301 preplay

Duke and Nathan fight in the galley. Nathan gets Duke pinned and starts choking him, then sets Duke's trouble off and he throws him across the galley. More fighting. They're both on the ground, trying to reach a gun first, when suddenly everything metal in the galley flies up and sticks to the ceiling.

Nathan immediately suspects Duke of doing it. Duke says that's not in his wheelhouse. Nathan says he just threw him across the room. Duke explains the rush his trouble gives him. More arguing, then Nathan locates his chill and agrees to let Duke and Danny help look for Audrey.

We covered all this in the other post.

This stuff gets summarized before the first OCD thread: They find out that the magnetism thing happened all down main street in town. Nathan asks Dwight to take care of it while he focuses on finding Audrey, finds out another woman has been abducted, the owner of an inn outside of town. Nathan and Duke head out there to go find out if it's connected to Audrey.

OCD starts here with the son of another abducted woman: The woman's son is a conspiracy nut with a hard-on for UFOs, and claims his mother was abducted by aliens. Duke plays along to try to get the guy to go to the police station, but he runs off on a motorbike, and Nathan, Duke, and Danny give chase.

Second OCD thread: Nathan's truck dies, as do all the phones and radios. Nathan stubbornly tries to fix the truck, resulting in an argument with Duke about not being able to fix everything (which Danny is sure to be highly amused by), capped off by either Nathan or Danny getting dragged off by their ankles into the middle of a crop circle.

Then a UFO floats by and crashes into the ground not far away. The phones and truck start working again, and they decide to go check out that UFO. It landed right next to UFO guy's house, where he's gone to get his alien fighting equipment.

Summarized, not played out: They discover all sorts of clippings and news reports taped up in the house, all about aliens showing up around the country. It's all the things that have been happening in town. There are two that haven't happened yet: strange lights in the sky, and a big blast from a UFO taking out an entire town. RUH-ROH. Meanwhile, Audrey has managed to escape from her kidnapper and finds a phone. She calls Nathan, tells him she and other woman were being held in the basement of the Inn.

Next OCD thread: Nathan, Duke, and Danny rush over. Duke finds Audrey first, tries to calm her down, but when she sees Nathan she all but flings herself at him. Duke has very visible Feelings about this.

Lights appear in the sky. Followed by a massive, threatening UFO. TOWNWIDE DESTRUCTION IS IMMINENT. Audrey tries to talk UFO guy down from his trouble by empathizing with having your entire world view and identity turned upside down. It doesn't go super well. Duke starts wondering if he's going to have to use his trouble to save the town, which freaks Nathan out. Instead, Nathan talks the UFO guy into letting himself get abducted so the aliens go away.

Last OCD thread, mostly me until the end: Duke has a whole "wtf, how was that plan better?" conversation with Nathan that ends with "You're a hypocrite, Nathan" and Duke storming off. He decides that, yeah, he's getting the fuck out of Haven again. He tries to talk Audrey into doing the same, up to and including offering to take her to Fandom with him, but she refuses. She still has too many questions. Duke hates it, but he understands. He heads back to his boat to sail home, offering Danny a ride, though I'm gonna guess Danny will just portal back to Fandom instead. ;D

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

From:

seaoftroubles

I think we can handwave/summarize the getting the deets in town. This is already going to be kind of A Lot of scenes to cover.

From:

betterthanaplan

It didn't take long after they headed into town to discover that whatever had hit the Rouge was pretty widespread. They'd found Dwight on Main Street, pulling a manhole cover out of the hood of a car while babbling about old pipes under the streets needing replacing.

If Dwight "accidentally" aimed that manhole cover at Duke when he tossed it aside, well. Duke had just thrown him all the way across and off his boat last time they'd seen each other.

Nathan decided to let Dwight handle whatever weirdness that was so he could focus on finding Audrey -- only to hear from one of his uniformed officers that another woman had been reported missing: Roslyn Toomey, owner of the Altair Bay Inn.

So here they were, Nathan, Duke, and Danny, at the Altair Bay Inn, a large, rustic style building at the top of a bluff overlooking the ocean.

"Gosh, Nathan," Duke said, hopping out of the Bronco. "You take us to the quaintest places."

Nathan didn't bother answering.

From:

hatesparadise

"You just can't help yourself, can you?" Danny asked with an amused little eye roll.

