soddersays | APRIL 2020 TEST DRIVE MEME

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APRIL 2020 TEST DRIVE MEME

Welcome to April's Test Drive Meme! This month's Test Drive's theme is: ENCHANTMENT 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: Enchanted food, possible body horror, mild finger injuries, magic based mind control, rapid aging, possible death
Don't forget to tag content whenever necessary. Have fun!

Prompt One
Prompt Two
Character Arrival
Master Navigation

YOU UNCULTURED SWINE

Pork is on sale!! Time to buy it up for all your family meals. It also means anything with pork in it in all of the restaurants is on special and super affordable for just about anyone. New arrivals can even get a free meal of bacon, sausage and eggs at the diner! Seeing all the low prices, you find yourself craving pork more than ever. But who doesn't love bacon, right? Maybe you had ham and pineapple pizza at Peter's or those delicious and mouthwatering pork dumplings at the Hot Pot. You could have cooked a nice pork loin with your friends and family for a large get together. Candied bacon is a real treat to munch on in the park!

You're cooking it yourself or getting it from the local restaurants, so nothing bad could happen with a little self-indulgence, right? Just about everyone has learned not to trust the food at a giant feast in Deerington, but short of the lunch and dinner menus at the diner, the restaurants and the grocery store have never done a Sleeper harm! At least, that's the way it's always been before. Two years is long enough to start taking things for granted.

Anyone who has any of the specials from the restaurants or who cooks any kind of pork related product at home will find that once they have finished their meal, they will slowly turn into... pigs. It seems to vary on how fast a single person turns, some moving slowly over the course of days while they eat more and more food, and others will turn into a full blown pig in a manner of minutes. At first you can still talk to others and display your usual personality in pig form, but the longer you stay a pig, the more boarish you'll become.

So how do you break the curse? Locals say there's a magic stream up on the mountain that will stop these kinds of enchantments, but you can't go alone. Someone will have to carry you up and sing to you while you drink. It might be a friend or a lover or a complete stranger, but whoever you can nudge into it will have to physically carry you in their arms up the side of the mountain looking for this stream. It can take a while— the walk is fairly long, a few hours at best, but you'll know it when you find it. The stream sparkles unnaturally in the sunlight and it seems like none of the animals are willing to drink from it's unnaturally cold waters. The moment you take a long sip while your companion sings whatever song pops into their head, you'll turn back into a human. Hopefully your clothes turn back with you.

If your character does not eat meat/pork, then they'll be safe from this event!

GOOD ENDURES

Mirror mirror on the wall...

The pork doesn't seem to be the only enchanted object around Deerington this month. There are several of them cropping up all over the place and each one has a different outcome for those unfortunate enough to run into them.

Spinning wheels seem to be in the most random of places. Some of them will even just appear in your house. Sometimes multiple spinning wheels show up. Anyone who gets to close will have the strong urge to prick their finger on the spindle, the needle very easily cutting the tip and making you bleed more than you might have expected. Hopefully you have a first aid kit around.

Anyone who pricks their finger will find that they are forced to follow the next person they see around everywhere. They'll follow them to work, to school, to the bathroom, to the kitchen, even to bed. It doesn't matter if it's someone you've never spoken to in your life, you will follow them like a lost duckling every hour of every day. It's enough to drive anyone bonkers.

Mirrors will also suddenly be being displayed in every home and every shop, even if you never had them before. It doesn't matter whether or not you have a reflection, any person who looks into the mirror will find that they are forced to imitate the next person they make eye contact with. This can be their personality, their posture, the way they speak, their basic movements— you'll start to become a total mirror image. If it goes on too long, you might even start to find the two of you start to look more and more alike...

Apples start to pop up in all the stores as well as in your fridges. They're bright red and look so delicious, you can't resist taking a bite. Even if you don't like apples or are normally allergic to them, you'll want to eat these, and you'll find they taste delicious and don't bring harm to anyone. At least... not at first.

A few hours after eating the apple, you'll start to notice differences in your appearance. Your hair has start to thin and become gray and limp, your skin is wrinkled and covered in spots, your hands become frail and shaky. You're aging, and rapidly at that. Before you know it, you've turned into a hideous hag, one that would frighten children in any fairy tale book. But how do you reverse it?

The cure for all three enchantments is to tell three facts about yourself. Even just introducing yourself will show improvement if it's to someone who never knew your name before. Those who ate the apples will have to seek someone out, but anyone who pricked their finger or looked in a mirror will specifically have to confess these three facts to the person they're enchanted to follow/imitate. Once three facts have been shared, you'll be able to leave, return to normal, and age back to your regular self.

