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

"That doesn't actually answer the question, Jon," Tim points out. Is it an illusion (miles and hours and the very fabric of reality warping and twisting in tunnels, and people's faces and voices conceived of as something strange and other), or something done chemically? How is it only temporary? Does it hurt?

He looks at the knuckles of the hand he'd punched Jon with, how much lighter the blossoming bruises are than they should be. He doesn't want to think about it.

Tim sips his drink. "Was this a strange month or a bad month?"

Jon looks exasperated, at that. "I'm afraid it's just Deerington is going to be a common answer. The things that happen here defy explanation. It's... not of any one Entity that I've yet determined? All their influences can be felt here, but the delineations aren't always clear."

At the question, though, he answers without hesitation: "Bad."

That just... hangs there.

Tim rolls his eyes, a matching exasperation to Jon's, because that might be an answer, but it isn't an explanation. And he doesn't really feel like playing a game of semantics right now, when Jon is bleeding not-quite-humanly.

But he doesn't fight on it. Not right now. Not when Jon keeps going, the casual talk of the Entities and how they all just sort of merge together. Shouldn't they, though? Before the Institute and the knowledge of the Entities, Tim never really thought of those things as distinct, unless he was talking to someone about a specific fear. Instead, it was just fear as fear itself, until it was something specific.

But that's it. He takes another sip, then gestures with his glass. "You ready to fill me in on what I've missed? We can just do the Deerington stuff, even. For now."

He grimaces and takes a long sip of his terrible gin drink.

"That will take longer. It's— it's been a very bad month."

And Tim has started them here: at the idea that there's non-Deerington information to fill him in on. The very premise of the thing hurts. The understanding that Tim didn't make it out, but Jon, without even a scratch evident on him, did.

He inspects his drink.

"To begin with... It worked. The whole Circus was destroyed."

"Well, that's something," Tim says. And he has to have expected it, since Jon's sitting across from him, looking surprised to have seen him, which means that Jon was expecting not to have. Which means that it wasn't just a pain, a fracturing, horrible discomfort and then nothingness--that's really what death feels like, at the end.

Tim hopes, way down low, Danny couldn't feel anything at the end. He can't imagine the agony of Grimaldi torturing him.

"With all that plastic explosive, I should hope it did." He stares at the ice shifting in his glass. And then, in a small way, Tim says, "Thank you. You pulled me out of it enough that I knew what was happening at the end, mostly. Did Daisy and Basira make it?"

He startles at the thank you, looks up, blinking with an expression that is painfully open. He's at a loss for what to say back; is left fumbling for a moment, then finally fidgets with his drink.

"I... yeah. Both of them. Eventually." He gives a wry little half-smile at that, tired. "Basira found her way out before the explosion. Daisy... they'd trapped her in the coffin. Um— from the Statement of Joshua Gillespie, the one chained shut. I... went into it and got her out. After."

It is clear from the absolute intensity with which he inspects his drink, and the tight set of his mouth, how pleasant a story that is.

Tim knows a look of avoidance when he sees them, and Jon is an expert at that look. It's become even more intense than the last time he saw it, which doesn't bode well. Tim doesn't know what to do with the weight of that. They knew things weren't going to be better, because things hadn't been easy in months, but shouldn't they have been easier at least with the ritual taken care of?

"Take a drink," he recommends. He tried to pick through his own muddled, fuzzy memory of The Unknowing, but most of it was the stark terror and disorientation of it, a different sort of twisted and twisting than being in the tunnels and hallways of the Spiral.

"I didn't even realize it was there. Surprised it didn't get blown up, too."

He blinks up at Tim, frowning, looking for some jab in that. When he finds none, he is left off-balance for a moment. Finally he takes up the drink just to have something to do, something to fidget with.

"Yes, well." He gives an ambivalent little half-shrug, wry. If only. But then they wouldn't have had a way to get Daisy back, and she would have... been there, forever. The idea makes his skin crawl. "It led directly into the Buried. The fear of... being buried alive, trapped in tight quarters, not able to—"

He abruptly finds that he can't finish the sentence, which is idiotic; he's not looking for sympathy; the Unknowing was just as bad, in its way. A different breed of fear, all bright reeling panic instead of the slow crush of despair. Jon breaks off with a hard little breath and glares at his gin. He takes a long drink and winces at the burn.

