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

Wowwww. Okay then.

[The most put out robot voice ever.]

What, no. Nothing lame like that, man. You're talking to a certified Autobot, defender of justice.

[There's. Heavily implied fingerguns there.]

[ A PAIR. ]

There's nothing lame about wagons. [ He loves his wagon. And his sleigh. He'll fight. ] I have... no idea what that is.

Uh, schyeah? There is. That's what kids pull around.

[They super are a pair. Because somewhere in that car, there's an eyeroll.]

Fine. Okay. Don't panic though. Really hate the running and screaming thing.

Not that kind of wagon, the kind you hook up to an animal. Nothing that takes that level of highly trained carving expertise could ever be lame.

[ Nerd. ]

I'm not much of a panicker.

... Huh?

[Yeah he's. Literally never seen that kind. Ever.]

[The car sighs.] Okay. Don't say I didn't warn you, dude.

[Because the car? It's actually going to hop on its wheels. And then unfold. Into a robot. Sideswipe isn't super tall, for an Autobot - humans come up to about his thigh. But still.]

[He shoots some fingerguns.]

Hey-!

[ He was gonna explain the whole wagon thing further, but then he turns into an Autobot and that's very distracting honestly.

Though he looks at him with a surprisingly straight face, all things considered, even if he has no better idea of what he is now than he did two seconds ago. He kind of looks like a metal version of Marshmallow...

But rather than ask about that, he's looking at his hands, attempting to recreate the whole fingerguns thing in obvious confusion, like doing it himself will decode the meaning.

It does not. ]

What's wrong with your hands? Do they always do that?

[ KRISTOFF ]

What...?

[You know, it's nice to transform in front of some new human and not have them freak out. Really! That's actually refreshing. And he'd be so much more stoked about it if the dude knew what... he was doing.]

[So Sideswipe tries again. More slowly.]

Dude. It's fingerguns. You know... like. Pa-pa-pow!

[ That apparently does absolutely nothing to clarify. ]

... How is that anything like a gun? [ Nevermind that it could be, it's not like he's seen a ton of guns or ever used them. ]

... look it's like. This is the part that goes "pa-POW".

[He wiggles his pointer finger.]

The rest is like. The rest of the gun? Dude it's a human thing, how do you not know this?

[ He is REALLY SURE that's not the sound guns make, either, but he gets the basic message. He pauses before he goes to hold his hands like one would hold a very large and bulky musket. ]

That's the only way anyone can hold a gun, a finger's not long enough to be the barrel. I've never seen a human do it before.

[ Never mind he's only lived among humans consistently for like three years, that's gotta be enough time. ]

Dude, dude. Dude. No. That's like - real blasters and stuff. This is like. Way different. It's not supposed to look like a real one!

It's just the shape? Y'know?

[And there's another 'pa-pow' for good measure.]

Your human friends've gotta be something else if they dunno what a fingergun is.

[ WHAT IS A BLASTER, MAN. He goes to fold his arms over his chest. ]

The humans I've been around are perfectly normal. [ ... Mostly. ] Maybe the ones you met who taught you this "finger gun" stuff are the weird ones.

[WHY ARE YOU SO LAME, DUDE.]

No way. [He, too, can fold his arms like a petulant teen.] They're the cool ones. They know exactly what's awesome.

[ THE 19TH CENTURY WAS HELLA BORING. ]

How are people who don't make weird, not-gun like finger shapes with their hands the weird ones?

[Sideswipe probably would have died from boredom tbh.]

They're lame. That's how.

And lame means weird.

Anna isn't weird, she's perfect.

[ ... Give him a second to realize that makes it sound like he only hangs out with one person. ]

And the rest of Arendelle is perfectly normal. They know all sorts of things about human... stuff... [ That sure makes him sound like an expert there. ] So it's definitely your friends who are lame.

[ He really hopes he used that word right. ]

Uh, dude? I didn't say "Anna".

[It totally does, buddy, but Sideswipe doesn't realize this. Not even for a hot second.]

Never heard of it. [Please don't try and teach him where it is... You'll just be frustrated.] And ummmmmmno. Nuh-uh. Grimlock is awesome. He'll watch the movies no one else will!

And I didn't say Grimlock.

[ It is at least not the first time someone has said that Arendelle doesn't sound familiar, and he's never heard of "Maine" so... This tracks. ]

What's a moo-vee? [ Yeah he's saying that real slow to make sure he gets it to sound right and he still doesn't nail it. ]