And Every Stranger's Face I See Reminds Me That I Long to Be Homeward Bound

[pretendtoneedme]

WHO: Anyone not whisked off on a Glorious Adventure
WHERE: The villages
WHEN: May 10th and the days following
OPEN TO: Everyone still "at home"
WARNINGS: Please put triggers in the subject line if they come up!

---

For some people, it's noticeable: other members of the village community suddenly not where they'd been working beside them a moment before, in the hospital, the inn, or out in the fields getting them refurbished after winter. For many, it's not - not until their attention is drawn to it, anyway, by absences at meals or other villagers running around looking for the missing. But on the tenth, twelve members of their little tribe have suddenly vanished, too many to be accounted for by the random disappearances they're all familiar with and undoubtedly part of something the observers have planned. What it is, no one knows, and it's easy to wonder and even panic if more people would disappear, and if they did, who would be next. Questions are asked, plans are discussed, and speculations are made over the next few days as the missing begin straggling back to the village. It's another demonstration of the lack of power over their own lives that many people didn't want, and not an easy one to swallow so soon after the last one.

At some point during the first day, part of the chalkboard that had been moved to the inn has been erased and a new message added:

HAVE YOU SEEN THESE PEOPLE
SEEKING INFORMATION

Below is a list of names that anyone can add to if they find a friend, loved one, or relative has vanished. Some have added names next to the missing to show who specifically is looking for this or that person or who to bring any discoveries to. It's an imperfect system, but at least it gets the word out.

((OOC: mingle post here to ask questions, search for the lost, discuss plans for finding them, look after their animals, panic attacks, whatever you want to do! Feel free to go nuts and have your kids put on their shiniest tinfoil hats to speculate what the hell is going on here.))

Comments

Margaery - OTA

[thekittenqueen]

It's a nightmare that she can't pull herself from. Margaery had expected to see Robb during the afternoon, returning from the hunt, tired but hungry for lunch. She had waited for him at home, as she often did, occupying herself with mending. But as hours passed and it was growing close to dusk, it was becoming more obvious that something had happened. Her mind immediately went to the most extreme outcome, that he had been sent home. Loras' disappearance was still fresh with her, was it possible that Robb was sent back as well?

It made her sick to consider, knowing what he'd be returning to. It was as good as killing him here.

Panic shot through her and drove her to the inn, where others had gathered because of missing loved ones as well. It didn't ease her fears, but it at least meant that he might not have been sent home. It was another game, another test. The Observers seemed determined to separate the two lovers and now she was left to suffer the same feelings Robb had when she went into the woods with the others.

Days pass and there is still no news. To occupy herself, she continues to care for her animals, but errors start to occur in her work. Her loom becomes tangled, she doesn't fully churn the butter and sometimes she nearly forgets to wrangle one of her sheep inside. The longer Robb is away, the more she feels she is losing her mind.

The inn is a safe haven. She stays close to the chalk board, as though that would be enough to bring him home. Every time someone enters, she jumps from her chair, her heart in her throat, certain that he would walk through the door. After several times of this, she finally collapses in her chair, covering her face with her hands.

"I can't do this. I can't wait here for news. What if something has happened? If they're injured somewhere? I have to look for him."

Re: Margaery - OTA

[tooktheblack]

Jon had been looking for Robb as well - not to mention Lyanna, who lived in his home. They speak daily, even if it is only a few words in passing, and not seeing his brother at all gave him cause for concern. Lyanna he spoke with more than in passing and when he awoke to find her missing, he went to the Inn to see if she'd merely gotten sidetracked doing other things and had left the house well before him.

When he went to the Inn and saw several others worrying over the missing, he realized it was more than simply House Stark that was suffering a loss. Margaery was a welcome sight and he drew close to her, hoping to assuage some of her concerns.

"If there are this many missing, it must be a trick of this place and not that they've gone home," Jon said, trying to be optimistic. "Lyanna is missing too."

[thekittenqueen]

"If they weren't sent home, then they were taken somewhere for another reason." While her own journey to the woods had ended with everyone relatively unscathed, that didn't mean that this would as well. The Observers were playing another game with them and there were so many dangers in the woods. However skilled Robb might be in the wild, she couldn't shake the fear that there might be something waiting for them out there.

She glanced up at Jon with sympathy. She didn't know Lyanna and had never spoken to her, as the girl seemed to dart away whenever Margaery came too close. But she knew what the woman meant to the Stark family, even if she didn't know the particular details about Jon's birth. "She and Robb are together, at least. They aren't alone."

