soddersays | JULY 2019 TEST DRIVE MEME

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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

i: cooking contest
[Dave can't cook.

That's the first thing that needs to be said. He cannot cook. He is an adult. He owns his own ~~hive~~house. He even mows its ~~lawnring~~yard. He is technically a god. But he has never even made a piece of toast that wasn't either burnt to hell and back or somehow so undertoasted that even the most supportive toast enthusiast would have to declare it as still just a disappointing piece of bread.

But Dave was also irritated. With this whole...being trapped in a dream situation thing... And when he's irritated he likes to either irritate others, waste time, or, ideally, both. And so Dave is in the cooking contest pavilion, intending to waste a whole lot of time, patience and food.

Like he does most things, he is good at faking it. He goes about making his lobster liquid (he has no idea the difference between a soup, or a bisque, gumbo or stew) with all the aloof detachment of a master who was absolutely confident in every ingredient they're throwing in the pot. But Dave is just grabbing whatever and tossing in any random amount of it. A pinch of paprika, 14 sprigs of thyme torn in half because why not, some pine needles he had in his pocket for some reason, a whole stick of butter, et cetera.

As such, whenever another contestant tries to sabotage him he is entirely nonplussed. In fact, as you're watching, someone "accidentally" spills his cup half full of salt, most of the grains falling in the pot. They do a very poor job of pretending to apologize, but Dave just keeps calmly stirring, his gaze through his shades never leaving the bubbling liquid.]

Joke's on you, dude, was gonna dump that cup of salt in there anyway. You sayin' you don't dump a cup of salt in your lobster liquid? That's cute.

[The erstwhile saboteur shuffles off, a little unnerved by this confident response to what should have been a terrible culinary mistake, and Dave finally takes notice of you. He does a small up nod in greeting.]

S'up. Pick an ingredient. Any ingredient. I'll toss it in. [He nods to all the plates and bowls and cups and vials of stuff he gathered from the ingredients table, all spread out haphazardly in his space. All the ingredients is stuff that would never all wind up in one dish, or even in a lobster-based dish in the first place, including fruit and some food from outside like half-melted ice cream with a cone dumped upside down in a bowl.

Any observant person will notice that there is no lobster to be seen and the pot doesn't smell like it already had lobster in it.]

ii: nigtmare
[Nightmares wasn't unusual, but they hadn't been this bad in awhile. Most often nowadays they were about having to give a speech to the troll kingdom but he's in his pony patterned underwear, which is ridiculous. Because Dave would never give a speech to the troll kingdom, mostly naked or not.

But this. The figures were familiar, and black--literally black, with a suspicious shiny luster like well-polished chess pieces. In the corner of his eye he might catch the hint of multi-colored flicks of light from terrible eyes. The sound of a knife being drawn along a hard surface, or the tap of a gold cane, will echo behind him but when he turns nothing is ever there. Every off instance dredges up memories of a tough battle where he had to use powers he disliked, and swing a sword he wanted to give up, just return to the safety of an isolated meteor home, and seeing many severed heads, why was that a thing, how were heads so easy to detach with sharp things??

He was able to defeat the Jacks before, but only after being teamed up with 2 other talented people. People who were always much stronger than he was, and helped to bolster his time abilities so it wasn't just him throwing Dave fodder at the problem.

But those two weren't here now.

None of them were.

It was evening, which was almost essentially midday for Dave, and he was just trying to get somewhere for food, floating down the street, a good 3 or 4 feet off the sidewalk. Floating meant no footsteps, so maybe he would be harder to track. But these figures, these shadowy Jacks, just appeared whenever, and what was more terrifying, they were getting closer and closer, the sounds nearer and nearer. His nerves grew more and more frayed as he kept getting more and more inexplicably tired throughout the days.

Perhaps you're just about to pass him by on the sidewalk, or drawn to a floating man who's wobbling up and down in sinuous, vertical arcs because he's essentially driving drunk, except with flying and all he's drunk on is pure, unfiltered drowsiness. Or perhaps you witness sleep finally cold-cocking him in the back of the head like the coward we always knew sleep was and he suddenly tumbles down, face-first, hard into the ground to catch a spontaneous z or two.

If you're kind enough to see how he is, you may be facing unexpected consequences. Sorry 'bout that.]

iii: wildcard
[Want a unique starter? Let me know! Want to write something for me to reply to instead? Drop that prose in a comment, I'm game for almost anything. Want to plot or have a question beforehand? Hit me up through PMs or catch me on plurk!]

[Well, with that much salt the lobster was going to be very close to inedible, so there was no harm in making this more of an ... experience. The woman who was looking over his 'creation' considered the offered ingredients and pointed towards some perfectly innocuous looking little peppers. They'd add a little heat to deal with the salt, right?

...if by a "Little," one meant some of the hottest peppers on planet earth.]

Why don't you try these? They look cute.

Sure, why not. [He reaches out and takes 3 of those bad boys, dropping them onto his filthy cutting board.] That's what's most important for a recipe, right? How cute the food is before we chop the fuck outta it and yank around its juicy entrails? [He picks up a giant knife, overkill for such a small pepper, and starts chopping them up willy nilly.

Once done, he gathers up the mangled parts, getting his hands all nice and covered in its juice and seeds, and tosses the pieces into the boiling liquid. He regards his molten concoction with a proud glint in his shades, and gives it a nice nod of approval. Then he looks at her, and jabs a thumb at the pot.]

So what the fuck did I just toss in there, anyway?

[She watched him dice up what was usually dropped in whole so that the seeds and juices didn't get everywhere. This was going to be one colossally hot and salty dish right now. Eye blisteringly.

Dave definitely wanted to wash those hands before touching his face.]

I think they're called Scotch Bonnets? I heard they're a little spicy?

[Yeah, Dave has no idea he should wash his hands. He is playing with culinary fire now, baby. Karma was setting up the dominoes for payback for the pain he was about to put a judge or two through.]

Sick name. Perfect choice. Can already tell this is gonna be a remarkable liquid. Gonna go down in the annals of time. Gather 'round, children, and listen to this tale of the legendary salty scotch bonnet liquid.

[They were going to have a damned heart attack from this liquid from hell. At least she didn't have to drink it.]

It's got quite the sharp odor, does it not? I don't think you gave me your name by the way. A master chef should be known by their name, yes?

[Fortunately for her, Dave doesn't offer her his hand to shake, keeping hers safe from a dose of heat in her future.]

Dave. Pretty underwhelming for a chef's name, really, but I can come up with some sick nickname to really sell who I am. "Dave: the Ass-blast Conte."

[If only she knew, she'd be quite grateful.]

Vira-Lorr. A pleasure to meet you, and why not give yourself a grand nickname? Makes the victory better wouldn't you agree? What will you do with your winnings?

What, Dave: the Ass-blast Conte isn't grand enough? It's a promise and a threat, an honest chef's name.

JULY 2019 TEST DRIVE MEME

WHEN THE BOAT COMES IN

BLUEBERRIES FOR SAL

NINE, TEN, NEVER SLEEP AGAIN

Character Arrival

Dave Strider / Homestuck

Cooking Contest

Re: Cooking Contest

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II because unexpected consequences are the best!!

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cooking contest!

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