PlayerOliver

When you were a kid, you lived with your grandmother in the small town of Silvertree, on the edge of a magical forest. Grandma is a witch, and she taught you how to use your magic to affect the natural world, too. “Magic is a part of you,” she always told you. “Learning how to use it means figuring out who you are.”

Now you’re 19 and on your own. After years of living in the forest while you perfected your witchcraft, you’ve returned to take care of your grandmother’s house and crow-familiar while she’s gone. Figuring out who you are feels more important than ever - not to mention, figuring out what Silvertree is. A lot is just as you remembered: the friendly generous next-door neighbors with a kid just your age, the proud town council, the quaint little shops with quirky punny names, the gentle shadowy forest full of magic.

Stone in the shoe

Since Robin's research is focused on a certain point in time around a hundred years ago, you decide to look for some evidence about how the town has changed since then. You start by searching for photos by year, then refining the search criteria based on what you're interested in seeing. Pictures of birds and prize-winning pumpkins are nice, but they don't really tell you much about what the town itself was like. Instead, you focus on pictures taken on the streets of Silvertree, as well as ones showing events like Town Meetings, elections, and store openings.


From what you can see, however, there aren't an awful lot of pictures still on record from more than around 50 years ago. In fact, the time when more and more pictures start to emerge seems to more or less coincide with when the town was beginning to be renovated—suggesting that the archiving system used to be a lot less robust than it is now.


Still, you find that you can tell quite a lot from the photos that have survived from that period of around 50 years ago. You get a good sense of just how different the town was—but while you see quite a few photos of places in their heyday that now no longer exist, there are nevertheless a lot of pictures showing parts of the town that were a lot more run-down than they are today. It seems like it's not necessarily a new thing for the town to be in some state of disrepair.


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