(event) WAY DOWN WE GO

[vestigemods]

AUGUST EVENT: WAY DOWN WE GO

AUGUST 14TH - 24TH

► THE BASICS

Sup, scrubs. We've still got quite a bit of time before the meat of the event, I'm just getting this post (and the log) up early like I mentioned in August's Infopost to give y'all more time to plot + to actually thread at your own pace throughout the event - so there's no need to worry about scrambling to do any of the above Right The Fuck Now.

This month's event is structured a bit differently from the last - rather than 'here are circumstances that happen to your character', this one is a multi-step problem-solving event, and will feature environmental horror (with mild-to-moderate psychological horror depending on how well your character handles the environmental horror).

The circumstances surrounding this event (the state of the lake, as discussed below) run from August 14th - 24th, with the actual actionable section of the event taking place over a few different stages in the shorter span between the 17th - 22nd. The event log will be going up in the next couple of days, but feel free not to hit it until you're satisfied with your plotting.

This event is a bit experimental, in that it's something that characters need to opt into in some capacity in order to be involved + no alternative 'for those who aren't participating' is really being provided to avoid having too much happen at once. Additionally, this is the first event in which players/characters influence the outcome, so there's bound to be a little bit of troubleshooting in that whole process. I'll have my eye on the success of this event + what I can do to improve these various experimental features in the future!

Content warnings are a lot milder this month - we'll be dealing with dark tight spaces and threat of drowning.

THE REVEAL (14th - 17th)

THE LAKE.

As mentioned in the August Infopost, the lake's prevailing water level has been dropping at a rate of 3-4 inches per day for a week now (between the 7th and 13th). This has been mostly inconspicuous, though perhaps more observant characters have picked up on it... But even the unobservant will have a hard time missing what's to come.

Characters at lakeside on the 14th will notice that they can quite literally see the water level dropping, like a tide that never quite washes back in. Each hour that passes reveals five more inches of shoreline - of lake bed, as it quickly becomes. Throughout the day the water level drops ten whole feet, a full 1/3 of the lake's total depth, and continues to drop at a rate of ten feet per day over the next two days, and if anyone dares to swim out near the center of the lake, the inexplicable heaviness from last month has intensified to near-inescapable levels. Hardly peaceful now, this new heaviness feels as though you're actively being sucked below the surface, pulled by some force unseen.

But as the water level drops further and further, characters might notice an oddity at that very spot. Something dark and rectangular along the lake bed, terribly conspicuous now as the turbulent water around it washes away the silt that has hidden it from view so far.

At about noon on the 17th, the water level stabilizes at a depth of about 1.5 feet - save for the mysterious lake-bed object, which now sits above the surface on a muddy little island about two yards across. Upon further investigation, it turns out to be a hatch.

THE HATCH.

The hatch is weathered on the surface but otherwise sturdy and intact, bearing a barely-legible insignia of an eye encircled by arms. Most notably, it has been knocked fractionally askew on its hinges, leaving nearly inch-wide triangular gaps at the front and one side - certainly large enough holes to drain a lake (though whether it could drain it so quickly is up for debate). To each side of the hatch lies a padlock, broken, half-buried in mud.

The hatch door opens easily enough (in fact, doing so straightens it back on its hinges), revealing a six-foot laddered drop into a cave, long and narrow and steep. The floor is at no less than a 20° incline, though the floor seems clean enough of most rocky debris. The only light in the cave is that which filters in from the hatch.

One could certainly choose to just close hatch back up like it should have been from the start, to walk away and wash their hands of this mess... But the insignia on the door seems ominous, important. What's more, the second a sincere suggestion that they explore the hatch reaches the air, everyone in the Containment Zone receives a text with no listed sender:

Close the hatch. Stay away from the hatch. This is your only warning.

That's certainly not ominous or suspicious.

