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

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?"

He grimaces.

"Reincarnating sounds much too... clean. No, he..." This is very unpleasant when actually said aloud; he hadn't really had a chance to dwell on that, what with everything else, the whole rest of it. "He, uh, removes the eyes of a... host. And replaces them with his own. As best we can tell."

Tim was very still and very quiet for a moment. What a terrible way to put it, a host. There was no other way to put it though; body hopping and perpetual longevity and all that sort of thing, it wasn't so much transference as it was parasitism.

That's all the whole thing was. The holy terror of parasitism.

"I'm sorry, I thought you said he stole people's eyes." There wasn't enough alcohol in the world to deal with this. "And, what. Keeps them in a jar? Eats them? Did we not get to that point in the questioning?"

It's maybe slightly hysterical, even if Tim's trying to keep his voice calm and quiet and low.

"I didn't get a chance to ask."

It pitches a little high and desperate on Jon's part, too.

"He still isn't particularly forthcoming. He has some sort of, of grand plan for me, that's all we know. He's been playing games with— with other avatars. Martin got caught up in one. For a while."

"Of course he's not forthcoming, he hasn't been forthcoming since he made you the Archivist instead of Sasha," Tim snaps back. He can't help it in the face of something so absolutely asinine like that.

But to know that Martin got caught up in the middle of things just builds the rage in him even more. None of them deserve it, but it's cruel to do it to Martin, who got hunted by Prentiss and stuck in the Archive for so long, who had to go through those tunnels and hallways with him, who's had so much go against him.

"And you were in a coma, and then...what? Didn't step up? Where was everyone else?" Tim swallows more of his drink and frowns, surprised by ice and the bottom of his glass. "You think about that while I get another one."

Instead of Sasha. He'd wondered at the promotion, even back then. Had half-believed it was for a job well done in Research. For being more dedicated than the rest. Once he'd seen the state of the Archives, he'd genuinely believed he was the only person with a thorough enough investment in organization to handle the state of the place. He'd thought Elias was showing faith in him.

Now? Now he doesn't know. Especially after July, and seeing Ultimate Archivist printed neatly on Sasha's Fluid, identical to his own. After their fight.

He's wondered more than once, in July, how she would have done in his place. Would she have this many scars to show for it? This many losses?

Didn't step up makes him properly flinch, mouth and shoulders drawn tight. He is too busy aching at the thought of Martin in that office— flat-eyed and distant, with a cold little laugh— to put up an argument.

It's only when Tim returns with a new drink that he's rallied the explanation, flat and level as he can manage: "Once Elias was gone, the Institute went to Peter Lukas. An avatar of the Lonely. He made Martin his assistant."

"Well, that sounds exactly like Elias moving pieces, doesn't it?"

It's a petty dig. What else can he do, though? He was dead, unable to be there and help. Daisy was in that coffin, Jon said, and Jon in a coma. But that's just it; where were Melanie and Basira to back Martin up, to keep him from falling into that hopelessness?

Tim is obliquely familiar with the Lukas family and their ties to the Institute. But it's just that. Oblique. And while he knows a bit of the statements they've gotten from people who have lost people to the Lonely, he's always been elsewhere in his own personal research, and in his follow ups.

But Martin has always been sensitive, tender, and something as insidious as The Lonely praying that closely. Tim shakes his head and focuses on his drink with a sort of intensity that oozes his frustration.

"It was." He rolls his empty glass to watch the melting ice clink around. "He'd clearly intended for the whole thing, in some capacity."

He still doesn't understand it. It eats at him, constantly. Difficult to say whether it's better or worse, now having Elias so close at hand and still not knowing.

"As for the others, Basira has been... pragmatic." There's a tight, bitter little smile with it. "And Melanie..."

He takes a careful breath, and looks up, looks at Tim.

"Melanie got out. I found a way to quit, and she took it."

It's clear enough from the soft tone that it's not a good way. But she's— she's free now. She's with Georgie. She and Georgie are safe.

"Pra--Pragmatic. Oh, fantastic, I'm glad we finally got some fucking pragmatism around, that's exactly what we needed. Trade one spooky voyeur monster boss out for the embodiment of depression and emotional abuse boss, and now is the time for pragmatism."

