whitechapelmod | TEST DRIVE

TEST DRIVE MEME

OPTION A

With the cooling weather came the changing of the leaves, the lighting of candles and the advertisements in all the shops and bulletin boards for the Annual Whitechapel Road Fall Festival. Overnight your quaint little neighborhood has been transformed from a typical Victorian-esque scene to well, a typical fall festival scene. Strings of lights have been wound between the lamps, scarecrows have been put up in shop windows that hold signs with arrows on them, directing you down the main street toward the park.

In the park, you'll find a small carnival. No big gaudy rides, of course, but booths set up by local businesses where they sell items from their shops. Games like bobbing for apples and pin the nose on the scarecrow have been scattered in the places between the face painting booths and cotton candy vendors. There's also booth offering food and drink-- and doesn't that cider just smell wonderful? Of course, they have hot chocolate too, if cider's not your thing.

Mingle and enjoy your night! But be careful-- you might just end up in the dunking tank..

OPTION B

You wake late in the morning to a strange chill in the air. The weather, sure, but also something else, something wrong in the energy. Maybe you've never been much of a person who believes in that sort of stuff-- energy, vibes, whatever-- so you brush it off and go about your day. It's not until you're out and about that you really start to notice something. The streets are mostly empty, the shops closed down. A cold wind blows through and makes you shiver as you turn down the street toward the Town Board. The papers flutter in the wind, but it doesn't matter, you're not reading them, you're reading the message written in red over all of them.

YOU WILL ALL BE PUNISHED.

Is that blood it's written in, or paint? It's hard to tell, but the color seeps into the fliers and advertisements-- "puppies, free to a good home" or "half off on all clothing TODAY ONLY"-- staining them, ruining them. You know without even turning and walking the extra block that something very bad has happened. Yellow tape surrounds the board, you just notice, and blocks the entrance to a nearby alleyway. An officer stands guard, but he looks pale and shaken. This isn't the first. Just last week, someone was killed too. The boy who delivered the milk. Eddie. Throat slashed and a message written in blood on the wall above him, similar to this one.

An ambulance arrives but you stay where you are, watching as more officers emerge from the alley, carrying something on a stretcher. Someone, you realize, because what else do they carry on stretchers? A shock of red, curly hair pokes out from the top and you think of the girl who runs the register in the bakery, a waitress from the cafe you tried last week, your sister back home who will (hopefully) never end up here. Could this really happen here? Some maniac killing people because they think you need to be punished? It's wrong, it's confusing, and it's terrifying, isn't it?

Make a top-level comment below, with whichever option you'd like in the subject, and maybe a little starter. Please also feel free to disregard the options and choose your own adventure! Below are links to the setting and premise, so feel free to use those as reference in guiding your post. Tag around and have fun!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

It's far from her first murder scene, though it's been a long time since she's been forced to stand on the sidelines, craning her neck for a better view and reminded of the fact that she's a civilian. She hadn't had a badge back home, just a reputation and an ID that marked her as being on retainer, but dropping Sgt. Storr's name was usually enough to get her access. Not here. Here, she had to stay behind the line like a well-behaved citizen, arms crossed as she did her best to get a better look, waiting for a break in security she might be able to exploit.

Call it curiosity, but she wanted to see this up close if she could. She was used to the police looking for all the wrong clues. Sometimes the killer was something more up her alley than theirs.

Of course, sometimes people were just plain awful and there was nothing creepy-crawly involved at all. She couldn't decide which she hated more.

Speaking of people who were just plain awful...

"My, my," a voice remarks from somewhere a little behind Anita. "It certainly seems like someone wanted to put on a show for us all."

If she turns, she'll see a tall, thin man in what appears to be some sort of military uniform, smiling faintly as he gazes at the message written in blood. He pulls one hand out of his pockets momentarily to adjust his glasses, which catch the light, obscuring his blood red eyes for just a moment with a bright gleam.

