Week 1

[bathymetric]

Good morning, New Rapture. A new day is dawning.

There may not be much light to differentiate the days here, but the lights of the part of the city you're in change enough by the clock that you can almost believe there's a sun somewhere. It looks like Mayor Fontaine has no intention of going back on his deal, and for the time being? You're all stuck here. But there's plenty to do, and... maybe not plenty to see, but there's enough. There's something, at any rate.

Especially if you're willing to look beyond the surface.

And if you spend enough time around others, you might find something neat!

No matter what, it's time to start getting to know your fellow captives. You might be here a while.




MONDAY | TUESDAY | WEDNESDAY | THURSDAY
FRIDAY | SATURDAY

[ ooc: Welcome to the first week of Unknown Seas Round 3! We're very excited to have you. Please make sure to mark any investigation toplevels accordingly, and you can reach either Mayor Fontaine or Eleanor for conversations! ]

Comments

[allatonce]

Not a huge fan, no. We know more about space than the ocean.

[She leans against the pedestal.]

Maybe if we were on a space station I'd think it was cooler.

[inaclearing]

I don't know if that would make me feel better or not. I think I'm bothered by the weight of it...all that pressure.

[He leans his head back against the pedestal, looking up. After a second, he clicks his tongue.]

I'm sorry, I'm being depressing.

[allatonce]

It's chill. The whole situation is depressing.

[She tries to remember what's on his profile, so she can change the subject—oh, he's a podcaster. Perfect. Those guys love to talk about their podcasts.]

Nevermind that, though. Tell me about your podcast.

[inaclearing]

Oh, god.

[Brett chuckles. It's just absurd - being the White Guy With the Podcast even at the bottom of the ocean.]

Okay - it's called In Strange Woods. It's done now, it was more like a miniseries. It was about this group of small-town kids up in Minnesota. I met them when I went up there to research a different project, they were taking this really intense wilderness survival training from a mysterious man who lived in the woods. It was the talk of Whitetail. Of course I wanted to know more about that, and about him...it all sort of blew up.

[allatonce]

Blew up true crime style or blew up ghosts and werewolves style?

[She sounds genuinely interested, at least. Although she's definitely more interested in gauging how weird this guy's world this than... the podcast. Sorry, Brett. Drama podcasts aren't really her thing.]

[inaclearing]

True crime. Nobody got murdered... [Probably? He says it with a little more uncertainty than one would want on that particular sentence!] Don't look at me for ghosts or werewolves - my world's boring, compared to all of...this.

[Gesturing back towards the hotel, and also like the entire situation in general.]

[allatonce]

Pretty sure ghosts exist in every world. It's more about whether or not something can sense them.

[She just says that kind of casually. Don't worry about it!]

What's the confusion about murder, though? Usually that one's pretty cut and dry.

[inaclearing]

Oh...

[Brett grimaces a little. That's a whole Thing.]

I went digging in Howl's past - the survivalist I talked to. There was an explosion at a chemical plant he oversaw, back in the sixties. It was ruled an accident at the time, but his cousin thought he let it happen intentionally. And then, a couple years ago, a kid got lost in the woods and froze to death on his land. Some people thought he knew he was there, and let him die. But I don't know.

[Even now, even after everything, he doesn't feel like he can make any real accusations.]

[allatonce]

Sounds like a guy that's just easy to blame.

[Not that she'd know anything about that.]

And like you maybe bit off more than you could chew, but that's kind of the way rabbit holes go.

[inaclearing]

I thought so, too! I still don't think he was...malicious. [He maybe doesn't think Howl was exactly trustworthy, either. But that doesn't mean he intended harm.] But I never got to talk to him again after everything happened.

[And the rest, well...Brett shrugs a little.]

Mmm. That is something I do.

[allatonce]

I think that comes with the territory. You start off trying to do a puff piece and then all of a sudden you're in the middle of a 10-part investigative journalism series about the industrial prison complex.

[She says this like it's something she has experience with, for some reason.]

[inaclearing]

[Brett laughs.]

Yeah! I just went out there to learn a little family history, and next thing you know I'm in the woods looking for a bunch of lost kids.

[And someone was dead. Brett doesn't entirely feel responsible for that - at least, not the same way he might have, if it were Peregrine or one of the others. But he still thinks about it. Don't act like you weren't a part of this.]

Have you done any journalism work? ["Research assistant" is a really broad title, and anyway people jump around.]

[allatonce]

I've done some journalism, yeah. Although someone else I worked with ended up in the industrial prison complex rabbithole—I ended up in the "fluff piece about Britney Spears to conservatorship activism and conspiracy theories" pipeline instead.

[Equally a rabbithole, but a very different one. Not that she ever ended up in a conspiracy theory, but she sure saw a lot of them in her research.]

[inaclearing]

Oh, yeah? How did that happen?

[Brett's from solidly pre-Free Britney, he fully doesn't know what exactly you're talking about.]

[allatonce]

You start out writing about her new tour. Then you end up in the #FreeBritney camp. Then you find out that much like anything on the internet, it's been co-opted by conspiracy theorists and they're going full Illuminati coded messages in her emoji use and you're like "I did not sign up for this when I joined Buzzfeed.

[But you know. You report on it, because that's what good journalism is.]

[inaclearing]

[Brett chuckles.]

That's what you get for being fun and marketable.