JULY 2019 TEST DRIVE MEME

Welcome to July's Test Drive Meme! This month's Test Drive's theme is: DREAM HORROR.

All Test Drive Memes contain at least one clue to the Deerington's upcoming in-game events for the month! Keep your eyes peeled! But...not literally.

Characters may die during TDMs, but you do not need to count it towards a game-canonical death unless you want to. Consider it a freebie. All TDMs can be considered game canon as TDMs introduce minor aspects about the world of Deerington that can be revisited by characters later on in the game. You may also use TDMs for your application writing sample as well as AC.

CW: Violence, Freddie Kreuger references, fire, forced sleep with some drug-like references, stabbing, nightmares, monsters, possibility for extreme alcohol consumption, and lobster festivals
Don't forget to tag content whenever necessary. Have fun!

Prompt One
Prompt Two
Prompt Three
Character Arrival
Master Navigation

WHEN THE BOAT COMES IN

It’s July and July in Maine means lobster! The Lobster Festival springs up seemingly overnight down near Koji Pond. In the morning, there’s a large parade that makes its way through town, starting from the top of East Main Street and all the way down through West Main St until they hit the festival. There are tents, a few rides, games, arts and crafts, and most importantly, food pretty much everywhere behind the hotel and you can help yourself to free ice cream at the ice cream shop! Lobster ice cream and Blueberry ice cream are pushed to the forefront, but you can get just about any flavor you could possibly dream of in the long run.

You can hear live music playing and a stage has been set up on the roof of the arcade. Live bands play everything from folk music to jazz to classic rock that you may or may not have heard in your lifetime. There’s a tent where local artists (including sleepers) are selling art, a craft tent where people are selling goods they’ve made such as pottery and homemade fudge, and a Do It Yourself tent where people are teaching you how to make your own buoy decoration for your front yard or how to weave your own baskets!

A seafood cooking contest is held for anyone who may want to show off their culinary skills. Any kind of seafood dishes are allowed, but they highly encourage showing your abilities to cook with lobster! Think you can beat the longstanding champions from Deerington? It’s pretty unlikely, especially since it looks like the townspeople keep trying to sabotage your meal as you’re making it. Did you mean to put in an entire half cup of salt to your stew? Oops. Guess you better figure out how to work with it anyway.

Across Koji Pond, there are floating crates set up for the great crate race! See if you can make it across the lake fastest – challenge a friend! These lobster crates wobble pretty heavily, but each runner is given a life vest for when they might inevitably fall in. Be careful if you do! Some of those strange looking fish in there definitely bite.

Each morning at the festival there will be an all you can eat blueberry pancake breakfast. Surprisingly, nothing drastic seems to happen, so have as many pancakes as your body can hold! They’re delicious, after all. Through the rest of the day, it’s easy to get your hands on lobster rolls of varying sizes, full steamed lobster meals (with corn on the cob and a buttered dinner roll), lobster salad, steamed mussels, scallops, haddock (baked or fried), fried clams, lobster stuffed risotto balls, blueberry cobbler, and strawberry shortcake are all available at any of the food stands. All the food seems perfectly safe. But you’re gonna need something to wash it down with…

The drink stand has a great deal to offer, but every drink seems to come with a particularly strange side effect to it. People who enjoy the hand crafted beers will find that it gets them drunk twice as fast and can even make people who would normally never drink completely wasted after just a glass or two. Every glass you have makes you thirstier than the last and it can be easy to want to reach for another beer to try and get yourself together. In fact, it’s particularly hard to reach for anything else. Urges to drink the beer will last for at least one full hour or can be cut short by being responsible and going to drink some water instead.

So maybe beer isn’t your thing; that’s okay! There’s also blueberry lemonade which will turn you the color of blueberries from head to toe! Fresh iced tea will make you feel particularly sarcastic, prone to mocking even your closest friends and gossiping with complete strangers about the things you may or may not have heard about the town. Got a juicy secret you were trying to keep for someone? Well, it’s out in the open now. Cream sodas will make you extremely cuddly, wanting to cozy up next to the closest person to you for a little while. The more you drink, the more touchy-feely you may get, so maybe try and stick to just one or two unless you’re looking for some afternoon delight. Hot tea will make you feel calm and relaxed to an extent you never have before. To the point where you might even want to just go lay down on one of the docks and take a quick catnap in the middle of the afternoon sun. Hopefully you wore sunscreen.

Effects from any drink will last for one to three hours or until you have some strawberry shortcake from one of the food vendors.

