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soddersays2019-06-25 12:24 am
sodder) wrote in soddersays2019-06-25 12:24 am
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JULY 2019 TEST DRIVE MEME
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!
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.
no subject
“Dije, seguir a los extraños es malo para tu salud.”
[Stern little thing, he thinks. But any amusement for that is quickly overshadowed by the briefest touch of iron in the air. Blood. Blood that isn’t his own. If she’s hurt though, she’s not very vocal about it. Reminds him of someone. Naturally.]
“Tu nombre.”
no subject
[She's genuinely a little surprised. The Logan she'd known — well, he didn't seem like he knew Spanish. Maybe he did, and pretend not to just to be an asshole. It's hard to say. She stands slowly to look as critical as ever at this man, a little content that she doesn't have to dramatically crane her neck to look at him.
She notices the briefest flaring of his nostril, and figures she knows what he's catching on the air.
Relatable, Logan. Relatable.
She doesn't bother drawing any attention to her hand, as it drips at her side.
... It's a little strange, to feel three holes in her hand, instead of the two.]
Your name first.
no subject
[If she’s confused by his Spanish he could say the same. For all the bloody clones, and cyborgs and other dimensional jagoffs he’s met going by his name little Spanish girls are a first.]
“Someone learned english in a hurry.”
[If she is him… another him, they could both do this stubborn act all day. But frankly if she’s been here even a minute longer than he has, maybe she knows something he doesn’t. He let’s out a gruff sigh and walks away, retrieving that smouldering stogie from the crook of a small black ash tree.]
“Logan.” [He mutters around the cigar between his teeth.] “You gonna tell me what happened to your hand?”
no subject
She wrinkles her nose at the smell of the cigar, reminded quickly of a reaver who had to be lectured not to smoke in the facility, or the intense stench of Las Vegas gambling parlors. She finally holds up the hand, where the blood's stopped trickling now.]
You are what happened.
You bounced it.
[If she just talks plainly to him, maybe this won't be so stressful for her.
Seems like a good plan.]
no subject
“You wanna try that again, darlin’? I found you, but I didn't cut you."
no subject
[She holds up the knuckles to the light, to show him the three gashes properly. They're the exact size of Logan's claws, looking too large on Laura's very petite hand.]
You're in Deerington. It does things to people with powers. Your healing still works, but if someone is too close, the damage transfers to them; you can cut your arm and see for yourself, if you don't believe me.
[She doesn't mind. Pain's pain, and it'd prove a point.]
no subject
"Deerington? What does things to people with powers? This place? The town?"
[It’s not surprise that gets him exactly. It’s having to wrap your mind around something with more holes than answers that makes him feel uncomfortably helpless to fix this. Stuck here, taking advice from a kid.
Looking at his own hand he considers it. But if she’s right, he doesn’t like the outcome. Healer or no. She’s probably had enough hurt on account of people like him.]
“Same with you? You got claws?” [He gives a nod in her general direction he holds his hand out, waiting to see the effect as she’s described it. If it works like that for everyone, her injuries ought to hurt him too, right?] “Show me.”
no subject
[She stares at him for a long moment. She should have figured he caught on to who she was faster than her Logan. After all, the Logan she knew was sick. Very, very sick, reeked of dying. How could he even smell anything past his own illness?
But... she shakes her head.]
My healing doesn't bounce. It is just slower.
[She glances down and away, a tight feeling in her chest. It takes her a moment to decide whether to show him or just run off and forget this happened for a day or two, but she does eventually let her two claws slide out from her knuckles as well. The injury, as she'd said, doesn't bounce to Logan.]
Me llamo Laura.
no subject
"Hn. Why’s it different for you? [He’s musing outloud with nothing to go on when he realizes she’s going to pop the claws anyway. Even if it won’t prove a thing.] “Then don’t, don’t just— ah fuck. Forget it, forget I asked. I believe it, OK? I believe you. Put’em away ‘fore you make it worse.”
[It was three cuts when she claimed he did it. Bounced his wounds, as she put it. Now, it’s just two. One for each of her claws. It’s not exactly bulletproof scientific evidence, but it’s already more than he wished he’d put her up too if she’s not going to snap back like a rubber band. A little faith on his part wouldn’t have been the end of the world. With a sigh, he hunkers down and offers out a hand waiting for her own.]
"How long’s that gonna take?" [Unrolling the sleeve of his plaid shirt he starts a tear at the button hole. Taking a strip off the arm until one cuff hangs raw at the end and shorter than the other.] “You don’t have to do that again, all right? And keep your distance from me if I do. I might not… be so great at remembering what you told me. I’m not so great at remembering a lotta things.”
“Gimmie your hand, Laura.” [He waits patiently with that makeshift gauze. Even if her healing isn’t that slow. A couple of straps will hold the blood back next time.] “I know… I knew another Laura. Good bit like you. Think your Spanish is better though.”
no subject
[Better her than someone else, anyway.
... Well, she doesn't see any reason to be completely distrustful of him, not when it comes to something as simple as offering a hand. She lets her claws sink back into her hand, leaving those open wounds there to bleed; they usually only do so for a minute, and then another few minutes'll pass to close up the wounds. Putting her miniature fingers into his palm, she's patient... if not intensely studious of him.
Words get stuck in her throat for a moment, and she lets the quiet of his work on her hand buffer them.]
... You're different from mine.
You're shorter.
What is your Laura like?
no subject
[It’s probably a good she’s standoffish. Better than naive. Hell, maybe he’s being too trusting himself after what he’s seen of this place so far. Maybe whatever this is, isn’t what it seems either. But it’s not everyday he gets an opportunity to start again with someone. If it comes back to bite him, well, so be it.]
[Tightening the strap around her knuckles just enough to stay in place, he turns up his palms when he finishes and he gives her an apologetic smile.] “Sorry to disappoint.”
“She’s …older. Older than you anyway. And just as stubborn as the both of us.”
[He when he rises to his feel again he rolls up the tattered cuff of his sleeve again until it looks as tidy as the one he didn’t ruin and looks down at her like she makes him think of a lot of things he’s not saying.] “How long you been here, Laura? Long enough to show me around? If my money’s any good here, maybe I can get us something to eat that ain’t candy.”
no subject
Surely any Wolverine, be it small or large, can.
She ignores his very decent commentary about pain and hurting oneself and how it isn't necessary to think about this other her instead, curiosity painting her expression as she envisions what an older her is like... It's strange to remember that she's still got a lot of growing to do; like this Logan, she is petite at her age...
Giving the bandage on her hand only the shortest of looks, she looks back toward the direction of the town.]
... I can show you. Money here is on your ID card, the one in your basket.
But I get free pancakes from the diner, if you want some; Frank never makes me pay.
[That's her Deerington dad. Pete-Just-Kidding-It's-Frank Castle and Wade Wilson, two people who are absolutely great examples for children to live by. They're not the only questionable adults in her life, and they won't be the last.]