First Reply Ain't That a Kick in the Head

[Ives]

The Mining Township of Halifax
Somewhere, Outer Rim

The cantina band wouldn't be arriving for another hour, which made the ambience in the establishment quiet enough to let Ives think. He sipped at his drink. He didn't remember ordering it, the bartender had set it down, but he didn't dislike the taste. Acrid, strong. Helped him focus.

Six new cases since yesterday. Ten fatalities yesterday, four reported missing. Twenty-eight total for the death toll so far. The number of infected he estimated to be in the dozens.

"You countin'?" Someone next to Ives spoke.

A bearded gentleman, hairs already turning white though he seemed in good health, had stopped by the bar to collect his drink. His eyes were milky white, though a faint blue circle outline an iris.

"Yeah?" Ives said.

"Counting the wrong things," the man continued. "What's a sinew know of a body? It's not the number of folk in a town that make it."

With that, the man left. He walked through the crowd, stopping by tables and saying more weird cryptic things. No one particularly seemed to mind the man, in fact some even exchanged pleasantries with him. He did his pass around the cantina and eventually sat down alone in a chair by the wall.

"What the fu...?" Ives muttered to himself, but he had more pressing headaches to attend to than a delusional stranger.

He chalked it up to the scent of ash in the air. It was the fourth day with no rhyme or reason to the outbreak, and cracks in the township's calm facade were starting to show. It was like a taut piece of rope where the fibres were frayed and threatening to pull apart.

---

At a table close-by yet unrelated to Ives, a miner put down a crystal he'd pulled from the earth that morning.

Another at the table whistled.

"One o' them power rocks, eh? Bet that red gold'll triple the moisture output on m' farm. I call!"

"I got more of them where this one came from, don't 'cha worry," the miner pushed all his chips into the middle. "All in!"

---

The sip Ives took from his drink felt off. Coppery, bitter. Had he bit his tongue? He set the glass down. It was still a clear orange. He wasn't just imagining it, though. The air had the distinct scent of copper to it, but when he looked around he couldn't see anything out of the ordinary.

The old man still sat there sipping his drink. Miners were huddled around their tables decompressing from their shifts. And the folk at the cards table were celebrating or bemoaning their luck in the latest round.

Ives sniffed the air, then frowned.

"Anyone else smell copper?"

---

Open to: Force Users, though anyone's welcome really. Forcers just have the easiest buy-in.
Tone: Weird Western / Occult Horror
// I'm doing a little exploration of Ives' emerging relationship with the Force. No prior knowledge required. Hoping for some character-focus with a background plot, but open to anything.
Come for the strange town, stay for whatever the hell is wrong with it.

 

[Vaelith Rhaen]

Halifax had not been Vaelith Rhaen's intended destination.

That fact had become increasingly irritating somewhere between landing outside the mining township and discovering that the rumors which had drawn her attention were considerably less exaggerated than she had hoped. Remote settlements collected stories easily. A miner became ill after opening an old tunnel, someone remembered hearing voices underground, and within a few transmissions an ordinary industrial accident had transformed into an ancient curse awakened beneath the mountains. Vaelith had learned long ago that most such stories became considerably less interesting once examined closely. Halifax, unfortunately, appeared determined to be an exception.

She had heard about the deaths first. The disappearances came afterward, followed by increasingly contradictory accounts of illness spreading through a settlement that could not seem to decide whether it was suffering from contamination, disease, violence, or something no one wanted to name aloud. None of that alone would necessarily have brought a Nightsister this far into the Outer Rim. What had caught Vaelith's attention were scattered references to unusual material being brought out of the mines around the same time. Crystals were hardly unusual in mining operations, but crystals accompanied by inexplicable deaths, missing people, and descriptions of disturbances that sounded suspiciously like poorly articulated encounters with the Force were considerably harder for her to ignore.

By the time she entered the cantina, Vaelith had already decided that she disliked the feeling of the town.

