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

Uhm ... I don't know. Why, is something wrong?

[ Because she thought she was imagining it, but if he's feeling something off too ... She takes a hold of her sleeve with one hand, intently rubbing her thumb over it.

No. Something is definitely weird. ]

[ He seems to finish staring at the crack, hoping it's not gonna get worse. He'd like to... keep that finger... ]

I can't move my hand.

[ He sounds really calm about this for some reason. ]

[ Why is he so calm about that? ]

What?

[ She immediately rushes over to him, reaching for the hand that he's looking at to inspect it herself. ]

[ There's the start of an objection, but she's already got his hand before it can come out, so it ends up more of a resigned sigh. The majority of his fingers have definitely turned to porcelain at this point, but it hasn't quite reached his wrist. ]

It's fine. Probably. I mean, I'm sure once we get out of here, it'll go back to normal, as long as it's just the dollhouse that has weird magic and this isn't a town thing.

[ ................. That was very good comfort, good job, Kristoff. ]

[ His fingers are porcelain, and there's a crack in one of them. That is definitely not fine. ]

You're sure? How can you be sure? What if it doesn't go back to normal?

[ Are they going to become dolls now? Oh, she's so tired of danger and uncertainty. She was ready for a life of peace and quiet, and maybe that's a lofty hope for a queen to have, but she's allowed to dream. Right? ]

All magic can be reversed. [ He says it with the exact kind of assurance someone who was raised by trolls would. He hopes that he's not wrong. He really, really does.

He goes to put his non-porcelain hand on her arm in attempt to be reassuring. ]

I wasn't changing before we woke up in the house, so, theoretically, the magic is coming from it. Which means we just have to get far enough away to weaken the connection and I bet you anything it'll fade as quickly as it showed up.

[ That is some pretty impressive bullshitting. ]

We should focus on finding a way out. Not my hand.

[ When he puts his hand on her arm, she looks up from his hand to meet his eyes. And maybe he doesn't actually know for sure and he's just making everything up, and she doesn't dismiss that thought, but something in his eyes makes her think that he's probably right. Well, that, and it makes sense. ]

Okay. Just be careful.

[ She doesn't want to know what would happen if he were to damage that finger more. What if it just fell off?

No, no. Don't think about it.

She takes a deep breath, and steps away from him to get back to clearing out the broken bits of furniture. Her clothes no longer seem to fit right and moving in them isn't as easy as usual, but she ignores it. It's fine. Everything will go back to normal once they figure this out. ]

[ He would very much like to keep his finger. Which is the main reason he's a little more cautious as he starts to move through the junk in the attic. He doesn't want to think about how much worse this could get, pretty sure it would distract him from the actual goal of getting out.

He bends down when he notices the scratches on the floor. They seem fresher than the others and like something's been moved more than once. He looks up to where they lead, noting the bookshelf against the wall with a tilt of his head. ]

Hey, come look at this.

[ At least it's easy enough to distract her from too many anxious thoughts about what will happen to them. That is, until she notices that she seems to be losing the feeling in her fingertips, and she's about to examine that closer when Kristoff calls for her.

Further distraction seems to be just what she needs, so she hurries over eagerly, bending down next to him. ]

You mean the marks?

[ He nods quickly. ]

Yeah. The path is too varied for it to have just been from shoving the bookshelf against the wall when it first got moved up here. It looks like someone's been shoving it back and forth a lot lately.

[ He goes to stand up, wincing slightly as he straightens out his knees. God, let this be the exit. ]

You think you could help me push it?

Yeah.

[ She nods too, determined. ]

Of course.