AUGUST 2019 TEST DRIVE MEME

[sodder]

AUGUST 2019 TEST DRIVE MEME

Welcome to August's Test Drive Meme! This month's Test Drive's theme is: DYSTOPIAN 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: Physical violence, monster violence, creepy ogre-like monster in link, being hunted by a monster.
Don't forget to tag content whenever necessary. Have fun!

Prompt One
Prompt Two
Character Arrival
Master Navigation

BLOOD IN MY VEINS

With supplies low and food getting even more scarce, things in Deerington, Maine seem to be getting that much more tense. For those who pay attention to the habits of the townspeople, there’s something that might add to that feeling of stress; all of them seem to be involved in some kind of physical training, whether it’s archery, hand-to-hand combat, or fighting with firearms, they all seem like they’re getting ready for something and it definitely feels like it might be something big.

But no one wants to train against a townsperson - it’s highly likely they’re not going to fight fair with the way they’re all glaring at the Sleepers, as though they’re to blame for everything that’s been going on. Unless you’re sparring with people in your own backyard though, it seems like there isn’t any space to get your own training in.

The Betties are starting to pop up around town pretty regularly, waiting until they find Sleepers on their own, and quietly waving for them to come closer. “You need to prepare,” they’ll whisper to you in hushed urgency, before grabbing your hand to try and get you to follow them. If you fight, they’ll insist only once more, before leaving you alone. But there’s something inside of you urging you to comply and follow.

They’ll lead you down an alley, pushing aside a large dumpster, and revealing a trap door in the middle of the concrete. You’ve never noticed it before, even if you’ve been down this alley a hundred times. The Betty leading you leans down, pulling it open, and the ladder that goes into the tunnel is long and dimly lit. You could leave now, but the Betty will insist this is for the best.

“Knock twice. No more or less. Show them what you’re made of.”

Once you get to the bottom of the ladder, there’s an equally long hallway that leads towards a closed metal door. You knock twice and the door shakes before sliding open. The light that comes through is almost blinding with how bright it is compared to the dim tunnel, but as your eyes adjust, you can finally step in to a fully stocked training room.

There are instructors in basics for beginners, areas for intermediate, and most abundantly there are one-on-one sparring areas. The moment you come close enough, you’ll be immediately paired with another Sleeper, and the two of you will be locked in the room together to be observed. You could choose to not fight, of course, but you’ll be stuck there for a good long while if you do. It might be best to just get it over and done with.

So feel free to help others who seem to be struggling or show off your strength for everyone to see. It looks like everyone is going to need to be ready for some kind of fight.

I AM THE GREAT UNKNOWN

Maybe you got knocked out during a fight or maybe you fell asleep in your own bed - or maybe you don’t even remember closing your eyes at all, especially if you don’t usually have the ability to go unconscious for one reason or another. No matter the cause, everyone will wake up in the same place, surrounded by tall, thick hedges in the middle of a... maze?

It doesn’t take you long to realize you aren’t the only one waking up, too. Someone is next to you and it seems like you’re stuck finding your way out of here together. Literally. On each of your wrists is a metal cuff with a long chain connecting them. It can’t be broken, no matter how strong a person is or how powerful a weapon or spell they try to use against it. You’re in this together whether you want to be or not.

Once you can pick a direction to head in, it seems like this might almost be boring - that is until you start to hear the sounds of rustling leaves and breaking twigs. At first it seems like it might just be a trick to spook you, but the more you ignore it, the louder it gets, until finally you see it, charging down the row at you, scythe raised and ready to strike.

You can try to fight, of course, but it’s hard when you’re chained to one another. Learn to work together quickly and maybe you can make it work. It seems to go down with normal attacks, though it takes a long time to get the creature to fall unless you cut off the head. Ultimately your best interest might be set in running as fast as you can to get away. You can lose it in the maze if you’re quick about it. But then you might also be lost yourself.

If you do manage to lose the monster rather than killing it, stay quiet and you might not attract its attention again. It may take a while to find the end of the maze. The hedges feel like they stretch on forever and the sun is blaring down. You’d think there would be shade with all the height of the bushes, but there’s no relief from the heat. Hopefully you don’t burn easy.