She stepped through the doorway dressed for travel rather than ceremony, her clothing practical in muted ash and charcoal with restrained crimson accents, boots carrying a thin coating of Halifax dust from the walk through the settlement. Nothing about her announced the Nightsister traditions she carried with her unless someone knew what they were looking for. Even then, Vaelith suspected they would notice the way she observed the room before they noticed anything else. Her pale gaze traveled over miners clustered around tables, drinks being poured behind the bar, and conversations conducted with the particular casualness of people working hard to convince themselves nothing had changed. She had seen that sort of normalcy before. It was not calm. It was habit being used as armor.

The Force did little to reassure her.

Vaelith paused only briefly inside the entrance, allowing herself to feel rather than immediately reaching for magick. Something pressed strangely against her awareness, hard to isolate beneath the accumulated emotions of frightened, exhausted people. It was not simply darkness. Dathomir had taught her far too well that darkness itself was neither explanation nor diagnosis. This felt uneven, as though something had disturbed the place's natural rhythm, and the disturbance continued to travel outward through everything touching it. People. Stone. Perhaps even the earth beneath the township. She could not yet determine whether the sensation originated nearby or whether Halifax merely sat above whatever had caused it.

Then she smelled copper.

Vaelith's expression tightened almost imperceptibly.

The scent arrived strongly enough that she instinctively searched for its source, expecting blood despite seeing no immediate sign of injury. Her attention moved across the room until another voice asked the question already forming in her thoughts.

"Anyone else smell copper?"

Her gaze settled upon the man at the bar.

"Yes."

Vaelith crossed the remaining distance without urgency, though she did not take her attention entirely from the room around them. "And unless someone has spilled an impressive amount of blood somewhere out of sight, I don't think we're smelling anything that is actually here." Her tone was calm rather than ominous, the observation offered as something to consider rather than a conclusion she had already reached. She stopped a comfortable distance from him, pale eyes briefly studying the untouched portions of his drink before shifting toward the rest of the cantina.

That was when a flash of red caught her attention.

At one of the nearby tables, miners were playing cards around a scattering of credits and possessions, apparently unconcerned by the small crystal sitting among the stakes. Vaelith's attention lingered upon it. She didn't need to identify it precisely from across the room to recognize it deserved more consideration than the men around it seemed inclined to give. More importantly, something in her awareness tightened when she looked toward it.

Her gaze returned to the stranger at the bar.

"I arrived in Halifax because people are dying and disappearing while your miners are bringing unusual things out of the ground," she explained, keeping her voice low enough that the declaration did not become an announcement to the room. "I had hoped those two facts were unrelated."

Vaelith glanced once more toward the red crystal on the table, then toward the miners celebrating another hand as though nothing about their township had begun to unravel.

"I'm becoming considerably less optimistic."
Ives

 

[Ives]

If Ives had a credit for every cryptic interaction he'd had on this world he'd have two, which wasn't even enough to pay for his drink but it was strange that it had happened twice by now.

But the woman might have a point. At least she spoke in a way that suggested she was competent. Or educated, at least, in things that'd probably make Ives' head spin. Which probably put her ahead in terms of her ability to properly manage a plague outbreak like this one, because try as he might with the bits of epidemiology knowledge he'd picked up, Ives was woefully outmatched by this disease.

No one knew where it had come from, or how it even spread. There wasn't so much a pathogen Ives had managed to isolate. It felt more like the roll of a dice on whether someone succumbed or didn't, which made quarantine procedures so much more difficult. Impossible, if you factored in that the township's council had refused to declare an emergency over "some particularly potent cold," electing to instead keep pushing the miners as their quarterly quota loomed and they had yet to meet the target numbers.

"Unusual things?" Ives repeated.

His eyes followed her gaze. The cards table didn't seem to have anything off about it. One of the miners had apparently pocketed part of their haul and placed it as a bet, or they were an independent prospector unaffiliated with Halifax Prospecting and had simply gotten lucky. The crystals had been something of a windfall for the town.

