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

[Fern doesn't notice the reactions he's garnering, he's too busy examining the scarecrow's scythe. Standing, he turns it over in his hands before slicing at the air with it.]

Are you talking adolescence? [Or puberty, or a teenager being a teenager. Same deal.]

Or some kinda tree phase? Do trees even go through phases?

[He wouldn't know, he's grass.]

Adolescence, and lemme tell you there's a lot more to his frickin' tree physiology than you'd think. The things I know now I can't begin to un-know.

[Sap. Sap everywhere.

....Anyway. He coughs.] You could mess someone up with that thing if you ain't careful.

[He does not sound like he's chastising. He sounds like he's stating a fact and he'd almost like to see it.]

Uh... I bet I can imagine.

[He's still figuring his own body out, but a tree body can't be all that different from a grass body.]

I'm not gonna mess anyone up. I know how to use a scythe.

[Bladed weapons in general. He even spins it in his hand.]

You're clearly gonna mess somebody up carrying that thing around. [half-mumbled, because he's kind of impressed and being tsun about it.] Just probably not anyone anybody cares about. You're pretty competent for a kid. You part of some team back where you came from?

[Any kid who can use a weapon and knows how to handle danger is probably on a team. This is a Fact Rocket has learned.]

[That sounds like a compliment, sort of. It's enough to make Fern grin.]

My brother and I are knights back home. No team, just the two of us.

Good for you two. I do a lot of universe savin' myself. I got street cred with the Avengers now, for all that does me here. I'd rather be back with the Guardians of the Galaxy. Five years apart and I end up alone again. This shit's gettin' old.

[He's an old man yelling at clouds right now, Fern.]

Never heard of either of those crews. Sorry, man.

[An old man who's alone, is what he's getting from all that.]

It sucks showing up here alone. [He's alone.] There's a lot of nice people here, though.