BLUEBERRIES FOR SAL

So maybe the lobster festival isn’t your thing or you got tired of all the crowds and wanted to go and do something else fun. Strangely enough, some of the fields out near the farmhouses apparently have a bunch of blueberry bushes that no one’s ever noticed before! They’re in full bloom and the berries look ripe for the picking. Perfectly round, juicy, warm from the sun – you could eat a whole handful of these and maybe never feel more satisfied. They’re deliciously sweet, perfect for pies and cobblers. And a whole basket seems to be reasonably priced, so why not go out and pick as many as you can!

The longer you’re out in the fields, the more you’ll start to feel a little groggy. It’s easy to shake off as just being from the sun at first and you might think about heading back, but something in you wants to keep picking. So you trudge in deeper into the fields, and that sleepy feeling becomes more and more difficult to ignore. Eventually, you might find that you’re ready to just lay down and take a nap in the shade of a particularly large blueberry bush. It seems like a good a spot as any – the ground is nice and soft. Just curl up for a little while and close your eyes. Even people who are normally not prone to sleeping will find that they are compelled and even capable of taking a quick nap in these fields.

Any dreams you may have while sleeping will feel more vivid than normal – to the point where it’s hard to tell what’s real and what’s not. Did you actually manage to find your way out of Deerington and back home? You can pinch yourself, but you won’t wake up, and it’ll hurt like a bitch, so it’s hard to be sure. Dreams seem to mostly be pleasant ones, but the occasional nightmare might find its way in to your otherwise restful sleep. Anyone who stumbles on you asleep in the fields might even hear you talking in your sleep, rambling out conversations and feelings you might normally have kept quiet. Got feelings for someone you were trying to bury? They might just hear you mutter them out loud if they’ve found you there in the dirt. Wanted to make sure no one in Deerington found out you had no home to go back to? That sucks, it sounds like you might have just spilled the beans without even knowing.

The real question is if the person who finds you will wake you up or just keep listening to find out more of your secrets without having to pry for them.

NINE, TEN, NEVER SLEEP AGAIN

It’s not just in the blueberry fields that sleepiness seems to be catching. Throughout Deerington, people seem to be having a harder and harder time staying awake for long stretches. The desire for a quick nap or even a long snooze becomes harder to fight as each day passes and you might find yourself nodding off in places you normally wouldn’t – behind the wheel of a car, in the middle of a store, at work… Hopefully no one gets too hurt or loses a job during these strange episodes.

Only unlike in the fields, when you do give in to sleep, the dreams you have are now far from pleasant. Nightmares are running amok in your mind, but that vivid realism? That inability to tell when you’re awake or asleep? That has definitely not changed. You might not have even realized you’ve fallen asleep at all – most of the scenery around you seems to be Deerington itself, but something just seems off. You don’t have time to think about it though because it’s then that things start to get scary. Whether it’s reliving your most traumatic experiences, running in to your worst enemies, or seeing monster of your own creation popping up and chasing you, danger and fear are permeating every corner of these dreams. Horror movie fans might find they’re being chased by Freddie Kreuger, hunted down by Jason, cornered by the aliens from Alien. Or maybe there are terrifying monsters from your own world that have started to come for you and are trying to tear you limb from limb. It feels impossible to outrun, and maybe in the end, you don’t. But if you die in your dreams, you don’t really die in real life, right? So you might just snap awake with a particularly frightening jolt.

You think when you wake up that everything is fine. That sense of fear is gone and you’re able to just breathe. But as you go about your day, you start to see images from your nightmares out of the corner of your eyes. Was that Freddie’s claws scratching against the blackboard? Did you just hear the strange clicking of alien feet against the tiles? You hope it’s in your imagination, but this is Deerington. When does anything ever stay normal?

The danger from your nightmares is definitely invading your personal space and it will try to kill you. Anyone else can see these images just as plain as day as you can and they are welcome to either sit and watch or help you fight. Whatever is trying to kill you will go down in the same manner it would have back home – that means that it could be as easy as a bullet between the eyes or it could be as complex as an intense ritual. Guess you’ll have to figure it out for yourself before it really does kill you.

Character Arrival

You can read how all characters arrive in Deerington here.

There is not a collective "all these characters showed up at the exact same moment" occurrence in Deerington. Since characters fall asleep, die, or pass out at various times throughout all their worlds, it wouldn't make too much sense if they arrived in game all at the exact same time. There should be some discrepancy between character arrival, whether by a couple minutes, hours, or even days up to a week.

The players are entirely in control of how/when they want to play their characters arriving in Deerington. For TDMs, you can play it like your character has just arrived and that can be maintained as your game canon, or you can wait until game events for that moment. Or you don't need to acknowledge it at all. The flexibility for character allows a bit more of an organic feel to the character arrival situation, so please play it to whatever feels right for you.

