>>6084651The smell of unfurnished elm seeps into your nose like the scent of unfiltered nostalgia. Dark wood covers the walls, floors, desks, shelves. Books of all ages line the rustic shelves, though plenty of space remains for more. Every piece of lumber and pane of glass has an artisanal, workshop style, almost amatuerish in ways if you were to trust the uneven surfaces of the walls and beams. You don’t have an eye for architecture, but you do recognize techniques similar to cabin homes. Some of the logs even seem to be <span class="mu-i">alive,</span> sprouts growing from the walls and treated as office plants.
You… you can’t help but smile!
The give of the floor boards take you back to the old near-rotting schoolhouse! The receptionist wooden counter is smoothed not with varnish or laminate but sanded down by human contact. There’s a presence in the air that’s… almost musty, but not bad? This place shows signs of natural, graceful aging.
Down the hall you hear the footsteps of robed scholars and sleep-deprived agents, in transit between drawing up missions, studying aberrant biology, and researching spiritual writings ancient and modern to try and come to a form of understanding with this thing that they felt as soon as they stepped into this floor.
This deep rooted nostalgia. This connection to a greater thing.
The Old Oaks funding has come on through, you can tell. They definitely had a hand in this. Though you don’t see anyone walking around in elk skulls or the sort, this is a place designed to highlight that certain connection.
“I have a question for you, Fiona,” Sumika says after watching you gaze around with stars in your eyes. “Just a simple question, from one hunter to another. No wrong answers, just tell me what you think.”
You shake your head. “A-ah! S-sorry, go ahead!”
Sumika has to be rather haunched in this floor, with the ceiling so low. Her hair drapes down nearly over you.
<span class="mu-b">”Why do you think we feel Attunement, now, and so strongly, when it was not a studied phenomenon before the calamity?”</span>
>Humanity has mutated.>We just grew too far from nature.>The Abrahamic God didn’t want us to feel it.>Write-in (encouraged for our local schizoposters) 