SEPTEMBER 2020 TEST DRIVE MEME

Welcome to September's Test Drive Meme! This month's Test Drive's theme is: CHILDREN/YOUNG ADULT 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: Evil dollhouses, potential body horror (turning into a doll), heights, pranks with the potential to cause harm, some stalking vibes
Don't forget to tag content whenever necessary. Have fun!

Prompt One
Prompt Two
Character Arrival
Master Navigation

THE EVIL DOLLHOUSE

When you wake up, you find you're not in your own bed, your own room, or even your own house. The room is well decorated, almost Victorian in fashion. The bed is pretty uncomfortable and you're not even sure the mattress is a real mattress. The chairs look like they might be made of plastic and the doors are flimsy. But it might not be what catches your eye, especially if you look out the window.

Through the clear panes (which also seem to be plastic), you will notice you do not see the town of Deerington, or even the outdoors at all. You see a living room that feels larger than life. There aren't any people in it, but as you look around at the fake looking furnishings and the strange view, you might be hit with a realization: you're inside a dollhouse.

The dollhouse has three floors for those who explore; the second floor you woke up on has two bedrooms and a fake little bathroom, all decorated in the same Victorian dollhouse style as the room you originally found yourself in. The bottom floor has a cute little kitchen with small porcelain dolls sitting around the table, a living room with all the basic furniture one would expect to find (in fact, it looks a great deal like the living room outside the windows), and an office filled with books that can't actually be pulled out of the shelves. On the very top floor is an attic. It's dusty and filled with broken toy beds and chairs, a few shattered doll pieces, and on the far wall you'll see another bookshelf. All seems... fairly standard, really, if you're used to seeing dollhouses.

But what there doesn't appear to be is an exit.

While searching, you may run into another Sleeper. A friend or a stranger, it's clear you're both stuck here together. And the longer the time ticks by, the more concerning things get. You might not notice at first, but anyone inside the dollhouse starts slowly... changing. It seems to go at a different pace for everyone, but the results are always the same. Your skin will start to become porcelain, your cheeks more rosy, your clothes made of cheaper cloth material, your joints become stiffer, and your eyes will start to become more and more glass like. If you don't get out of the dollhouse soon, it's clear that you may become the next doll at the kitchen table.

Searching the house again may feel fruitless, but keen observers may find light scratches on the floor in front of the bookshelf in the attic. Maybe they were like that because of someone moving things around or maybe there's a reason. If you decide to eventually pull the bookshelf aside, there will be a large door in the wall. It may seem strange, given that the wall only leads to the outside, but it's the only door to the outside that actually opens. You expect it to open up into the living room, but instead you'll see the grass of the park below. Far below. It's likely you could get hurt jumping, especially if you've started to turn to porcelain, but what other choice do you have?

Once characters take the plunge, they will find that they land rather softly in the grass, despite how high the jump may have seemed. As soon as you are out of the dollhouse, your body will have returned to complete normal.

And the house with the dollhouse in the living room will be nowhere in sight.

THOSE PESKY KIDS

You start off thinking maybe you're just forgetful and moved minor pieces around in your house without paying attention. You might think you're just seeing strange things out of the corner of your eye, because why wouldn't you? It's Deerington. Things are always strange. But each day, there's something weirder going on. Small objects might turn into entire rooms being rearranged, strange sightings out of the corner of your eye might turn into you swearing you saw a lake monster running through the street, and you swear you can hear the rattling of chains or the sounds of someone telling you to leave echoing in your house at night or following you down the street.

A haunting seems plausible. It wouldn't be the first time in Deerington. But no amount of herbs burned, or exorcisms performed, or chants and spell cast will make these things go away. In fact, they seem to just becoming more and more frequent, and more and more intense. Eventually, the strange creatures you see running around may start to try and attack you. They may start to try and kill you. But they always run off before you can attack back or show yourself to be stronger than them. It's probably the first time the monsters have ever been so easily scared.

Anyone who looks into it further may start to find weird clues lying around after a monster has been chased off. Footprints that don't look quite monster-like, tapes or records that when played will make strange rattling sounds like the chains you've been hearing, a piece of rubber that looks a lot like the monsters skin... Huh. The more you follow the clues, the more they'll lead you towards the answer to your dilemmas; these aren't hauntings.

