#; reference

         Your head’s pounding. You almost don’t open your eyes until you hear groaning and shifting beside you. Forcing open your eyes, they take a bit to focus, and when you do, a blue-haired blond-banged male is holding out his hand to you.

         “Hey, are you okay?” he asks, and you barely nod around the dull pounding in your head. You take his gloved hand, letting him help you to your feet before you pull away to look around — nothing around you is familiar at all.

                   ( what is this place? )

         Perfectly green grass is what you’d laid upon and there’s pathways and buildings farther away. Already, the teen boy has moved on, greeting others who’re just stirring as well. You already don’t recognize most of the people you’ve seen. Turning your attention around, you see a faint gleam pass across the sky, like light passing over glass. It’s dim and smells a bit musky, and the only thing that breaks your concentration is the sound of something hitting the ground. Upon inspection, you realize an unfamiliar phone fell from your pocket. When you pick it up and look at the back, you see your name engraved there, though you don’t know how or why.

         The phone rings with a message. Clumsily, you unlock the phone and nearly yelp when instead of a text, a small hologram of a girl appears. She’s wearing what seems to be some sort of suit and has bright green hair and piercing amber eyes...for a hologram.

         “Welcome. We’ve been waiting for you to wake. If you’re unsure what’s going on, please meet us in the plaza. Your phones are equipped with a map. You have ten minutes.”

         The girl’s hologram disappears to reveal a map on the phone’s screen. A small dot in the park tells you that’s where you are — and the word ‘PLAZA’ plastered on a section of the map tells you where you need to go.

         Slowly but surely, you and all of the others have made your way to the plaza. The boy who woke you up seems energetic, and it looks like he isn’t at all bothered by your situation. You’re only able to appreciate it until a person clears their throat.

         The girl from earlier is there, but so are three more nearly identical girls, and that fact is far more unsettling. One girl sports bright blue hair and gleaming green eyes, the other with soft purple hair and magenta eyes. The final has two bright pink pigtails and angry blue eyes that seem to keep you captivated. A soft, horrified gasp comes from somewhere in the crowd, but you don’t know who it was — you don’t have time to investigate as the pink-haired girl begins to speak.

         “You’ve made it. Welcome to your new home.” Her voice is cold and harsh despite the words and you shiver. “My name is Yuzu. This is Ruri, Serena and Rin. From this point onward, you may consider us the wardens of this prison.”

                   ( prison?! )

         “Yeah, she’s right,” the girl who called you over the hologram, Rin, says. “Basically, you’re all stuck here until you fulfill the requirement to go home.”

         There’s excited murmuring. The introduction of Serena’s energetic grin is enough to quell any of the excitement.

         “You wanna know, huh? Well, you can go home if you do one thing: murder another prisoner and get away with it!”

         The crowd hushes and then breaks into yelling and protests until the last one, Ruri, raises her voice.

         “We’ll let you get settled in before we jump into any fun. First, the rules. You can listen to them or read them on your phone. Each of you has one which works with a live translator, which will allow you to understand any language spoken to you, while also translating any messages you receive into the language of your choice. This doesn’t work on books or other printed texts. Be warned. Now, the rules...”

         Yuzu laughs and speaks up this time around.

         “Okay, so for the all of you idiots that can’t read or won’t read it, I’ll read it to you. The rules are as followed:

You have all been assigned a dorm; you may choose a room for yourself. It will then be visible on your public information.

You may only sleep in the room you chose. You may not be roommates with another prisoner. If you sleep in the room of another prisoner, you will be punished.

That means no sleeping outside either.

There is no fornication allowed with your fellow prisoners. Ever. There are kids here, you sick perverts.

Your phone is your lifeline. Don’t break or lose it.

Your doors do not autolock. If you lock it, the only way to open it is to use your phone.

We have set up a few stores for you. 

We have basic foods, like pasta, ramen, fruits and veggies for free in the food store. Anything else you gotta talk to the store clerk about.

