soddersays | AUGUST 2020 TEST DRIVE MEME

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AUGUST 2020 TEST DRIVE MEME

Welcome to August's Test Drive Meme! This month's Test Drive's theme is: CRYPTID 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: Violent animals, ghosts, hallucinations
Don't forget to tag content whenever necessary. Have fun!

Prompt One
Prompt Two
Character Arrival
Master Navigation

ARE YOU AFRAID OF THE DARK?

Everyone loves s'mores, right? Of course you do. If you've never had them, you're gonna love them, and if for some reason you hate them, well, as it usually goes in Deerington, something inside of you will nag at you about how maybe you ought to give them another chance. There's a variety of different kinds of s'more flavors to try and plenty of perfect campfires to roast your marshmallows over. There's promise of wholesome and innocent fun to be had! Surely that won't be a lie this time.

Everyone who gathers around the fire for some tasty treats will find themselves in the mood to share creepy stories from their home worlds. Maybe they make one up on the spot or maybe it's an ancient legend that was passed down through the ages. Regardless, there's gonna be a whole variety of spooky stories, and the flavor s'more you're eating seems to dictate the theme that you'll end up leaning towards.

🔥 Traditional S'Mores will have people wanting to tell classic ghost stories. Maybe it's a haunted house you ended up in or a spirit who possessed the friend of the brother of this guy from your town once. The main theme here will be ghosts of all varieties.

🔥 Peanut Butter & Chocolate S'Mores will have people wanting to tell slasher stories. A famous serial killer from home, maybe, or the story about a group of kids who went up into a cabin in the mountains where there was once said to be a creepy caretaker and they were never heard from again...

🔥 Chocolate Chip Cookie S'Mores will have people wanting to tell monster stories. Local legends, maybe, or the classic stories about werewolves, vampires, and Bigfoot. Any kind of monsters will do.

🔥 Salted Caramel S'Mores will inspire people to tell revenge stories. These could be legendary warnings that exemplify why vengeance always leads to digging two graves. Or maybe it's your own story of revenge from home— or the fantasy revenge you'd like to get someday.

🔥 Nutella S'Mores will have people wanting to tell personal horror stories. These stories are ones that hit extremely close to home. The scariest, most bone-chilling memory you have, no matter how silly or serious it may be in comparison to those around you. Hopefully most people aren't fans of chocolate hazelnut?

Regardless of which story you hear, anyone gathered around the campfire will listen intently to all words spoken, and they will find themselves believing every word. On your walk home, you'll be filled with a sense of paranoia and dread, seeing things move out of the corner of your eye that may or may not be there. Is that a man with a hook for a hand or is your imagination just playing tricks on you? It's certainly hard to tell.

These can stay as harmless hallucinations, but for those who end up stuck in the paranoia for too long without being talked down, they will slowly start to become real. Eventually, they can become solid enough for other people to start seeing them, and the creatures from your mind may even start to attack. They can be defeated with normal weaponry or by the power of positive thinking! Wish your attacker away with enough conviction, and poof! They'll be gone.

Let's hope you can do it before you end up the victim for the next slasher story someone tells.

AHHH! REAL MONSTERS

It seems that the monsters from these stories aren't the only ones popping up in Deerington, though. There's talk from locals of multiple sightings of classic Maine legends all over town. They're easy to ignore as the townsfolk just being easily spooked for a while. But when enough stories start to line up, you might start to think maybe there's some truth to them. Or maybe you'll even end up seeing one of the monsters for yourself.

Down in Lake Tomoei, the legendary Cassie can sometimes be spotted peaking up from the water, or trying to attack anyone who even tries to go near the lakes shores. She's a nasty beast with one hell of a temper and she's quite possessive of the lake she's found herself in. 100 feet long with a skinny neck and a fish like tale, she definitely seems like a force to be reckoned with. Cassie is easily injured by ordinary weapons, but her skin is thick, so it will take a while to draw blood. Most likely, she'll disappear into the depths of the lake before she can be killed.

Up in the mountains, there's talk of the ancient evil Pamola. Penobscot legend describes him as half-man, half-eagle, with the head of a moose and a temper to match one. Pamola can't stand people visiting his mountain, even for a casual hike, and will often try to deter people away with random and unpredictable storms; thunder, snow, and powerful winds will beat down on whoever goes looking for Pamola. If you manage to find him, he will show no mercy when he attacks. Most who have tried to find him have been killed and eaten by the evil spirit. Because he's an ancient spirit, he will be particularly hard to defeat if you manage to find him; he can not be killed, but you can offer a sacrifice to quell his anger. If you have magical powers that can hurt deities, these will still be effective in weakening him until he retreats.