Tim wants, desperately, to call it quits. It's too much. It's so much information, and Jon is useless when he's not in the mood for a statement, looking at information and knowledge, trying to impart the myriad strands of things together. Tim's called him out on it before, how much he prides himself on his organization and then falls down on it when he gets in the reeds of all the information.

Part of him wants to have Jon make a statement of it, and he'll research it himself. Talk to Sasha and Martin, be slow and deliberate. He has the time for it now.

He takes a deep swallow of his drink. Stares at Jon. When he sets the glass down, his town is deadpan. "She took it, huh? She in my camp now? This your way of telling me my contract has been terminated, Jon? Do I get a severance cheque?"

Jon processes this, and blanches.

"Oh— oh! No, she's, uh. She's alive." He goes back to picking at his empty glass. "She... chose to blind herself. That's the way out."

It's not such a struggle to say, to Tim. Maybe his contract is ended; maybe death broke the bond. He wonders if it's the same with Sasha. He wonders how many of them are still in danger if Elias were to die. Deerington is unpredictable enough to make it a real concern.

Regardless. "She's doing... alright, though. She has someone looking after her."

For a moment, it's just the noise of the mostly empty bar and the quiet clattering of Jon's ice. Then, Tim laughs. It's a hysterical noise, a burst, and then a nervous, hysterical failure to contain it, not because of the alcohol but because there aren't many things that Timothy Stoker fears but having to willingly maim himself is probably one of them.

But he blew himself up. There's nothing more blind than death, is there? And they are far away from Jonah Magnus's awful institution and research facilities and archive in honor of research and knowledge and all-seeing knowing.

It takes a moment to reign himself in. His shoulders quake in the aftermath, but there is absolutely nothing mirthful about any of it.

"So. Daisy was in a coffin that lead to The Buried that made her abandon The Hunt. You were in a coma. Martin got groomed by an Avatar of an entity that embodies melancholy and depression and isolation. Basira went to pragmatism, as if she was exceedingly helpful with anything in the first place, and Melanie got out of everything by blinding herself. That's--that's a goddamn mess, Jon."

He needs more to drink. Desperately. It feels exceedingly like it's the only way he's going to get through this. "You sure blowing up the House of Wax worked?"

He startles at the laugh. It's an eerie, humorless thing and it goes on longer than he expects. Jon can't help but stare.

Then Tim gets it under control, and his summary is... not wrong. There are still significant pieces of information missing— Melanie and the Slaughter, for one— but it's... not wrong.

"I didn't say we'd been doing well." He runs a hand over his face and through his hair, which just succeeds in pulling strands free of where he'd tied it back. It only makes him look more tired, more rumpled.

"It was very much a mess at the end. Elias walked out of prison. The Institute was attacked by Hunters, and— and the Not-Sasha was let free again. A lot of people were hurt." A lot of people died. Their coworkers from Research. He's seen the footage, now. "Daisy turned back to the Hunt so she could fight, and we haven't heard from her since. Basira is trying to track her down. Martin and I got away to Scotland. We were in a safe house, before— well, before Deerington. It's been a few months since then."

He's aware this doesn't explain Martin, and Peter, and the Lonely. That feels... even more difficult to untangle and explain than the rest. And then there's Deerington.

"Martin deserves that," Tim says with a cold efficiency, and something underhanded that does not say but does mean I don't know if you do. He doesn't think of Jon as a monster, not in the way that some of the things they researched, some of the things they saw, were. But it's an aching sort of realization that things had been bad before, and they'd only gotten worse.

They only keep getting worse.

He doesn't think ill of Daisy for that turn; it's a choice of protection or death, it sounds like, and he doesn't know her, doesn't understand it, but he doesn't need to. Basira just sounds like more of that pragmatism; tracking her down for what, but Tim doesn't ask. He thinks of the people in Research and Artefact Storage, the ones that were left behind, the ones that were disposable to creatures acting like they were so much grater than the rest of them.

It's just exhausting.

"You want a second one?" he asks, getting up to get himself yet another drink. He almost stumbles, but manages to keep his feet neatly.

Jon doesn't disagree. With Martin's deserving it, or with the idea that he doesn't.

He watches Tim lever himself up with the clumsy weight of someone becoming inadvisably drunk. He nearly dismisses the offer out of hand, but he's so very tired. And they haven't even started in on Deerington. On July. Maybe it will help.