There’s free, basic clothing in the general store. Short sleeved shirts, tanks, jackets, shorts, sweats and undergarments are among these. They come in black, white, pink, blue, green and purple.

Anything else has to be bought.

Any entertainment has to be bought (because we hate you).

If you need help, ask one of the store clerks. They’re here to help.

Damaging any of the property will result in a punishment.

The general IMs have a filter which you can see here. This doesn’t apply to the adult IMs.

Threatening any member of the staff (which includes, but is not limited to, the Wardens, SysAdmin and store clerks) is strictly prohibited. This is your warning. We will punish you harshly for threats and even more harshly for attempts.

Wardens cannot directly harm you unless a rule is broken or under specific situations where prior warning is given.

And that’s it...for now.”

         Serena looks around at all of the unhappy, devastated and angry faces and groans impatiently.

        “What? Your food’s free...oh well, whatever. That’s it for now. See ya later, okay?”

         — and by the time you blinked, your new Wardens were gone, and nothing was there to indicate they had ever existed. Either way, it was time to explore your new home.

OOC NOTES;

Hello everyone, it’s Mod Cassie and I need to address a problem we had in Chapter 3. 

If you have not already figured out, the last motive was carefully planned out by the mod team and we were stressed out to determine who would best fit what day. We have seen an incredibly positive feedback for having muses die outside of being chosen for murder victims. This means we can do more involved motives and more story driven motives, but we also need to address what this last chapter brought to light, and that’s that, despite applying a muse and saying they could be killed, many did not want their muse to die.

What this means:

During the application process, we asked if your muse could be killed. We have a list of characters who can and cannot be killed and FOR ALL FUTURE MOTIVES we will be drawing from this list to see who can and cannot be killed by non-murder means. People can still volunteer to be affected by the motive, this is just in the event we do not have the numbers to create the desired effect. You guys loved not having to have an investigation for every death.

I know this may seem harsh, but we will say this: YOU’RE IN A MURDER VERSE. If you don’t want your muse murdered, you’re in the wrong verse.

We have very big and interactive motives planned for the second half of Cordes so for the sanity of the mod team, we will NOT be accepting requests to get excluded from motives. It is too much of a stresser on the mod team, especially if we get the request the day before a post goes up. Do you understand the frustration of carefully and meticulously planning every detail of a motive only to have it damaged and needing to be rewritten? So we are doing this for our own health and we have far too many other things to be doing than constantly fiddling with a motive list.

What this does not mean:

We will be keeping close track of who gets affected by the motive. Unless a mun requests to have more than one character hit, we will only hit one muse per mun. 

This also means that not every muse hit will die, some might be barely injured and some might end up with major injuries. It all depends on the situation. As we demonstrated with the poisoning, not every poisoned muse died or was left with lasting consequences.

We are not killing your muses without your permission. You gave us that upon applying when you said, “Yes, my muse can be killed.” We understand the frustration at not being alerted prior to what happened in three, but because of the option to pull out, we felt that after you had been reminded a lot, we didn’t need to alert you again.

From here on out, we will try our best to alert you if your muse is going to die to further the plot without being murdered by a player, but accept that while there may be four of us, but there’s many, many more of you, and it’s hard and stressful to run a verse this large.

It needs to be said: THE MOD TEAM IS ONLY HUMAN.

We will make mistakes. We will mess up. Understand that while we do, we do so much for all of you. We painstakingly organize everything in this verse. We plan even small, non-plot related events weeks in advance. We pull time out of our busy, stressful schedules to run this verse for you. We lose sleep to keep things going on time. Hell, we consult other verses to make sure we don’t do a motive that’s been done before or done the same way.

We spend sleepless hours running a verse for you and we need you to understand that we’re human. We have jobs, schools and families. We have emergencies and sudden, unexpected plans. We don’t always have time, but we make time for you.

So we ask you for this one thing: save us from one more big headache, one more night spent staying up until 4 am to rewrite an entire event because of a sudden unexpected dropout, one more day in tears because we’re so stressed trying to make this verse enjoyable for you.

Save us from this, because we don’t want to feel regret for starting this verse.