Zenith : In Character → Threads, Logs, Events

Who: Kiley and Chase (and later Tobias)
Where Their room
When: A little after noon

( Today was AWESOME )

Who: Marco & Jerome
When: A little after noon
Where: Poolside

( He did this to himself )

Who: Vanessa & Dylan
Where: kitchen
When: around noon

( Cooking Lessons )

Who: Edwin and Oliver
When: Morning
Where: Their bedroom

( Have you always been this wonderful? )

Day 25.

Weather: It continues to be grey and windy until around 1pm, at which point it storms for about fifteen minutes. When the storm clears, it's hot and humid until sundown.

Events: There was a day a while back when The Powers That Be used some sort of gas to change people's emotions for a day. Maybe today can be explained by that. Or maybe the voodoo spirits really did visit during the night.

Anyone who had a voodoo doll made of them wakes up to find a colorful dot on them, about the size of a dime, where there doll had been pricked by the matching color's pin. Of course, there's always the chance that it's on someone's back, so that's not the only thing hinting at their being visited by a lwa. There's also corresponding altars that have popped up overnight, with those hidden symbols from yesterday now front and center, drawn in chalk in the pin's color, and offerings to the lwa collected below. A few rooms are lucky (or unlucky?) enough to have multiple altars. In shared rooms, there may even be more than one altar to a single lwa if both occupants were stuck with the same pin.

So what's happening today? Oh, a lot.

Chase, Kiley, Edwin, and Tobias find altars to Erzulie Fréda in pink. The altars have things like French pastries, coffee, expensive French champagne, Virginia Slims cigarettes, white cake, jewelry, and silk scarves.

This group is seeing the world through rose tinted glasses today. They're feeling more confident, more optimistic, and more appreciative of what the day might hold for them. Ridiculously, even. Maybe even annoyingly so. They're also more dramatic today, in everything from their reactions to their wardrobe to their gestures. Oh, and if anyone shows them positive attention? There's a chance that these guys will be doting over them all day. If it were possible for Them to give people floating cartoon hearts, you can bet that you would find them over this group today. They're all basically acting like lovesick puppies.

Don't mess up this outlook for this group today, though. If anything ruins their temporary world view, it's going to take some effort to make them stop crying. These guys are going to feel heartbreak just as hard as they do joy today.

Vanessa, Joe, Lucy, Scotty, and Tobias find altars to Bossu in red. These altars have rum, cocktails, Red Bull energy drinks, whisky, fried beef, and Tabasco sauce.

Today, this group will find themselves feeling aggressive, but protective. There's a lot going on in the house today, and just always, and while this can bother anyone on even the best of days, today they need to help make things better for people. They are absolutely channeling their inner Batman. How they do that is up to them, but these characters will feel like it is their duty to stand up for what they feel is right. Whatever that is. They may pick one person to do right by, or they may find something to do that will help everyone in the house. They obviously won't be able to get anyone out of their captivity, but they'll do anything else that they can. It's not smart to get in the way of these guys, either. That aggressive point is a huge part of what they're feeling, and it's best not to test it.

You would expect that those pinned with the love pin would be the ones who are feeling kind of horny, but it's actually this group. The red group is going to have some serious sex dreams when they're sleeping, and when they're not busy trying to save they day, they might be hiding in their rooms for some "me time", or trying to pair off and fulfill this other need.

Marco, Felix, Vanessa, Tobias, Chase, and Joe find altars in white to Damballa. Their altars have bowls of clean, fresh water, a hill of flour with an egg in it, white candles, rice, milk, and white fabrics.

This group will have strange dreams right before they wake up, all somehow featuring snakes. They're going to have a strong desire to create things today. Bake a cake? Sure. Write a song? Cool. Develop an intricate plan to tunnel out of captivity through the basement? Why not. Today these guys will want to fill some creative urges that they've had, as well as some new ones. If they do manage to find something to do that will fulfill this desire, they'll have some relief for maybe an hour before that itch to create returns again.

They're also going to be oddly quiet today. They're just not very talkative, like maybe their thoughts are a little too wild and creative for real verbalization. It's not stopping them if their creative outlet was, say, writing a book, but they're just not the best at carrying a conversation today.

