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soddersays2019-12-24 01:53 pm
sodder) wrote in soddersays2019-12-24 01:53 pm
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JANUARY 2020 TEST DRIVE MEME
JANUARY 2020 TEST DRIVE MEME
Welcome to January's Test Drive Meme! This month's Test Drive's theme is: OCEAN 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.
PLEASE NOTE FOR CHARACTER ARRIVALS: This month, all players can choose to have their characters wake up in the town of Deerington or on the Titanic.
CW: Ghost of a child, rotting corpses, drowning, hallucinations, paranoia
Don't forget to tag content whenever necessary. Have fun!
WHERE FEET MAY FAIL
For those who were left behind in Deerington while everyone else was whisked away in the flood during the New Years Eve party, they will find that the town is a little more wet than usual. The streets are still flooded, houses are damp, and the chill of winter isn't making it easy to deal with. Your hands can feel like ice any day of the week and it's hard to focus with how badly you may find yourself trembling from the cold.But it's almost preferable to the visions. They start off while you're sleeping; large sea monsters roaming the ocean, waiting to pull you down into the darkened depths; or maybe it's a strange, ghost looking girl with glowing eyes and tattered clothing, her skin blue and rotting the way a body does when it's been submerged in water for too long. She's calling out to you, beckoning you down, and all around her are the strung up, floating corpses of the people who were foolish enough to listen.
It's just a dream though, right? Slowly you start to see the girl around town. She's still calling to you, watching you, waiting for you. If you get too close, she'll even be able to grab onto you, pulling you down into the waterlogged streets, and into what you thought was only a puddle of water. It's as deep as an ocean, and just as dark and cold too. Someone near by can grab onto you before she can drag you under and the vision will disappear. If no one does, maybe if you're a strong swimmer, you'll be able to struggle free, but when you resurface, there will be a bruise forming on your arm in the shape of a hand – something to remind you that maybe these visions are a little more real than you gave them credit for.
The only way to stay safe is to travel in pairs. The girl seems to keep her distance when there's more than one person around, but it doesn't mean she won't try to find the means to separate you. Whether it's increasing the flooding in certain areas of the street or trying to distract one of you long enough to put some distance between you and your comrade, she'll do whatever it takes to try and grab onto whoever she can.
GHOST SHIP
Those who are on the boat might find that life is a little easier, depending on what class you've found yourself in. The struggles between first, second, and third are certainly rough on everyone, but many seem to find themselves thinking this is just the way of things. Maybe your mind has been altered to just accept the class differences or your memories completely rewritten and you think you've led a completely different life so far; either way, only a handful of passengers seem to fully understand that this isn't the way things are supposed to be.There's nothing anyone can do to change things, though, and so many find themselves getting lost in day to day activities. Whether it's working on the ship, enjoying the finer foods in the first class dining halls, or enjoying the rowdy parties in third class storage after hours, everyone seems to be finding something to keep themselves occupied. As the days pass, even those who know full well what's coming seem to forget the looming doom, and you might even find yourself feeling lost in the monotony of day to day life.
But those who stare into the water too long, who look at the strange, large shapes swimming just under the surface might find a sense of dread filling them. The paranoia will shake you to your very core, leaving you with a sense that all is not right with this journey. You can try to tell people, but most will look at you as though you're insane. Eventually, your fear will become so heavy that you start to see destruction all around you. Whole sections of the ship will look flooded, rotting wood and rusted steel taking over every inch of the once proud ship, and every section is covered in algae. You might start to realize it looks uncannily like an old shipwreck.
The ship is still floating, though, and the coarse steady. So it's all in your head, right? Staying away from the water will make the visions and paranoia eventually ebb, but any glance at the floating shapes will cause it to come back tenfold. Maybe just stay inside and away from the ship's edge. It seems a lot safer that way.
Character Arrival
You can read how all characters arrive in Deerington here.NOTE: Character's this month can wake up in Deerington or on the Titanic.
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
She tilted her head, looking from him to the nightstand in the room, and back to him again. She propped a hand in the door way and leaned there, curious.
"First you tell me why you have a nightstand already, then you tell me why you want mine? Seems reasonable to me." He wanted to borrow her nightstand, but why? It hardly seemed worth much, and if the boat sinks it wont be worth much anyhow.
no subject
So after a moment, he gave a quick, timid grin and turned back to face her fully.
"...Do you have any particular opinions about...icebergs...?" If she got the hint, then Oh, Thank the Lord Above, maybe he could get someone else involved in his hopefully non-futile plans. If she had no Earthly clue why a massive chunk of ice in the middle of the Atlantic would worry a passenger on a not-so-Unsinkable cruise ship, then the less time wasted trying to explain what was happening, the better. He'd already tried that more then once before, and he knew how much good it would do.
no subject
Icebergs.
Her face seemed to light up. Someone else who understood. She took in a breath and "Oh, I have opinions. Especially for this ship." Then she whispered "You can't call a ship unsinkable and expect it to not sink. You know, don't you!?" Someone else who gets it. Someone else who knows.
no subject
"Oh, my dear, more then you know. Which is precisely why I'm trying to...well...build little rafts, I suppose. the wooden furniture has the best chance of floating, and I was hoping that if I were able to tie enough pieces together, they could keep people out of the freezing water long enough for help to reach them, when the time comes."
He sighed, the sound of the plan just as ludicrous to his ears as he suspected it would be to anyone else who heard it. He knew it was more then likely a fool's errand, but he couldn't sit back and not do something.
