Ellen Allen's Last Straw

Ellen Allen served as the Living Village Elder for 35 years, until her death in 2005 at the age of 101. As the end of the 20th century approached and heralded a new millenium, tensions rose in the village until finally, Ellen Allen snapped and murdered her fear-mongering neighbor, Chad Brian Miller, IV.

The Conflict

Prelude

In the late 90s, as the turn of the millenium approached, concerns around the village began to arise. Some remembered the H1N1 Influenza Pandemic of 1918-1919, and nearly everyone remembered the Storm of '74.

These events sent waves of burdened souls into the village. It created a strain on their resources and settled hardhip on the shoulders of every villager, living or dead. Still as time passed, the dead worked through their lingering troubles and passed beyond, leaving the village to slowly recover from the strain. The villagers were concerned that Y2K hysteria would send people over the edge, and the resulting chaos -- whether war, mass suicides from cult beliefs, disease, or alien invasion -- would spawn another heavy influx of troubled souls.

Seeing an opportunity to sieze the percieved power of popular opinion, Chad attempted to sway the living villagers against the already troubled dead. He hijacked a village meeting which had been scheduled to assure the villagers that there was no reason to panic, and attempted to use fear-mongering and xenophobia to rally the living to his cause.

His attempt was as impotent as he was, and it garnered him a lot of ill feeling from a large portion of the village. But none more than Ellen Allen. As the next several years passed, he would try again and again to turn the living villagers against the dead, and time and again he failed.

Deployment

After years of putting up with Chad's assanine attempts at self-aggrandizement at the expsense of her friends and neighbors, Ellen had finally had enough. In a 'gesture of peace and forgiveness,' Ellen went to Chad and delivered a tin of homemade macarons filled with chocolate-almond-cyanide ganache.

The Engagement

Together, they sat on the cobbled patio behind Chad's house. They sipped the awful tea that Chad made to go with the cookies. It was bitter as he'd let the water boil. He offered her not so much as a cube of sugar to sweeten it, but the old woman did not complain. She simply sipped, then ate a cookie, and sipped some more.

Sip by sip, cookie by cookie, bite by bite she matched Chad's consumption.

Breath by breath, wheeze by wheeze, side by side, they died.

Conflict Type

Covert Operation