]

As for that, where I come from, it is possible to 'stitch' multiple footages from different points in time into one video to be broadcasted.

[weifinder]

( wei wuxian would be impressed but also likely tuning out unless nuclear war was what was happening up in here

... which maybe it is, he had no idea. )

Ah, but how aware do you need to be to be woken up by loud noises at midnight? Here, you head out, and I'll head out, and we can both tell each other what we see.

Ah, I see, I see. So one more way to present false evidence of this or that. In this case, what's the benefit if they're separate locations?

[apodictic]

[ sometimes angelo wishes he had a different background. maybe nothing to do with things like holding people hostage, or something. it'd be great if he didn't have answers. ]

It depends. Does the message mean anything? Is it a trap or a taunt? Who is it for? If you were keeping something like that ... creature in a secret space, do you want it found? If yes, how quickly?

From my window here things seem pretty quiet.

[weifinder]

( look, sometimes you've lived a Life, sometimes you've made Mistakes, he knows how that goes. talk to him about dead spirits sometime, it's wild. )

Count it up in numbers: that's two instances of the same phrase. The first time, no context. The second, those dark places and the wall with the painted words. As for what was crawling around... that's the thing, isn't it? All our puppet doubles went missing by the end of the month, or at least I assume so, since that's when mine escaped. Those had to be made somewhere too. What if the thing we saw there was an earlier prototype? One not fit for release to the public. Not good enough at mimicking a living person. A sort of incomplete puppet, if you will.

Peering in and seeing... nothing here either. No one's moving around downstairs that I can see, no lights on. All appearances are a sound night's slumber, and these neighbours have a child who wouldn't have slept through that, I don't think.

[apodictic]

It's a lot to consider, without any concrete rationale behind it. I propose we leave the topic of the prototype for now.

If they're so insistent about the phrase then pursuing that should prove fruitful.

I'm starting to think we're the anomaly here. Don't you?

[ that's a rather unfunny thought, but hey. they're the ones who are having problems while their neighbours are sleeping well. ]

[weifinder]

Fair enough, fair enough, thoughts for later.

Yes, well. Things repeated usually have a purpose, be it for or against those its being repeated to. We'll only know when we have more information.

Wait a moment, I'm checking out another neighbours, but ah! They, too, stay silent. Anomaly or target, I do think we're dealing with being the intended recipients, versus those who're at apparent peace with this place.

[apodictic]

In a way they're a better teacher of how to survive here.

[ not making a fuss, not looking for situations they want to interrupt their lives with. it's interesting to angelo. it's like they aren't human at all, and yet it's a most human reaction - to ignore what you don't want and to only consider that which is important to you. ]

[weifinder]

Are they the better teachers, or the likeness of Harding and Craven, do you think?

[apodictic]

Both have to cave in to societal pressures either way, don't they?

[weifinder]

Or navigate around them. Harding and Craven are much more deft at that.

[apodictic]

They've both made the decision to live in this town, right? They're not like us who are always thinking of ways to return. This is their home, like it or not.

[weifinder]

People become resigned to all kinds of things, or learn to play long games. I wouldn't assume they decided to live here forever at this point, but that they have managed to be in positions of relative power and importance is worth noting.

[apodictic]

Would you do it? If offered to you?

[weifinder]

What kind of offer are we talking about? The real answer comes down to benefits, it does for anyone. This place doesn't have what I want. Giving me power inside of a dungeon is simply asking me to ignore the locked doors and pretend these iron bars don't make a cage.

[apodictic]

But if you were offered the same kind of peace of mind afflicted by all other neighbours in this village, you would not even know that you were in a cage.