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

Oh. [That makes sense, and he hadn't thought about it.] Right, no, I'm not a handyman. [It would be totally pointless to try to take fixing things up as a skill when you live next door to a cabin full of the children of Hephaestus who would just fix everything faster and better anyway.

Sounds like similar things happening here, if there's so much competition on the board.] You're really looking for a job? Most stuff here is free. [Which is weird but as a person who spent a good chunk of his life roughing it out of sheer stubbornness, he can sorta appreciate that.]

Not really. I’m not much of a handywoman either. [ No, she’s more of the dog walking, table waiting, clothes making, odd job taking type. But give her enough time and determination and Blue could add ‘handywoman-ish’ to that list. ]

I'm trying to figure this place out, [ She looks at the bulletin board again. She’d been hoping that there’d be something of help there — maybe a neon flyer explaining exactly what the hell was going on — but she’d come up with nothing more than a good list of people to call if she ever needed violin lessons. ] and this seemed like as good a place as any to start.

[Nico hardly has any room to scoff at that, considering that he's also here doing basically the same thing and receiving about the same results. He was sure finding out what led the graveyard to become a graveswamp would illuminate... something, but instead he's just found a lot of nonfiction agriculture literature and not too much that will help him become anything but a farmer.

Libraries suck. Yes this is absolutely an issue with libraries and not with his methods, thank you.]

It's not working, I take it? [His eyebrows raise slightly, considering.] Unless you also need to get a whole lot of stuff fixed.

Not really. [ She huffs, both of her arms crossing over her chest, giving the board one last-ditch search for any kind of clue. Nothing. ] Pretty unhelpful, as far as libraries go.

[ Blue reaches to pull a hanging paper tab from off of one of the flyers and tucks it into her pocket — pottery lessons, she might as well learn a new skill or two while she’s here. ]

I’m Blue, by the way. My professional title would probably be… Waitress/Dog-Walker/Environmentalist. [ She laughs quietly. It’s the library, after all. ]

Nico di Angelo. [Nico doesn't know a whole lot of non-demigods or non-dead people, but he's still fairly sure he shouldn't be introducing himself by his titles. Ambassador of Pluto, Ghost King and son of Hades all probably sound deeply unconvincing out of context. And honestly from experience in context too, at least until he gets pissed enough to start raising skeletons out of the ground.

Which he is pretty sure is against library rules, so he will politely refrain and just let his name hang out there, unaccompanied and unimpressive.]

Environmentalist? You haven't learned anything about this place yet, have you? [He gestures, sorta all around them. Clearly she's new too but it doesn't hurt to ask.] Like why the graveyard's under water?

Cool name. [ Blue flashes Nico a lopsided grin.] I guess that’s more of a self-proclaimed title, but I think it still counts.

[ The grin quickly fades once he mentions the flooded graveyards — she hadn’t gotten that far in her discovery of this place yet. ]

I didn’t see that, no. [ She shakes her head. A flooded graveyard in this already creepy town? Blue had been told not to believe in coincidences. ] I haven't gotten much further than this. Is that the only place?

[He looks slightly startled by the compliment, like he doesn't quite know what to do with someone saying nice things even when they're as mild as that, so he latches onto the follow-up question instead:] I think it's just the graveyard that's underwater. [He doesn't sound all that confident, though, considering the graveyard was what he'd gravitated to first and he didn't really care as much about any other part of town after.] The only people I saw go near it were those ones who wear gas masks. [So double the weird for the price of one. It seems wild to him that it is the only formal burial site in the town, which means that surely everyone must have relatives buried there. Why wouldn't anything be done about the flooding? Still...]

But the forest seems messed up too.

Gas masks? [ Both of her brows lift curiously. ] What help would a gas mask be if it’s flooded?

[ Blue adds the new information the seemingly endless list of strange things going on — she feels as though the more that she thinks she’s figured something out, the more she uncovers that confuses her. She wants it to make sense and she tries to make it make sense in her brain, but fails miserably every time. It’s like she’s trying to piece together a puzzle without knowing what picture it’s making. ]

More or less messed up than an underwater graveyard? [ She pauses for a moment, thinking out loud: ] It could all be connected. [ Blue has come to learn that weird occurrences usually are. ]

I think they wear the gas masks everywhere. [Frankly the Wastes' whole aesthetic makes his brain itch with all the repressed memories 1930s Italy between World Wars. So, moving on.] Less messed up. The only animals out there are the deer, I think. [Which are weird enough on their own... and she's not wrong. Nico picks at the hem of his shirt, fidgeting as he considers it. He has no idea how to vocalize that the vibe out there is just Weird, so he doesn't try.] Seems too close not to be related. But I don't know what would cause any of it. [He wrinkles his nose.] You haven't seen anything?