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.

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Eugh. [ robin makes a face into the phone. ]

Where are you, anyway? Now that half the town knows I've been trying to track you down.

was he wearing a sailor suit? or being followed around by a few nerdy children?

[ aw, that's kinda funny! robin grins. ]

yeah! i'm looking for my dear friend leeve sharrington

you know him?

And what was the catch?

Well, Barry, I have to assume there's a lot of things here you haven't done.

( He has to assume. Though, he does seem oddly at home in this town all ready. But, that's Barry. He could make himself comfortable anywhere. )

To travelling? There wasn't one.

[Interesting. The way he describes this Fade, it sounds like a different plane of existence. His description implies one can either enter this place physically or in dreams, which sounds like magic of a sort Tina's never encountered before. She wonders if this man was previously in this Fade.]

Interesting. I wonder if this could be connected to that Fade, somehow? Maybe a different part of it?

[Deerington could be all manner of things, she realizes. All she knows for certain is that it is far more than just a mere town.]

I believe so. That's what I've been told. But it feels more real than any dream I've ever experienced.

[She returns his smile with a polite one of her own, though that smile turns into one of pleasant surprise when he calls her Lady Goldstein. No one's ever called her that before, and, she has to admit, it feels rather nice.

Still, she waves her hand.]

That's kind of you but you can call me Tina. It's nice to meet you Sen Lavellan. Have you been here long?

Was it the landing, that was so strange.

No one would appreciate falling, I shouldn't think.

For some reason, the first thing that struck her was the 'madam' part. Wasn't that usually reserved for old women? Or the keepers of brothels? Ariadne didn't think she gave off the appearance of either. But given the state of unrest of her mind, ever since arriving in this strange place, it just struck her as odd.

It took another second to remind herself that it was odd, but unimportant.

"Yes," she said, a little winded and off balance. "Don't touch the...spinning pokey things?" A pause. "We call them spinning wheels, back home."

And they were certainly common, even if Ariadne couldn't spin to save her life.

She took a moment to compose herself, trying to analyze the man's scent. He looked Human enough, but there was something of an Elf in his aroma. That tinge of ozone that always lingered in the air, when the other girls at missionary school were practicing their spells and making fun of Ariadne, because she had no magic to speak of. She didn't really know what to make of him and probably stared a bit harder than was polite.

She hadn't yet realized that she was in the wrong form. Skin green as the underside of a maple leaf, hair blue like candy floss. Otherwise, she would have known to be more afraid.

Oh, have you got a wild ride ahead of you if you think everything about reality is rational. [ he points with the bitten off end of the red vine, brows arching. ] This is my second time away from the, uh, the world I know. The dreaming thing's a new angle, though.

[ he glances around at the diner, then out one of the large windows at the town beyond. ]

.. I thought it was the astral plane at first. Sometimes it can be.. weird.. [ especially when it's one of david's constructs there. his mind is.. an unusual place to be. ] But it, uh, seems to be.. separate. And things aren't working like they should.

Hold up, where are you getting the burritos from?

[ and why doesn't she know about it already? ]

Oh no, I threaten to shoot him at least once a week. He's just an asshole.

While it may not have been out an outright war, it was a war none the less. At least that was the way that Ashe saw it. Her views may have been jaded by years of taking control of gang warfare in her neck of the world, but she couldn't view it any other way. It may have been more subtle but there were a couple of facts in Deerington that she was sure of. One was that every month, they faced some sort of attack from the townspeople, Sodder, or the world itself. The second was that the townspeople wanted them gone and were willing to go to extreme measure to try and do it. Yet despite these two things, getting people to take the offensive had been extremely challenging.

When Hanzo states so simply the solution that seems obvious, a smile grows on her face. "Yeah, that would make a lot of sense, wouldn't it?" She skirts around another spinning wheel as they step out into the street. It's not that busy downtown at that particular moment, but it's always wise to exercise some caution. "Convincin' people of that though is another matter, but I'm workin' on it." The ways she was doing that she wasn't ready to divulge so easily, but with the one statement, he'd already proven he was far more interesting than a majority of the people in this town and it wasn't going to require a spinning wheel to want to stay in his presence a while longer.

I don't follow.

To land you have to be airborne. Falling isn't a pleasant way to land. A little bumpy.

[ It doesn't take a telepath to know that the man he's come upon along the trail is in distress. The fact that he is doesn't seem to be proving a particularly good aid for him in the present moment. Wave after wave, almost nauseating in intensity. So much that he's having some difficulty focusing through it.

