Thanks, Ben [Mingle]

[saveournpcs]

Date: 4th of January 20, 3 hours after everyone came out of the cavesCharacters: OPEN

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Three hours after everyone came out of the caves, an earthquake of the magnitude 5.7 shakes the echo boundary.

Up on the ruins, a single block from one of the lower walls gets dislocated and falls.

Down in the city and villages, things go a bit worse. A couple of sheds collapse, things fall over and off things, and some houses are left with cracks in their walls and might end up condemned. A number of telegraph poles fall over and a few on cars. There's three injured and no fatalities over all, and a few related car accidents because people got distracted that again go without fatalities.

...And, of course, the Media are back. The next day, the Sun titles "IS THERE A NEW CRACK IN THE EARTH'S CRUST??? Another earthquake strikes Mossgate 4 houses condemned, 10 admitted to hospital, powerlines down", but newspapers with more journalistic integrity send reporters as well.

Someone else is back, too - Numbered will see Mr Neutral, Mr Evil and Mr Helpful wander the streets.

Comments

[saveournpcs]

"Not of any specifics, no." He falls quiet.

"...For what it's worth," he picks up again after a little while, "I always assumed that whatever the mystery underground source of all of this was was even bigger than that. Something that encompassed the entire area that's..." He makes a vague hand gesture, "an anomaly. So as giant as this is, it's smaller than I assumed.

This is all assuming that the giant mouse is actually the source of all of this."

[spaghettimonster]

Russell nods, with a pensive glance toward the river. "We're sure it caused the earthquake, but the rest of it... The mice and the echoes, they're linked somehow. The giant mouse itself, it might just be another creature caught up in everything, changed to be... massive. It's hard to say." He bites his lip for a second, then grabs his mobile and unlocks the screen.

"There was cave art down there, I took a few photos... Here." The screen's on a mundane photo of the three mostly humanoid figures around the giant mouse, the handprints of varying shape.

[saveournpcs]

He studies the human figures closely, and then frowns. "That looks like not all of them were human. Not completely at least, any more. But they are very old, aren't they?

...Do you have proof that the giant mouse is linked to the echoes the same way the small ones are?"

[spaghettimonster]

"'Proof?'" Russell echoes, squinting at him. "I don't... that's not what I was looking for. But I suppose, when Benjiro, uh, touched it, he got an echo from it. And not an echo about a giant mouse."

There's the mix of avoiding admitting the context in which Benjiro was climbing on it for hours, the confusion of his imperfect recall of details of whether it was the ordinary sort of echo or something different, and so on.

[saveournpcs]

He frowns in faint confusion. Maybe it's just that his own thoughts had been travelling into a different direction, but...

"Why would you have expected the echo to be about a giant mouse? You think the mouse is related more closely to Benjiro than to everyone else?"