I'm sorry about this guys - I'm really losing motivation for this site. Quality of play, the sheer number of replacements, and, frankly, boredom, are causing me to look at this as a chore rather than a game.
That said, I'm not throwing in the towel yet. I will finish my current games and I'll take stock then. I just wanted to apologise for my recent neglect of this game. Thank you Jdodge for looking after it - I know you're modding too many games as-is :P.
*Gulp*
The Mayor stared at the glass. It was empty. He frowned at it. It resolutely remained empty. He reached for the bottle, missed, and frowned as it fell to the ground with a smash.
"Damn." He was at home, a small, rather cluttered house, consisting of a bedroom, a kitchen, a living room and a bathroom. He was currently in the living room, sitting on a deep and comfortable looking armchair amidst a pile of papers, books, magazines and various knick-knacks of all shapes and sizes ranging from the scale model of a dolphin hanging above his head to a series of snowglobes strewn carelessly on the floor.
In the middle of this mess, dominating the room, was a plain wooden table. It had been varnished and polished but was otherwise undecorated, a solid, rectangular affair with thick rectangular legs giving it an air of unmovable solidness. On the table was a glass, empty, with the remnants of a brown liquid creating a slightly darker ring to contrast with the pale translucent ring of the glass itself. The table was otherwise bare, but by the leg nearest the mayor was a pile of broken glass covering one of the snowglobes.
The Mayor's eye landed on the pile of broken glass and settled there for a while. "Hm." Seemingly having reached a decision, he slowly reached out an arm towards the mess, wondering, perhaps, if he was going to have to get up from his armchair. A sudden, sharp cry of pain signalled his success to those on the streets outside.
Somewhere nearby, a meeting was concluding.
"So, then. We get 'im! It's all 'is fault, 'es sposed ta deal wiv fings like this!" The speaker was the man known as Mr Pots, a well known rabble-rouser and general hooligan. He was tall, but hunched, so that you only noticed his height when he stretched, and he spoke rather like someone trying to imitate Dick Van Dyke in Mary Poppins. There was no way such an accent was real, but then, why would anyone want to imitate it? He had no friends, but if he did, they might have wondered about this. He exuded an air of general grubbiness, not actually dirty but looking like he should be dirty. There were singe marks on his right arm.
The rest of the assembled crowd looked more or less ambivalent about this plan. The reason, perhaps, was the identity of the "'im" that Pots wanted to "get". Although they made a show of disliking him, because he was an authority figure and it's only right to dislike authority figures, none of them truly disliked the Mayor. It was generally tacitly agreed that so long as he did his job no one else would have to, and frankly, it was also agreed that no one else would be any good at it. The assenting voice was therefore somewhat of a surprise. That it was joined by another was strange indeed. The fact that no one could really place either voice, which were strangely high pitched, but with a quality that could only be described as a
growl
made it even more disconcerting. People began to fidget nervously. The eventual surge forwards was driven, it was later remembered, from
below...
The mob approached the Mayor's house. It was not a very good mob. There were some placards, some people had lit some torches, there was even a farming implement to be found here and there (carefully stored for the express purpose of forming mobs), but there was no real enthusiasm. Each person only seemed to be moving because everyone else was, and as everyone else looked as nervous and unenthusiastic as they themselves did, they were not inspired with great dymanism. Nevertheless, they approached the Mayor's house.
Mr Pots smiled. It was a singularly unattractive smile. There were teeth missing, and others varying shades of yellow and black. While the rest of his body just gave an aura of grubbiness, in his mouth that aura became a reality. It was not a sight to dwell on, so we shan't any longer. Shouting angrily, he ran at the door, kicking and punching in a frenetic attempt to knock it down. Though an unpleasant figure, Mr Pots was not exactly evil. He was, however, intensely (and insanely) proud. His overbearing wife was a source of constant ridicule to him, and he simply disliked the Mayor. He would lead the lads in, jeer at him, poke him a bit, break some furniture, and generally leave a mess. But he didn't intend to kill him. This fact might explain why, when he had finished single handedly demolishing the door, he stopped short at seeing the Mayor's body prostrate on the floor, face down, his hand underneath his chest and small puddles of blood staining the plain wooden flooring.
The reader may be assured that the Mayor is not actually dead. But his apparent death stirred the seeds of a mob with
real
fire in their bellies...
, lynched Day 2