"Yeah." He'll drink whatever is handed to him. Scotch no longer sounds intolerable. "Whiskey? On ice?"

He has generally skirted his way through nights out with a tolerable pint, or by struggling through regrettable quantities of Pimm's with Georgie. That really won't be sufficient, here. And he doesn't want to think any more about Georgie.

Tim gets up to replenish their drinks, the whiskey on rocks for Jon and another ridiculous, fruity, brightly colored thing for himself that he doesn't even care about the name of. It doesn't matter, after all. He's in it for the three or four alcohols in it, and the fact that it tastes a bit like candy or fruit more than anything else.

When he returns, he finds that the space hasn't done much for making him feel better. He hadn't really expected it to, but now it's confirmed, because setting the drink down in front of Jon makes him want to up end it over his head.

Instead, he sprawls gracelessly back into his seat and starts drinking this new one. "So, what else, boss?"

Jon remains blissfully unaware of how close he is to getting a glass of whiskey dumped over his head. He takes it with a grimace.

"Deerington." A month earlier, he might have described the place as... erratic, but tolerable. By this point, he can no longer manage that. "This place is a dream, supposedly. The nightmare of... a very powerful being."

The nightmare of a sleeping god. Of a tortured little girl.

"The town changes every month. This month, it's... pink blood, killer robots, and... executions."

Said on a sigh, because it's the only way he'll get it out. He is not looking at Tim. He drinks his whiskey.

Tim drinks his own. He's not sure how to take any of it, but they've managed to circle back to the pink blood, at least. Still with no real explanation, but Jon's always been the kind of person that does better when he's scripted, reading statements and following research that has been presented to him.

"Is that a people are following along with things, or a people are participating?"

Does it matter? When it comes to something like executions, what does it matter, really, if people are just turning their faces away or if they're actively dragging their neighbors up?

He's quiet for a moment, watching Jon, then asks, "Have you been going along with the executions?"

He hisses a frustrated little noise, pulls his glasses off to run a hand over his face.

"Both? Neither? It— it makes you vote, if you're unlucky enough to be chosen for a jury. Or if you choose to watch a trial. But it's not people carrying out the executions, in the end— it's all machinery, rooms of knives and things. Trying to vote someone innocent when they aren't will just get you thrown in, as well."

At that question, he gives a single humorless laugh.

"Hardly. I broke into Martin's to stop it, though he was voted innocent, in the end." And, softer: "I escaped mine."

It sounds like bullshit, as far as Tim's concerned, but he's also stood and watched, unable to move, and watched death happen. Maybe he wouldn't be able to do anything. Maybe he'd just try to hide. He likes to think he would be an advocate to righteous justice, and not a farcical kangaroo court, but who knows.

He supposes he won't know, if these things have passed.

"Should I be on the look out for a mob out to deal you justice?" Jon hasn't done anything but been a shit boss and been a bit short sighted, as far as Tim's concerned.

Jon freezes for just a moment too long, in response, which is probably answer enough.

"Hopefully not." Mob is overstating it. Probably. There is Arid and two companions, Lindsey, Wesley, Fern and Varian and perhaps whoever else resides in their circle... and what if there are more beyond that? Wesley certainly seems out for blood, now, and he has friends; the intensity of Hunt pouring off Buffy alone is terrifying. Any of them might be in a murderous state of mind. And now he can't See any of them coming.

This is why he rarely leaves the house. Why he shouldn't even be out now, in all honesty. Jon stares down into his whiskey. Stiffly:

"If there is, it... shouldn't involve you." This is the best reassurance he can give. It's not a very good one.

"That's not as much a glowing condolence as you might think it is," Tim says blandly, but he knows that Jon knows it isn't in the way that he says it. They each spend a moment in their own heads, staring into their own glasses and thinking their own thoughts about the situation.

Tim's grateful, at least, for the growing buzz of drunkenness clouding his brain. It makes him want to turn everything into a fight, but it also makes everything so painfully stupid.

He polishes off his drink in a couple of unhealthy swallows, cringing at the compounding burn of alcohol at the back of his throat. "We get any fair warning on the bullshit around here or just?" And here, he gestures with a broad, displeased vagueness, mostly with his ice-clattered glass.

AUGUST 2020 TEST DRIVE MEME

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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