If the surface emotions and thoughts of the man are so turbulent he has no desire at all to delve deeper. Charles finds himself nearly ready to move along on his own with no other issuances but a word strikes him in the cacophony of turmoil: Sunseeker. He pulls in a ragged breath and covers it with a clear of his throat, patting the pig's side with a nod. ]

Of course, thank you. Oh, he's a---[ Person. He finishes quietly to himself as Charles starts up again to go past the other man. A frown turns down the corners of his mouth and he turns. ]

I never gave you my name.

[ It could be a lucky guess perhaps. A turn of phrase? Or just Charles' own stubborn optimism to see the very best in people. Erik can hardly stand it. ]

She's far more used to being the giver of that sort of tone rather than on the receiving end. Chloe's trying her damnedest to make this less weird by figuring out how to get her feet to move in the opposite direction, to make herself walk away rather than hover around. It doesn't seem to be working though and she's slowly resigning herself to being awkwardly stuck here.

"You don't see a lot of them around here. Small town Maine is super against high quality body art, I guess. They think it's all like criminals and sailors or something. Talk about backwards thinking." Says the girl who is very much a criminal with a full sleeve tattoo, but that's beside the point. She's just rambling to fill silent space here.

"Are you new?" A beat. "I'm not some weird welcome wagon. Promise."

I suppose reality can simply be what one makes it to be. [ He'd written about a great many mutations in his thesis. The possibility of one able to warp the very fabric of reality had not come to mind. Would that not seem as if it were magic to the uneducated? Hm.

While the pig snuffles around at the new surroundings, Charles takes the moment to gather the clothes. Useless for the moment, but he imagines this townsperson will want them back once he is returned to himself. ]

Astral travel, you've done it? [ Asked with unabashed curiosity. ] You talk of an irrational reality as though you have personal experience.

[ While they talk he'll just deposit the clothes and shoes into the booth he was sitting at. He'll work out something better later. ]

If you heard it was some kind of spell, possibly. Did anyone mention how one might go about undoing it? I don't believe anyone would wish to stay trapped like this.

Is it your plane that fell?

Is there something else?

( an angel but that's not public knowledge )

That's.. truer than you'd think.. [ considering his experiences with his own abilities, nevermind this place.

he finishes off the red vine, then crouches by the newly-made pig. ] We'll get you sorted. [ apparently charles has been voluntold to help, rip charles. ] Just sit, uh.. sit there for a few minutes. [ he ignores the piggy stinkeye he's receiving, straightening up again and glancing toward the other man as he speaks again. ]

Something-something a magic stream up the mountain? [ he scrubs a hand through his hair with a sigh, because he's. really not looking forward to carrying a pig around, but..

anyway, going back to the astral travel: ] I spend a lot of time on the astral plane, actually. I like.. making stuff. Safer to do it there than in the real world. And it doesn't have to be so noisy there. [ a beat. ] You're familiar with it?

[ Wynonna's never asked too many questions about where the items that wind up in this thrift shop officially come from, but also because she tends to get conflicty answers every time she tries fishing for more deets from the people who happen to work here. At most, she'll get a shrug and a noncommittal response, and eventually she's just given up in terms of trying to nail down anything resembling a legit answer.

Her first reaction to being on the receiving end of a smile is to offer a somewhat startled grin back — but hey, it's not like she's going to say no to kindness when it happens, especially since the default look earned from any townsperson tends to lean more towards vaguely hostile. ]

Just means we're on the right side of history. [ Oh, she'd have a story or two to tell Buffy about vampires, although chances are her brand doesn't come with their own sexy pink fog in tow. ] And who doesn't like the worn-in look? Call it natural distressing.

Virgo the virgin, (she says it in a sing song voice, bobbing her shoulders as she says it.) What else, Bella? Where you from? I probably never heard of it.

No sailor suit, but nerdy children galore.

Yeah, it's - a long story.

[Seat cleared off, he stands back up with his hand on the door before moving himself out of the way to let her get in. Maybe it's habit, maybe it's stupid of him, but he waits to close the door for her afterward - like a good ol' driver - before moving around to the driver's seat. He's more or less on auto pilot until he's in said seat, keys in the ignition, swallowing hard before shooting her a sidelong glance.]

We don't have to get into it, but - I needed a job, and an income back home. This was the... best way to go about it.

[The dash lights up with his ID; reading James Howlett next to his photo.]

Would still prefer the bike, for what it matters.

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APRIL 2020 TEST DRIVE MEME

APRIL 2020 TEST DRIVE MEME

YOU UNCULTURED SWINE

GOOD ENDURES

Character Arrival

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