NOVEMBER 2019 TEST DRIVE MEME

Welcome to November's Test Drive Meme! This month's Test Drive's theme is: DEATH/ZOMBIE 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: Possible mild cannibalism, organs (including pictures of fake food that looks like organs), mutant insect in linked picture, blood, sensations of starvation, possible binge eating, possible binge drinking.
Don't forget to tag content whenever necessary. Have fun!

Prompt One
Prompt Two
Character Arrival
Master Navigation

NOT BEAST NOR KIN

The blood and organs that have been festering in the ground and walls of Deerington seem to not only be attracting rats at this point, but something far more dangerous and... just plain gross. These deadly looking maggots are roughly the size of an average human. They’re slithering in an out of the ground, filling up holes where some organs seem to have burst open, or writhing around in the wake of the red waves that have left bloody puddles in the street. If you keep your distance, they’re mostly just disgusting to watch, adding to the feeling of utter decay that the town has gone into.

But those who wander too close or who are unfortunate enough to go by a nest of these maggots without noticing could end up swarmed. They can leap farther than something that large should physically be capable of and the sharp teeth on the end of their bodies will pierce through even the toughest of skin and bone. Once they latch on, they won’t let go; not until they’ve finished their meal. If you aren’t quick, the blood loss will be, and you could end up an evening snack for a whole group of these creatures.

They are fairly easy to kill, luckily. Average weapons seem to take them down or you can smash their heads (if you can call it that) with a few good stomps from a boot. The only trouble is how quick they move and how strong they are; you might need to call for help to get away from them when you get cornered by too many of these monsters.

ALL YOU CAN EAT

Maggots aren’t the only things that want to eat, though! And it seems that the community center is aware of that as well. Advertisements are strewn all over town for an all you can eat buffet that will be set up, not even an entrance fee required (though donations are welcome at the door if you’re feeling generous). No one in their right mind would want to go and get food from a party into Deerington at this point though, right? Of course not. You’re way too clever for that.

Except that as the party draws closer, anyone who saw the advertisements will find themselves slowly feeling like they’re starving. There’s a hallow belly feeling that no amount of food you consume will ever be able to fill. It feels like you might go crazy from how bad the hunger gets, craving something to fill your stomach, anything... And in the back of your mind, you might remember the buffet. You might start to feel a strange realization that the food they’re offering will actually help get rid of your cravings and you’ll be drawn to the party no matter how adamant you’ve been that it’s not a good idea.

The spread they offer isn’t something that should be appetizing to most on a regular basis; raw, very clearly human organs are laid out across the table on fairly decorative plates. A fountain of what looks like blood is put up in place of chocolate for you to dip your food into. No matter how disgusted you might normally feel, you find yourself practically drooling at the mouth and you’re quick to grab a plate and dive in.

At least the drinks look like they’re normal; sodas, beer, wine, champagne, and liquors ready to create your favorite cocktails. A menu will give you an idea of what pairs best with each organ, so make sure you select something that goes perfectly with your plate of intestines.

What would a Deerington party be without something tricky attached to all this. Even the smallest bites of any of the organs will offer sudden changes to the consumer, each power growing stronger the more that you eat.

Eating BRAINS will make it so that you are able to hear another person’s thoughts. Anyone standing near by, really. They’ll trickle in slowly at first, but the more that you eat, the more you’ll hear, and eventually it could become overwhelming. Sometimes you can focus in on just one person if you stare at them intently, but that could make you look like a creep. Maybe you should just go somewhere quiet until it passes.

Eating a HEART will make you feel compelled to confess your emotions to someone. Maybe a specific person or maybe it’s towards a complete stranger, but you just want to get everything out onto the table. You’re overcome with feelings so strong you don’t know how to contain them anymore and you’ve just got to get them out somehow.

Eating LIVER will cause you to want to drink. A lot. You might find that you’re not able to get enough, even. It doesn’t make you immune to the alcohol though, so it’s got the potential to lead some pretty nasty alcohol poisoning if you aren’t careful. Characters who usually can’t get drunk will find that consuming liver makes them a total lightweight. Woops. Better have someone help you walk home.

Eating the STOMACH will make you want to eat everything. You’ll no longer feel starving, but you just want to taste any food that’s near you, and you won’t stop no matter how full you feel. It’s not just organs, but any food consumed outside of the buffet. It might be a bad time to go to Peter’s Pizza for a late night meal.

Eating INTESTINES will give you an abundance of courage. You’ll find that you’ve got guts you never knew you had and it might make you willing to go tell your crush how you feel about them, or tell off that one guy who’s been pissing you off for weeks, or maybe you might start to think it’s cool to go scale a building or fight a monster when you don’t have any skill sets to actually take one down. Hopefully you don’t do anything you’ll regret in the morning— assuming you don’t get yourself killed doing something stupid, of course.