When you get to the end of the maze, the two of you will come up on three doors. One door will lead out of the maze and back into the center of Deerington, cuff free. Another door will lead you right back to the beginning, forcing you to start again. And what’s behind door number three...?

The monster, of course.

Choose wisely.

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.

Comments

[wwrench]

Yes! Wrench knocks a heavy fist in the air, and the chains that bind them give an agreeable little clink of acknowledgement. Victories have been precious few for the man lately, not just in the context of this strange place, but well before it too. He's better as part of a unit. All this isolation isn't good for his psyche. And maybe the stranger on the other end of the chain isn't the type of compatriot he's typically known, but if the surest way of determining your friends is by your mutual enemies, this is a good start.

When the shorter man taps his fist into his open palm, Wrench's eyebrows raise almost comically. Help, he parrots back with another exaggerated nod. He can help, of course. He scans the area for some sign of what's being asked of him. What role he can play in the destruction, or the uncertain path ahead of them. But whether he's too slow on the uptake or the man simply changes his mind, Wrench is left to wonder.

And so they head right. He's more alert now, determined neither to be taken by surprise a second time nor to be seen as a liability. But the sun overhead is beating down and those rows of perfectly-manicured hedges go on and on. Eventually, curiosity gets the better of him and Wrench tugs at the chains that connect their wrists. When the other man looks up, he touches his fingers to the spaces between his knuckles. They're still raw, caked in blood from some injury he can't quite comprehend. Wrench catches the man at the wrist and rattles his hand demonstratively.

[howlett]

“Oh. Yeah. Sorry about that.” His fist passes in a circle around his chest again. He’ll probably getting a lot of use out of that one.

He should know a few more of these than he remembers, Logan thinks. Not that he could hold a conversation with any depth, but if indicative words, they were topics somewhere along the way. Some kind of special ops training. The type of program that prepared you for literally any circumstance. He can almost picture himself watching Maverick gesture at him silently from the far side of a doorway, but the time and place are completely lost on him. He racks his brain in an effort to remember. You, me, them, are all the pronouns just pointing?

And then one dawns on him.
Same.
That might even come in handy.

Same, he gestures between them, before he realizes what a broad statement that must sound like from the complete stranger cuffed to his wrist.

Logan drags that stick in the dirt again. Hurt? He looks at the stranger expectantly, but when the younger man brushes it off as though answering for his well-being, Logan shakes his head. “No, not the… no you. The word. How do you sign that?” He wiggles his fingers frivolously in the air and underlines the word in the dirt again.

It's not necessary supposes. This conversation doesn't need to happen. But god knows how long it'll take to find their way out of this place. There's worse things than getting stuck here with some guy who doesn’t speak, he thinks. He could've been stuck here with Wade.

[wwrench]

Of course it hurts, Wrench thinks, but it's far from the worst he's ever had. What is perhaps more concerning is the origin of the injuries. Both the slashes between his knuckles and the heavy raking on his forearm are from sources not easily explained or rationalized. He can feel the depth of the cuts and the way the bleeding has slowed to a trickle, but what's to come will remain a mystery. And with no source of water or bandages in sight, he can only wonder at how it'll progress over the coming hours and days. What kind of venom could a thing like that leave behind?

He could say all of it, and plenty more. Driven to more impatience he might feel inclined, but instead Wrench simply shrugs away the thoughts from his own mind. There was a time he worried more about it. When he was much younger, he felt the pull to prove his mind by any means possible. Now he just wonders how the other man must feel. It's infantilizing, he suspects, relying on a mixture of kindergarten vocabulary and everyone's least-favorite party game. But undoubtedly more so for the man at the other end of the chain, rather than for Wrench himself. After all, he's used to this. Hearing people don't often have to stretch to make themselves understood, and that lack of comprehension seems to rattle them in a way that's most damaging. It's a source of power for Wrench, though it's taken him plenty long enough to realize it.

