Pareidolia OOC & Meme Community

The month looms ahead...

Welcome to the first Pareidolia event! Characters are just beginning to settle in, but there's no break to be had here. The nights are dark, the wind is cold, and the food sucks. Hope everyone who found themselves here is good at entertaining themselves.

Post any happenings on the appropriate header below. Letting everyone know what your character is doing gets you bonus points!

There will be no IC event post. Please post prompt logs in pareidolialogs with your top levels. Use the following form to post your plotting comment below. Fill out as much or as little of it as you like.

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In the first few mornings of your time here, long before you feel settled in the crumbling cabin unlocked by your key, you find your dwelling has been defaced. You may notice it as the door thuds shut behind you. You may not notice it until you return, hours later, ready to collapse into your creaking mattress late into the night:

Across the door, right at your eye level, are words scrawled in dripping, bloody streaks. These words aren’t just crude insults: they are an accusation of specific, damning missteps in your life. It could be a single word stabbing at the heart of your guilt; a threat that someone knows a horrific sin you believed long buried; anything that sets your heart racing and your stomach curdling in mistrust.

Whatever it says, the words are true.

The blood never dries, and it clings fiercely to the wood grain, fighting against any attempts to remove it. Scrubbing it away takes effort, and the longer you struggle, the heavier the air in your lungs feels, the more grey mist at the ground seems to swirl and thicken around your shoes.

And when the words are finally gone, your relief lasts only as long as your next breath. The bloody message blooms from the cracks in the doors anew, seeping through the wood, replacing what you painstakingly removed with even more gut-wrenching detail.

If you climb the rocky path on the edge of the mountain, just past the cottages nestled there, you come to the sanctuary. It looms above you, the cracked doors inviting you inside.

The air hums faintly as you step inside. Dozens of silhouettes flicker into view, as if crossing the threshold has pulled a veil from your eyes. Most are unfamiliar, but if you look long enough, you will find a person or pair of people you know. They may sit or kneel among the pews or stand in pairs against the wall, their faces downcast or delighted or afraid. Their voices are inaudible, words caught on the edges of the uneasy breeze passing through the sanctuary - until you come close enough to listen.

Those you recognize are discussing you: your disappearance, your life. Their voices align with your memory of them: they are kind and sorrowful and miss you; they are cold and scornful and hope you never return; they are bitterly indifferent; they are lovingly desperate, praying to their god for your safe return. To them, you may have disappeared yesterday. You may have disappeared years ago. You may be presumed dead.

If you reach for them, your hands pass through a chilly mist that warps from the disturbance of your hand, and resettles when left alone. The figures cannot be interacted with. They do not know you are there. Anyone who enters the sanctuary with you, however, can see and hear them.

The silhouette of a girl lies on the altar, her dark curls unbound and splayed around her head like a pillow. Her wrists hang limply over the edges of the altar. She stares at the ceiling, each blink slow. Her eyes never quite open all the way, never close to release her to sleep.

Wherever you go this month, your reflections are wrong.

Every pane of cracked and dirty glass, every still puddle of water, every polished surface has become a gateway to the uncanny. Your reflection lingers even after you've moved on, its movements out of sync with yours. Your image stares back at you with eyes far too pale and too wide. From the corner of your eye, you may see its lips move, as if it were trying to tell you something: a warning, a message, a threat. No matter how hard it tries, or how hard you listen, there is no sound. Your reflection’s words elude you, like crows scattering at your approach.

No matter which reflections you look at – other people’s, your own – you feel an uneasy certainty that these reflections wish you ill. They watch you pass without sympathy, their faces exuding resentment or judgment or worse. If you touch any of them, no matter what surface they appear on, your body rebels on contact. You feel dizzy, unsteady, and weakened, filled with a deep, pervasive wrongness that lingers even after you pull back. Dark grease slicks your hands, thick and rancid, and you can see that you have left streaks of it behind. It blurs and obscures your reflection, spreading out from the point you touched.