Quest 270

( Private || Hackable by Friends )

[Filtered AWAY from the Deities | Attempted Unhackable]

I'm sure most everyone has noticed by now the carousel animals' recent habit of jumping off their posts and stampeding throughout the City. It's an unexpected occurrence, I think, but hardly a surprising one at this point. It's May, after all, and strange things always seem to happen in the month of May, just as October tends to be a particularly horrifying month when it comes to the curses.

Still, I think this May is turning out to be much different than the ones I've seen before it. It isn't the first time I've ever heard the clock wind down into silence, and it's not the first time I've seen the animals leave the carousel and attack the passerby. What is different, though, is how long things have gone on--and how quiet the deities have been in response to it. Horrible things have happened before, but it's strange that the deities have been so silent. Moreover, they haven't stepped in to intervene this time, as they sometimes have in the past. Last year they fairly finished off the shepherdess for us, and spent a certain amount of time talking amongst themselves about her, as well. But this year there's nothing, and there haven't been any unusual invaders the way there have been in previous years; on the contrary, it almost seems as though this year the City itself is acting to cause the mischief.

It seems clear, though, that the deities aren't willing to step in this time. They left us to manage the problem of the barrier for ourselves, and it seems as though they plan to do the same for the clock and whatever else might be tied to it.

Two words have shown up now, since this trouble seemed to begin--"death", and "IECENVDE", which we think might unscramble into the word "evidence". Death and evidence could point to any number of things, really: to blood, to wounds, to the graveyard, or to the dead in the City themselves. Blood and wounds, of course, are evidence of death on their own; a graveyard is evidence of death because it's where the dead are laid to rest, and where those places are marked with headstones. And it doesn't seem to make much sense, having a graveyard at all in a place where the dead are made to live again, but it's played a role in a few times of trouble before this--once when people that tried to escape the City were put into graves instead, and another time when it filled with all new gravestones, ones that bore the names of visitors that had come to see us, and digging down into the graves only led to a set of catacombs beneath the graveyard itself.

And then there are the dead in the City, who can't help but be evidence of death just by existing here. Adrastus's mother once suggested that she was the one who paid for the dead in the City, who gave them the chance and ability to live again here. And the first time I met her was just around two years ago this month, when she came to collect Adrastus in the beginning of May.

It's hard to say, with all this in mind, what might be going on. Whatever it is, it's certainly not a series of events we've seen before, though bits and pieces of it have shown up in other places here and there--the clock stopping, the harpies, the carousel animals. And all in the early days of May.

But I think what's becoming clearest of all is that things can't go on like this, and something will have to be done because the deities certainly don't seem inclined to do it for us. There was a second way of restoring the barrier, after the first came down; what's to say there isn't a similar way of restarting the clock, if we can only find it? That seems to be the problem most at hand; if the City revolves around the clock and it's the City that's against us at the moment, then perhaps mending the clock will also mend the City. Perhaps that's the thorn in the lion's paw that only needs to come out for things to resolve themselves again. But I can't face that clock, I can't--

Which I suppose, at the risk of mixing my fables, leaves just one question: who, then, will bell the cat?


[OOC: Bzns has officially become srs. Anybody with information about the Omens Plot who wants to get together and chat it out, consider this an open forum to do so! Threadjack, talk amongst yourselves, whatever. Rosella, for her part, is still suffering from phantom pains and is fixin' to get that clock fixed; if she answers you in voice or video, feel free to notice she sounds rather strained and tense. o/]