echoes [Echoes]

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> //There is great unrest among the parishioners, and indeed many of the townspeople are calling for the abolition of the whole practice- swift action must be taken to remedy this phenomenon before the town falls into anarchy. Are we expected to cross our doorsteps with the chill of November air always in our bones? Will we breakfast each morning with an itch on our neck? The constant moaning of bowing wood would haunt you, if you cared to ever visit the town.//
> --- //A letter from Mayor Poole to the Lord of the estate Richard Eastman, requesting the relocation of the gallows from the town center to the moors. //
 
==== What are Echoes? ====

In this world, strong emotions generate echoes, which are a snapshot of one or more of the sensory experiences being felt at the same time as the strong emotions. 
They are created during moments of high intensity emotion, and are a global phenomenon ingrained in the day to day lives of your characters. Echo creation is involuntary -- in an emotional moment, it is not up to you if an echo is generated or not. 

Echoes do not contain the memory of the moment itself, but rather the memory of one or two sense experienced during the moment of intense emotion. 
This could be:
  *Touch: the feeling of a warm mug pressed into your hands, or the sting of nettles.
  *Sound: Raised voices, or howling animals.
  *Smell: the smell of something burning, or fresh cut grass.
  *Sight: flashes of the moment that generated the echo, a face or fireplace.
  *Taste: a bitter aftertaste of medicine, or a sweet wine.
  *Interoception (other than emotions): a stab of pain, a rush of adrenaline

Not all echoes contain images, and experiencing an echo is not the same as having a flashback or getting to watch a scene from a different moment in time. Most echoes will have on or two strong senses, e.g the slight pressure across your chest and shoulders that comes from being hugged, or the sudden taste of hot chocolate. People with a higher echo sensitivity may be able to pick up on a third or fourth weaker sense and use this information to get a better understanding of the moment that created the echo, but this is a skill that requires some dedication and practice. 

Echoes can settle on relevant objects, for example sentimental items or objects involved in the emotionally intense moment. If you were holding a cup, were given a meaningful gift, or fighting over a piece of jewelry, any subsequent echoes might attach to those objects. If those objects are moved the echo will travel with them. Echoes might also form in the air or attach to larger/ less focal points, such as a brick in the wall, a pane of glass in the window, or an apple on the branch of a tree above your head. 

Echoes are experienced through a sixth sense that is closely connected to the senses of sight, touch, taste, smell and hearing, which allows you to experience the sensations of the past, preserved in the echo. 

It is obvious both IC and OC when your characters are experiencing an echo vs their own sensory experiences, and echoes have an emotional resonance which allows them to be detected/ noticed by your characters. Echo-sense refers to the sense through which people experience echoes. 

You can interact with an echo by entering its field of effect, usually a 20cm diameter sphere centered on an object/ point. Interacting with an echo means allowing your character to experience whichever sensations are attached to that echo. Experiencing echoes is involuntary (IC). If your character enters an echo's field of effect they will experience the echo (depending on their sensitivity).

The possibilities for what an echo might hold are endless, but note that the sensations aren’t necessarily related to the strong emotion that caused the echo. Someone who receives heartbreaking news while doing the dishes may create an echo that includes the feeling of warm soapy water, even though the dishes didn’t do any heart-breaking. 

==== Dying Echoes====

Echoes that aren’t interacted with begin to dissipate, weakening into a haze that suffuses the town. This means that as well as echoes, there is a general humming of past sensations everywhere you go. They are too weak to be felt, but people can pick up on the general feeling of the haze- for example a school may have a general air of awkwardness, while the air around a cemetery is mournful. 

If a large amount of people experience the same heightened emotion simultaneously, a more intense echo will be created, which dissipates faster. Each time an echo is experienced its lifespan grows, so it’s possible to visit an echo so often that it has the strength to exist many years after you’re gone. This also means unpleasant echoes can be ignored until they fade, and some echoes can be lost, misplaced with their object or traded away to someone who doesn’t appreciate the sentimentality of the echo.

==== Understanding Echoes ====

The ability to experience echoes is an inherent sense, but you can decide your character’s sensitivity to the echoes, and their ability to understand what they have experienced. There are vast fields of echo study and preservation, and some people devote their lives to the practice of reading and interpreting echoes. Maybe you have also studied, or just have naturally stronger intuition when it comes to these things? 

For some people, their echo sense is strongly in-tune with another sense- an example of this could be that voices and noises in echoes are much clearer than the other senses, sometimes to an overwhelming or unbearable degree. Others are rooted firmly in the present, only picking up the dullest sensations as they march on towards whatever they were doing.