From:

betterthanaplan

"It's fun," Duke said. ". . . You know, when he's not actively trying to murder me."

Seriously, Nathan had tried to choke him twice now. And this time he couldn't even blame a trouble for making him insane.

Nathan ignored them both and headed for the front door to the Inn. He hadn't even knocked yet when a squirrelly looking guy stepped out, looking anxious.

"Are you the police?"

"Chief Wuornos," Nathan said. "Haven PD. Are you Wesley Toomey?"

Wesley nodded. "They took my mother, Roslyn."

From:

hatesparadise

Dnany just side-eyed the hell out of Duke for that one.

"Who took your mother?"

Edited Date: 2020-10-17 05:15 pm (UTC)

From:

seaoftroubles

Personally I'm very into the idea of Danny being the one who gets dragged off. GIVES HIM SOMETHING TO DO OTHER THAN YELL.

From:

betterthanaplan

The road from the Inn was long, winding, and not well paved. Nathan called in their pursuit on the radio, referring to Wesley as unstable and potentially dangerous. Wesley darted around a curve on his bike, and before Nathan could follow, the Bronco's engine sputtered and died.

"What are you doing?" Duke asked, as the truck slowed down. "You're letting him get away, he's our only link to Audrey!"

"I'm not!" Nathan barked back. "The engine just died!"

From:

hatesparadise

"Jesus, stop bickering for five minutes," Danny snapped. "That is all I ask."

From:

betterthanaplan

This was what people had to deal with hanging out with you and Steve, Danny. Only . . . angrier.

Nathan pulled the Bronco over to the side of the road as it rolled to a stop. He put it in park, then tried the engine. And the radio. "Dead."

Duke checked his phone. And his other phone. And a third phone. "Phones are dead, too. What the hell is going on?"

From:

hatesparadise

So much angrier!

Danny looked at his own dead phone with an annoyed little purse of his lips. "What always seems to be going on here," he grumbled, rubbing his forehead. "Some stupid power thing probably."

From:

seaoftroubles

We can maybe handwave/summarize finding the conspiracy theory board and shit, too, and bounce right to the inn and the climax of Nathan talking the dude into getting abducted.

From:

betterthanaplan

The meteor, it turned out, had landed just down the road from the inn, in the side yard of Wesley Toomey's house. Where he'd returned, it seemed, after losing them on the road, to go get some of his "equipment". Dwight had beat the Bronco to the house, and discovered a hell of a conspiracy board inside, filled with articles from around the country about strange occurrences blamed on aliens.

Nathan's theory was that Wesley's trouble was causing his belief in aliens to come true. Considering that everything that had happened so far resembled something in one of the articles on the board -- up to and including a police officer getting dragged off into a crop circle by his ankles -- it was hard to argue with him.

There were only two articles left which hadn't happened, in fact: strange lights in the sky, and a "blast from an alien ship" levelling an entire town.

"Of course it's going to blow up the town," Duke said with a groan. "Why wouldn't a trouble threaten 20,000 people at once?"

From:

hatesparadise

"And people live here willingly," Danny added. You know. Helpfully.

From:

betterthanaplan

"Yeah, well." Duke scuffed his foot across the ground. "People are stupid."

The sun had set again while they were in the house, and the cloudy night sky was suddenly lit by what looked like a floating ball of lights.

"Lights in the sky," Wesley whispered anxiously.

"These incidents seem to be following him," Dwight said.

"They may just be following the ideas he has in his head," Nathan said. "Locations that are familiar to him."

"I can start evacuating the houses around here," Dwight offered and headed off.

"That's it?" Duke said. "That's your plan? You're just going to let this happen?" He could fix this. Claire's words from before he'd gone into the woods after the Benton sisters were ringing in his head.

Whose trouble are you more worried about?

Right now, the one that promised to obliterate the town seemed way worse than the one that would just take out one guy.

From:

hatesparadise

Don't even think about it, Duke.

"Or we try talking to the guy," Danny said. "Does he even realize that he's the one causing this?"

From:

betterthanaplan

It was way too late for that. Duke had been thinking about it pretty constantly for ages now.

"That's so crazy it just might work," he said, looking at Wesley with a shrug.

"The troubles are a myth," Wesley said. "This is science! My grandfather taught me all about it before they took him!"