Day 3: Morning

[wizardseason]

Morning: 6:00am - 12:00noon

[ IRL Timeframe: April 22nd - April 29th May 8th, 2019 ]

It's the third day and, in striking comparison to day two, it is not a bright and sunny morning. The day begins for every hero with an unfamiliar room in an unfamiliar place in an unfamiliar time.

When your characters check their phones, clocks, calendars, or any other timekeeping implement they'll find that the year is 00 AW, forty years before the present day. The year before the Wizard's first game was held, the year before it came down to only two knights and the Princess facing off against the Wizard. It was before all of it.

Everywhere your characters go, there are no people. Their devices will not connect to the internet outside of the island, their companions will not appear, the Protector will not answer, but they can text each other without difficulty. If groups in the same city try to find each other, they will find that some kind of mystical plot barrier is keeping them from finding each other. A wrong turn, a locked door, a lost connection. Somehow, they're kept apart. All the support they have is who they woke up with. Oddly, everyone wakes up in their normal day-to-day clothing rather than pajamas.

There have to be answers somewhere, but where?

Third Morning Event: All Cities: The Past.

---

The Weather

• Eerily still.
• 64°F / 18°C
• The trees are unmoving, there is no wind.

---

Prompts:

• 6:30am Spa Hotel, Bamborough: Two sets of heroes wake up in the Spa Hotel in Bamborough. Garrot wakes up in the same room as Olivia. On the far side of the Spa hotel, in one of the waterfront cabins, Haizea and Joanna wake up in the same room. The hotel is empty, but every room is unlocked. Food's still in the dining areas, too. Oddly, things look like they were in use around the Hotel. Carts in the middle of hallways, half-eaten meals on tables, bags halfway up staircases. Odd.


• 6:30am Lodge Cots, Craydon: The Craydon lodge isn't much, but it's a spanning complex of cabins that maximize occupancy by filling them with cots for that "outdoor camping" experience. Rory and Gail will wake up in one of the cabins near the base of the mountain. On the furthest edge of the lodge, Gyre and Seth will wake up in their top-level cots higher up the mountain. There are a few campfires going with meat roasting over them, piles of raw meat to the side ready to cook, and various festivities left laying around. It's almost like everyone up and left all at once, but where did they go?


• 6:30am Cozy Inn, Far Haven: Far Haven's 'Cozy Inn' promises the 'small town feeling' in the middle of the big city. The inside is exactly that, a very cozy little hotel with three floors of rooms and a covered walkway with a glass floor over a garden into another section of the hotel. Zafika and Web will wake up in a room on the first floor nearest the train station exit of the cozy inn. No doors are locked here and it looks as if things were left strewn about like the people just teleported out of here. Terrence, Matilda, and Luka wake up in the glass walkway above, in sleeping bags. They'll find that the only way out goes to the cozy inn's far building, they'll have to go through a spanning cafeteria space with tons of empty tables that, strangely, look like they were just in use. Plates with half-full, or even untouched plates sit around on every table and there are even jackets draped over some chairs, purses on the ground. The city outside is much the same, vehicles just stopped in the middle of the street with no drivers, things dropped on the ground. What happened...?


• 9:30am, Exploration, Bamborough, Craydon, Far Haven: The scene is much the same in all three cities. When the heroes make their way outside, they'll notice that the sky above Harsen Island is a massive vortex centered over the mountain in the middle of the island. Heroes in Craydon will get to see it a little closer, the massive clouds occasionally crackling with blue lightning. All three cities have glowing cracks in the ground in various places, the cracks lead all around, some larger, some smaller, maybe there's something to be found? There are large glowing obelisks that are floating over each city and outside of them, they occasionally float down near the ground enough to touch or look closer at. Once the heroes make their way out into the streets, they might start seeing glimpses of a Wizard hat in the distance but each time it passes behind a wall or into shadow and is gone. Maybe they can catch up? Maybe your hero takes a moment to search through local news, the paper, letters, a television station. What's going on in the city right now?