"She was there for months. You can't die, in there. It won't let you."

He sets down the glass again and continues to inspect the fizz of carbonation as though it is very interesting.

"But we made it out. It helped her, actually. She, uh... she left the Hunt, for a while." But not at the end. It all went wrong at the end. Basira still hadn't found her, last they'd heard. She was still looking.

Tim has this moment, as he's had so many times in the weeks, the months, leading up to the end. It didn't start with Jon storming Elias's office to confront him about Leitner and Gertrude's deaths, or with Martin talking to him about The Unknowing like he'd been in the loop the whole time. It's a moment where he's just still and aware of the wedge that he made, and that the Institute made between them.

That's part of it, isn't it? Things got ugly, and Tim pulled back so far that no one knew where to find him, so of course they didn't tell him what was going on. So he's read, and run research, on some of those freaky hunters. But the way that Jon talks about The Hunt, and Daisy; that's different, the existential weight of it a feeling in the back of Tim's throat.

"Must've been hard," he finally says, thinking of her, the rigid set of her jaw, the fire in her eyes, the look of hungry rage when Elias cornered them into Basira's contract. No, he can see it now, in retrospect. "For her, I mean. I mean, it's not like she was a monster."

His hand goes tight on his glass. He is staring into the depths of his drink, gaze gone distant, not seeing much of anything. He is abruptly not sure he can do this at all. He is abruptly not sure why he's even trying.

"It was." He sounds bitter. He is bitter. At Tim, at himself, at everything. At the absolute appalling mess he made of this, and at knowing that he can't make it better, because he chose this. "She turned away from it, even though it was killing her to do it. She chose not to be a monster."

Up until the end. Up until she had to save them, and submitted to it. Fine; he'll get this over with, then.

"I was in a coma," he says, like it's that simple, like he wasn't dead in a hospital bed, heart gone still. "For six months. And then I got up again. So I suppose it's clear what I chose."

Edited 2020-07-30 04:41 (UTC)

Tim shakes his head. None of that--no. But how does he say what he wants to, what he means to, in a way that means anything at all, when he's always been on the outside of everything and not touched in the same way that Jon, or Daisy, or even Melanie were? It's hard to find the ways to put the words down, and he hates that.

"Making a choice to do something that kills you, and making a choice to do something that drags you away from death--all that's not the same thing as being turned into a monster. Or choosing to be a monster from the beginning."

For a moment, he's still and quiet, thoughtful, trying to complete his thought on the matter. After a minute, he throws back a couple of heavy swallows of his drink, like that will help, except all it does it make him reset to saying, "Blowing myself up made me introspective. We can talk about this place instead, if that's any easier."

It's so much more than he expected, and Jon looks up, surprise written open and honest across his face. He— Tim doesn't know what he is, now, doesn't know what he can do. Tim hasn't seen the trial. Tim doesn't know he can shred a person's mind and like it.

It's still... a nice sentiment, even if it's unearned. Even if it might crumble later. Jon drinks his gin. At that last bit, he gives a wry little huff of a laugh, without much humor in it.

"It's really not."

The trial. The things he's done this month alone. But... well, they can start with the basics.

"Martin is here. He came in when I did. We, uh—" And god, why not, a bit of levity. Sasha seemed to enjoy it. Jon goes a little embarrassed, a little transparently pleased. "We're dating, actually?"

"Christ, finally."

He tries to remember if they'd ever actually gotten that betting pool going, not that it would matter here, but it might be fun to figure out the timing and if any of them were even remotely close to getting it right.

"You say that with a little uncertainty, so I guess I'll confirm with Martin, but I think he thinks you've been dating since he had to live in the Archives, so, you know." He shrugs one shoulder. "Cheer, at least not everything is a disaster."

He blinks, dumbfounded and reflexively indignant. Then some of the tension goes out of his shoulders, and he huffs a little laugh.

