Mayfield Mods (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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mayfield_ooc2012-01-02 04:42 pm
mayfield_mods) wrote in mayfield_ooc2012-01-02 04:42 pm
Entry tags:
The Plot So Far...
If you hadn't already guessed, idyllic Mayfield isn't quite what it seems. From the horrifying events to the brainwashing to the fact that you can't leave, Mayfield isn't the pleasant place to live it's billed as.
Who brought us here, and why? What are the drones? Can I speak to the manager? And what's with the milk, anyway? These are the questions, and Mayfield's most intrepid detectives are trying to find the answers.
For quite some time, the only face of authority one would see in Mayfield would be the pleasant face of Police Chief Grady. Grady appeared to work for Mayor Doe, an elusive figure who was rarely seen, dispensing brainwashings to anyone who made trouble. Grady has the ability to monitor the town, quell uprisings, and move about as though he has total control. As an attack on City Hall and a few covert operations meant to break into the shops demonstrated, it's hard to get the best of Grady, and trying is likely to get the town punished in creative ways (a week of starvation and/or complicated psychological torture, for some examples).
But there have been a few cracks in Grady and Doe's omnipotence.
After a run-in with the musician Vorpal, the so-called drone Jane Smith exhibited bizarre, almost human behavior for the briefest of moments. She was subsequently "fixed" by Grady after a private phone conversation between himself and the Mayor.
Halloween 2009 passed uneventfully; unfortunately, this was because the real terror was waiting right after it. During Election Day, the Mayor's bout at re-election was defeated by the enigmatic Milkman, who temporarily became mayor and assumed control over the town and its faculties. The reign of "Mayor Milkman" was introduced by a massive power outage and cataclysmic storms. Not knowing that filters were down, Grady attempted a call to the Mayor; this only served to bring his location to the attention of Mayfield's citizens, who led an attack on the police station.
Inside the station, the characters discovered a younger Grady locked in some kind of confrontation with the Milkman. Distracted by the characters' entrance, Grady was apparently defeated, and both he and the Milkman disappeared, leaving the characters to the empty station. The next day, Grady appeared to be brainwashed. Fortunately, the terror of the Milkman's reign was not to last: by voting against him in the re-election, the characters were able to restore "order" back to Mayfield. Soon afterward, the Mayor called Grady, expressing relief at the end of the event and telling him that "he" had released a woman named "Blake" from captivity, adding that she was to be assigned the role of a librarian.
The next major event was the riots, in which a pre-organized group of citizens attempted to rebel and wreak havoc in various locations around the town. Although Grady was able to quell the riots, he was visibly exhausted by doing so, suggesting that his power isn't without its limits. Enraged, Grady declared war on the captives of Mayfield, promising personal retribution... and letting it slip that perhaps the citizens aren't the only ones being held in Mayfield against their will.
Grady soon followed up on his promise. This was the beginning of the "monsters" event, in which the captives of the town were led to believe that certain people among their number were being brainwashed into becoming murderers without knowing it. Some sacrificed themselves in order to protect their friends, while others simply denied the accusations. Grady taunted the citizens, while at the same time denying any involvement when inquired by the Mayor.
Grady's scheme came back to bite him, however, when Lucy Smith made a public post condemning his actions and restoring order to the town. Grady was brainwashed again, and citizens were allowed to repeatedly murder him for one day.
All was relatively quiet for the next few months until news of a neighboring town began filtering through and a mysterious road opened. Those who followed the road to see where it lead found themselves trapped in Westport, a bombed-out shell of a town where the only living things other than the spiders were a group of homicidal beings donned in hazmat suits and a familiar white-toothed smile. From the clues found around town, it quickly became apparent that this Westport was intimately connected to Mayfield’s past and perhaps even its present…but how? And who were these names that kept popping up, this Richard Grey, Samantha Achewood, and Evan Olney? Putting the clues together, the townspeople realized that Samantha Achewood and Evan Olney were likely the real names of Jane Smith and Officer Grady, although why their names changed still remained a mystery.