Audrey, Levi, and Tobias find altars to Baron Kriminel in purple. They've got rum, rum cake, rum candy, more rum, cigars, coins, Day of the Dead toys, and sugar skulls.

What's going on with this group is easy enough to explain: pain. This group's implants seem to be in need of repair, providing shocks of various sizes throughout the day. It can be a little static shock, or one that can bring them to their knees. There's no pattern to it, so there's no way to predict it. Luckily, the shocks are more often than not on the medium-to-lighter side, but at least twice an hour they'll get one of the bigger zaps.

These guys will also find that anything that they eat today tastes like raw meat. Specifically raw pork, if they have anything to compare it to.

Audrey, Tobias, and Vanessa find altars to Baron Samedi in black. They find black coffee, plain bread, dry toast, roasted peanuts, rum in which hot peppers have been steeped, cigars, cigarettes, dark sunglasses, Day of the Dead toys, and beautiful wrought-iron crosses.

These people are in for a rough day. They will wake up to find themselves completely paralyzed. It's not the first time that They have used paralysis around here, but have they ever kept someone paralyzed for this long? For over two hours after they wake up, this group will not be able to move anything but their eyes. They won't be able to make any sounds at all. Not even a whine or a grunt. For this hour, they're basically trapped in their own corpse.

Luckily, those effects slowly wear off, but that's not the end of their misfortune. Through they day, this group is still feeling kind of numb, both in mind and body. They'll have that "pins and needles" feeling in their fingers and toes. They'll feel like their mind is in a bit of a fog. The continuing effects are a little bit like hypnosis, meaning that, while unable to be convinced to do something that they are completely opposed to, they are very susceptible to suggestion. They're going to feel a little bit like zombies, and even in that fog in their mind they're going to understand on some level that this isn't right, but there's nothing that they can do to pull them out of this funk. Hopefully everyone else in the house is not too willing to take advantage of it, though if anyone ever wanted a servant, there are a few people that they could try that with today.

Finally, there's the matter of this green pin, and an altar in green and offering white rum, vodka, mangos, yams, river rocks, quartz crystals, ribbons, and shed snakeskins. This is found in Lucy's room.

There was nothing explaining what the pin would do when used, or even offering a hint. It's still not immediately clear what it is that Lucy has had done to her until she is around other people who have had voodoo spells cast on them, when she'll finally realize that her gift for today is to lessen the effects of the spirits on others. The green pin represents Simbi, lwa of magicians, and so for today, Lucy is magic. Just being around Lucy will dull some of the compulsions that people are feeling, and bring them down to more of a normal state. It doesn't work entirely, though, and so Lucy's other pin, strength, may cause her to stay busy today offering others relief. Or maybe she'll find some other way to fulfill that need. Either way, Lucy is the only way to calm everyone's strange urges.

There are some people who have found themselves with multiple effects, and they're in for some emotional whiplash today. They'll be cycling through their symptoms at random, and sometimes feeling them all at once, which is going to be a bit of a nightmare for those conflicting urges.

This is going to be especially difficult for Tobias, who was the only person to manage getting every pin. He's going to feel everything, and hard. It's going to be a long day for him, but if he still has any sense of self by 4pm, he's going to find that he's been given the chance for relief. On his bathroom sink, he'll find a brand new voodoo doll, a marker, a new set of pins, and a note:

To remove any of your spells, write the name of the person you would like to pass them on to on the doll and use the pins of the lwa that you would like to transfer over to them. Leave your voodoo doll on the bed, then leave the room for ten minutes and your chosen spirits will leave you.

The person you have chosen to receive these spirits will know that you were responsible for this change.

If Tobias chooses to use this new voodoo doll, then true to Their word, the effects of whatever pins he chooses will leave him, the chosen altars will be gone from his room, and he'll just have to suffer through whatever he decided to keep for himself, if any. If he sees the person that he had passed his effects on to, they don't seem to be feeling the effects that Tobias was, though. Which means that Tobias will be giving Them something to do in the future.

Oh, and with all this going on, there's still those Zangbeto randomly popping up in dark spaces. They don't waste time lurking today, they just charge at you as soon as the lights go out. Not everyone will see them today, but they're still around. How do haystacks move so quickly?