A very merry Halloween! [Mingle]

[ourearth]

Date: 31st of October
Characters: Open!
Warning: Non-sexual desecration of formerly buried corpses

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On the morning of Halloween, when people first step out of their houses, they will almost step into something.

A bucket of water. Every flat and every house in the Mossgate Boundary has a bucket placed in front of its entrance door (and sometimes, especially in Folkton and Moss Manor, the back door too), in which scary apples are floating. A little sign taped to the bucket reads: Have fun bobbing!.

But that's not the only thing that happened. The second thing that people will notice is that there are billions of spiders of all sizes crawling all over the town and villages, the military base, the Manor House... everywhere. And they certainly did their job - trees, lanterns, the higher attractions on the pier, and everything else that is high all over Mossgate Council is covered in thick layers of cobweb.

And lastly... those who pass by a church will notice something about the graveyards around them. Namely, that someone placed skeletons on top of most of the graves... Awfully real looking ones. Really, really awfully real looking ones. To some of them, the soil of the graveyard still clings, and the graves underneath them are in a state that betrays that they were dug up during the night. DNA tests would show that, indeed, the skeletons belong to the individuals buried in the graves.

Comments

II

[vernal_miss]

Should his endeavors lead him over to Moss Manor, he might very well spot his granddaughter investigating the spiders on her own while waiting to be picked up for trick or treating by her group of friends out in the yard. The whole day has been a little spooky, as delightful as she finds the natural decorations from the spiders, and her school refused to let the children outside with all the spiders moving about.

Nel is chasing down spiders and depositing them into a jar to study one a time where she doesn't have to worry about any bites. A stick does wonders for sneaking under them, and sweeping up another to tuck into the jar, she sits down in the grass holding the jar up in the light to look at the spider within to look for spots or stripes or any other sorts of marks while taking note of how large it happens to be.

[scarsolderthanyou]

"How many of those have you caught now?" Sam asks, coming to pause, bend down a little, and look over her shoulder at the jar. "Anything interesting about them?"

Not that he's found much of interest yet, besides the sheer number of them. Then again, his vision isn't the greatest.

[vernal_miss]

Staring intently at the spider within, she looks back over her shoulder as her grandfather comes down partway to examine it with her. Her expression is serious but there is a definite wonder in her voice, “A lot. I think this is number twelve.” Holding the jar up even higher in offer for her grandfather to take it, lid screwed on securely, she answers regarding the matter of details, “Absolutely! I’ve never seen this one before, and there were three others I didn’t recognize. Two of the yellow ones were just cricket bat spiders, but there was another yellow one that was much bigger, very slim, and it had yellow spots on black and black stockings of color on its legs. It was nice.”

“This one...it’s got a funny spot on its head that looks like an upside down string instrument. Like a fiddle or a violin.” The abdomen is pale compared to the brown body and legs, and hailing from the States, Sam may recognize the dangerous species she stumbled upon finding that isn’t normally in Europe.

[scarsolderthanyou]

Why yes, yes he does recognize that. Sam spent a ton of his youth just out in the woods, and he's seen a lot of those. He sucks in his breath a little at the sight. "Nel. Honey. Have any of these spiders bitten you?"

[saveournpcs]

The spider in question seems to rise and look at them, and a familiar feeling washes over both of them, though muted, like a little brother of the usual - a bit of a hollow feeling, a small heartbeat, the faintest feeling of dizziness and a fresh, new plot echo.

[vernal_miss]

Head dropping back all the way to look up to her grandfather as she hears that tone in his voice, she looks puzzled, "No, I don't think so... I have my gloves on, and I've been using a stick to get them in the jar." With a horde of spiders about today, Nel does not want to take any chance of having to ask for her mum to treat a spider bite when it's so obvious she should be careful.

Gaze turning back to the spider in the jar as she wonders why this spider got such a reaction, her eyes widen at the way the spider looks back at them. The wash of that odd feeling comes over her, and her arms slacken to bring the jar back down into her lap slowly as she hears that heartbeat, yet unlike the last time, she keeps herself steady and is able to shake it off. Her hat had slipped somewhat looking up, and an actual shake of her head makes it fall off, but she's no worse for wear if a little more confused than before.

