week 2 - weekend

[productions]

murder manor week two



saturday & sunday

24 players remaining.

This is a general mingle post. Please put your character's name, the time, and location in the subject heading of their comment. Players may also thread in logs, either posted to murdermanor or in a private locked journal post filtered to include productions.

This post will cover the weekend period from the end of trial Friday evening to early Sunday evening, when new incentives will be announced. No murders will take place over this time.

Setting & Rules
Private Conversations

Comments

Sunday

[reunified]

[ The only reason Altman is in the conservatory is because it's been a while, and he wants to see if anything changed--

Ah. He hadn't expected to run across the alien girl doing something with fruit. ]

...What are you doing to those?

[speakveryclearly]

I've been drying them in the sun. [She eagerly explains, proud to move the tray so she can better show him.] They've been here over a week now, with everything going on you can understand how distracted we've all been...

[reunified]

[ He edges closely, temporarily forgetting his anxiety as curiosity takes over. ]

Oh... I used to see people doing that down in the Yucatan, around the markets. You could find pretty much anything dried like that. Fish, fruit, meat...

[ He pauses, then laughs a little. ]

This is probably the first thing I've seen here that's reminded me of home.

[speakveryclearly]

Really...? [That makes one of them.]

What kind of regional division is the Yucutan, exactly? [Is it a city or a country or what? Earth geography clearly challenges her.]

[reunified]

[ He seems to warm up a bit, getting a little excited to talk about his work, something sane and normal. ]

It's a peninsula down in the Southern Sector, around an enormous, ancient impact zone in the ocean known as the Chixulub crater. People... People used to think it was the remnants of an asteroid impact that might have caused a mass extinction millions of years ago. I used to work in the area, and it was--

[ He hesitates, then smiles a little sadly. ]

It was a gorgeous place, even with the environment going to shit.

[speakveryclearly]

Work...

[She puts some pieces together from what aspects rise to the fore in what he chooses to say. Her image of him thus far has been built up from a distance as well as detailed study of his card, and one of his main skills was listed as--]

So the environmental issues made the area ripe for geophysical study, then?

[reunified]

[ He nods slightly. ]

Yeah. There was a lot of contract work down there with mining corporations, looking for deep deposits other companies had passed over. It wasn't very interesting work, but...

[ But he hadn't been there for himself. ]

It was nice there.

[ For a while. Except this is getting way too personal, and his anxiety is flaring back up thinking too hard about it. Back to the fruit. ]

The locals used to have huge, open-air markets near the waterfront. There'd be huge tables piled with fruit, both fresh and dried like this. It... [ He shrugs awkwardly. ]

Makes me homesick.

[speakveryclearly]

[The phonograph needle on the record playing this conversation skips - because nothing at all in this manor engages the alien girl's capacity for homesickness. She decides to stick to the safer topic Altman returned.]

Was the flora itself infected by the pollution?

[reunified]

Everything was. The plants, the animals. The air and sea. The people were too, because they lived off of all that.

[speakveryclearly]

[Her eyes move as she wonders what the people means, if it includes him or if his stay was too brief.]

So it didn't look much like this, then. Sorry, obviously my frame of reference isn't very good.

[reunified]

Some of the same kinds of fruit, but they weren't this... nice? They tended to be smaller, more flawed. The fruit trees tended to struggle with the pollutants.

[ He shakes his head slightly. ]

It's fine. [ He pauses, then adds hesitantly: ] Did... they have fruit like this, where you're from?

[speakveryclearly]

Yes. I think it's the most similar element of our respective biospheres, convergent evolution for edibility - the trees and flowers themselves were more drastically divergent chromatically. While the fauna there were only vaguely similar. Earth animals are smaller and more docile by comparison.