Save Our Earth

Date: 18.9.19
Characters: OPEN

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The local radio station is the first to spread it widely, but of course the news have already made the rounds around Moss Manor itself by the time they become official. Village gossip and all that.

And quite some news they are: The graveyard has been closed! Fences and tape have gone up, and if you stand on tiptoes and know where to stand and where to look, you can see the most visible reason for why that is: A sinkhole has opened near the centre of the graveyard, taking down two graves with a third tombstone balancing precariously at the rim of the sunk area. Luckily it hit the more historic part of the graveyard that has no recent burials in it, so it will be less emotionally impactful than what happened at Halloween last year, but it is still a dangerous development and has the vicar in a very unhappy situation.

Partly because there's press in the house yet again.

Press that is also bouncing around the whole Mossgate area trying to interview people in hopes of finding someone who will be hysteric about the situation. Or at least dramatically worried.

Most of Moss Manor's residents are unhelpfully calm, at least towards outsiders... but many are secretly treading very carefully and eyeing the ground closely wherever they walk. What, after all, if more sinkholes show up?

Date: 24 August 2019
Characters:OPEN
Note: Like all welcome mingles, this is a SoL free-for-all mingle meant to get new characters involved by centring around something relevant to them. Without further ado, please welcome Celestial Ray Jones, Sacrament Lucas Jones and Torin Byrd!

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The summer is drawing to an end, but not without one last big event: A day-long music festival that's spread out over the Greens and the nearest bits of the shoreline. One stage sits just below the tideline, so sometimes there's water around it and sometimes there isn't and one stage sits higher up on the Greens. Many bands and singers have come from both the local and wider area, and the festival has even has managed to acquire two big-name headliners: Bryan Adams and Busted, so all ages are catered for. The general music styles range from rock to pop, nothing extreme on any ends but still a wide enough range to not be boring.

The entrance fee is cheap and there's family discounts, so there's a lot of locals but also a good deal of people from further away, and due to the scenic location there's even people from further away than London in attendance. Especially since the weekend is blessed with perfect weather, just overcast enough for people to not get too many sunburns and heatstrokes but sunny enough that there's no worries about rain.

It also helps that the festival is fundraising for a cause that unites all ages, classes, and any other disparaging groups: Dinosaurs. Who doesn't love dinosaurs? Exactly. We all come together for dinosaurs. Or that is what the organisers say in the opening speech. Fact is, the kids' corner of the festival is dinosaur themed, a few people in dinosaur suits hang around, there's dinosaur themed food, and there's a group of party tents explaining what the fundraiser is for. And, more excitingly, displaying some dinosaur artefacts - bits of a skeleton arranged to make it clear where in the dinosaur they went, a fossilized egg, and a stone with the imprint of a dinosaur in it. Because this is what the fundraiser is about: The town museum has managed to successfully campaign for an additional room in the context of the renovations necessary after the controlled WW2 bomb detonation last year. And the director of the museum has been working closely with a paleontology professor from the local uni to dedicate that room to what they can reasonably call dinosaur ages. Well, and everything else that came before the time that the up-until-now "oldest" room in the town museum covers. But mainly dinosaurs.

They even have a very specific thing they're fundraising for, the two explain when they're on stage in-between acts: One specific full dinosaur skeleton that was found in Mossgate during the Victorian age which has been in private hands up until now will be auctioned off in a couple of months, and of course Mossgate's town museum has a very special interest in acquiring that fossil.

All in all, it's a typical festival: Drinks and food can be bought, the music alternates between the two stages to give the next showact time to set up, and such. There's more security than there would be normally, and the bag checks are more intense, but with the things that have happened in Mossgate in the last year that's maybe not surprising. ...And when Busted plays on the sea stage at high tide, there's sharks circling the stage. They don't attack anyone, just circle, so everyone just writes it off as a publicity stunt. After the first song, the band even says that they brought mascots, so all is fine, right?

And they make sense, a band member quickly supplies. After all sharks are very closely related to dinosaurs, closer than almost any other reptile!