"You mean the power stones?" He asked. "What's so special about a rock?"

He proffered his hand for a handshake, before he reconsidered--they were in the middle of an epidemic after all--and awkwardly turned it into a wave.

"Ives, by the way."

Vaelith Rhaen

 

[Vaelith Rhaen]

Vaelith watched the offered hand become an awkward wave and couldn't quite prevent the small smile that touched her expression. Given the circumstances, she understood the reconsideration. She answered with a slight inclination of her head rather than making the moment any more uncomfortable than it already was. "Vaelith Rhaen. Vael is fine." Her pale gaze returned to the card table and the red crystal resting among the miners' wagers. "And yes. The power stone."

Calling it a rock was understandable when no one had apparently given him reason to think otherwise, but Vaelith regarded it with considerably more caution. She did not approach or attempt to touch it from where she stood. "Some crystals interact with the Force in ways ordinary minerals don't. They can respond to energy, focus it, sometimes retain impressions of what has happened around them." Her attention lingered upon the distinctive red coloration for another moment. "That doesn't mean this one has anything to do with your outbreak, and I'm not going to pretend I know that from across the room. But its color concerns me enough that I wouldn't dismiss it as just a rock."

She glanced back toward Ives, curiosity replacing some of the unease in her expression. He had clearly been here longer than she had, and unlike Vaelith, he seemed to regard the crystals as an ordinary part of what had recently been happening around Halifax. That alone made one question considerably more useful than a dozen assumptions. "How long have they been finding them?"

Ives

 

[Ives]

Rocks with a memory? Ives' instinct turned out to be correct, on the count that Vaelyth was much more versed in these things than he was. Ives nodded along to her explanation, doing his best to follow.

"About two weeks back," Ives rubbed his neck. "I was in the mines the day they discovered them. Would still be down there if I wasn't more useful as a doc."

While the plague followed the discovery of these stones, creating a temporal link, the plague seemed to be targeting folk regardless of their contact with the mineral. Only a few of the miners had gotten sick, and they hadn't been the first, which had made Ives dismiss the mines as a potential source for the outbreak, though if these rocks had any part to play, then that hypothesis would warrant revisiting.

"What's the colour's significance?" He felt more than silly asking about rock colours at a time like this, but his investigation had yielded nothing, and this woman was talking more sense than he'd heard in a while.

"The couple they dug up have all been red," Ives noted.

Vaelith Rhaen

 

[Vaelith Rhaen]

Vaelith listened without interrupting, though the mention that Ives had actually been present when the crystals were discovered drew her attention away from the card table. Two weeks gave them a useful reference point, especially if the sickness had followed sometime afterward, but she resisted fitting those pieces together too neatly. Coincidence had ruined more investigations than ignorance ever had, especially when something unusual offered such an attractive explanation. "Then the timing is interesting," she said, choosing the word deliberately. "Interesting isn't the same thing as connected, though. If people who never went near the mines are becoming sick, I wouldn't blame the crystals simply because they appeared first."

His question about the color was harder to answer without giving certainty where she had none. Vaelith looked toward the red crystal again, studying what little she could discern at this distance. "Kyber doesn't ordinarily occur naturally in that color, at least not to my knowledge," she explained. "There are ways a crystal can be changed through the Force. One practice produces red kyber by imposing yourself upon the crystal until its nature is altered. It's commonly called bleeding." Her expression tightened slightly. "But knowing that such a thing exists doesn't mean that's what happened here. Finding several already red beneath a mining settlement is unusual enough that I'd rather examine one before deciding what we're looking at."

Vaelith considered him for a moment, particularly the casual admission that he had been underground when the first crystals came out. If the stones were involved, his presence might matter. If they were not, dwelling upon it would accomplish little beyond making a physician wonder whether he was about to become his own patient. "You said you were there when they found them," she continued. "Did anything seem unusual before they were brought up? Not necessarily illness. Anything you noticed in the mine that seemed strange enough to remember afterward?"

Ives