Now characters have a choice: Do they investigate this hatch that the Technicians want them nowhere near, or do they steer clear as instructed? Note that it is a completely viable choice to close the damn hatch and move on with life - I'll toss out some sort of half-assed alternate event and it'll be fine. But if my faith in our merry band of intrepid (and wary) explorers is well-placed, it's time to talk about...

THE CAVE (17TH - 19TH)

EXPLORING

Whether your characters take the day to prepare or dive right in, let's skip ahead to the part where they find themselves crawling down the hatch and into the cave. The floor is very damp, almost but not quite muddy, and so are the bottom ~2 feet of cave wall. The walls are narrow, six feet wide at the widest point and often too narrow for two people to walk side-by-side. The cave also seems to turn distinctly to the left at approximate ten minute intervals, doing so two separate times before the incline levels out to almost completely flat and a faint, rhythmically-intermittent red light can be spotted a few yards.

Thus leads to their first and only discovery.

The light, as it turns out, is a circular beacon at the top of an almost clinical-looking (if dusty) sign fastened securely to the cave wall at just under eye-level. It seems to be for navigation: One side, with an arrow pointing back in the direction from which they came, is labeled ZONE 2 MAINTENANCE HATCH. Another, with an arrow pointing the way they've been traveling, reads, EMERGENCY EXIT. Opposite the sign is the first offshoot-tunnel the cave has offered so far, but it's not much to speak of: the path is thoroughly caved in just a couple of yards from the intersection, with the top left corner of what looks like it was once an elevator peeking feebly out of the debris.

The only options, it seems, are to return to the surface or to see where 'EMERGENCY EXIT' leads. At the very least, that tunnel also seems to ascend back toward the surface.

CAVE-IN.

Should characters choose the latter and continue down the EMERGENCY EXIT path, the response is immediate: The ground gives a shudder, cave walls rumbling in protest for a long ominous moment, and those looking down the tunnel ahead will see the cave ceiling begin to collapse in what almost seems like a wave rippling down toward them, thundering to an ominous stop at precisely where the tunnel starts to incline (though some of the debris does cascade out into the flat part, such is the way of things). Those who may have made the wise choice to flee back toward the tunnel from whence they came are met now with a hollow stone crack of warning, and a section of this ceiling comes down now as well.

It seems that our poor spelunkers are trapped.

Though the EMERGENCY EXIT path has been thoroughly destroyed, the debris blocking their path back up to the lake isn't nearly so deep - in fact, light shined at the pile-up filters out to the cave on the other side through many a gap in the rubble, though none are quite big enough to crawl through.

The concept of moving the debris seems slow at best, dangerous at worst - a well-lit glance at the ceiling finds bits of it leaning heavily against the uppermost debris, threatening further cave-in if the wrong bits of supporting rubble are removed. Despite the danger, it may prove to be one of the better options available.

Those who try to use their phones find that network service exists even here in the caves, though the quality of all audio/video transmissions are grainy and choppy, sometimes cutting out altogether for a moment, and any attempt to text instead takes multiple attempts to convince it to send. Here's hoping the reply even makes it through.

And if you want a little extra yikes with your cave-in, characters who were standing too close to either cave-in as they occurred may have been injured by falling rocks, or may even have ended up with an arm, leg, or even their torso pinned under heavy stones and debris.

PROBLEM-SOLVING?

At this point, characters (both spelunkers and those who initially stayed outside the cave) need to brainstorm and work together to figure out how to get everyone safely out of the caves. I have no right or wrong answer in mind, and I leave it entirely up to your discretion how quickly the rescue efforts will feasibly work given the circumstances.

With any luck, a solution will come together that gets everyone out safely before anything gets any worse... But if they happen to still be stuck on the 20th, they've officially run out of time to waste.

THE WATER (20TH - 22ND)

THE LAKE.

If the cave-in itself wasn't reason enough to worry, this most certainly is: Early on the 20th and with no discernible point of origin, the lake begins to refill.

Those outside the hatch will notice the lake waters rising until they've swallowed up the little island and begun pouring mercilessly into the hatch. The waters rise no further from there - all of the water that would be refilling the lake now seems to funnel down into the cave.