---

Procedure:

Reply to the appropriate toplevel comments for events below. Indicate if a post is a private conversation with "Private" in the subject otherwise all threads should be open to interaction with others. Plan OOCly how you'd like to toss everyone around.

Important: 'Exploration' toplevels will unlock additional information as items in their descriptions are explored. If your character explores a feature, write [Character explores ____] at the end of your tag and send a ping on Discord to get a reply with further details regarding that item.

Comments

Haizea + Joanna

[tropicalstorm]

Haizea wakes first, as suddenly she feels supremely uncomfortable. When she opens her eyes, she sees why; she's fully dressed, in jeans and boots and everything. She's literally never been able to sleep like this, and the sheer wrongness of it all makes her shiver a bit until she jumps out of bed.

When she sees Joanna, her eyebrows raise. What on earth happened?

"Hey, uh... Joanna? Joanna, wake up!" she starts of speaking softly, but reaches an tone closer to yelling by the end of that.

[fauntofwisdom]

Joanna's ears flick at the sounds for a few seconds before the rest of her catches up, and stirring enough to roll over and blink at the world.

"I'm... I'm awake," she mumbles, raising a hand to shield her eyes and help her focus.
"...Haizea, right? Is something upsetting you?

As she pushes herself up to sitting, Joanna surveys the room. The curtains are mostly closed, but it's light enough to make out this is an unfamiliar place, and she's waking in a bed, fully clothed. That much isn't a terrible surprise, she'd struggled to fall asleep the night before, with her thoughts churning over the aftermath of the monster fight...

If you can really call it the night before.

[tropicalstorm]

"Uh, yeah, I'm a bit upset! Do you remember us falling asleep in this room? Or even whose room this is?" She starts checking her person, as if that will answer her questions. Her outfit is basically what she'd intended to wear today, and she finds her knight weapon brass knuckles in her back pocket but only her knight phone in her jacket.

"I don't know 'bout you, but never in my life have I been able to fall asleep fully dressed like this. I got a bad feeling..."

[fauntofwisdom]

Joanna regrets asking the question almost as soon as she takes in a little more of their situation. Even if Haizea hadn't directly answered, the shape of her questions after gives it away. So Joanna sits for a moment, controlling her breathing and listening, trying to wake herself up a little more.

"I haven't visited anyone else's 'home', but this isn't mine," she confirms softly, and slowly stands. "You think we've been brought here by someone. We're not restrained... and you have a weapon on hand... so it may simply be a prank."

She doesn't think so, either. Their voices sound a little too loud, and her every step towards the door seems to echo even though they're on carpeted floors. It's like the world outside has gone silent. Ominous.

"...I'll try opening the door. Keep a lookout, would you?" Joanna asks, pausing a second for an answering nod, before opening the hallway door.

[tropicalstorm]

Haizea nods and slips her brass knuckles on. If this is a trap, she's ready to fight her way out of it. When the door opens though, there's just.... nothing but an empty hallway. She walks out into it cautiously and listens for anything unusual, and hears not a sound.

"This feels weird... let's try and get outta here, we can at least figure out where we are then."

[fauntofwisdom]

"Does it seem too quiet to you?"

Joanna keeps her voice soft, and looks around with her ears flicking in different directions, trying to make out any sign of what's going on.

She notices the brass knuckles and pauses a moment to pat herself down. No weapons in her pockets, but she has the zipbag of finger foods - and the corporate cell phone. The date and time appear as she tests it, and she freezes.

"...Haizea. Do you have your phone? Mine is... reading something strange."

[tropicalstorm]

"Hm?" Haizea says, looking over her shoulder as she heads down the hallway. "Oh, yeah, I do. What do you mean strange?" She asks, and turns it on.

At first, she doesn't react. But when she notices the date, she stops in her tracks.

"Joanna... does your phone say that it's 00 AW too? It's gotta be a glitch right, I mean, I wasn't even b-" she breaks off, realizing that she doesn't actually know if that's true or not. She might have been born by then, for all she knows, and it's weird to think of herself existing in a pre-wizard world.