It's not very effective comfort, but it's something. "We can't sit by and wait for them. We have to look for them, Jon. We have to do something. If he's hurt or...I can't wait for news. It's driving me mad."

[tooktheblack]

"If you give me time to get supplies together, I could mount a search. It's likely to be over rough country, though." Jon gave Margaery a look of assessment. She'd been over the new terrain when seeking the antidote for the illness last moon; she might know more than he about how the land changed.

"Did you make any notes about what the land was like when you were on the expedition last month? Any drawings, any landmarks?"

OTA, May 10th - 11th

[pretendtoneedme]

( 10th )

The revelation that two of his housemates are missing comes at dinnertime - it isn't his night to cook, so when Clint walks back into House 20, Arado following him like he does on most days, to find nothing started and no hint of occupation anywhere in the place... It's eerie, and he doesn't like that feeling. Too much about this place is already eerie, and he really doesn't need it to be any worse. He's been there long enough that he knows the protocol for anyone that disappears suddenly, how the clothes they were sent in with disappear while anything else they were gifted or acquired while in the village does, and a quick check of the respective rooms shows that the standard disappearance reason isn't at play here. Something else is going on, and since it's impossible to know what it is, that means that Clint has all sorts of potential explanations and very little he can do about them all.

There is still one thing he can do, though. Taking Arado with him again, Clint backtracks to the inn, finding whispers about others missing. Wetting the corner of one of the towels they keep stacked for people fresh out of the fountain, he scrubs out a non-essential part of the notes and scrawls the opening statements of the list in his mostly-readable handwriting. Below that, he puts two names - Bev and Picard - with his own next to them, since he wants to know what the hell happened to the people he lives with.

( 11th )

The next day when no answers have come forth, Clint's come up with a new idea: compare what information they have with Mark's census-thing he'd done a few months back. He's not had reason to go into Mark's house before, but he knows where the botanist lives; he's been there long enough to know where pretty much everyone lives. But then Mark doesn't answer his door when Clint knocks, even after waiting for him, and he's not at the inn or the hospital or the fields or... anywhere, really, and that's close to enough proof for Clint to make the assumption that he'd been bamfed out, too. Whatever the hell was going on with that. And while he doesn't live alone, others do, others who might not have anyone to notice they're missing...

So for the rest of the day, Clint's moving around the village to every house he knows is occupied (which is most of them), knocking on doors and checking to see if anyone answers. He also checks the public buildings, asking questions and trying to collate information, and generally doing his best to do detective work in a place that really doesn't make that easy.

May 11th.

[dann_0]

Danny's been fretting since he discovered Steve was gone and he had hardly slept. He is looking like a mess, his hair is poking out at weird angles and he has big bags under his eyes.

But when Clint answers the door it takes him a moment to answer. "Steve?" Then his face falls a little when he notices it is not Steve. "Oh... Can I help you?"

[pretendtoneedme]

For a moment, Clint's opening his mouth to ask how Danny knows Steve (granted, everyone knows Steve at home, but this isn't home). But he catches it quick, before he can start to speak; Cap's been gone a long time, with no sign of returning, and he wouldn't leave his team in the dark as to his presence if he was there. Steve is a common name, after all. So that means there's probably another name to add to the list.

Clint's got a small notebook and a ballpoint pen he scrounged from the storage room several months ago, items to only be used in an emergency, and he's already starting to write down STEVE as he speaks. "I'm going around checking the houses - you're missing someone, too? Steve?"

[dann_0]

"McGarrett. Lives here with me and his sister Mary. He's well... He knows how to handle himself in a tough spot but..." But he might be in over his head or worse already dead. His thoughts dwell on that a little too long and he forces himself to think about something else.

"You are?"

11th

[theluckygirl]

There always seems to be a mystery to figure out or a puzzle to solve and there's yet another one now to figure out when a number of people up and vanish. It's enough to strike worry and concern because how did anyone know that it would stop with just them? Would more go missing? It definitely put a lot of people on edge, including Claire given this wasn't a simple case of people being sent home.

So her regular routine shifts slightly, yet again, to include taking a few more casual walks in an effort to keep an eye open for anyone listed on the blackboard the day before at the inn. Claire also takes to sitting on the steps of her house whenever she isn't doing anything in order to keep an eye on the clinic and who might need medical help. That's when she sees Clint.

