apocalypsehowmods | Player Plots

Player Plots

Player plots are plots that have a large enough reach to require some sort of sign up, or would be difficult for those not directly involved to ignore, or need some sort of NPC/mod involvement.

Examples of player plots include:

Actions that would negatively affect 4-or-more PCs.

Death of a PC.

Death of a named NPC.

Death of more than 1 unnamed NPC at the same time.

Significant property damage.

A PC gaining powers as a result of aligning with a patron Entity.

Anything that could potentially expose the supernatural to the wider world.

Please submit player plots at least a week or two in advance of when you'd like to run it. In the event something happens suddenly that would escalate to a player plot, please let us know as soon as possible.

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cw: character death, child death, terminal illness, car crashes, cancer

Awesome! Okay, the team would be able to find the people below to talk to based on their sleuthing. Please have each player respond to this message with their initial five questions and the name of the NPC they're speaking to.

1. Augustine Moore - An aging widower who was Amber's foster father for about 6 months. He is the last person who is known to have housed Amber. His wife and biological daughter died in a car crash around the time Amber went missing. He has not fostered any children since and lives in a ratty apartment in the Wolf Trap area.

2. Cherise Cordova - A young woman returned home to the Wolf Trap area after her first year of college. She was in and out of foster homes with Amber over the course of three years when they were both younger. She was eventually adopted by a family and is staying with them in one of the cities near Wolf Trap.

3. Tamia Bhatt - A teacher in one of the school districts near Wolf Trap who is noted in the foster care files as having taken a special interest in Amber and her well-being. She is now in a hospice care home and has a very short time left to live due to a losing battle with cancer.

Edited 2022-12-26 21:11 (UTC)

What was Amber like?

Was there anyone Amber was close to?

When's the last time they saw each other?

These two she won't ask directly, but will try to indirectly get answers to:

Has Cherise had problems with nightmares?

Has anything strange happened to the foster families she shared with Amber?

1. She was... smart? Pretty morbid, too, I guess, but you kind of expect that for someone like her, right? Like us. But she was into normal things, too. Like travel and food vloggers. She always wanted to travel. I remember we talked about traveling abroad more than once and she was super into the idea of visiting Japan. She was really into this one vlogger named Lovely Ren. She showed me a fan forum she was part of once. I joined it for a while. It's really a shame what happened to her. Lovely Ren, I mean.

2. Me? No one else I know about. Most of her friends seemed to be online. Mine were, too, honestly. When you're getting shuffled around so much, it's just... easier not to get attached to people you meet in-person. You get to take your online friends with you wherever you go, though. Wow, that's... sorry. That's really depressing now I've said it out loud.

3. Years? Like, it's been a while. A really long while. Sorry.

4. Cherise will share that she has had fairly intense nightmares her whole life. Her parents were murdered when she was a baby, though. She's pretty sure that's what's caused them. She mostly dreams about being killed, even after a lot of therapy. She drinks a lot of coffee and Monster Energy drinks to stay awake.

5. She hasn't kept in touch with most of her previous foster families, but she did hear that a woman who fostered them when they were both very, very young died a few years ago. Unexpected heart attack when she was only in her 40s.

Does she remember the name of the forum?

Were there any online friends Amber spoke of more than others, people she might've been planning to visit, maybe?

Does she remember Amber being into coding?

1. It will take some effort, but Cherise will eventually be able to find the forum. It's an old LJ fan-group with people who posted things about food, travel, and Ren. Fanart, that sort of thing. Overall, it seems pretty innocuous, for the earlier posts with trolls moving in an starting to cause drama well after Cherise would have left the site.

2. She talked about getting to meet Ren one day. I always thought that was more of a... you know? Like... like a parasocial thing? I don't want to- We were kids. Kids get obsessed with internet celebrities sometimes. She didn't mention anyone else, in particular.

3. Oh, yeah. She did some cool layouts with HTML and CSS, but we were little. I don't know much about what she got into later. I wouldn't be surprised if she went into more serious coding. She was also really good with the audio programs that can let you design music? I remember she composed little songs. A lot of them were creepy, but it was definitely impressive. I mean, especially at our age, looking back.

Sounds like she had a real gift. Does Cherise have a copy of any of the songs, or know if they were posted anywhere?

It was a very long time and more than one family ago, so Cherise does not have copies of the music. She'll give Yelena some half-remembered site names to check, though. Digging in the Way Back Machine would lead her to a forum and a user with the name 'darklydreaming' that seems to have posted a number of haunting lullaby tracks that may sound distinctly familiar. Darklydreaming does pop up elsewhere on the internet with more recent posts to Ren fanclubs (and memorial sites), as well as some tech forums where people are discussing sleep technology. Darklydreaming seems to have taken an interest in disparaging the Ludicio Eye Mask as ineffective in inducing lucid dreams. Darklydreaming's internet presence disappears completely after October 2022.

LMK if this needs to go in a new thread, but since Steve's ICly mentioned it in our post-interview debrief log and Yelena's going to look it up, did Copernicus create the Quicksilver radio mentioned downthread, or any similar devices?

While Copernicus doesn't seem to have existed at that point, digging would reveal that one of the people involved in the development of the device does appear to be one Zyrian Steel.

What was Amber like (personality-wise)?

Did she get along with your wife and daughter?

Did Amber ever cause any trouble?

Have you ever talked to any of Amber's other foster families?

Do you know what happened to her when she disappeared?