Eating EYEBALLS will allow you to obtain the memory of the first person that you touch. Depending on how much you’ve eaten, you may just see a small snippet or you could get sucked in to a full and heavy flashback. The memory will feel like it takes place in real time, but by the time that it’s over, you’ll find that whoever you touched is only just starting to ask you what’s wrong — or tell you to watch where you’re going, buster.

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

For his own part, Wrench has grappled with none of the moral or visceral quandaries related to the buffet spread. His upbringing has given the man the advantage of being well versed in organ meat, and a willful eye towards ignorance is just enough to allow him to assume the animals these were harvested from were natural prey. It is, of course, an extreme leap of logic for a man who has seen Deerington serve up its horrors on offered plates tucked with festive napkins time and time again, but today he can't seem to resist. Something draws him to eat that goes beyond hunger. The desperate need nags at his mind and pulls him along until he's greedily shuffling bits of the spread onto his own plate.

Brains are a true delicacy. Liver is a more common offering in the circles he's traveled, but no less delicious. Wrench even scoops some slices of heart and a tract of intestine. His plate is nearly heaping by the time he reaches the end of the buffet. It looks like a generous helping for a man of his stature, but for a guy who's hardly eaten anything since his arrival the food might easily weigh against every bite he's taken thus far.

He's already forked a bit of the heart even as he's turning away from the buffet table, too ravenous to wait to find a place to sit. But it's a familiar face that stops him in his tracks, and stalls the utensil halfway to his lips. Wrench feels drenched in ice, and as if by instinct he reaches into his pocket for his knife.

Molly, with her own plate of food, is equally surprised to see a familiar face, especially this far from home. The cop brain kicks in — instinct, really, probably of the survival variety — and before she can think about what a mess it's going to make, she drops her entire plate of eyes and brains in favor of reaching for a service weapon she's not even wearing.

"Hold it—!" she says, but even as it's out of her mouth she understands why that won't work. The guy can't hear, right? They'd established that, had shared a tentative, tense bond together in that hospital, two wounded and confused creatures. She thought then that Wrench had reminded her of a hit dog, not just wounded but wary, and hadn't that been how all his kind had acted? Not friendly, not local. Liable to pull knives even at parties.

Backing up, taking a defensive stance, Molly has inched away enough that she's got a clear escape should she need it. She doesn't have a lot of choice here — unarmed is one thing, unarmed against a giant is another — so she's ready to run if she has to.

"Didya follow me? Huh?" He can read lips, she remembers that. And he must recognize her (although Molly is fairly certain there are people who react this way to all law enforcement, not just the ones they might recognize). "Didya— Didya bring me here?" she accuses, widening the conspiracy. It doesn't make any sense based on what she already knows, but in the heat of the moment, the only familiar face in town is most definitely the easiest to blame.

Just the gesture of her reaching ignites a pain in Wrench's abdomen that he likes to forget. Five years is a long time for everything but trauma, and he still isn't sure the surgeons didn't try to botch the job. He wonders what must've crossed their minds, to have been told they'd be operating on someone like him. Maybe they'd wished the bullet had struck just a little closer to the heart. The officer, though, he remembers differently. She'd shot him, but now that they're here again in the same room time seems to pitch backward and Wrench finds himself recalling her gentle expression and the kindness in her eyes. She had seemed almost sorry to tell him about Grady.

There's not much to be grateful for in the news that someone you love has died, but she seemed to understand things Wrench still hasn't said to anyone, even a half-decade later. He stalls with his fist around the hilt of the blade, but doesn't take it from his pocket. Instead he waits and watches, a predator sizing up a would-be adversary.

The shake of his head is meant to communicate plenty: that he can't hear her, that he's innocent of the accusations she's volleying his way. Wrench scowls as he looks her over, trying to remember more about her than her eyes. He's changed quite a lot in the time since the ambush. He's leaner, his hair is longer and the curls more unruly. Wrench thought he knew hell before, but it was nothing compared to the time since the loss. Finally, he lets go of the blade and taps his ear. Wrench gestures with the plate in his hand by way of demonstration. He's just here to eat.

As seconds pass, the time for one-two-three shots right in the pot goes by the wayside, and Molly's left cringing, waiting for a second hit out of nowhere. It never comes, and her expression barely changes, except the eyes. She's processing now that immediate, imminent danger has subsided, and details begin filtering in.

Armed. But compliant. Non-hostile. Tall. (Really tall. Was he always that tall?) Older.

None of any of it makes sense to Molly, who finally uncoils, hands slowly coming up to wipe at her nose, to sniffle.

"Well, maybe I got a little... carried away, but— Well, on account of what happened and all..." She dips her head, mindful to listen as she slowly crouches to start gathering the mess.