More questions would pop up that July, where on Independence Day, Mayfield found itself hijacked by Soviet adversaries. Overnight, the town transformed into Maipole, a communist equivalent that celebrated the Glorious Proletariat (provided that all celebrations were State Approved) and where the familiar faces of Grady, the Mayor, and the Smiths were nowhere to be found. Anyone glad by the change in regime soon found that the new boss was not necessarily better than the old boss, as all working-age citizens were assigned with jobs ranging from the inane to the impossible, and those who didn’t finish theirs or deemed to be Enemies of the State were harshly punished and even executed. With Maipole appearing to be even rougher and less forgiving than Mayfield, it may have even come as a relief to some when Grady assassinated the State Leader of Maipole and the town returned to normal…although this wouldn’t be the last they’d hear of their Russian comrades.
The status quo would be shaken again soon after though, and this time the change would be permanent. Mysterious promotions began appearing on cereal boxes and in the mail, advertising trading in the boxtops for regains…and a certain processing fee. The importance of reading the fine print soon became obvious when those who traded in their tops in the new post office building that had suddenly appeared wound up losing either body parts, memories, or previous regains in the exchange. Although the cereal box promotion ended after a week, the post office and the ability to trade in certain things for regains remained…as well as the rather cheerful Postman who manned it.
Around a month later the Smiths held a little party, where it was revealed that John Smith had mysteriously disappeared and replaced by one Jack Smith, with the drones and the Smith family acting as if Jack had always been there. At the same time, a series of private phone calls between Grady and the Mayor took place, referring to Grady’s activities in a separate Russian town, whereupon a horrified Mayor let slip that Grady had let ‘one’ escape.
What this ‘one’ was became clear a few weeks later, when a battered and bruised Sergei Smirnov, Maipole’s equivalent to John/Jack Smith, began appearing and disappearing in front of random citizens and houses around town. Although confused and disoriented, Sergei revealed quite a lot of information about his town and this world’s history, from the war that started the whole mess to the connection between Maipole and Mayfield, as well as the destruction of his own town at Mayfield’s hands. Grady and the Mayor quickly began to search for him but failed to find anything, until finally, Lucy Smith revealed her true nature for the first time, ordering the Hazmats out into the fray. Although neutral at first, their behavior quickly escalated into brutal violence when the townspeople kept Sergei’s unconscious body hidden, massacring entire households and anyone caught wandering around outside. In the end, despite the best efforts of many characters, Grady found Sergei’s hiding spot and executed him with his newly-given power to permanently kill anyone in the town.
After that mayhem, Halloween and Thanksgiving passed by relatively smoothly. Mayfield never stays quiet for long though and come Christmas, things took a turn for the strange again when Santa Claus himself turned up and asked the townspeople what their they wanted for Christmas. Those who confided in the jolly fat man or sent him a letter had their wishes twisted against them. At first this seemed to be just another one of Mayfield’s cruel jokes, until on New Years Eve, Santa revealed himself to be none other than the Postman himself. He claimed to have the power to bring everyone home for real and seemed to share an antagonistic relationship with Lucy, sending out ballots to all those in town asking if they’d like to stay in Mayfield or leave. Whether he was serious or not is unknown as several people voted to stay, leaving a disgusted Postman to refuse to help until everyone was with him.
Things quieted down again for a couple of months until in March, a new highway out of town suddenly appeared, leading to a near abandoned diner before looping back to Mayfield. Panicked, Grady hired a select group of the less morally-inclined Mayfielders to stop their brethren from exploring the highway any further. Around the same time, Billy Smith received an angry phone call from the Librarian, with both people showing quite a different side to them as the conversation went on. Meanwhile, Mayfield seemed to be on the verge of a breakdown when the Dairy’s doors opened for the first time. Although well-guarded, the tides began to turn when the Postman defected and engaged in a pun-ishing battle with the Milkman, where he was tragically killed but managed to return all of everyone’s regains before his death. Anyone who made it past Grady’s hired hands and into the depths of the Dairy itself discovered what seemed to be a vat full of tortured souls – perhaps the ultimate fate of all those droned. They wouldn’t have long to dwell on it though, as the Milkman appeared once more, riding a giant Milk Mech. Through the combined efforts of Mayfield’s finest fighters, the Milk Mech fell and the Milkman along with it. The death of her closest follower seemed to strike Lucy Smith hard and she followed him not a day later. With everyone in power having vanished or died, Mayfield at last held no more control over those it had trapped in its grasp and the exit that would lead them back home finally appeared…
…that is, until the whole debacle was revealed to be an elaborate April Fool’s Day trick. But then again, with both the highway and the diner still remaining and now permanent fixtures, who can say how much of it was joke and how much was truth? And although all the deaths resulting from this prank turned out to have been fake, not even those running the town could have predicted that a few months later, their numbers would dwindle – this time for real.