"I'm very certain, just... surprised." Said no one but Jonathan Sims. "We've been together a few months now, largely in Deerington. Things became a bit," and here the warmth drops back out of his expression, "chaotic, back home."

But, right, they're discussing Deerington. The most pressing things. He'll hedge with the smaller bombshells, first.

"There are others here. Um, Gerard Keay." How much of that had Tim been clued in on, beyond the basics from old Statements? Difficult to remember; everything up to the Unknowing is a blur of stress and fear. "He was helping Gertrude Robinson track down the Unknowing, and he's been friendly, here."

Very friendly; he has been a source of Statements, and commiseration, and Jon is still stoutly not-remembering a flushed and grinning Gerry calling him cute over birthday drinks. He tries and fails not to inspect the remaining black polish on his nails, now flaked mostly away.

Tim scrubs his fingers into his hair for a moment. He knows of to Keays, Mary and Gerard, and her death, and their statements to do with her bookshop and the strange happenings there. Mostly his attachment to the Keays ended up being to do with the Leitner books and Robert Smirke and things like that more than anything.

"Didn't he die?" Tim asks. He is aware of the irony in that question, sitting her after blowing himself up. Obviously death doesn't matter in this place or their line of work, or something like that.

He has another little sip of his drink, looking for the words.

"Yes. He was bound to a Leitner, after, as a sort of... ghost. Like his mother." He grimaces with it. That Leitner is still in Deerington, presumably still in the keeping of someone who really should not have it. They'll have to deal with that sooner or later. "I was able to free him from it. Before the Unknowing. He should really just be dead."

Like Tim.

And this seems to be the best lead-in he'll get, so here Jon gulps the rest of his drink, wincing. Sets it down and lets the warm buzz start to settle in. He does not really think it will help.

"There is... a less simple case." He looks at Tim, finally. Meets his eyes. "It's Sasha— the real Sasha. She's here."

And he has never been so overjoyed and crushed at the same time, because he still cannot remember her.

Tim nods, just taking it on. The Leitner's are curious to him, intriguing, interesting in the same way that Smirke's architecture is, except he's never been foolish enough to pick through any of the ones they have in Artefact Storage. Not before they really got into any of the statements, and especially not after they started researching some of the gruesome ones.

From Jon's face, there's more there, but Tim doesn't pry about it. He'll get the answers as they come, even if they come in bits and pieces. He's not here for one of Jon's statements, after all.

But then--he's in the middle of a sip, and he chokes for a second, startled, sets his cup down. He just stares for a second. That isn't a funny joke, Jon.

"...you're sure?"

"I'm sure."

Said with utter conviction. Hesitates, here, because he doesn't suspect Tim will like it, but:

"I... confirmed it." By prying the truth out of her, just in case. "I Know that it's her."

He's watching Tim intently, and there's a sort of desperation in Jon's expression. He knows how this hurts. Not to the level of Tim— he's at least aware Tim and Sasha were close, if not not entirely sure how close— but to have her here and not know her feels like a terrible loss all over again.

It's not in the way that he says it so much as the way that he looks at him. Tim nearly tosses his drink at him, a rage in him that feels like every ounce of the months of nobody telling him anything while they all knew what was going on. It's still that. It's still some part of Tim being out of the loop.

But he isn't. There is a clarity in coming from nothing back into this. In sitting here across from a man that had to draw knowledge from someone when he simply knows. He can recall, once more, Sasha's laugh and smile and how she taps her fingers while she's working, the tuck of her hair behind her ear, all of the things that that thing never got right and that none of them noticed because that's how The Stranger works.

The anger, the frustration, chews at him because it always does, because he doesn't know what else to do. He's the first to look down.

"I'm getting another drink."

"R-right."

Jon breaks when Tim does, and fidgets with his empty glass. Is he meant to fetch them a second round? He supposes Tim will start giving orders, if so, and he'll... go along with it. He doesn't know how to repair this. He doesn't even know how not to make it worse.