[fauntofwisdom]

"Yes, it... It must be," Joanna agrees, slowly shaking her head as she stares at the numbers. "We didn't even use that notation for... a year or so later? It took a while for us to realize... how the world had changed..."

But that era's exactly what this quiet reminds her of. The times when the jungles went still, no animal sounds filling the trees, as all of nature held its breath in anticipation of the next movement of the war. Her own breath stutters, as decades old habit tries to reassert itself.

[tropicalstorm]

"Yep, definitely a glitch, technology is dumb, let's get out of here!" Haizea says, sounding more like she's trying to convince herself than Joanna. Her bad feeling about all this hasn't let up, she at least wants to get out of this unknown hotel and get her bearings.

She leads the way down the hallway, brass knuckles still clenched on her right hand. Eventually, they find a door that leads outside the large cabin they'd woken up in. Haizea takes a deep breath before reaching for the doorknob, almost dreading what they're going to find.

[fauntofwisdom]

The door opens to a wrap-around porch, with a fallen suitcase open with clothing spilled out on the stairs. The paved path extends from the base of the stairs up the slope to a much larger building - the Spa Hotel's main building. To either side, there's a couple of other cabins, all ocean front places with beautiful views of the water.

The ebb and flow of the ocean waves are about the only sound in the world, besides the noises the two knights make. The whole world is quiet, and still - no signs of other people, no rustling of animals in plants, not even a breeze.

Joanna has her hand to her mouth, a fist curled up to breathe through as she takes in the scenery. The city has changed, the buildings don't look the same. Certain touches of architecture, the telltale signs of modern magitek - they're all missing.

[tropicalstorm]

“This... ain’t right, is it?” Haizea remarks, looking at their surroundings. Under different circumstances, she’d love to go swimming on a beach as quiet as this, but the general sense of ‘wrongness’ is ruining the mood entirely.

“I haven’t seen one of these since I was a kid,” she says, pointing at a piece of rudimentary tech that has long since been replaced by magitek. She walks out onto the porch and squints a bit. “I think we’re in Bamborough?”

[fauntofwisdom]

"That's what it looks like to me, except... Well, there's a lot of things like that. Not how they are anymore, but... maybe how they used to be." She doesn't know for sure. Being a child in Amarosia in the year now known as 0AW, and only visiting the island a few times in later life... There's little to compare to.

Joanna shakes her head, and leans out further to examine more of their surroundings, more of the island and sky. The mountain's crowned under a strange storm cloud circling the island's center, and the horizons's clear beyond it...

"That moon," Joanna says, and can't get anything out for a second or two. "Have you ever seen it like that... even pictures?"

[tropicalstorm]

"No," Haizea says softly, also staring up at the moon. This is a bit overwhelming. "I've never seen it look like that before."

She finally tears her eyes away from it and looks down at her phone to distract herself. There's that year again. She takes a deep breath while looking at it.

"Joanna... What if this is right?" She asks, and holds up her phone.

[fauntofwisdom]

"That... That would make this the day of the wizard's arrival," she realizes as she speaks, and her voice goes soft with wonder. The day, maybe even the very hour.

The moon's astonishing... but it's also relatively motionless, compared to the crackles of lightning over the mountain or Haizea turning the phone to face her. Joanna glances at the phone, then back up at the sky.

"What could she want to show us...? We shouldn't stay in here, but get out, go searching."

[tropicalstorm]

Haizea nods in agreement. “Yeah, we need to figure out more ‘bout what’s goin’ on here. Let’s head out to town, maybe split up a bit to cover more ground. Let’s just check...” Haizea pulls out her phone, writes a text that says just ‘test’ and sends it to Joanna. Her phone buzzes in response.

“Good, looks like we can still get in touch with each other with these, at least.”

[fauntofwisdom]

Joanna's phone buzzes first with Haizea's text, then again with Garrot's right after. She looks at it closely, then lets out a relieved sigh, holding the phone close for comfort.

"Each other, and it seems the others, too. Let's do as you said, then. Split up, keeping our phones close at hand if we need help."