"Hey, stranger." Claire greets. It's been awhile since she's last seen him.

[pretendtoneedme]

"Hey," he responds, a bit of an apologetic smile on his face. He hadn't meant to kind of abandon Claire to whatever she was doing, but he'd had a lot on his mind lately, between Laura's birthday passing and Wanda's disappearance, and things had just kind of... slipped. Not to mention fighting the tail-end-of-winter food scarcity; he's been having to spend more time hunting lately to find enough meat for as many villagers as he can, since the animal population hasn't had its major boom from spring births yet and he has to spend longer tracking a creature to make sure it doesn't have kits or cubs he's going to leave orphaned. It's a delicate balancing act and he's desperately missing having a grocery store nearby.

Knowing Claire, if she had anyone missing she'd have already put them on the list (he's pretty sure he remembers her name on there somewhere), but he's not going to just walk by. What they have is a situation, but it's not an emergency, not yet; he can't really run off to the rescue if there's no rescue to be run, and he's not going to go barreling off in a direction that might do some good when he might (probably will) be needed more here in case a more serious situation crops up. So Clint comes up to lean against the porch railing next to the steps, looking a little tired but mostly trying to hide it. "And here I thought this place'd give us a break for awhile."

[theluckygirl]

Good thing Claire didn't see his absence as abandoning. If the nurse knew anything, it was that each person there had something or someone to be (or feel) responsible for. Clint obviously had a number of responsibilities and she wouldn't come between that. At any rate, they all had a lot to deal with so it made absolute sense that they'd be too busy to stop and chat.

Like Clint, she had her own things preoccupying her time. She'd fallen and had to heal from that. Claire also had a complete meltdown and hid in her room for a while and that was not something she wanted anyone to see. But things were all right now and despite the missing people, the nurse felt decent.

Her reaction to his comment showed how exhausting and frustrating that was to think about. Yet, it was a fact and this time it was vanishing friends. What was next?

"Well, it can't be argued that this place doesn't have one hell of a sick sense of humour."

She smiled, but it was mostly for show. There was nothing funny in this at all. Claire pauses.

"How are you holding up?"

Peter Parker | OTA

[fwips]

People disappear. That's apparently a thing that happens around here. People disappear kind of like they appear, although presumably less wet. Not that Peter really knows, but it seems like a given.

Currently he's standing in the middle of the front room of the place everybody calls an inn (Which is kind of funny because nobody pays to stay there, which would make it more of a boarding house or just a house with a lot of bedrooms, although it is super old-timey and has a bar in it), and he's frowning at the big blackboard at the back of the room. He doesn't really know anybody here very well yet, but the idea of so many people blinking out of existence makes his gut twist more than he really wants to think about.

What's weirdest to him is that for some reason there's an assumption these people didn't just disappear away like other people have before. Like Cap was here, but he's gone now, and maybe he'll come back or maybe not. But somebody obviously thinks these people might still be around but like... beamed somewhere else as some kind of crappy joke. Maybe there's precedence for this. He's still pretty new to this whole trapped in a possible simulation or maybe on a distant planet thing.

Well, first things first. He hasn't seen any texts about this yet, and there are a lot of old-timey people to go with the old-timey inn. Maybe they don't know that's a thing they can do. So he sends one... OK, more than one. And then he waits.

[theluckygirl]

It's rather hard to miss a new face when she sees one in the village now. Especially when it coincides with a new message being sent out that her bracelet alerts to and gives her the name of the new person, who happens to be in there in the front room when she walks in.

"You must be the new guy, Peter." she remarks, giving him a smile on her way over to the blackboard to put the name Jax Teller under the other names.

They haven't met yet, but she's got a familiar accent he would recognize.

"When did you get here?"

[fwips]

"Hi, yeah," Peter is quick to reply — He really doesn't know if she knows he's 'the new guy Peter' because he just sent a tweet to the whole pocket dimension or simply because everybody is in everybody's business here. "Um, seven days ago, so still pretty new," he adds with a vaguely awkward smile and a slow nod. He can't help but feel like the new kid here, emphasis on kid. Would he like to say, 'why yes, I am the new guy Peter, also member of the Avengers, maybe you've heard of them?' Indeed he would. But that would be a superhero no-no.

He watches her print out the name on the board and then quickly scrolls through the responses he's gotten to his message. "I haven't heard anything from that person yet, but maybe they just didn't see my text," he offers.