It isn't always beneficial, of course. He has no interest in lording it over the other man, who seems to truly be trying his best to recall some bit of knowledge he might have known and forgotten, or could call up from a passing familiarity. Wrench's lips form into an O of understanding and he raises both index fingers, crooking them towards one another and twisting. It's a gesture that resembles the illustrated spikes on a comic illustration of injury, or maybe two knives twisting toward a source point. Hurt, he mouths helpfully. It's a start. A jumping off point, maybe.

He gestures to his hand again, and this time Wrench uses his fingers to imitate the blades emanating from the slashes of blood between his knuckles. What the fuck? he asks, middle finger and all. If that's not a universal gesture, what is?

[howlett]

It takes some back and forth. Signing and pointing and nodding at each other until they’re both certain they’re on the same page. hurt. He doesn’t think he never learned that one, but it makes a little sense to sign it. There’s something about that motion that feels like a good representation of pain.

The way this guy mimics the claws in his hands makes sense, but Logan makes the mistake of thinking he’s more interested in how they hurt him too, than some better understanding of the claws themselves.

Armed with two words and two solid pronouns. It might be enough to articulate the point he set out to make. What he can enlighten him about those shared injuries is limited but it might stand to make the younger man more careful if he can’t put any real distance been them.

“I hurt. You hurt. Same. ” He can’t help speaking when he signs it anyway. It’s clumsy but for some stupid reason it feels like it’s adding to their effort towards a shared understanding. “You get me? Anything that hurts me, hurts you the same.”

[wwrench]

The same of the matter seems most apparent. Maybe it's Wrench's fault for skipping so many steps in the pyramid of needs. He's trying to shape the best of what he has around some query of self-actualization when their safety isn't even assured. It's not a particularly solid foundation from which to start his building. At least this man seems to have a better concept of what's happening here. He's uncovered some formula for the source of their pain, though. None of it means anything about how he came by the claws in his hands, but neither does Wrench know how the creature they just beheaded had such red eyes or bladed fingers.

What's to distinguish one monster from another, save the hope that the one you're chained to means you no harm?

It's not a very fair question to ask. Thus far, the man next to him has amassed a body count of one. That's all that Wrench knows for sure, and his own list of sins certainly extends beyond that. He nods his understanding at the stranger and reminds himself instead to start over. Name? he asks, tapping two fingers on either hand together with an expectant look. A-B-C, you know?

[howlett]

His eyes followed the younger man's hands a few times but whatever he saying is lost on him. With no memory of that particular gesture, he instead hands this stranger his writing stick.

The only thing that cures Logan of his vacant expression is when they take it all the way back to the alphabet. Logan's eyes light up a little bit. “Oh yeah. Yeah yeah,” he nods repeatedly as it all comes back to him too quickly to know what to parse first, but eventually he’s staggering through the alphabet with his hands. It’s certainly not fast. It's not even all that accurate on the first go around as he stumbles over similar hand shapes that leave him squinting at his quiet companion for direction.

“Not great but. Give me some fuckin’ credit here. I feel like it's been at least 50 years.”

[wwrench]

Wrench watches the effort with all the patience of a saint, giving minor correction only when the man seems to hesitate like he knows he needs it. He's always thought pride to be the greatest barrier. At some point in living, people start to think they're done with learning. They get defensive about the things they don't know, and hesitate to give much effort to what they fear might make them look stupid in the interim. When the man makes it through without a hitch, he levels a thumbs-up for the good work. With the two of them chained together, bloodied, and looking in their own ways like brooding animals it could easily seem condescending. Wrench seems genuinely pleased, however.

It's a lot to work with after all. He points to himself, and for a second a sign stalls on his fingers. The moniker is easy for several reasons: it's a single sign, firstly. But more than that, it's a comfortable place to dress himself into. The persona he's worn for many years. Even with Fargo disbanded, his partner dead, and everyone who ever knew him lost to the wind, Wrench has held onto it as the power that carried him through. But it's been a long time since he's had reason to refer to himself as anything now.

Fingerspelling is the starting point, and it's the easiest way to demonstrate what he's asking. Wrench considers it and points to himself again before shaping slowly and intentionally: W-E-S. He points at the man then quizzically and signs again, Name?