She turns slightly to get a look at the voice's owner over her shoulder, pressing her lips into a thin line, grimacing as she gives him a quick once-over before turning her attention back to the scene -- or what little she can see of it.

"Whoever it is wants to get caught," she muses aloud, frowning. "They always do when they go over-the-top like this. They're desperate for someone's attention."

"The question is, then, whose? And why? After all, it takes both a considerable amount of effort to arrange the warnings and bodies thus," he remarks, still smiling. The use of plural is hardly a mistake; he's been eavesdropping on some of the local law officials and their hushed remarks about these dreadful occurrences.

"People have their reasons. They vary."

She's lost count of the number of killers she's come across over the last few years. The police only need her for special cases, which means she often sees the worst of the worst. The most attention-starved, the most desperate.

His use of plurals doesn't go unnoticed, though she doesn't seem terribly surprised, either. She's been listening closely, too. She smiles grimly without looking back at him, shifting her weight from one foot to the other.

"Whoever has done it is trying to make a statement. Otherwise they wouldn't take so much care to set up each kill the same way. It means something to him. Or her."

Nico stays out of the way, in the crowd, as the police go about their duties. Even with his skull ring and sword, the thin boy blends in well with the curious crowd of people. In part because everyone else has varying wardrobes, as well. He watches the activity behind the tape with rapt attention, but ultimately he'd gotten there too late to see anything big.

He decides to ask this stranger. She looks like she's absorbing every detail, too.

"Did you see who it was?"

She shakes her head without missing a beat. People talked at crime scenes. Really, scenes like this were often noisy, lacking in the quiet that people tended to associate with death. Between police, medical examiners, press, and bystanders, there were always so many people coming and going that it was difficult to startle anyone.

"Nope. So far, seeing a whole lot of nothing. The backs of a few uniforms. Hoping for a glimpse of something more."

The demigod looks back to the police and the medical examiners, and everyone who would have gotten a glimpse at the body. He makes a note of those pasty, tense expressions.

"They look scared."

Which probably isn't a good sign, since they probably see murders all the time. So what's going on with this particular crime scene?

"Honestly, that just means they're smart."

She gives him a quick glance, her lips pressed together into a thin, tight line as she peels her attention away from what little they can see of the scene. She has to agree. They look scared, and they look like they don't have a clue.

"Usually, if a cop is scared, it means they have a good idea of what the culprit is capable of -- or how serious it's going to turn out to be."

Maybe she should have toned it own a little, talking to a kid, but she had never been in the habit of sugarcoating. She wasn't going to start now.

Nico absorbs this with a serious, dark expression that doesn't fit most fourteen-year-olds. And Nico di Angelo is certainly not typical for his age, in most ways. Though he's smaller than he should be, and bears the signs of not getting enough to eat — bordering on possible, but recovered, starvation.

Being held captive by giants, and going into a death trance, hasn't been kind to him.

"So there are going to be more murders." He glances back to Anita. It's a statement, rather than a question. "They must think he, or she, will do it again."

"More than likely, yes. Judging by by their reaction, I don't think this is the first one. They wouldn't be so scared if there wasn't a precedent. The fact that it's not the first just proves to them that there are more to come, and I think it's safe to assume that they're no closer to figuring out who did it than they were at the last crime scene, whenever that was."

It's a lot of speculation, sure, but speculation from someone who does this for a living. She's lost count of the number of murder cases she's been brought in for. Most of them were monster-related, of course, but the process of deduction was the same-- and the way the cops themselves reacted was the same, no matter what the culprit was.

This is new for the Son of Hades, who normally deals with matters far more arcane. Police procedure is somewhat of a mystery, with the exception of broad details anyone reasonably clever could scrape together.

"I thought it was too nice, here."

Sarcasm tinges the statement. Being trapped isn't exactly nice.

TEST DRIVE

Anita Blake | Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter | Option B

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject