stateofdecay | 🧟 Clearing the Fairgrounds

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narration: event

🧟 Clearing the Fairgrounds

Monday: 🧟  Visibility is poor today and the deep snow makes trudging around the Fairgrounds a soggy nightmare, but the group turns out in force to start clearing the horde by picking off stragglers at the edge in melee. It becomes a kill-count competition, with Mud  coming in first place, Dutch in second, and [Volunteer] and Hunter Jakobsen from the Fairfield group tying for third.

Tuesday: 🧟  Competition again today at the Fairgrounds, although with better visibility the group takes to the ferris wheel to use the carriages as sniper nests. Rather than simply counting kills, Dutch assigns Carter Betancourt and Russell Romero to judge sharpshooting kills on style and panache. The pair ultimately select Calliope Nightengale as the winner after they manage to shoot three zeds with the same crossbow bolt on their first try. Beginner's luck?

Wednesday: It's another long day of hard work at the Fairgrounds, but with a perimeter cleared the group can turn to digging pits to trap and burn the remainder of the zombies in. After Arwen Hartly sprains their ankle jumping down into a pit, they get re-assigned to lunch duty with Val and Kath Romero, who have set up shop at a nearby barbecue restaurant.

Just outside the secure perimeter, [Volunteer] gets caught in the crossfire of a snowball fight: Winslow Yates vs. Paget Yates and Jasmine Jakobsen, who are ganging up on him. Please help him here.

Thursday: Work on the pit digs continues today. Seth Romero enlists [Volunteer] as an extra set of hands to help him hotwire a nearby CAT excavator, which significantly expedites the process and means the group can make the pits much deeper, lowering the risk that they will fill completely.

Friday:  The burn pits are lit today, which will hopefully constantly draw the very sluggish nearby zombie horde into them. Shifts are set up amongst the Quad communities to make sure the fires are constantly fed and wood is chopped. Nobody is sure how long this process will take, or if it will be entirely effective.

The Fairfield group hosts a small cookout at the barbecue restaurant to celebrate completion of the project, which goes great until the wind shifts and puts them downwind of the burn pits. The event gets cut short as everyone heads home.

♡

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"Fuckin' watch this!" Mud hollers and shakes the last of his whiskey bottle into his mouth. That's not the thing he wants everyone to watch, it's just unfortunate.

"Ya watchin'?" He squints up at Carter in the next carriage, like a five-year-old making sure his mom sees his cartwheel, then hucks the bottle up in the air. As it falls down toward the shambling corpses in the fairgrounds below, he fires his gun... and misses the bottle completely. But does manage to hit a zed in the head, so it's not a total loss.

Carter had not been watching. She’d been dissociating and shooting zombies in the head, one after another, with the intention to do this until she dropped with exhaustion or they were all gone. She turns her attention back at the second call for it, though, with the sixth sense of any mom whose kids are about to do something dumb.

“Mud, be careful.” She admonishes without quite being able to help it, when that bottle hits the floor. “…But good shot.” Because it is, and she doesn’t want him to feel bad.

"The fuck you think Ima do, shoot my foot off?" he yells, though his gun is currently pointed directly at his foot so this is a distinct possibility. "HORSE?"

She doesn't do him the disservice of saying yes this is exactly what she fears, mostly out of a conviction that he'd shoot himself in the foot to be contrary. Carter blinks around at the ground, though, looking for this horse he's shouting about. "No shooting horses, either." She forbids automatically.

"Then we call it fuckin' ZOMBIE." Bold of Mud to assume he knows how to spell that word, but Mud is nothing if not boldly stupid. The carriage rocks dangerously as he shifts into a better hollering position. "Red raincoat," he points to a wandering zombie wearing a decidedly green raincoat in the midway area, "fuck up that bitch's arm."

Oh. This is a game. Mud has asked her to do a shooting game. That makes way more sense. "There's one less letter in HORSE. But that shouldn't matter." Says Carter, who does know how to spell ZOMBIE.

She's not sure she knows what colors are, though, when Mud makes his call. None of them have on red raincoats. Luckily, context clues display a zombie in a green one, and that's good enough. She reminds herself to look up facts on color blindness later, and then rids the zombie of her left arm, cleanly at the shoulder joint. She rocks her own carriage forward to grin, smug, down to Mud. "Get the right one, now."

Mud levels his gun at the one-armed zombie in some color of raincoat, seemingly unbothered by her fresh new amputee status. He'd killed a good 70 or 80 or 900 zombies yesterday (he didn't actually count and barely has an eighth grade education, those numbers might not be accurate), he's been using a gun for 70 or 80 or 900 years (see previous parenthetical), this should be no fuckin' problem.