[theluckygirl]

It was honestly a bit of both. It was kind of pathetic but what else was there to do?

Setting the chalk back on its ledge, Claire gives a bit of a surprised look. Seven days wasn't that long, no, but it felt long to those who had been there awhile and the nurse was beginning to feel the length of the days now that she'd been there over half a year by that point.

She walks a bit closer, glancing over a shoulder to the blackboard again. "If you do, he'll be cursing this place up and down. He's had a pretty bad week."

A beat and Claire narrows her eyes curiously. "Where you from?"

[pretendtoneedme]

The beeping on his wrist makes Clint look down to see the message appearing on the new things they'd been outfitted with on the recent climb out of the fountain, the things that look like Fitbits on steroids. He's still incredibly wary about the devices, which is part of why he hadn't tried to use them to locate anyone himself, despite that being the easiest method. They'd done without any sort of technology for so long that it was easy to forget they even had that capability now, but also as a high-level international spy that is still alive, Clint knows exactly how tech can be used to fuck you over. He wouldn't put it past the people (things?) watching them to do something to not locate their missing people. And what if someone didn't respond? At least doing this the old-fashioned way made it possible to cover the holes.

But, yeah, someone probably had to try it to be smart. And it was no real surprise that it's a kid doing it (goddamnit, more kids). Wondering briefly how long this one'd be able to survive without his smartphone or wi-fi connection, Clint rises from the table he'd been sitting at while waiting for more information to come in and heads over to Peter. "I hope that works."

[fwips]

"I'm already getting some replies," Peter says, gamely looking up with a smile that freezes on his face the moment he sees who it is talking to him.

"You're here!" he spits out, eyes rounding, and then shakes himself out of his surprise. "I mean, Mr. Barton, sir, I didn't know you were here in this place—" He leans in, dropping his voice. "Are there other Avengers here, too?"

If there are, that is both good news and bad news. The bad news being that whatever Thanos did has kicked even more people into these alternate dimensions; the good news being that he's got somebody here who knows what the heck that even means.

[pretendtoneedme]

Well, fuck.

It's not like this hasn't happened before - once. Wait, twice. And neither Claire nor Karen were that instant light of recognition that blazes in Peter's eyes, and for a wild moment Clint's wondering if this kid is somehow from Cooper's school even though he looks too old for that and he doesn't live under the Barton name, they use Laura's name, and- and then Peter mentions the Avengers and nope, that's it. Either this kid's one of the few that's managed to decrypt some of the files Nat dropped online two years before he came here, or he's a major fanboy that's so super deep into the whole "superheroes are real!" thing that he's got all the variant action figures (why are there action figures of him). All of that goes through his mind in half a second as his jaw slowly drops and Peter gets a look at something not a lot of people can claim to have seen: Clint Barton's look of sheer bewilderment.

"How do you - wait." Holding up one hand to forestall any questions, Clint looks down at the floor to collect himself and not attack a teenager demanding answers. When he looks back at the kid's face, he's not quite in the laser focus mode he usually wears during work, but it's bordering on that. Peter would be familiar with this particular expression from Leipzig. "Start at the beginning - who the hell are you and how do you know me?"

Nerys (OTA)

[thenewways]

It's been a strange few weeks, adjusting to the old-new village and environs, and Nerys' feelings about it keep shifting. On the one hand, she'd gotten sort of used to the Very Earthlike simulacrum that had been overlaying things (at least, that's how she thinks this was working), but on the other hand, adjusting to a different environment, to be out of her depth like everyone else, is what she's trained to do.

This latest development (unlike, say, the probably-sentient animal a couple of weeks ago--someone called it a badge?) is more spooky than weird. One person, or two, disappearing, is understandable, but this is far more than can possibly be coincidental. Unless some kind of sinkhole has opened up across half the area, it's almost certainly some new kind of game or task, one with stakes that are high and ugly.

Nerys stands in front of the chalkboard, looks down the list, and sighs. Her stomach roils in particular to find Beverly Crusher and Jean-Luc Picard listed, but the whole thing reminds her, more than anything, of the end of the Occupation. In her mind's eye, she recalls the old cenotaph at the central square in Dakhur city, plastered with still images and holo-pics--have you seen--fastened to the stone and wearing away in the weather only to have further ones taped on top. In the end, it became a war memorial of a very different kind to the original builders' intent. The city cleaners, last she heard, still refuse to touch it.

Out of reverie, though. The answer to the question, much as she regrets it, is the same as it was several years ago, back on Bajor. No, she has not seen.