As for inside the hatch, the news breaks much more alarmingly. What could almost be considered a waterfall now pours down the center of the long narrow path, colliding with the fallen debris before properly seeking out gaps and holes to pour through into the space beyond.

THE FINAL STRETCH.

The trouble is, that very 'space beyond' - the one in which our spelunkers are trapped - is the lowest point in the tunnel, ascending at each exit. The water that funnels here has nowhere else to go, puddling outward from the wall of debris until it covers the floor of the room and gets deeper and deeper from there.

It's best to hurry things up a bit, because though the room seems to be filling slowly enough, it will be too deep to sit down and rest in by morning of the 21st (my condolences to anyone who tried to sleep at reasonable hours and woke up with a mouthful of cavewater), it will be up to an average man's neck by nightfall of the 21st, and by noon on the 22nd there will be no air pocket left for even the strongest swimmers to breathe.

BACK TO NORMAL.

The lake will finish filling back up to its prior water level by July 25th. Further attempts to swim down to examine the hatch will find that opening it reveals nothing more than a harsh concrete slab beneath.

QUESTIONS, ANSWERS, & MISCELLANY

RE: THE CHOOSE-YOUR-OWN NATURE OF THIS EVENT

So as much as I obviously have this all worked out down to the possibility that everyone drowns, I'm absolutely not requiring that this event go that far. Like I said near the top, characters can literally just close the hatch from the get-go and not even fuck with it, or they can turn back at any point pre-cave-in, or the rescue mission can be quick and efficient and nobody will have to risk drowning.

All of which means that the plotting for this event is pretty critical, since the ideas thrown out in that are what decide how this goes down. Please, utilize the RESCUE EFFORTS plotting top-level below specifically to coordinate how characters are going to solve this mess, so that I can keep an eye on it and help keep the masses informed about how this is shaking out.

Q: CAN THE HATCH BE CLOSED?

It can be! It will leak somewhat even if it's properly closed, but nothing near the amount of water that would drown those trapped below. This is, however, a double-edged sword: A closed hatch means that the lakewater has nowhere to go quickly, so it will begin to fill up properly and leave the hatch submerged.

Q: HOW WIDE IS THE PATH AT THE CAVE-IN SITE?

It's a little over 6 feet wide, and the ceiling in this section (as well as the trapped area beyond) is about 8 feet high.

Q: IF LITERALLY OUR ONLY PLAN IS CAREFULLY DIGGING, WHAT'S OUR TIMEFRAME?

Rough estimate, between the time it takes to identify which debris is safe to clear without risking further cave-in and the time it takes to actually do so (big rocks! very heavy!) there would be a safe enough gap to climb through by the time the water is at a little over waist-height (mid-21st).

Q: MY CHARACTER WOULDN'T/CAN'T GET INVOLVED IN ANY OF THIS - WHAT CAN I EVEN DO THIS MONTH?

Well firstly, don't sell your character short! Those down in the cave working on solving the problem will certainly need food, water, and other supplies along the way, which your character is welcome to help collect/supply or even to be the runner who carries things up and down from the hatch to the rescuers. Other less direct opportunities to help may arise as plans or formed, so keep an eye on the plotting post replies!

As for non-event things, our August Infopost had quite a few things of Unusual Nature to interact with. Of particular interest include the somewhat concerning tree (see: ANOMALIES, it has moved and is possibly doing shit), the obscenely hot weather + methods of coping with it (especially with much of the lake gone), the erratic wildlife behavior, the party-inducing effects of the Party Pack slap bracelets, the mouth/throat numbing blackberries, and the alarming hands sticking up between the slats of your character's porch. :')

That's it, folks! If you have any questions, toss them into the top-level below. You're free to use this post for plotting purposes, though I also recommend linking it on the discord/modplurk for those who may not check the comments! You're also free to make a plotting comment independent of the three mod-issued plotting top-levels - those are primarily just for coordinating efforts within specific groups.

Godspeed, and happy digging!