They're pranks.

People can work together to catch a monster or ghost (or killing it, if you decide to); catching them will lead to them getting quite flustered and angry, struggling to get away. Pull off the mask or the sheet and underneath you'll find... a very disgruntled townsperson. Maybe your business was taking too much money away from theirs and they were hoping you'd close down with enough scares, maybe you talked back to them one time and they were looking for revenge, maybe you ruined their house or garden when you were fighting the things in Deerington that actually try to kill you, or maybe they were just having some "harmless" fun; they all have a different excuse, but they're clearly angry about getting caught.

They woulda gotten away with it if it weren't for you pesky Sleepers, after all.

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

Yeah. We're going there in a sailboat. A car isn't safe or reliable.

[Or so says Abby. He squints at Ford at the way he talks about that sort of stuff. To him, Demons as he calls the Infected, are a fact of life, and yet ghosts seem completely farfetched, even though zombies would be to many others.]

There's no such thing as ghosts. ...Are there?

[ Huh. Looks like his boat guess was right. He's curious about what's so unsafe about driving in Lev's dimension, but he sets that aside as something to ask after another time. ]

Of course ghosts exist.

[ Again, he says this with complete confidence. ]

Though that may not be true across all dimensions, and they may manifest differently even if they do exist. But where I'm from they're a fairly common occurrence. There are three substantially haunted buildings in my town, and countless other incidents across the globe.

Oh.

I see.

[Lev, who just learned what a pun was a month or so ago sort of... stares as he tries to work his brain around the concept of real ghosts. Of common ghosts. And not just something Yara used to tell him to scare him at night or keep him from exploring places he shouldn't. The idea of a ghost was a lot more scary than the Infected.]

...What's a 'dimension'? Is it like "countries"?

[Big vast places that are hard to understand and some that are far away.]

[ Lev didn't actually ask for a mini lecture but he sure is about to get one. ]

No. A dimension is a plane of reality, a self-contained universe with no connection to any others. Two different dimensions could have significant similarities, or each one could have a completely unique history and composition.

[ And since even Ford realizes that might be a little to esoteric, he adds: ]

For example, in your dimension Seattle is ruined and flooded and travel by car is dangerous. But in my dimension, Seattle is an intact, thriving city, and driving or flying would be the best way to get from there to Santa Barbara.

Oh. I see.

[Kind of. It's hard for him to imagine Seattle as it is in Ford's world, or "The Old World" as he calls it. Abby's explained about highways and cars and even planes. But it's still hard for him to grasp. But he can at least understand that perhaps in Ford's home, it's a different Seattle. Or maybe an earlier Seattle? Oof, it makes his head hurt.

He squints down at the man with sort of an amused look.]

Is it normal that people get headaches when talking to you?

[HE MEANS IT MOSTLY NICELY.]

That's--!

[ Ford looks a little offended... for about half a second. Then he huffs out a sigh, his expression embarrassed but amused. ]

... Not the first time I've heard that, no.

[ He clears his throat. ]

Was there something in my explanation you need me to clarify?

No. It's just hard to imagine other worlds. I only learned how big "America" is a few months ago.

[He grabs the last bit of supplies and leaps down from the shelf, landing catlike, before straightening up. He looks over Ford for a few moments, like he's trying to figure out what he wants to ask. Finally he speaks, brows furrowed.]

...Why do bad things happen in some dimensions and not others?

[Ford's Seattle is intact. No infection. In Lev's, the world ended 25 years ago.]

[ They probably should get off the shelf now, huh? Ford finally climbs back down as well, though he pauses at Lev's question. That's a pretty heavy subject to suddenly touch on, but instead of discomfort Ford's expression is one of melancholic understanding. His thoughts immediately drift to the version of himself that never fell through the portal, and how much better that Ford's life seemed to be.

(He's a little startled to realize he's less envious of that life now than he was even just a few months ago.) ]

I wish I could say there was a definitive answer, but the reasons are as varied as the dimensions themselves.

But I can say that the most meaningful differences I've discovered were caused by conscious decisions made by specific individuals, rather than random happenstance.

[ He's never been able to decide if that's more or less reassuring than the alternative. ]