The final creature that seems to be wandering about is the Specter Moose (pictured above). This moose is thirteen feet tall, with thirteen foot wide antlers, and is a blinding white color. The moose can be found wandering in the park, usually, but sometimes it comes out to look around town. He may seem harmless, even cute, but don't get to close; moose are dangerous and locals fear them for a reason. They can charge at the drop of a hat and not even large vehicles tend to survive an encounter with a creature that big. The Specter Moose also seems to be incapable of being injured by normal weapons; solid objects mostly go right through it, unless it's purposefully aiming for them. You'll either have to get a shot in while he's slamming into something (or someone) or just run. Anyone who has magic or weapons that can hurt spiritual beings will be able to fight the Specter Moose as they normally would.

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 doesn't... want to? But he should. It's Tim. God, it's Tim, and he's should be ecstatic! Tim, alive and whole, and eating marshmallows. That's exciting. That should be exciting. He'll have the chance to talk to Tim again. To laugh with him again. To do anything that isn't being trapped together in a godforsaken archive of evil.

Martin sits, his whole body sort of sagging as he does so. "Sorry. It is good to see you. Just... I'm tired, you know? Probably just means I need more sugar, right?" He's trying. He'll try for Tim.

"The answer is always more sugar, isn't it? Don't know if the answer is this sugar, but." Tim shrugs a little bit, giving Martin a bit of a look as he sinks down. He's not sure if it's good that Martin's taking this in stride, really, that seeing one of your coworkers and friends back from the dead doesn't seem to phase him very much.

That's fucked up, right?

He puts the marshmallows between them, open so they can both steal from the bag at their leisure. "This a bad time for a catch up? Think I missed out a bit. Or we can sit here and eat junk food like teenagers and pretend like it's not definitely weird."

Martin takes one of the marshmallows and just stares at it where it's sitting in his hand for a long, awkward moment. Perk up. Say something. Say anything.

"Mm? No, it's fine." He used to be... not great at this, but at least better. Martin takes a deep breath and just holds onto the sweet without eating it. Or maybe he's supposed to roast it? The level of effort involved in that seems daunting.

"What's the last thing you remember? Before the deer, I mean."

There's a whole reason that Tim's not going anywhere near the fire, and it's entirely related to hearing bits and pieces of people ghost stories from a distance. It feels too much like Statements. Nothing feels like Elias and Jon and the Institute, but that doesn't mean that this place doesn't also have the same consuming, all-knowing gaze.

"The Unknowing," he says. Well, that's not the last thing. The last thing is the shrill pain after clicking the detonator, the moment of the explosion, and then--then nothing.

But it gets the point across.

So, dying. Great. Right.

"That's..." Well. Might as well be honest? "That's absolute rubbish. Sorry. I guess... have you seen any of the others here? There's Jon... Sasha. Gerard Keay, too. And Elias." Maybe not if Tim's not in a frothing rage or more of a mess? "You, um... you're not going to recognize Sasha. She doesn't look like... you know?"

The thing that definitely wasn't Sasha that they all thought was. Except Elias.

"You're the first," Tim says, and that's? Not a fantastic line up, with a name that's only familiar from a statement or two, and two people he doesn't really want to see, and--

He blinks. He puts a marshmallow in his mouth and chews thoughtfully.

"You mean you didn't recognize her," Tim says after a careful bit of thought. How did you approach that sort of thing? Knowing the change that had happened, but only after notSasha was gone, and after he himself was dead?

"But she's...Sasha, right? Not not Sasha? We're sure about that?"

"Yeah. I mean... mostly? Pretty sure at this point. Jon got into her head when he first arrived because of this... orb thing out in the forest." It was a whole thing. "He got some of her memories shoved into his head and she got his. And then She showed me some memories that I had too when there was this labyrinth. It was the Christmas party the first year we all started in the Archives.

"She also hasn't tried to kill us, yet. So that's... something." He quirks a wry smile before going back to staring at the marshmallow. "Jon's dead right now. He's supposed to come back. Might be a few more days." He tries to say it casually, but has to bite his lip for a moment.

Tim manages to drop the Sasha bit for the moment, in the wake of the latter bit. He puffs out a breath that feels absolutely catastrophic for a moment, and when he touches Martin, a brief, casual thing, it's not enough.