Looking suspiciously at the spider in the jar now in her lap, she speaks to it, "...did you do that?"

[scarsolderthanyou]

"That particular spider is very poisonous," Sam warns. "You should be more c--"

He pauses when the mini-echo hits him, and while he isn't as dizzy as usual, he does sit himself down rather than risk falling on his ass. "Okay. Well. No vision that time."

However, should Nel glance over at him, she'll see that his skin is no longer the well-tanned peachy color it usually is. It's gray. A kind of ashy, muted gray, in fact.

[vernal_miss]

Hearing her grandfather move to sit down on the grass, she stares down the spider only until it resumes crawling around in the bottom of the glass. Her head turns towards him ahead of her eyes, but her gaze certainly catches up, "Wait, you felt tha-...?" Words trailing off, her eyes widen as she takes immediate notice of the change in her grandfather's skin color.

Baffled, she tries to ask a reasonable question, "Grandpa? Did...did you dress up for Halloween?" Nel has severe doubt in this other potential explanation given that he apparently similarly felt the weird Echo effect, yet she wants to be positive he has in fact changed color when she had not looked directly at him until now.

[scarsolderthanyou]

He blinks at her. "Not yet, I have a cape and fake teeth at home, for when kids come by the house, but... why you askin', honey?"

Like the stunned silence of Mike Wazowski

[vernal_miss]

The color is not makeup, so that means... Ornella clams up briefly with the alternative explanation eliminated, her lips pressing into a thin line and her jaw shutting tight in a muted squeak. Wrestling in her head about what to do or say, she instead blurts it out with a nervous shrug of her shoulders, voice hushed so only he can hear her, “...youchangedcolor.”

[scarsolderthanyou]

That's all alarming, even before she spills what the problem is. Then he blinks, and glances down at his hands... and they're gray.

For a moment he just stares. Then he says, disturbed enough not to sensor himself, "Shit." This is. Going to be hard to hide.

[vernal_miss]

Watching with a helpless feeling as her grandfather becomes aware of his new color, she frowns worriedly when he curses. She sets the jar with the spider aside and crawls over on her knees to kneel in front of him for a closer inspection, anxiety gone now that he is aware. The muted gray color is in stark contrast to her own skin color as she reaches to take one of his hands in both of her own if allowed, seeking any signs of a tactile difference with that color.

Her creativity kicks in, “Tonight you can just tell people you’re from a black and white movie, but...” Tomorrow no one will be in costume, and he will need to conceal the color.

[scarsolderthanyou]

The skin is at least exactly the same, other than the color: the texture, consistency, and apparent health of it hasn't changed. It's just gray. He lets Nel examine his hands, as he works through what he can possibly do about gray skin. "I'm going to have to talk to your mother, I think," he admits after a moment, shock fading into a somewhat more familiar scowl. He got rid of all of Amy's make-up years ago.

This is going to be awful, he can already tell.

[vernal_miss]

Taking off her gloves to get direct contact, she finds absolutely nothing else unusual about his hand aside from the color. Nel marvels at the simplicity of the change. What an odd thing to have as an Echo. Then she recalls that Sadie said her eyes took quite a while to change with one immediate alteration followed by a gradual shift after. The girl is not about to bring that up seeing his scowl, but she’ll keep it in mind to keep checking his skin for a couple weeks when she sees him.

“It feels normal,” she reports, then asks, “Do you want to come inside and call her?”

Gloves for his hands should do with the weather turning colder at least.

[scarsolderthanyou]

"Yeah, I'll come inside." He pushes himself to his feet, then gives the spider in its jar another wary look. "And maybe you should leave the spiders alone for a while. They tried to spin up Feste, earlier, and now this one went and changed my color."

[vernal_miss]

Hurrying up to her own feet when he starts to stand, Nel watches his face to make certain he isn’t dizzy changing positions. Then when he speaks of the spider, she looks to the jar as well and moves to pick it up, “...I don’t think this one will do anything,” else. She felt something of an Echo, but she feels no different for it and once more recalls nothing unusual.

Jar tucked under one arm, she walks with her grandfather to go inside the house and fetches the phone for him.