On the night of July 4th, after a droning experiment on the townspeople had ended, Jane Smith was seen wandering around displaying extremely erratic behavior. Once again, her droning seemed to be wearing off…only this time, she refused to be “fixed” and opted for a more permanent solution. After an unusually emotional conversation with Grady, Samantha Achewood’s corpse was found in the park the next day and Grady had vanished from town entirely. With no police chief in sight, the Mayor released a truth serum into the air in order to distract Mayfielders from taking advantage of this weakness while he searched for Grady and eventually captured him after a few days. Evan Olney’s body appeared in the pool soon after, kept alive even after fatal injuries as his punishment; it was only after he revealed that Zemekis, the man behind Mayfield, and Lucy Smith were one and the same and that he kept himself docile in her guise that he finally passed on for good.
Jane Smith was quickly replaced by Jill Smith, a housewife drone who somehow seems to be even emptier than the usual, but the police chief spot remained open…until to the horror of the town and even the Mayor himself, the Milkman stepped up to the job. His only law was that every household had to drink a bottle of milk a day – the kicker being that these bottles were usually poisoned or worse and that any household that didn’t drink its milk would have one of its members become a murderous drone. The bloodshed eventually got too much for even the Mayor to handle and Jack Smith was called upon to replace the Milkman.
Halloween came and went without much other than a few cheesy monsters. The real monsters would have to wait until Thanksgiving when, irritated by the lack of gratitude Mayfielders had for being given such a wonderful place to live, Zemekis pulled down the walls of Mayfield for the first time despite the Mayor’s pleas against it. For three days, Mayfield became a nuclear radioactive wasteland, inhabited only by dangerous cannibals. After the third day, the walls were reinstated and Mayfield went back to normal…although it seemed that this little trick would have consequences. These consequences would come into light that Christmas, where after an attempt to conserve power by shutting down resources such as heating, Mayfield decided to take a more extreme solution by convincing various characters to erase themselves permanently. Eventually, the erasures were all completely reversed…but the town has still yet to solve its power crisis....
Who brought us here, and why? What are the drones? Can I speak to the manager? And what's with the milk, anyway? These are the questions, and Mayfield's most intrepid detectives are trying to find the answers.
For quite some time, the only face of authority one would see in Mayfield would be the pleasant face of Police Chief Grady. Grady appeared to work for Mayor Doe, an elusive figure who was rarely seen, dispensing brainwashings to anyone who made trouble. Grady has the ability to monitor the town, quell uprisings, and move about as though he has total control. As an attack on City Hall and a few covert operations meant to break into the shops demonstrated, it's hard to get the best of Grady, and trying is likely to get the town punished in creative ways (a week of starvation and/or complicated psychological torture, for some examples).
But there have been a few cracks in Grady and Doe's omnipotence.
After a run-in with the musician Vorpal, the so-called drone Jane Smith exhibited bizarre, almost human behavior for the briefest of moments. She was subsequently "fixed" by Grady after a private phone conversation between himself and the Mayor.
Halloween 2009 passed uneventfully; unfortunately, this was because the real terror was waiting right after it. During Election Day, the Mayor's bout at re-election was defeated by the enigmatic Milkman, who temporarily became mayor and assumed control over the town and its faculties. The reign of "Mayor Milkman" was introduced by a massive power outage and cataclysmic storms. Not knowing that filters were down, Grady attempted a call to the Mayor; this only served to bring his location to the attention of Mayfield's citizens, who led an attack on the police station.
Inside the station, the characters discovered a younger Grady locked in some kind of confrontation with the Milkman. Distracted by the characters' entrance, Grady was apparently defeated, and both he and the Milkman disappeared, leaving the characters to the empty station. The next day, Grady appeared to be brainwashed. Fortunately, the terror of the Milkman's reign was not to last: by voting against him in the re-election, the characters were able to restore "order" back to Mayfield. Soon afterward, the Mayor called Grady, expressing relief at the end of the event and telling him that "he" had released a woman named "Blake" from captivity, adding that she was to be assigned the role of a librarian.