It's never enough.

"Christ, Martin, I--" He wants to pull him close and just hold him, a commiseration of friendly knowledge of the suffering and loss. But they hadn't done that after losing Sasha, so why would they do that now? So he only touches him, fingers slow up Martin's arm to his shoulder, gripping him gently.

"I don't think a few days makes it better."

Martin presses his lips firmly together and reaches toward the nothing, the lack of feeling that will let him deal with this sensibly. Tim's just arrived from being dead. He doesn't need this on top of that. The cold fog is like a familiar blanket in a way. His own hand reaches up and gently pats Tim's.

"Not really, but it's... what it is. You're alive here. That's good. You should talk to Sasha. I'm sure she'd be excited to see you."

Tim watches Martin shut down in a very visceral way, in a way that he hasn't seen, but that he knows, because he's familiar with his own depression, with the haunting anxiety and misery of loss, the grief of loss and pretending that everything was fine. He lived with that for years after Danny.

"Don't do that," he says, quiet and understanding. He moves the marshmallows and gets closer to Martin, slinging an arm over his shoulders to haul him close.

"We can talk about Sasha and me and all that in a minute, yeah?"

Martin draws in a sharp breath at the touch. In his head, he's screaming at himself to be less obvious. He's lied before he can lie. It's not even that hard. But he just can't bring himself to put on a brave face right now.

"I can show you where he died. He's on a loop. I've been watching it happen. I thought maybe I could break him out of it, you know? It's why I was bringing him tea. I thought it could help him... maybe put his-his spirit to rest.

"It's pretty stupid." And incredibly unhealthy, but that's another matter.

"Jesus, Martin," Tim breathes, and he knows, he understands, the misery of it all. Loss and grief are miserable things to deal with, and even if you have someone, something, telling you that it will work out, it doesn't make it easier. And to have something like that, an external reminder, an echo or apparition?

He kept him close, just held onto him, and ached along with him. At no point, even in all his rage and frustration and upset with Jon had he wanted something to befall him. Not really.

"You probably shouldn't do that," he says, but it's not said with malice or judgment that Martin has been. And, with a smile that is quiet and knowing, he says, "I don't think ghosts drink tea, anyway. You might want to save that for when he...he comes back?"

They're in public, so Martin won't let himself have a full-on breakdown, but it takes him a moment to reply as his chest hitches, and he has to fight down the urge to either sob or just get up, walk away into the forest and blow the whistle that hangs heavy around his neck to call the Lonely's fog to him. Or whatever approximation of it Deerington can manage. As it stands, he leans into Tim at last. Trying to take some comfort.

"Yeah. I-I don't know what else to do. He was gone for a long time after the Unknowing. Coma. The doctors said he should be dead and didn't think he'd ever wake up. I... said my goodbyes. But then he came back, and I just... I didn't get to say goodbye. To him. I-I never said goodbye to you, either. Your family didn't invite me to the funeral. I'm sorry. I'm really sorry.

"I get that," Tim says, because he does. The amount of ridiculous shit he did because of losing Danny was practically innumerable, and that was a sibling, so it's a different sort of love. And--well, there's all the pain and frustration he never had a moment to process when it came to Sasha, either.

But they're not talking about him. It's about Martin right now. And hearing it, Christ, like that? He wraps his other around him and just holds onto him for a second.

"We can pour one out together," he says after a second, a quiet thing that does nothing to solve that Martin so obviously feels genuinely bad about the situation. But was there even a funeral? Who would have even told what remained of his family, a scattered, disjointed mess of relatives that didn't really keep in contact; he hadn't spoken to most of them since Danny died. "Don't be sorry, Martin."

"I'd rather be sorry than not-"

He falls quiet, cutting himself off.

"There are worse things than feeling bad." Not feeling anything at all. "God, I'm being so... I-I don't want to be here. Can we- I have whiskey back at the house."

Tim waits to see if Martin's going to finish that thought, and when he doesn't, he avoid the compunction to pry. Instead, there's the offer of somewhere homey, and of alcohol, and Tim's a sucker. He smiles and nods, giving Martin one last squeeze across the shoulders.

"Lead the way," he says. "It's getting a little weird out here, anyway."