This is a dream, right? Someone had said that. She'd awoken here, into a dream so real it might as well be. It's her reality, anyway, at least for the moment, and she's very aware that despite all she knows, Wrench could boot stomp her into the stained tile and not a soul would know why except for him. She's been by the police station. She's heard of the cats prowling the neighborhood. Honestly, she doesn't set the odds much in her favor, but she still has fight enough to take the bet if she needs to. Suicide, for sure. No one's told her yet that she'd be right back.

Gathering the shards first, eyes second, she stops and looks up, gesturing to a dark eyeball that had rolled neatly between Wrench's footwear. A four-inch blade, even something as invasive as a pocket knife, if that's all the worse he's carrying, would cleanly end Molly if plunged in from this angle. It's a lot more trust than he probably deserves, but Molly's always been a little more understanding and kind than most.

Trust is something Wrench has much more of now than when he and this woman first met over five years ago. Though one is a number that represents much more than zero. Any amount might be significant compared to the high-strung, uncertain animal he was back then. Time has done nothing good for him. It's Deerington that has shown Wrench a life beyond his own hiding. The months that he's been here have been good for him, death rooms and monsters aside. He's almost forgotten to wonder after the things isolation gave him time to mull over. Like what this woman thought when he turned up missing from his hospital bed, and how hard she might've searched for him.

She'd be happy to know he was on his way to prison, he thinks. She'd be glad to think justice was served, and true to her word he was bound to spend the rest of his life in prison. Right now, nothing is a certainty. Wrench watches her crouch and wonders again about hatred and forgiveness. Everything she represents terrifies him, but he doesn't hate her. Not even with the hot sting of acid in his gut, reminding him of that aching wound. He follows her gesture, and turns his boot to tap the eyeball with the side of the sole. It rolls back in her direction, and Wrench waits for her to stand.

By now he knows this isn't purgatory, and there's no amount of proving himself that will lead to the outcome he thinks he's looking for. But Wrench considers the overflow on his plate -- the excess compared to how starved he was just months before -- and offers it out toward her.

It's difficult enough to process their circumstances, let alone the odds, and the more Molly collects herself like shards of the plate in her hands, the more she feels relieved. Perhaps more horrific than being unwittingly but willingly interested in eating organs is the fact that she's absolutely desperate to keep this one touch of home in sight, considering for only a few seconds before nodding and deciding there's no reason they can't share.

"Oh, sure. Hm." Looking down at her former plate, she shuffles the gory pieces and ruined parts into a nearly trashcan and then fruitlessly wipes at her hands with a flimsy napkin. "Lemme just—" Molly starts, gesturing then to the stack of clean plates behind Wrench. Not wanting him to get the wrong idea, she notes one of the empty tables and then drifts around him to collect clean cutlery, too.

With her back turned and her hands hovering over the buffet setup, a slow breath escapes her and she quietly questions her own sanity. Hell, her hands are shaking where they hadn't been a second ago and that ought to be information enough to tell her she's on the wrong track here, and yet... The world suddenly feels so widely out of control, impossible and theatrical, and she can't help herself.

But why? Why them? Why here? Why now?

"What happened to you?" she asks as she sits. A blanket question like that might help her with some context as to why he's offering to share instead of turning on his heel and beating feet to get away.

Hers is not the first familiar face that Wrench has seen of late. If he had his choice she wouldn't be here now, crouched before him as a painful reminder of the impact of his choices. There are worse people he could encounter, but this woman brings a set of memories only she can hold. He's not used to having to confront those he's shot after the fact, and her words to him in the hospital are as clear now as when she first spoke them:

And for what?

Wrench seems lost in thought when she first gestures at the table, but her movement jolts him from his thoughts and makes him tense again in anticipation. He feels like a fool when she moves for the buffet rather than towards him, and manages to gather himself enough to slide into an offered seat. Old habits die hard, and as she collects her silverware he adjusts the seat to put his back towards the wall and give himself a faster route away should she decide she wants to take another run at what she hadn't managed to do all those years ago.

When she returns the plate sits untouched and Wrench's hands are folded. He lets her settle in, and finally reaches for his Fluid when she has. Even as he types, though, he doesn't take her eyes from her. Several moments of silence pass before a masculine and automated voice reads the text. I ESCAPED AND I RAN. HOW MANY YEARS HAS IT BEEN SINCE THE HOSPITAL?

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

NOVEMBER TEST DRIVE MEME

NOVEMBER 2019 TEST DRIVE MEME

NOT BEAST NOR KIN

ALL YOU CAN EAT

Character Arrival

Feast Your Eyes (har har har)

Sorry for my lack of icons!!

Psh, please. I am delighted. 💛

<3

no subject

no subject

no subject