The next major event was the riots, in which a pre-organized group of citizens attempted to rebel and wreak havoc in various locations around the town. Although Grady was able to quell the riots, he was visibly exhausted by doing so, suggesting that his power isn't without its limits. Enraged, Grady declared war on the captives of Mayfield, promising personal retribution... and letting it slip that perhaps the citizens aren't the only ones being held in Mayfield against their will.
Grady soon followed up on his promise. This was the beginning of the "monsters" event, in which the captives of the town were led to believe that certain people among their number were being brainwashed into becoming murderers without knowing it. Some sacrificed themselves in order to protect their friends, while others simply denied the accusations. Grady taunted the citizens, while at the same time denying any involvement when inquired by the Mayor.
Grady's scheme came back to bite him, however, when Lucy Smith made a public post condemning his actions and restoring order to the town. Grady was brainwashed again, and citizens were allowed to repeatedly murder him for one day.
All was relatively quiet for the next few months until news of a neighboring town began filtering through and a mysterious road opened. Those who followed the road to see where it lead found themselves trapped in Westport, a bombed-out shell of a town where the only living things other than the spiders were a group of homicidal beings donned in hazmat suits and a familiar white-toothed smile. From the clues found around town, it quickly became apparent that this Westport was intimately connected to Mayfield’s past and perhaps even its present…but how? And who were these names that kept popping up, this Richard Grey, Samantha Achewood, and Evan Olney? Putting the clues together, the townspeople realized that Samantha Achewood and Evan Olney were likely the real names of Jane Smith and Officer Grady, although why their names changed still remained a mystery.
More questions would pop up that July, where on Independence Day, Mayfield found itself hijacked by Soviet adversaries. Overnight, the town transformed into Maipole, a communist equivalent that celebrated the Glorious Proletariat (provided that all celebrations were State Approved) and where the familiar faces of Grady, the Mayor, and the Smiths were nowhere to be found. Anyone glad by the change in regime soon found that the new boss was not necessarily better than the old boss, as all working-age citizens were assigned with jobs ranging from the inane to the impossible, and those who didn’t finish theirs or deemed to be Enemies of the State were harshly punished and even executed. With Maipole appearing to be even rougher and less forgiving than Mayfield, it may have even come as a relief to some when Grady assassinated the State Leader of Maipole and the town returned to normal…although this wouldn’t be the last they’d hear of their Russian comrades.
The status quo would be shaken again soon after though, and this time the change would be permanent. Mysterious promotions began appearing on cereal boxes and in the mail, advertising trading in the boxtops for regains…and a certain processing fee. The importance of reading the fine print soon became obvious when those who traded in their tops in the new post office building that had suddenly appeared wound up losing either body parts, memories, or previous regains in the exchange. Although the cereal box promotion ended after a week, the post office and the ability to trade in certain things for regains remained…as well as the rather cheerful Postman who manned it.
Around a month later the Smiths held a little party, where it was revealed that John Smith had mysteriously disappeared and replaced by one Jack Smith, with the drones and the Smith family acting as if Jack had always been there. At the same time, a series of private phone calls between Grady and the Mayor took place, referring to Grady’s activities in a separate Russian town, whereupon a horrified Mayor let slip that Grady had let ‘one’ escape.
What this ‘one’ was became clear a few weeks later, when a battered and bruised Sergei Smirnov, Maipole’s equivalent to John/Jack Smith, began appearing and disappearing in front of random citizens and houses around town. Although confused and disoriented, Sergei revealed quite a lot of information about his town and this world’s history, from the war that started the whole mess to the connection between Maipole and Mayfield, as well as the destruction of his own town at Mayfield’s hands. Grady and the Mayor quickly began to search for him but failed to find anything, until finally, Lucy Smith revealed her true nature for the first time, ordering the Hazmats out into the fray. Although neutral at first, their behavior quickly escalated into brutal violence when the townspeople kept Sergei’s unconscious body hidden, massacring entire households and anyone caught wandering around outside. In the end, despite the best efforts of many characters, Grady found Sergei’s hiding spot and executed him with his newly-given power to permanently kill anyone in the town.
