OCTOBER 2019 TEST DRIVE MEME

Welcome to October's Test Drive Meme! This month's Test Drive's theme is: HALLOWEEN/MONSTER 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: Blood, organs, stalking, food poisoning, rotten food, bugs, worms, evil scarecrows, body horror, skinning, murder via throat slicing, torture
Don't forget to tag content whenever necessary. Have fun!

Prompt One
Prompt Two
Prompt Three
Character Arrival
Master Navigation

pumpkins scream in the dead of night

Everyone loves fall, right? Pumpkin spice, the leaves changing, Halloween. The costumes alone are always worth it. And what's a more classic way to ring it all in than some good old fashioned pumpkin carving.

There's a wave of nostalgia that hits anyone who comes near the carving station set up in town. It doesn't matter if you've never carved a pumpkin in your life or if you've even heard of jack-o-lanterns or Halloween before. You just feel like you know this, feel a longing to reconnect with an act that maybe wasn't even part of your childhood. Some people might be strong enough to ignore it and keep walking. But others will find themselves sitting down at one of the empty chairs and a pumpkin being placed in front of them with all the necessary tools for a good time.

You'll stab your knife into the pumpkin and pull off the stem once you've carved it out. Grab your spoon, get ready to scoop, and then...! You see what's inside.

The pumpkin is filled with blood the moment you stick your spoon inside. Maybe it was like that from the start and you just didn't notice. The knife is covered in blood, so it must have been there all along. Even if you feel sick to your stomach and go to pull the spoon out, it will come up with something stuck to it. Pieces of brain, eyes that look like they've been ripped from their sockets, a still beating heart... Looks like someone was playing a trick on you this month.

When you back away from it, the blood might still be covering your hands, but the moment you try to warn someone else? All the pumpkins innards go back to being exactly what they should be. The only thing stuck to your hands are stringy pumpkin guts and some seeds. Was it all in your head? Maybe you'll stab into another pumpkin to find out. Or maybe you should just get out of there.

everybody scream

TRICK OR TREAT!!!

So you had some rough luck with the pumpkins, but candy can't be all that bad, right? Some of it comes with a money back guarantee if there's any tricks inside instead of just your favorite sweets. Buying these seems to go okay! You get your candy corn, your caramel apples, chocolate bars galore, and all of them are totally normal! It's a real treat for anyone with a sweet tooth. Stuff your face and enjoy.

Getting some from one of the buyers who isn't guaranteed, though — well that's a different story.

Any candy bought anywhere else in town will have some definite tricks attached to them. The candy corn might make you overly flirtatious and downright corny with your pick up lines. The caramel apples will make you clingy and needy to anyone who gets too close. Chocolates will make you bitter and unfriendly. Taffy will keep your mouth stuck shut for at least a full day.

And that's all if you're lucky.

Some places are even giving out bad candies. They look fine from the outside - the apples are shiny and perfectly candied, the Hershey's bars are giant sized and look so good! But when you bite inside a piece of fruit, it will be rotted and filled with worms, the candies will taste like earwax and have maggots stuck inside in place of filling, the chewy candies taste an awful lot like actual rotting flesh — you can only hope it's bad meat and not human.

People who eat these candies will get horrifically sick almost instantly. They'll need to be helped home and probably kept an eye on until it passes. It might only be a few hours or it could be for a several days. It really depends on how quickly it works through each individuals systems.

the "who" when you call "who's there?"

Walking to and from locations isn't always a breeze when Deerington starts to get up to its new tricks. It's unnerving even during quiet times with all the strange things that go on in the shops, or in the cornfields, or even in some of the houses of your neighbors... Sometimes it's best to just keep your head down and walk as fast as you can to your door.

But there's a different sort of unease that follows you as you make your way around Deerington now. A sense of being watched. Of being followed. You can't tell from where and every time you try to look around, the streets seem empty. The fields are still. The only thing you might see here and there are scarecrow decorations in people's yards or even the legit thing in the middle of some crops. Everything seems totally harmless.

Except that feeling gets stronger. Eventually you start to hear rustling. It sounds like it might be jeans rubbing against each other or maybe... straw?? When you go to look around again, you notice that one of those scarecrows has moved — in fact, it seems to be missing entirely. But where could he have gone...?

Turning back around, you'll find yourself face to face with your sneaky friend. The grin feels empty and cold, the eyes bright like fire, and there's a large sickle in his hands that's poised and ready to come down right on your throat if you aren't quick to dodge out of the way. The scarecrow doesn't respond to most weapons the way one hopes — blades just go right through it without even so much as a flinch, bullets will fly out of the straw and hit whatever solid objects are behind it. None of it seems to stop the scarecrow from advancing, so maybe your best bet is to just run.

If the scarecrow manages to catch you, you're in for one hell of time. The lucky individual might just get their throat cut and bleed out quickly. Others might end up getting skinned alive. And still some might find their bones twisting and breaking, their body shrinking, their skin turning to deep, dark and rich black feathers. An evil scarecrow would be nothing without a loyal flock of birds, after all.

But if you remember your lessons from The Wizard of Oz or are just a genuinely reasonable person, you might think to fight the thing with fire. It's the only weakness the scarecrow has and it will do anything it can to fight through it. Crows will swarm around, using their wings to beat out the flames as quickly as they can. So if you really want to do the sucker in, you're gonna have to make sure he gets fully torched and fast.

