outofsticks | January Plotting: Bitter Winds Howling

OOC UPDATES

Regular AC will be resuming in January!
January is also a TDM month, so it’s the best time to think about who you may want to bring in or to enable the people you love who aren’t us.
New characters of preexisting players are welcome on this post, for the record!
A new past life plotting meme will be going up January 1st to ring in the new year as well, and hopefully the new format will make it more engaging.
We are going to set 2024 on fire and I am personally holding 2025 at gunpoint on all our behalf. Otherwise, we have a lot of really fun things planned for the year and we are greatly looking forward to playing things out with everyone together this year!
Also there is an end of year love meme for the game. This winter’s been hard. This year’s been hard. Let’s end it with a bit of love and joy.

SETTING UPDATES

Mayoi has built a shrine to Ourania, which doubles as a new home. It is placed in the formerly burnt town!
The weather is going to reach sub-zero temperatures, with raging snowstorms threatening one’s health if they stray too far from the indoors… though with how bitter cold it is, that may not help as much as you might want it to.
The river and lake are both completely frozen over, and not even Terho’s cabin has any light or presence to it. State of the seaborne and fish and Sinann? Frozen.
By nature of their magic, the fruit trees and blackberry bushes are still perfectly fine. It’s just a matter of getting to them at this point.
As the winter progresses, the cold encroaches further and further into where it should not be. Cups from the cabinets are frigid as ice, and any fires you try to keep burning flicker even as you stoke them and feel as if they could go out at any moment- Irene’s fireplace in the inn seems to be the only one that isn’t affected.

PLOT UPDATES

Characters will experience strange dreams of water and something trying to reach out. What could it mean? Great question!
New arrivals will find themselves struggling to get through the storm to safety, and will find themselves drawn to various buildings within the settlement. Hanging from their necks will be a pendant with a heavy snowflake amulet. While they wear these, the wraiths may use their voice to call for their sacrifice, and the new characters will feel incredibly cold even within the hottest places in town until they melt the amulet in a fire.
On top of the awful cold, the Grove and surrounding forest are once again under siege- though this time it doesn’t actually seem to be the Fallen Sun’s fault. The winter comes beckoned by the call of wraiths of frost and ice, and their presence only makes things worse.
They can be fought off with a partner or more- they’re much too strong to face alone- and for a time their defeat will abate the winds, but the howling blizzards return not long after. Working alone may cause a curse similar to last January to befall characters as well, where they slowly turn to ice unless saved by an act of true love (platonic or otherwise). The buddy system is the way to go!
(Mods will not be handling these fights, NPC the wraiths in battle as desired.)
All the while the wraiths call for a sacrifice. They do not elaborate on what they could possibly want, but “to stop this awful winter, sacrifices must be made”. Player characters must decide on their sacrifices and how they make them. The results will impact the end of the month with a small mini-event.

Please use the following form for plotting.

Character:
Canon:
CR:
Plans:
Not Seeking:
Anything Else:
Recent Posts or Toplevels:
Past Life Plotting Toplevel:
Meme:

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Character: Dipper Pines
Canon:Gravity Falls (CR AU)
CR: Once upon a time Dipper and his twin sister Mabel were sent off to spend the summer with their weird great uncle Stan at his house-turned-tourist-trap in the woods. While Dipper figured it would be a boring, annoying summer, he uncovers a secret journal about the supernatural and from then on, the whole family is dragged into nonstop supernatural shenanigans, mysteries, and danger. After surviving an apocalypse orchestrated by a trillion year old chaos demon, the twins get back on the bus home at the very end of the summer.

Instead of waking up in Piedmont, California, Dipper wakes up in Deerington, Maine and then spends the next two-to-three years surviving in a horror setting. Deerington, being a nightmare dimension constructed by a dying eldritch girl, does eventually fall apart and dissolve, which leads to the people there waking up in Trench instead, aka Deer Country. Newly awakened and semi-eldritch, the people of Deerington learn to navigate the new world they're meant to build new lives in. Dipper spends a lot of this time pretty content. He has his family, he has a setting steeped in the occult to explore and learn in, and he's growing up in a setting that lets him really pursue his interests without backlash. However, their family starts slowly falling apart after the ocean begins calling them back to the sea. Stan first, and then the twins, leaving Ford alone. Bummer.

Sticks: Dipper wakes up in the Grove after spending [??????] time bobbing around in an eldritch ocean as a squid and finds, oh no! He's here all alone without his family! Something he's never dealt with before! His start here is a little rocky because he is genuinely not sure what to do with himself and doesn't trust his own ability to make friends, but hey, it turns out, this place is full of freaks and he realizes pretty fast that making friends here was super easy because he too, is a freak. Rad. Eventually his uncle turn up, too and he's even happier. They have a house in the woods now just north of what used to be the burned town.

Plans: The cold sucks? And Dipper knows better than to go out into horror winter since the last time he was in a place that got this cold, frost zombies were terrorizing the place and killing everyone so, Dipper is actually going to try and behave for once and stay out of trouble. THAT SAID if anyone gets caught out in the winter over by the Pines house, expect to be dragged in probably. As for Sacrifices, Dipper has An Idea about what to do with that so he will likely be plotting with his family. Stay tuned!! otherwise I am open to shenanigans!!

Not Seeking: No romance! otherwise GIVE
Anything Else: Dipper's powers Opt in/out
Recent Posts or Toplevels: Semi open log and recentish netbook!
Past Life Plotting Toplevel: I'll update that once it goes up!!
Meme:

January Plotting: Bitter Winds Howling

Dooples