Martin rises to lead them off to Blackwood Run, wondering where Tim might have got put down by Sodder for housing. He walks quietly, listening closely for the sounds of anything that might want to kill them. This place is dangerous. If it's not the murderous robot bears or the poisonous weed-killer in the air, it's probably going to be orcs or evil fairies or alligators in the bloody sewers.

"When did you get here? Just today?"

Tim nods, keeping up with Martin easily enough and watching the cautious, nervous way that he moves through the camping woods and back into town, and even through town as well. For his part, Tim is fleet foot but not exactly foolhardy. He doesn't know where he's going, so there's no sense getting ahead, even if his natural confidence (and need to appear confident) has the better of him.

"It's weird, right?" He shrugs. "Well, of course it is. I--I'm aware of death, the becoming of being dead, but not...any of the rest of it. And then there was the fuck off deer, waking up here, all of that. So it's just...it's weird, you know?"

He doesn't want to talk about being dead, because there's nothing to say. Maybe it's his own agnosticism at work, but who really knows. Maybe tonight's not the night for some sort of religious existentialism.

"So I spent most of the day looking for the edges of everything. Trying to figure out how to get the best way out and get back to England, as if I could."

"Yeah, I don't think there's any way home apart from... waking up." And even then, what's Tim going to wake up to? A corpse? It leaves Martin feeling colder again, wondering at the possibility that they really all are just figments. How else could Sasha and Tim be here when they're from years ago?

"I think the Forest turns you around, though. I haven't found an edge apart from when this dome came down on us. But I've never actually found, like... the next town over? Any sign that there's a world past Deerington. It's truly the middle of nowhere."

"Felt like it," Tim says with a nod. "I never felt like I was getting anywhere, and then I'd be back. Which isn't a fantastic feeling after everything."

After The Unknowning, and Grimaldi, and everything uncanny and untrustful that had happened in Yarmouth. He doesn't like the idea of this place turning him around, but at least it's gentler than the horrors of twisting, unknowable hallways and raucous, friend-wearing strangers speaking with voices that aren't quite right at all.

"There's got to be something though, right?" Tim shrugs. "It's not like every house has a little garden plot in it, we're not sustaining ourselves. There's shops. So there's somewhere else besides this. Just...something keeping us in, or keeping us out. Both."

He gives Martin a tiny smile and a bit of a nudge. "But once Jon's back, on the mend, that's the gang back together, isn't it? Except, Christ, I hope you've got him better behaved than he was."

"It's all a dream, Tim. I think... maybe things just come because people expect them to?" Which is a terrifying thought, but he's worn out on existential crises for the moment. They arrive at the townhouse, and Martin lets them in with the key.

Sasha's not in because it's deathly quiet. That's... fine. He tries to muster a smile for Tim's teasing, as well, but it's half-hearted.

"Define 'better.' Do you want ice?"

Either way, he's heading to a cabinet in the kitchen that most people would need a step stool to reach.

"Not stalking his coworkers like a paranoid psycho? Talking to people more than he used to? Literally any improvement I might take at this point, you know how he was before The Unknowing. None in mine."

Tim doesn't know how he feels about thinking about it like a dream. If it's a dream, and he knows it, he should be able to do something about it, right? Wake himself up. Influence it in some way. Make people's clothes change color.

Martin is still wearing a Hawaiian shirt, though, so is it really a dream?

Down comes the bottle of whiskey and a pair of glasses. Martin pours a generous three fingers in each before bringing one over to Tim.

"He was better. Is." Was. "He... he's really changed, Tim. I mean, he's still an annoying little prick sometimes, but he- He cares about people. A lot. And he tries to show it. He's just not very good at it.

"I've changed too. Probably for the better." A faint smile. "Toughened up a bit, I promise."

"I never doubted you were tough, Martin," Tim says with a fond, equally faint smile. He looks at that generous pour of whiskey and makes a pleased noise as he takes it with a little lift of the glass in cheers.

"And I think he's always...cared, in a weird way. In his weird way. If he didn't, he wouldn't have done half the stupid stuff he does. But I'm glad he's better at not showing that through paranoid stalking, at least."

"Mm..." Martin lifts his glass a little, glancing off to the side. Tim is being nice, which is... so incredibly different from how he remembers things being toward the end. He'd been so bitter and angry. Dying really does change things.

Finally avenging his little brother, as well.

"Yeah. He has always cared. I just... I wish he'd care about himself, too."

AUGUST 2020 TEST DRIVE MEME

ARE YOU AFRAID OF THE DARK?

AHHH! REAL MONSTERS

Character Arrival

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