If you manage to kill him, the crows will lunge at you, disappearing in a thick burst of dark smoke before they can do any damage. The scarecrow will remain a pile of ashes and you should have enough time to get you (or whoever you were saving) home. The ashes will blow away in a gust of wind, though, and the scarecrow? Well, it'll go right back into the yard or field it came from, waiting for the next person to come along.

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

[He's fresh out of the fiery explosion grenades, having just come from a battlefield, which he is pissed about, considering he didn't expect to be thrown into another warzone this fast.

He lifts his head as the kid runs and leaps and... Fuck. That's actually impressive. The scarecrow thrashes with its scythe, making a move to pry the child off its back with a sharp pointy object and not even remotely caring if it takes Chara's head off in the process.

He makes a decision.]

I hate this already. [He holsters his gun and lunges forward on all fours, jumping up on the scarecrow's scythe arm and digging claws and teeth into it to prevent it from angling the weapon. Now it's got two tiny obstacles on either side of it and it's pissed.

Rocket spits out a mouthful of straw.] Aw shit. That's vile.

[The fire, fortunately, appears to be doing something. Fire, then. That's what it takes. What's less fortunate is the dark cloud of descending crows that rapidly start to divebomb the pair of limpets latched onto the scarecrow, trying to beat out the flames with their wings.]

If you can keep these off me -

[The knife is still more or less hilted in the scarecrow's back, and Chara isn't letting go, despite how viciously the thing twists and torques, trying to fling them off. In a brief half second they have to adjust their grip, they winkle a second knife from their pocket and set it on fire as well.]

They're putting out the flames.

[The crows that aren't trying to put out the flames seem to see Rocket's eyes and head as a perfect target for pecking and he's forced to let go of the scarecrow to curl into a fetal position long enough to get his goggles over his eyes. That takes care of some of it, but not enough as they grab at his scarf and claw at his jumpsuit, looking to get enough of a hold on him to lift him up off the ground and keep him from covering the kid.]

All right, all right. I got it.

[He cringes through a crow grabbing one of his ears in its beak and tugging and wrenches his pistols out out of their holsters.] Bet these guys ain't immune to bullets.

[They are not, as it turns out, immune to bullets. And crows getting hit with armor-piercing rounds is not pretty. It's either converge entirely on Rocket or risk getting picked off one by one while they put out the flames and the amount of time it takes them to figure out means Chara gets pelted with some of the exploding bird remains- nothing to be done about that.

Rocket is now a hail of bullets surrounded by a cloud of birds, which is kind of dangerous as every now and then a stray bullet will whiz precariously close, saved only by the grace of Rocket having some idea of where Chara was before he got locked into an Alfred Hitchcock wet dream and every now and then blowing enough of a hole in the mass to adjust where Chara has moved. It's not an exact science, but neither is fighting a murder of crows with murder on their minds.]

[Thankfully, the guns work on the birds. Good. Chara shuts their eyes against the shower of...bits...that promptly begins raining from the sky. They get a long strand of entrails in the face, but there's no pawing it off while they have two flaming knives in their hands.]

[The second knife is burning. Instead of digging it into the scarecrow's back like before, Chara sets about trying to carve it in as wide an arc as possible. Get those flames really cooking this thing from the inside out.]

[Several times, a bullet whines very close to their head.]

If you shoot me, you lose your one advantage.

[Just in case. Gotta cover all the bases here.]

Way to be practical, kid! [Seriously. Most people would be more worried about their lives, but it's like the kid just knows he's a pragmatist.

Granted, he's a pragmatist with a heart of, if not gold, then perhaps silver, but that's neither here nor there. The birds are thinning out, and don't seem to have any idea what to do, because if they try to go for Chara, then Rocket can just pick them off, and if they go for Rocket, then they're just flying into his bullets. Lacking anything else to do, they hover out of range and see if the winds will change.

Meanwhile, that scarecrow sure is burning.]

[It'll have to be enough. They're starting to slip, and they're not going to abandon their knives - they're one of the only true advantages they have against this place. So when their grip starts to get untenable, Chara allows themself to drop to the ground, rolling to avoid getting trampled by angry scarecrow feet, and immediately starts moving.]

[At least they still have their knives.]

Move. While we have the time to.

What? Were not gonna finish 'em off? [Rocket looks conflicted by this course of events, but after a moment of debate- and the the reminder that his head is thoroughly pecked- he snarls and holsters his guns so he can drop down on all fours and run.]

Unbelievable. I'm takin' tactical orders from a kid with knives.

Very few things here stay dead. I don't intend to be around when it decides to take its vengeance.

[Already, they're running - but at least he's listening.]

You're certainly free to head back and see what comes of it. I'm not about to stop you from throwing your life away.

[He might be reluctant, but he's not STUPID, so he keeps running, bitching incoherently under his breath the whole way. They've gotten a good distance away before he finally speaks up louder.]

Y'know, I thought I was finally gettin' a break from bad business. Just goes to show you that there's never really an end to anything.

Not here, that's for sure. The dead don't stay dead, and the points don't matter.

[Take it from them - dead twice over, before they even made it to Deerington, and it certainly hasn't stuck so far!]