After that mayhem, Halloween and Thanksgiving passed by relatively smoothly. Mayfield never stays quiet for long though and come Christmas, things took a turn for the strange again when Santa Claus himself turned up and asked the townspeople what their they wanted for Christmas. Those who confided in the jolly fat man or sent him a letter had their wishes twisted against them. At first this seemed to be just another one of Mayfield’s cruel jokes, until on New Years Eve, Santa revealed himself to be none other than the Postman himself. He claimed to have the power to bring everyone home for real and seemed to share an antagonistic relationship with Lucy, sending out ballots to all those in town asking if they’d like to stay in Mayfield or leave. Whether he was serious or not is unknown as several people voted to stay, leaving a disgusted Postman to refuse to help until everyone was with him.
Things quieted down again for a couple of months until in March, a new highway out of town suddenly appeared, leading to a near abandoned diner before looping back to Mayfield. Panicked, Grady hired a select group of the less morally-inclined Mayfielders to stop their brethren from exploring the highway any further. Around the same time, Billy Smith received an angry phone call from the Librarian, with both people showing quite a different side to them as the conversation went on. Meanwhile, Mayfield seemed to be on the verge of a breakdown when the Dairy’s doors opened for the first time. Although well-guarded, the tides began to turn when the Postman defected and engaged in a pun-ishing battle with the Milkman, where he was tragically killed but managed to return all of everyone’s regains before his death. Anyone who made it past Grady’s hired hands and into the depths of the Dairy itself discovered what seemed to be a vat full of tortured souls – perhaps the ultimate fate of all those droned. They wouldn’t have long to dwell on it though, as the Milkman appeared once more, riding a giant Milk Mech. Through the combined efforts of Mayfield’s finest fighters, the Milk Mech fell and the Milkman along with it. The death of her closest follower seemed to strike Lucy Smith hard and she followed him not a day later. With everyone in power having vanished or died, Mayfield at last held no more control over those it had trapped in its grasp and the exit that would lead them back home finally appeared…
…that is, until the whole debacle was revealed to be an elaborate April Fool’s Day trick. But then again, with both the highway and the diner still remaining and now permanent fixtures, who can say how much of it was joke and how much was truth? And although all the deaths resulting from this prank turned out to have been fake, not even those running the town could have predicted that a few months later, their numbers would dwindle – this time for real.
On the night of July 4th, after a droning experiment on the townspeople had ended, Jane Smith was seen wandering around displaying extremely erratic behavior. Once again, her droning seemed to be wearing off…only this time, she refused to be “fixed” and opted for a more permanent solution. After an unusually emotional conversation with Grady, Samantha Achewood’s corpse was found in the park the next day and Grady had vanished from town entirely. With no police chief in sight, the Mayor released a truth serum into the air in order to distract Mayfielders from taking advantage of this weakness while he searched for Grady and eventually captured him after a few days. Evan Olney’s body appeared in the pool soon after, kept alive even after fatal injuries as his punishment; it was only after he revealed that Zemekis, the man behind Mayfield, and Lucy Smith were one and the same and that he kept himself docile in her guise that he finally passed on for good.
Jane Smith was quickly replaced by Jill Smith, a housewife drone who somehow seems to be even emptier than the usual, but the police chief spot remained open…until to the horror of the town and even the Mayor himself, the Milkman stepped up to the job. His only law was that every household had to drink a bottle of milk a day – the kicker being that these bottles were usually poisoned or worse and that any household that didn’t drink its milk would have one of its members become a murderous drone. The bloodshed eventually got too much for even the Mayor to handle and Jack Smith was called upon to replace the Milkman.
Halloween came and went without much other than a few cheesy monsters. The real monsters would have to wait until Thanksgiving when, irritated by the lack of gratitude Mayfielders had for being given such a wonderful place to live, Zemekis pulled down the walls of Mayfield for the first time despite the Mayor’s pleas against it. For three days, Mayfield became a nuclear radioactive wasteland, inhabited only by dangerous cannibals. After the third day, the walls were reinstated and Mayfield went back to normal…although it seemed that this little trick would have consequences. These consequences would come into light that Christmas, where after an attempt to conserve power by shutting down resources such as heating, Mayfield decided to take a more extreme solution by convincing various characters to erase themselves permanently. Eventually, the erasures were all completely reversed…but the town has still yet to solve its power crisis....