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

( She hasn't been here for long enough to experience anything close to what others had described to her. A few weird dreams, some more vivid than others, and the fact that she woke up here at all... it's all out of the ordinary, sure, but nowhere near close to monsters being described to her.

To think it was all some elaborate prank that the entire town was in on was a little too self-centered, even for her. )

Then why are you here? How are you here? ( Which isn't to say she's completely buying the whole 'monsters' bit. But if everyone else believes it, why would they chose to stay? Chloe's the first familiar face she's run into since arrival. She could write off aliens and weirdos she'd met before as all being a part of the elaborate dream she must be in — or maybe she boarded the wrong plane without realizing it and ended up here. But Chloe? How did they both end up in the same place? ) How is anyone here?

( The whole dream within a dream thing had been explained to her... but she tuned out when it started sounded too similar to the plot of Inception. )

There's got to be an plane back to Oregon, right? Fuck, I'll even take a train. Or a bus. Or a goddamn Uber. ( An Uber across the country probably cost more than she thinks, but she's good for the money. )

I'm sure being the thorough student that you are, you read the letter, right? You're about as in the know as the rest of us. Congratulations.

[ She'd been lucky to remember being to another world before this one, but she remembers the first time she woke up in a strange place with no means of escape, and a part of her might be able to empathize with the general feeling of insanity that came with it if she'd just let herself. It's more confusing than half the art history lectures she only half-listened to and barely cared about on the rare days she'd actually come to school.

Chloe holds out her arms to gesture to the field around them, like it holds any answers to the millions of questions that this place always drags up. ]

We're stuck. You can't get outside the town limits without some severe backlash. Puking blood for a week is as miserable as it sounds and I don't really recommend it if you wanna keep lookin' pristine and put together. Not that I've been exactly itching to go back to the hell hole we came from, but I'd have been on a train to New York a fuckin' year ago if I'd had the option. Trust me.

So we've been kidnapped? Cool. Cool. Glad I get to cross get taken by shitty deer-people off my bucket list.

( Chances are Chloe isn't lying about the majority of it, as insane as it sounds. If there really was a way to escape, people wouldn't be staying here in the first place. The doesn't mean she isn't going to try to find her own escape. It's not like she needs Chloe's approval to do it, either. She'll find the first road she can and walk until it leads her out of town. From there, she'll get help. Fuck puking blood, Victoria will figure something out! )

How are you acting so chill about this? ( Victoria is chill, too. She's chill in a way that means she's seconds away from screaming in frustration. )

Fourteen months to adjust and some pretty decent pot.

[ She shrugs her shoulders, going to grab a handful of berries from a bush within reaching distance and throwing them into her pail with the rest. She had come out here for a killer sale on blueberries after all. She wasn’t leaving without enough to make a damn pie for Max and Rachel like she’d planned. ]

I freaked out a lot my first month, but I think somewhere along the line you start to develop some kind of Stockholm Syndrome or whatever for the place. [ She reaches for another fistful, yanking them off the branch with a little more force than needed. She’s not entirely chill as she appears about the whole place, but when her other option is to be dead on a bathroom floor, she figures it’s maybe not so bad.

Which actually reminds her; ] Hey, Victoria, humor me for a minute and tell me what’s the last thing you remember from home.

( Fourteen months?

...She's going to assume that time works differently here, or some other sci-fi trope bullshit.

It's true that she hadn't seen Chloe in a while (not that she was really looking for her), but there was no way Chloe was gone from Arcadia Bay — the Arcadia Bay that she knew — for over a year. Not without anyone noticing.

At some point between Chloe's mention of Stockholm Syndrome and her overly aggressive blueberry picking, Victoria reclaims her seat on the ground. Somehow, the threat of berry stains matters a lot less. )

I think I died, or something. But not literally. ( Maybe literally. She doesn't quite know. ) It was kind of... a lot. Max Caulfield was there. ( It brought up a new question of what happened to Max after that night, but she'd save it for later. ) She came up to me after the End of the World party.

She thought Nathan was up to something. I didn't want to believe her. I kind of didn't. I went to Jefferson, anyway. ( All said a bit distantly. )

Then I fell asleep. I woke up, then I fell asleep again. Then I woke up here. ( A lot happened between those three points that she'd rather not remember. ) I don't know. Whatever. Not like makes sense. ( She's taken a handful of berries for herself and begins flicking them at nothing in particular. ) Not like it matters.

[ Ahhh shit. The more she talks, the more Chloe's shoulders slump. She'd had a vague hope that she was either from after everything had settled or maybe way before everything went to hell, but here she is, from the worst possible moments of her life. Ones that Max would erase in probably just a few precious hours, right?

Unless that timeline continued with a totally different Max after the rewind, like some theories liked to put, and this Vicotria had the misfortune of it just being her solid universe. Ugh, she hates time travel theory so much. ]

Got it. [ She wasn't about to give her any of the even fuzzy details Max had given her about the inbetween points, because there's absolutely nothing that would help. But she suddenly feels a lot less furious at her and there's an almost weird sense of ... sympathy? This is terrible. ]

I'm sure you're fine. [ That sounded like the worst attempt at comfort of her life. ] No point in thinking too much about it, I guess. You're at least from around the same day as me if you were at that stupid party.

[ Time definitely worked differently. ]

Rachel's here. [ An awkward beat. ] But she's seventeen. So I figure it doesn't hurt to ask people timelines.