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

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.

He is quiet for a moment as well, inspecting his whiskey. At least the question is one he can answer easily.

"It's cyclical. Something happens around the turn of the month, then worsens about halfway in." He has a sip of his whiskey, for something to do as he tries to find a simple explanation. "This month began with people suddenly bleeding pink, among other things. Everyone's personalities and powers became... skewed in some way. Then the executions begin mid-month."

In a way, for all that it's terrifying and humiliating and he can no longer show his face with ease, the public trials aren't so bad as Ultimate Archivist has been. It's only by virtue of a very valuable and powerful elixir that Jon doesn't have more than the two eyes, now. That he isn't a danger to everyone around him.

"Well, maybe it won't happen this month."

Even as he says it, Tim knows it's daft, that it's a hopeless sort of wish. But he says it with the tipsy conviction of someone that hasn't been doing this in the past months. Even if he had been here, who's to say if he would think it so regular? After everything that happened over the last year in the Institute, it seems reasonable enough to not trust the regularity of terror.

The look Jon gives him is thoroughly unimpressed, exasperated that he would— that he would waste time on thinking that. Deerington doesn't work that way. His life rarely seems to, as of late.

"One can hope." His tone is not terribly encouraging. But he does manage, on a sigh: "Some months are better than others. Romance festivals, people turning into fairies, nonsense instead of horror. I am still trying to discern the patterns."

Tim's quiet a moment, like he can parse through what Jon's just said. Like it means anything. It might. It might just be what it says on the tin. Tim's not sure which is better and which is worse.

Finally, he just says, "You're having a laugh at me. Turning into fairies. Fuck off."

He feels that he's fully entitled to be disbelieving in some of it, any of it, as much as Jon had been a skeptic to hold back on everything else when he'd first been made Archivist. This is different, of course. At the end of the day, all Tim has is his own self-comfort, and it isn't very much at all. So what if he can set his calendar to this place going wild? It's still going wild.

Ask Sasha, he almost says but doesn't. That's— for later.

"I do mean it. Wings and all. That was June. April had a, an entire matchmaking theme, with a sort of mental link between—" he stumbles over the instinct to say mates, "—romantic partners."

Which he will be glad to never see again, for the sake of Martin's sleep schedule.

"Deerington is either shockingly horrible or shockingly absurd. It seems to swing between the two at random."

"I bet you were a bloody delight for that. Poor Martin."

He shouldn't tease, maybe, but he can't quite help it, and doubly so because he's really feeling the alcohol now, that warm buzz that loosens his tongue more than it should.

He's not sure how he feels about the unreliability of the whole thing. If it's going to be absurd or horrid, it might as well be regular. But that's what torture is, isn't it? If it's regular than they get used to it, they adapt.

Tim's always been good at adapting. He just doesn't want to adapt to any of this, really. No choice, is there? If he can adapt to the Institute, to the Archives, to every strange new normal that's come at him over the years--well, he can certainly adapt to this, but that doesn't mean he has to like it, does it?

He shakes his head a little bit, like that resolves anything at all.

Poor Martin is entirely accurate. He knows it. There is no way to argue it. Least of all with an increasingly drunk Tim.

Jon drinks his whiskey and hopes it will help. Maybe it does. It leaves him warm and buzzy and makes all the horror feel more abstract, somehow. Less immediate.

"The best we can hope is that August will be ridiculous, rather than trying to kill us all."

"And that I don't eat shit when we leave," Tim says thoughtfully. He gets out of the seat, a little wobbly, but steady enough. And he gives Jon that slightly firm look without having to say that it's all on his tab as he heads toward the door.

He's no plan to go anywhere. He can't remember where his apartment is right now. So he might as well wait for Jon to come out and impress upon his hospitality until he's sober enough to remember where he's supposed to be.