Who: Ken Kaneki anthropophagite, Peter Parker tinglesense, Harleen Quinzel amenace, Kamala Khan bestversion, Alina Starkov sunmon, Kumoko survivalrate, Bart Allen kid_flash_found, Jinx whimsikills and Loki Laufeyson thecoolerloki.
What: Over the course of a few days, kids find an old spell book in the school library and come up with a plan to cast the spell inside at a spooky manor in Sunset Falls.
When: Monday 7th - Wednesday 9th March
Where: Meta school & Sunset Falls
Content Warnings: I'll keep you updated





It's just another day at the school in the sky. Classes run like clockwork, playground powergrabs are narrowly avoided, and somewhere in the school library a mysterious new addition sits on a shelf, waiting to be read.


DISCOVERING A BOOK;

It's especially quiet in this corner of the library - a perfect place to study. Browse the shelves and your eyes will be drawn to an old book: leatherbound, weathered, no trace of a title.

This book has a certain draw to it. Anyone who sees it may find themselves thinking about it all day, thoughts always looping back around.

Inside, the book is filled with scripts and symbols that don't make sense. Try to translate it and nothing solid comes up: it's a mish mash of different alphabets and languages and ancient runes.

It's also structured very oddly, hand written and chaotic. Script bunches together to form structures and patterns, curls in unsteady spirals, plays with empty space and covers other pages with dense layers of ink.

Only one page makes any sense, written in English. The page gives instructions about casting a spell, though all it really says about the spell itself is…

🔦 The spell creates a secret place that sits inside another.
🔦 The place hides those it houses, maps lose their meaning.
🔦 The more people lend the place their power, the better hidden they will be.

… does this sound like the perfect clubhouse to anyone else?




SPREADING THE WORD;

Maybe you found the book yourself, maybe you happened to be in the library at the same time somebody else found it.

If you've already seen it, you may feel compelled to share. Isn't this thing cool? Hey, check out this spell, do you think we can…?

Or maybe somebody smuggled the book out of the library and you're sitting in class and feel a sudden draw to peek inside their backpack…

However it happens, it's time to figure out who knows, loop in anybody else you want to know, and start coming up with a plan to test out that spell.




SCOPING OUT THE VENUE:

The house on Will-o'-the-Wisp Walk is well known in Sunset Falls as a trouble spot. An old and long-abandoned Victorian manor on a street where the houses are separated by vast property boundaries to ensure privacy, it's the perfect place to cast up a secret hideaway.

There's a gate at the bottom of the driveway but the lock is long gone, and a brief walk up the long sweeping drive reveals the house itself: four stories if you count the central tower, wood-paneled with arched windows and a stone staircase leading up to the porch. The implied grandeur doesn’t take away from how the whole place looks worse for wear, roof tiles slipping and window shutters hanging on by loose hinges, rotting wood on the porch railings.

The door opens as easily as the gate, and inside is looking just as rough… though not as disused. It's all old and dusty, sure, but some rooms show signs of the rumours you may have heard about this place: snack wrappers and leftover takeout, carpets scratched up and thrown back so some kid could scrawl chalk spell circles on original hardwood floors. Nobody's here right now, but they have been. Almost every room you walk through is laden with some kind of magic, hasty handwritten warnings stuck to walls and furniture to keep you away from half-finished spells.

As per the instructions in the spell book, the ideal room for the casting must be pitch dark, silent, and have at least two doors, one to be closed and the other left open a crack.

The only room in the house that fits this bill is the in the basement, a plain room with stone floors and walls and a single rusty lightbulb with a pull chain hanging from the ceiling. It's the middle room in a basement warren, one door for entry and another to pass through into the room beyond.

Once it's found and everyone's ready, it's time to gather round and prepare to cast the spell.




CASTING THE SPELL;


The book may not give an awful lot away, but it does provide instructions.

Spell casters must face the closed door with their backs to the open one, and any light in the room must be extinguished. Once these conditions are met, all you need to do is speak the magic words to cast the spell -

Now I'm here and then I'm gone.
A secret space will hide me.
In that other place I'll run
Where no one else can find me.

– and wait. The book says that soon enough you will feel the door at your back open wide to let you in, and when that happens all you need to do is turn around and walk inside.

As soon as you speak the spell, something shifts. It may take you a while to realise that the silence around you is now absolute. No murmurs of the spell words from your classmates, not the sound of their breathing or their footsteps moving toward the door.

Maybe you'll try to reach out for someone or attempt to turn on a light. Maybe you head to pass through the open door or try to leave through the closed one. Doesn't matter. As soon as you spoke the spell words, you were transported to another place. Maybe completely alone, or maybe with someone else from your group - your phone, if you try it, has no service. The old lightbulb with its pull switch is nowhere to be found, and if you do strike a light you'll find yourself in another room entirely, all peeling paint and bare wooden floorboards.

The only people who won't be immediately transported are those who chose not to perform the spell. They are left together in the casting room, with one simple choice to make. Pick a door or wait and hope.



( Here we go, time for some kids to do some magic!

This log is intended as the lead up to and casting of the spell - the place created by the spell will be described in detail in the event log going up on Wednesday, so please don’t run any further than the moment characters realize they’re not in Kansas anymore.

If you have any questions or need to figure anything out with me or anybody else, please refer back to the plotting post! I’m ready and waiting for you at the Questions comment. )