There is so much he doesn't know how to say: all the little gifts and cruelties of Deerington. At least when Sasha had arrived, she'd been very quickly— brutally— brought up to speed. And Gerry didn't ask many questions, nor bat an eye at most of the answers. For all that they'd been silently hoping Tim might arrive, Jon hadn't exactly planned for this conversation.

Tim takes it upon himself, but doesn't offer to get Jon another one. He moves away from the table and over to the bar just so he can have a second to compose himself and process through the information, the knowledge. They're supposed to be talking about the Institute, anyway, and that means not talking about Deerington, because apparently that was easier.

It's all mangled up, like so many things get.

He gets himself fruity, and deeply alcoholic, and also a shot of tequila, and then a second shot of tequila, and says the put it on Jon's tab with a little gesture back at their table before he returns. When he sits again, he's a little less stormy about it.

"I don't want to talk about Sasha right now," he said, firm and flat.

Right. He can handle that. He's already resigned himself to however much of his money Tim is going to spend; it's not as though he makes much use of his researcher's paycheck, here. Watching Tim get blind drunk to tolerate his presence is... probably better than getting hit again. Probably better than watching him walk away.

"Alright." Stiffly, but he's trying to find a topic that is somehow less fraught. He... only has one remaining update on familiar faces, and if it's less of a bombshell than Sasha's presence, it's only because that set the bar rather high for surprises. "Well. Elias is also here, unfortunately. There have been... rather a lot of developments there."

A gentle understatement.

"Martin and Melanie got him arrested, after the Unknowing. He did actually go to prison." For a while.

"Are we still stuck with him?" Tim asks. It's an important sort of question, before he gets into the deep amusement that comes with knowing that the half-cocked, still-in-the-works plan that Martin was working on seems to have come into full fruition at some point between heading to Yarmouth and Jon getting up from his coma.

"Please tell me you're not still harping that he's doing some good and righteous mission looking out for us or something like that." He takes his second shot to wash the taste of it out of his mouth. "I already hit you once, and that wasn't to knock the sense into you."

"He got out again," Jon confirms. "And he's just as free in Deerington as you or I are."

At this last bit, though, he looks a bit taken aback. Had he really been— yes, of course he had.

"God, no. Not at this point." Not after what he did to Melanie. What Jon can only imagine he did to Martin. "We found the tape of him killing Gertrude Robinson. She'd been trying to burn down the Institute."

She'd been planning to quit. He— he needs to tell Tim about quitting, owes it to Tim. He'd wanted to tell Tim more than anyone, when he'd found out, but by then... it had been well after the Unknowing. It had been far too late.

"There's more besides that." Still no answers; still no true understanding of why. He'd ripped a man apart trying to Know, and Elias seems to regard that as no more than an impolite inconvenience. But: "Elias is Jonah Magnus. He's been jumping between bodies to keep himself alive, all this time, while his real body is deep below the Institute."

"But we already knew he'd done that," Tim says, half over what Jon's saying, because the news of the death isn't news at all, it's just the same information they've been hounding at for ages. They know that Elias is dangerous. Gertrude, Leitner--watching the manipulation of the contract with himself and Melanie, and the blackmail to get Daisy in play after Jon confronted him on those murders.

Jon might be an object of The Eye, twisting to its work, but Elias really is a monster of it, the way he works.

So he talks over the parts of it. Of course Gertrude was going to try and destroy the Institute (why else would she have had that much C-4, that they took only part of it with them to the House of Wax), and good riddance, too, as far as Tim is concerned. But Jon gets the words it, gets the knowledge out, and Tim's left with it.

He's not dumbfounded. He'd made a joke about it, what, years ago to Sasha after she got passed up for Jon becoming the chief archivist instead of her. Not directly, but sort of. Enough of it. None of them had known, then, had they? But maybe they had, in a sort of primordial way.

"The OG, Jack Magnet himself." It's not funny. Tim laughs anyway. He drinks. "Jumping between bodies, what the--what the fuck does that mean, Jon? Reincarnating or...or what?"

AUGUST 2020 TEST DRIVE MEME

ARE YOU AFRAID OF THE DARK?

AHHH! REAL MONSTERS

Character Arrival

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tagging this for TMA 159 spoilers just in case

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