There's a small ding! as Mud pulls the trigger and hits a bell on one of those rigged midway games instead. The bullet ricochets and hits a different zombie in the ear.

"Damn bitch, can't turn off this trick shot, check that out." The shot was all wrong, but that's not gonna stop this confidence.

It's been a long few days already. Carter's arms are heavy from holding up a gun the whole time, and now a shovel, too. For once in her life, she's dressed almost all the way down in worn jeans and a big winter coat, almost unrecognizable as herself, a cold shovel hitting colder dirt over and over. It's awful work, and she's not getting as far as she'd like, but that's not why her work is slowing right now. Beau is working too hard. She's been shovelling almost as long as Carter has.

She can't express any worry. She doesn't want to suggest something as demeaning as even taking a lunch break. Beau would just double down and shovel harder. No. The only way to stop this, she thinks, is violence. She grabs a handful of snow, forms yet another perfectly round sphere, and chucks it at her twin, not even trying to hide today. She just stands a few feet away, grinning.

Beau is so intent on digging that she hasn't looked up once in the last five minutes. She lost count months ago of how many trap pits she's helped build, and works tirelessly, despite the cold and damp and the growing ache in her muscles. Stubborn, but Beau is proving a point.

So the snowball catches her completely by surprise. Beau screams, flailing in an undignified manner, and then spots her twin. "Oh my god," she says, before throwing aside her shovel to run for a patch of untouched snow. The ball she throws back at Carter is less perfectly formed, but there's only a few feet between them.

The little squeal of delight that Carter lets out when Beau is successfully distracted is nothing short of gleeful and eminently childish. She was planning to just let Beau hit her, but years of reflexes kick in and Carter feints to the left, avoiding the snow. The small victory just makes her even more proud of herself, but fearful of her life, so Carter starts running in the opposite direction, away from the pits.

"Oh, you know you're going to have to try harder than that." She taunts over her shoulder.

Edited (duck roll 19 i'm sorry) 2025-01-09 03:04 (UTC)

This is mostly just a space for various scenes! All four leader characters will be around intermittently, and I'll be posting some opens for them. If you have a PCal Vol Slot with the Fairfield Group NPCs, I'll also be starting little interactions for those.

FAIRGROUNDS TIIIIME
All of mine will be here with Carter very present at this event. Accepting bribes for the shooting contest, but she doesn't enter either of the days of them for sportsmanship's sake. I really wanna jump back in this game so do threads w me thank you

so unfortunately all our threads are bad but

But we should do one anywayyy (I will get to my tags tonight too I VOW it)

should we do a known bad combo or an exciting new bad combo

my Instinct is to fall back on a bad combo to get my brain legs back but now that i consider an exciting bad new one could do that too who are you Feeling.

dice maiden is being so rude to me and not answering when i try to ask who to play

would you like to play with mud

dice maiden was nice to me and said carter can yell at mud how do you feel about that

yes please carter come yell at mud while he's doing his favorite thing (drinking and using guns at the same time)

She will try to stop this so bad oh my god.

i will try to start a thing!!! but it
might not be tonight

HELLO thank you for this JJ!! <3

If anyone wants any of mine they'll be here, though obviously Wednesday Arwen takes herself out 😌 if anyone wants to make fun of her or I guess help her or something, lmk

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🧟 Clearing the Fairgrounds

SCENES: MONDAY

SCENES: TUESDAY

TUESDAY: Mud & Carter

TUESDAY: Mud & Carter

TUESDAY: Mud & Carter

TUESDAY: Mud & Carter

TUESDAY: Mud & Carter

TUESDAY: Mud & Carter

TUESDAY: Mud & Carter

SCENES: WEDNESDAY

WEDNESDAY: Carter & Beau

WEDNESDAY: Carter & Beau

WEDNESDAY: Carter & Beau

SCENES: THURSDAY

SCENES: FRIDAY

OOC: Coordinating, Plotting, Chatter

Re: OOC: Coordinating, Plotting, Chatter

Re: OOC: Coordinating, Plotting, Chatter

Re: OOC: Coordinating, Plotting, Chatter

Re: OOC: Coordinating, Plotting, Chatter

Re: OOC: Coordinating, Plotting, Chatter

Re: OOC: Coordinating, Plotting, Chatter

Re: OOC: Coordinating, Plotting, Chatter

Re: OOC: Coordinating, Plotting, Chatter

Re: OOC: Coordinating, Plotting, Chatter

Re: OOC: Coordinating, Plotting, Chatter

Re: OOC: Coordinating, Plotting, Chatter