If you are interested in having an "arrival" introduction for one of your TDM prompts, you are more than welcome to explore that option.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Okay, good. Phew. [ Somehow drunk!Dana has even less difficulty disguising her reactions than sober!Dana, shoulders sagging a little when the girl she's sitting next to absolves her — or that's how it plays out in her head, anyway, and she might only be dimly conscious of the hand pressed between her shoulderblades but the contact serves to steady her as she nods a few times, wondering how long it will take for their surroundings to stop doing that tilt-a-whirly thing. ]

That sounds — disgusting.

[ Drunk!Dana also doesn't seem to hold back what she's thinking, either, saying the first thought that pops into her head as she struggles to envision what lobster ice cream would even taste like. Clearly, she can't put a picture of it together in her mind considering her current state. ]

Wait, you said "Americans." Where are you from? If y'don't mind me asking.

[ wanda manages to laugh at the girl’s blunt response, offering a nod in affirmation at the sentiment. ]

It does sound disgusting, doesn’t it? But believe it or not, it surprised me too. [ she peers down to her cup, still half filled with the dessert along with the small spoon that was supplied with it. she’ll even hold it out to the woman beside her in offering. ]

You’re welcome to try it, if you’d like.

[ because maybe it’ll aid in sobering her up, though maybe that’ll be better done with some water. for the moment, wanda would rather avoid leaving the girl here on her own, swaying back and forth on the seat. ]

Oh, I’m — I’m from Sokovia. Small country, not many know about it. Right by Bulgaria and Greece.

Oh! Maybe. [ But in spite of Dana's apparent reluctance to try new things, her current level of intoxication means that she's more inclined to embrace the side of her that wants to be more daring, the kind of girl who absolutely would sample some lobster ice cream even though some distant part of her is thoroughly not in favor of the idea.

So she definitely does reach out to take the spoon that's being held out to her since there seems to be a little ice cream on it already, sticking it in her mouth and making a few thoughtful noises. ]

Okay, s'not bad. You were right.

[ She mouths the name of the country after it's uttered out loud — So-ko-vi-a — but in spite of all the time she spent reading up on Soviet economic structures for Bennett's lectures, she doesn't remember ever stumbling across a Sokovia. There's every chance that her memory is just bad when she's this plastered, though. ]

Your accent is nice. Kinda exotic, you know, like — okay, that's not the word I meant, but it's different. Melodic. Uh, soothing. Like they should pay you to read the phonebook or something.

See? [ if anything, it might at least serve to sober the girl up, and honestly she'd probably had her own fill of it already, good flavor or not, considering how much they'd piled into the cup for her (not surprising; this town always seemed to encourage eating and drinking everything they supplied).

she can already tell by her face, how she seems to mouth the name, that she likely doesn't know it, which doesn't come as a surprise to her. then again, it hardly matters now when the country mostly doesn't even exist anymore.

for as briefly as she presses her lips together in the melancholy of that thought, she finds herself smiling softly in response to the compliment, a small laugh in her breath that's almost bashful. ] Well, that's very kind of you. Maybe I should reconsider my career choice here. I could quit baking and perhaps take up reading soothing poems over the radio. Might help in putting people to sleep.

M'pretty sure I'll wake up tomorrow and question everything about my life's choices leading up to this moment, but right now, eating lobster ice cream is definitely not one of them.

[ Even in the height of her intoxication, there's a chance she's going to remember this interaction, fragments of conversation rather than anything linear — but she might actually recall the name of a country she's never heard of, and a kind stranger with a comforting lilt to her voice. ]

You bake? [ She asks the question around another spoonful of ice cream, hardly the height of manners at this juncture. ] That's great. I basically burned every batch of cupcakes I've ever tried to make, but by that point I usually get distracted eating all the icing straight outta the bowl.

Then I'm glad I'm not encouraging any immediate regrets.

[ just as long as the girl doesn't get sick with a mix of alcohol and lobster ice cream — especially when you consider that not everything in this town was safe, especially in combination. at the very least, it appeared safe enough.

but she chuckles lightly with a small nod, shrugging a shoulder. ] Well, I'm no expert, but my brother always had a major sweet tooth, so I had to teach myself pretty young. Better option than taking the risk of letting him near a stove.

[ though pietro near anything, or anyone was always a dangerous risk to some degree. ]

I actually still have an excess of cupcakes if you'd like some because if there's one thing I'm terrible at, it's counting. It turns out you don't need to make about two hundred cupcakes for a small camp of kids, even on the fourth of July.