ourearth: Silly Mod icon, reads: MI5 | Current UK threat level: Cup of Tea (current threat level)
Save Our Earth Mods ([personal profile] ourearth) wrote in [community profile] saveourearth2019-01-20 05:30 pm

We shall rebuild [mingle]

Date: 2/1/19
Characters: Open


With the festive season well and truly over, and most wallets smarting from the festivities, Mossgate has, as usual, been extremely quiet through January. The last of the sales are still lingering in the stores, hoping to entice any shoppers who aren't desperately holding out for that first January pay day at the end of the month, and the seafront is empty of all but the hardiest dog walkers, wrapped up against the cold winter winds. At least the evenings are finally starting to ever so slowly get a little bit lighter, but that's small compensation for the otherwise grey and dull month.

It seems as though it will drag on this way all the way through to February, but on the afternoon of the 20th Mossgate is shaken awake. Literally. A 4.5 magnitude earthquake hits the town just after 3:15PM, with the epicentre located at the mouth of the Moss River. The shaking lasts for a couple of seconds, and sends a couple of chimney stacks flying, but there's very little real damage done around town. As earthquakes are extremely rare in the UK, most people are unsure what is happening, and most report it to the media as assuming that a bomb had gone off, or a lorry gone past, or something similar.

Almost immediately the internet lights up with the usual British response to such events, and it's headline news on the local papers and TV for the next few days. Initially they cover the event and the clean up, and then the social media response to it.

However, those who have numbers will not just be subjected to the initial scare and then the following ridicule. As the shaking fades, an unsettled feeling starts to rise; subtly at first, but increasing as the days go by. They are left feeling anxious and uneasy, but also curious and excited. In particular, they will find themselves drawn to the earthquake and the information about it, perhaps checking the news or social media about it more than they usually would, or easier to draw into conversations about it. Whatever they can find just doesn't seem to be enough, and they're drawn to discuss it and the other unusual events (such as the appearance of the poppies in November, or the strange gifts over Christmas) of late more, and to find out more about them. It can be ignored, but as any niggling annoyance it won't disappear if it is.
saveournpcs: (other)

B

[personal profile] saveournpcs 2019-01-21 07:07 am (UTC)(link)
Most of what Jimmy can find about earthquakes in the area from studying books amounts to: The area is not particularly active tectonically, there only very rarely are any earthquakes, and if there are they're of low magnitude.

Digging deeper, however, he'll come across another bit of information. Perhaps he reads old newspaper clippings that point him to this, or perhaps he branches out to the uni library by himself and finds an old dissertation, and then follows that papertrail.

Either way, the information amounts to this: In the 80ies, a group of students from the fields of geology, history, and archaeology teamed up in an attempt to write a story of the earthquakes in the Mossgate area and use the results for their various dissertations. For the most part, it's uneventful and just a very scholarly, number- and historical record based reiteration of the general information to be found.

Except for that they did find one aberration that occurred a little while before the Norman Conquest. If Jimmy finds the dissertations, he'll find that one of the history students wrote their whole dissertation about how people interpreted the events as the first calamities before the apocalypse, as a sign that the world must surely be ending soon, and how a wave of Millenialism swept across the area. The others mostly mention it as a part of larger context, but the information boils down to: A series of earthquakes took place around this time, including two major ones. There is no exact localisation to be found, only that the epicentre must have been located somewhere in the south tip of Kent or in the Channel close to that area.
Edited 2019-01-23 06:40 (UTC)