1. Quiet. Hard to read a lot of the time, but we knew that about her already. I think some people felt uneasy around her cause she kept to herself but didn't hide she was smart as anything. She was a good girl with a bad lot. Just like the rest of us.

2. About as well as you'd expect. You know how girls can be, on the outs and then thick as thieves within seconds. I think it was hard for Chrissy, my little angel, I think she wanted a sister and Amber just needed a little more time to settle in and open up than she was expecting.

3. Not really, not any more than any other little girl. Maybe even less, but it was only- only six months...

4. Only at the beginning, I guess. We got the heads-up that she was quiet and needed music to get to sleep. I was so excited to make her feel at home, I got her one of those...oh, what were they called? Quicksilver? Yeah, it was a stereo specifically meant to help with therapy. So they said. I thought...thought it'd maybe be nice for her.

5. No...no I don't. I should shouldn't I? She- My girls....my Lynn and Chrissy, they- There was a lot going on. A lot of people in and out. A lot to take care of. One day they were there and the next they weren't...and Amber was just the same. It was my fault. By the time I remembered to look up, she was already gone.

Did anything odd - not trouble, or bad, just odd, anything you recall being just a little strange - seem to happen when Amber was around or had just been around?

That was real nice, of you, to get the stereo for her. Did it seem to help?

Was she in the car with them when the accident happened?

1. No, no, nothing especially odd. Nothing I wouldn't expect. We just tried to give her stability, you know? The accidents didn't really help things. Our neighbor fell off his ladder and a boy down the road the girls played with sometimes tripped in the ravine and snapped his neck while they were playing. Those kinds of things probably didn't help her settle in any better. We tried.

2. Seemed to! It was...oh it was sweet, she'd be wide awake as you were putting her to bed and then put on that music, five minutes later? Out like a light. Not sure even a thunderclap could have woken that girl.

3. No, she wasn't. They...they were out for...ha...ice cream. In the middle of winter. Amber and I chose to stay home, have some hot coco instead. Hot coco with exactly twelve marshmallows. Just enough to cover the top.

Those are some crazy accidents. Can you remember - did they seem to stop after the crash?

I just told you I wasn't even paying attention to my own foster kid- you think I was noticing what my neighbors were doing?

Sorry. I-I don't know. Maybe.

Just to set the scene, Winter will probably seem kind of awkward and shy to Tamia, and he's working very hard not to come across as creepy. Gloves on both hands, lighter colored clothes than usual, and softer top layers.

He'll bring her a couple brownies to the interview because sweets are nice when you feel bad, and brownies are the best sweets.

His questions:

1. What was Amber like in class?
2. Did she have any friends, or was she mostly alone?
3. What about her caught Tamia's attention?
4. How did Amber react to Tamia's special interest, if she noticed?
5. What does Tamia think happened to her when she disappeared?

1. Oh, whip-smart, not that she'd let you know if she could help it. She was one of those kids who kept her head down in a book, three chapters ahead of the class or off down some rabbit hole she'd found at the library. It wasn't ever that she couldn't grasp the subject; her mind was just always off somewhere else.

2. No...no, she kept to herself. I think it was hard for her to make friends...and sometimes I think she scared them off on purpose. Always ran off to the computer lab the second the bell rang at the end of the day.

3. Those rabbitholes of hers--caught her reading Frankenstein under her desk, and the next week it was a textbook on electrical transmission--ha! You get the idea. Really bright kid. Great mind for science. I turned her onto a couple tech magazines, and then she was always on top of whatever next thing someone had come up with.

4. She was...it helped her. I helped her. I really believe that. But she was a hard nut to crack. Life isn't a Hallmark movie, you know. Anyway, that's not what it's about. It's about making the children's lives better, whatever that looks like for them. And for Amber, that just meant giving that mind of hers something to chew on. I really think she could have been something.

5. I wish I knew. In my heart...I wish I could say she would never have been a runaway, but I'd be lying. It's hard for kids in her situation, even when they have a good foster family and people who love them. Things get hard at home, and there are people out there who will take advantage of a young girl in a bad situation. That's what I'm afraid of, that she fell in with someone she shouldn't have. It's been...it's been so long now without any news of where she went. I'm sorry, I wish I knew more. I wish I could help you find her.

Do you know what her last thing that she was on top of was, before she disappeared? What tech thing?

Were there any signs that things had changed, nearer to when she disappeared? That might suggest she did fall in with someone she shouldn't have?

And is there anyone else in town who might have any ideas of where she might have gone, or care to know if they do find her?

(It's very hard for him not to tell Tamia that Ava is definitely dead. It feels bad having to keep that secret, but it'll feel worse to tell her, Winter thinks.)

1. It was...not Frankenstein, she moved on from that one...what was it....

Oh--prosthetics. That's right, it was sort of odd, but her interests were all over the place. Some new thing that was supposed to work off of brain waves and work like a real hand. I wonder...I don't think she knew anyone who used a prosthetic. I think she just wanted to know how it could work.

2. I couldn't say for sure. She was distant--more distant. Distracted more often, and more obsessed with getting to the computer lab to go online every day than ever. But the school checked up on her browsing history, of course, and the police never made anything of it after she was gone. But then her foster mother and sister got in that accident. I don't know that it had to be anyone else telling her what to do to make her run away after that happened. Maybe she just didn't know how to cope with what happened.

3. There was her foster family, of course...or her foster father. Poor man. I'm sorry, I know there should be more than that for any child...but you're the first person who's asked me about her in years.

(Winter is a kind man for not telling her.)

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Player Plots

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Cherise Cordova

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Augustine Moore

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Tamia Bhatt

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