"I don't even know where to start looking," she says to herself, and the task seems incredibly vast.

[pretendtoneedme]

Since it's been discovered people are missing, Clint hasn't been going out hunting; others also hunt and they have a decent level of game stored up for the moment, so it's not necessary. Instead he's stayed centrally located, ready to go run a rescue operation if needed. He's internally cursing their lack of any sort of vehicle, because the distances really aren't all that much, but when they're all on foot, over unknown terrain with plants and animals the captives have never seen before, it makes everything so much more difficult and take so much longer. The bracelets and their features are proving more helpful than he expected them to, but he still doesn't trust them, and they won't prevent people from getting into trouble.

He sees the woman lingering over the list, paying attention specifically to the two names he put up, and steps up to look at the names written up again. Soon they'll be able to erase this list, and he'll be grateful as hell for that. "We've got some ideas - looks like they might be okay, though. Just yanked around again, 'cause whoever put us here thinks it's fun to mess with us like that."

[thenewways]

Nerys would agree, in all honesty. Even without scanners, they could be far better off if they could even just search from the air or from a high guard tower, or something, but there aren't the resources for it, and it's incredibly frustrating. She scratches her arm idly just above the bracelet, where she's been stung by something small but irritating, if only to Bajoran physiology, and turns to the low-voiced man speaking to her, grateful for someone to break the reverie.

"I hope so," she agrees, with a nod. "I mean, I'm not going to pretend I'm surprised, if that's this turns out to be." Some days, she's more than in agreement with Picard's notion that Q is behind the entire thing, but sometimes the events transpiring around her seem to be more thoughtfully and psychologically manipulative than anything that entity could muster up.

"There was something, just before everything changed and the illusion broke," she adds after a second. "Did it happen to you? A couple of people I know were having weird little flashes of being back in their pasts, like incredibly immersive hallucinations. Wonder if it's the next logical step, not that logic matters much around here."

((apologies, I was away for a long weekend and didn't get a chance to tag--hope this is all right!))

It's fine! No worries!

[pretendtoneedme]

"Nah, logic matters - just not when it comes to us." Clint has been in the espionage business too long to not recognize some of the patterns here. It's not quite a one to one comparison, because he's sure a couple of the "events" that have happened here have been random and just the result of a combination of circumstances coming together at the right time. That badger, for one. But most of the things that happen have a distinct flavor of psychological manipulation to outright brainwashing attempts to him. Pushing a subject to see how much they could take, rewarding them periodically (and always randomly), changing the environment to put them off guard; all of that is too familiar to him. The thing he can't figure out is why this is happening, but that's commonly the case for victims at home, too. "Whatever they're wanting to accomplish, there's an endgame at play here. It just doesn't matter what we want." Because of course it didn't.

"No, nothing like that's happened to me. It happened to some other people who got letters from the assholes in charge, though - any of your friends get those?" Overall, Clint's glad he missed out on that particular experiment. Getting to see home again after so long just might break him, and he knows that.

claire temple | open

[theluckygirl]

Claire sits at one of the tables, eyes deadlocked on the blackboard and the names that were listed. Despite the staring, the nurse is lost in her own thoughts again, trying to think a little harder about why exactly they were all there. It was a test, for certain, but why? And for what? If the last place was a dream, then what was this place?

Hearing a noise, she blinks out of her daze and turns her head to look at who was there, giving them a smile in greeting, hoping they didn't notice her so transfixed.

"Hey," she starts, setting her cup back down on the table. "I really hope you're not here to put another name on the board."

Though Claire wouldn't be surprised.

[guessihavelostcount]

"No, thankfully, I'm not." Claire Bennet murmurs softly, giving the board a concerned look as she reads over the names quickly while moving to claim a seat across from the other Claire who looks lost in her own thoughts. Or at least, she had while Claire had wandered in.

"I didn't realize so many people were missing." She frowns, switching her gaze back to the other woman. She knows about a couple due to knowing someone else but that is about it.

[theluckygirl]

"Neither did I until I got here and saw them on the board," Claire muses, looking a little tired. She gives the other woman a small smile as she sits down but only in greeting. Missing people was not a reason to smile.

Her face is one she doesn't see very often and while she knows everyone has been busy trying to get over the move from where they were to here, Claire honestly can't remember the last time she's seen the other woman.

"And where have you been lately?" she asks, her eyes conveying how long it's been.