"Frankly, I don't know that it will do much good in the long run, but it's better then trying to warn everyone ahead of time. They seemed to be under the impression that I had come down with a case of hysterics when I tried."
no subject
A glance to him and the table he hand, then a glance to her table. She turned back and cleared it off, collecting it now as well, then walked back to the door, nodding. "It might not do much good but it's something. I'll come help, if you like. Where are you going to store them all, and what's the date? It's not time for the ship to... " She waved a hand, knowing he's understand she meant 'sink' with out wanting to say it again.
"Also, what are we going to do about the lock down? Don't they lock the 3rd class people in?" She wasn't TOO sure on that fact, but she had heard it before.
I am so sorry for this teal deer
"Yes, exactly! Even a single life saved when they would have perished otherwise is a win, and if there are enough of us who try, hopefully it will be a great deal more then one life saved! And any help you would be willing to offer would be splendid. I may be an-...a very determined individual, but there's only so much I can do on my own. I've been keeping everything confined to the cabin me and my - er..." Beau? Friend? Paramour? Well, perhaps not that one. They didn't have to be secretive, anymore. He was still trying to find a word to describe Crowley that seemed to fit. "Partner," There, ambiguous enough for now. "Crowley, were given. It's beginning to be a little cramped, unfortunately."
And then the question of dates came up, and he paused, a sort of disgruntled confusion crossing his face. This was obviously something that had vexed him a bit.
"To be quite honest, I'm not sure, entirely. One would assume it was sometime in April, given the circumstances, but our moment of arrival here coincided with the stroke of midnight no New Years. We're more then four months and a century off-schedule. Not that silly things such as time ever seemed to matter to our captors before."
He stepped away from the door of her cabin and gestured for her to proceed him into the corridor as he prattled on in irritation. He shook his head and cast a reassuring though still rather somber look back her way at her concern for those residing in steerage.
"Oh, no, not exactly. At first, that had been a concern - something to do with isolating those in need of quarantine from those in first class, for immigration purposes when we reached New York - but once they realized what was really happening, they opened the gates and let them onto the deck, as well. Little good it did. By then, they'd already launched a great many of the lifeboats, and hardly many of them were filled more then half full."
The more he spoke, the more distant his tone was, the voice of someone who was remembering things he had seen firsthand and not simply imagining the situation based on third-hand accounts retold through movies and historical documentaries on the telly. There were moments, when he was almost able to discuss it with the emotional distance one achieved after a century of being able to come to terms with what had happened. But then their current situation would remind him all too quickly that it was happening again, and an angel's memory was much stronger then that of a human, besides. What was more then a lifetime for them was a drop in the bucket for him, and the memories reigniting themselves vividly in his mind had only served to make his anxiety worse.
"That, my dear, is one of the greatest hurdles we will face, once the events start. E.J will try to call the lifeboats back for more passengers, yes, but none of them will listen. We will need to find some way of ensuring that they are filled to capacity before they launch. And honestly, I'm not exactly sure what chance we have in that regard."
His hands had been tied in 1912. Heaven would never have allowed for him to exert such a massive use of miraculous force over the sinking, so he had been as useless as any of the humans in changing the way things would go. He had spent every possible second of the sinking trying to help people onto the boats when he could, the way a human would, trying to keep them calm, trying to get people to the dryer parts of the ship once it began flooding, up until the moment the human he was supposed to have been would have drowned in the freezing water. In the end, a small miracle to render himself invisible before leaping off of the bow of the ship and gliding over the aftermath on white wings had been all he could do. He'd circled above for hours, until the last life boat had been loaded onto the ships who had come to their aid, and had finally allowed himself to land on the deck of the Carpathia for the trip to New York.
No longer hindered by worries about what Heaven would think of his intervention, Aziraphale was left without his powers no thanks to Deerington's incomprehensible control over the Sleepers. Where now he would have gladly used a great miracle to ensure not a single soul on the ship perished, he was still forced to act as a human would, short of having the foresight to know what was coming. The irony of the situation did not help his mood in the least.
No it's fantastic! And all deers are approved in this game
"I agree. If it saves at least one extra life, it's worth it. And your partner, Crowley? I take it he knows what's going on as well? I've noticed most people here either flicker oddly, or are passengers, but they seem off. I don't know how to explain it."
She is, of course, not coming form Deerington itself, so she literally just woke up on the titanic. In all truth, she spent some time trying to piece together if an Angel had touched her. If a Weeping Angel had managed to grab her and throw her back in time. That was how it worked, wasn't it? Except that they fed off the energy of that person displaced in time, so why would they drop that person on the Titanic with the huge possibility that they'd die?
It was a lot to consider. For all she knew this was really the titanic. Which is why when he mentions captors, her brow lifts. "And to be quite honest with you, I have very little idea of what's going on right now. Captors? I fell asleep back home and woke up here, like in some strange dream I can't wait up from. I tried pinching myself and everything."
She followed him, stepping out into the hall and closing her door, the table held in one hand to her side, by the upper neck of a leg. Then she swung it up to hold in both hands and followed the strange man.
He prattled on, yes, but it was a lot of information. Everything he spoke about seemed to come as first hand information as well. Either he had been there, which seemed impossible, or he's a researcher of fine histories like this, which seemed more likely, giving his appearance made him feel like the type to research things.
Then again she was on the TITANIC herself. So anything was possible. Perhaps an Angel got him as well. "You sound as if you have lived through this before, if you don' mind my saying it. Or at the least very well read in the entire situation." From the supposed lock down to the captain calling the lifeboats back for more passengers. It all seemed too 'familiar' to the man.
She couldn't help but wonder if something else was going on here. Something more than Weeping Angels and the Doctor.