WELCOME TO WADE, ILLINOIS…
Voted “Best Place to Live” 1974.
There’s something sinister about the place you call home, but neither you, or your neighbors can put your finger on exactly what it is. Could it be the way the dogs howl at midnight like there’s someone at the door when your entire family is tucked tight under the covers, and you know you’re not expecting guests? Perhaps it’s the way reality warps, and shifts itself the second you step into the supermarket that’s always a tad to cold for comfort? OR maybe it’s the way the one light in your neighbors attic flickers all hours of the night like someone’s playing with the switch, even when you know the Smiths are gone on their annual family road trip to visit Grandma in North Dakota, and there’s not a soul in that house. Than again, who can be sure? With the amount of strange (unusual, unnerving, bizarre) things happening in Wade lately, who’s to say where the root of the problem lays? No one knows– and even when they say they know, they don’t know; people just know that the town is different.
But if this place is different from all the other little towns of the same kind, if it’s fundamentally, and unexplainably off, has it always been this way? Has the chill in the night air has always cut straight to the bone, and have little blonde girls always been plucked from plastic playgrounds while their parents swore they had their eyes on them? … Are we just noticing now? Now that the demographics are changing, the houses are getting bigger, and the faces are less friendly, are we just seeing the reality of how disturbing, and how dark this town is? Or was there really a time when this was the “best” place to live, when folks didn’t have to lock their doors, and kids could ride their bikes to the park after dark without having to worry about what’s lurking in the shadows? You can no longer recall now if you ever felt safe here; not seated firmly in a church pew between your parents, not loitering outside of the gas station off main street with your friends in high school, and definitely not currently, as you watch the sharply dressed businessmen, and their cookie-cutter wives unload the delicate items they don’t trust the moving men with themselves, carrying them out of sight, into the sprawl of McMansions that you swear weren’t there yesterday.
If something’s changed here, what is it? Is it just the times– are we living in a more dangerous era? Or is there something else? Something more? The evil that’s here (because it is here, the hairs standing straight up on your neck tell you so, and you know better now than to distrust the feeling in your gut), is it a new evil, or an evil we’ve always known?
What the hell is happening in Wade?
MIDDLE AMERICA is a literate, original science fiction roleplay coming to tumblr at the end of June, 2017 (based on roleplayer interest)! The group is heavily based on the literary genre of suburban gothic, revolving around the atypical, yet unbearably typical lives of the residents of Wade, Illinois. Join them as they navigate the multitude of changes (some spooky, some not so spooky) that the past few decades have brought to the once simple, sleepy, perfectly subdivided little suburban town. Writers will be able to bring their own original characters to Middle America, or apply for skeleton roles that they can personalize, and make their own.
BEWARE: this roleplay will contain mature themes including homicide, (non-graphic) cannibalism, etc.
If you’re interested in the concept of this roleplay, or just want answers to some of the questions posed above, feel free to REBLOG this promo for early access to the full plot line, and the skeleton masterlist. Your reblog will also help determine if, and when Middle America’s main account will be released.
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