[howlett]

Logan speaks the letters out loud when the other fellow spells them on his fingers. It takes him no small amount of time recall each hand shape and string them into a syllable. “Wes. Got it.”

A moment hangs between them as Logan realizes that wide eyed look is a question levied at him. He watches the sign again and it finally clicks. “Me? My name? This is name?” He repeats the sign knocking both pairs of fingers together on the perpendicular. “Jim. J-I…M,” he tries that again when the J and I feel clumsy one after the other, but eventually he gives up and scratches it into the dirt before they make another right.

“For fuck sake how big is this place….”

[wwrench]

The sight of his name on the other man's lips looks all wrong to Wrench, and he realizes he can't remember the last time he's given it. It's not just that he keeps it shrouded like a secret. Sure, maybe some time ago he believed in the kind of power Rumpelstiltskin himself was forced to relinquish when his true name became known. But it's plenty simpler than that. He's simply been a shadow, a stranger to all. Hell, even Wrench knew and was known by others. They're all gone now, and the folks who knew Wes vanished well before that even. So maybe it isn't the name itself that's as strange as seeing someone say it. It assures his existence, and this of all places is the last one he's been hoping to find that kind of guarantee inside of.

Despite the clumsy fingers, Wrench nods at the man's efforts, and then again with greater acknowledgement to see it scrawled in the ground underfoot. It's not the most illuminating answer to the endless list of questions that come to mind, but at least it feels humane to know it. He trudges on, paying more of his attention to the perfectly-manicured hedges that surround them and the angle of the sun with every new turn they take. It's a tedious method, but thorough, and Wrench finds a new wave of relief every new corner they turn to an expanse of greenery.

The longer he has to dwell over it the more he finds the persistent sting in his arm a source of frustration. Wrench is sure all of this must be a dream, but he simply can't find the formula to wake himself back up. As if on cue, a glimmer of something ahead catches in the sunlight, and Wrench stalls. It takes a minute for his eyes to focus over the glare, but he rattles the chain between them for Jim's attention and points it out at the end of the row.

[howlett]

For all the names he’s known by that’s perhaps the one Logan opts for when he’s looking to help people take him for something like normal. Course, that might be a lost cause by this point. Once the claws comes out that’s not something regular folks are quick to forget. But if he’s got to be chained to this fellow a while yet, it couldn’t hurt to make this fellow, Wes, at least feel like he’s not completely alien. That they might have more in common and more reason to keep working together than reason to feel at odds.

The doors Wes points out, don’t look like doors from this angle. But after a slow lap around they don’t look much like they lead anywhere either.

Choices never feel like a good thing around here, he’s come to learn. So he turns the decision over to Wes with a lazy gesture towards all three options.

“Well, bub. Take your pick.”

[wwrench]

If this place operates on its own reason, Wrench hasn't discerned the thread of logic that binds it. Not only do the doors look equal in potential, they give no impression that they're actually the answer to this puzzle. The structure and their configuration in this maze doesn't do much to convince the man they're meant to lead much of anywhere at all. Every option forward seems equally as bad in its complete potential. What's to say that whatever waits for them on the other side isn't just as nightmarish itself?

Wrench frowns at the trio of frames and hinges and takes the time to cast his gaze over each one in turn. If there's no physical indication of what to choose, perhaps he's hoping for something in his intuition to rouse him. Grady would have some idea of what to do; he's sure of that. What had his partner called it? A paradox named after some post-Golden Age television host. He can almost feel Grady shaking his head. Not a paradox, but a matter of fact and statistics. Anyway, you'd have to open one door to choose the second, and Wrench doubts he'll get that chance here.

Losing and gaining must be two sides of the same coin. The outcome is as unpredictable as that toss, but he steels himself and turns the knob on the door closest to them. Wrench thrusts it open as he pulls back, ensuring some distance between them and whatever waits them. But all is still, and he frowns disbelievingly at the image on the other side of that door frame: the shape of the town that's grown infuriatingly familiar.