soddersays | SEPTEMBER 2020 TEST DRIVE MEME

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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

a. arrival

[Boromir is, of late, becoming quite used to playing the stranger in a strange land. Sometimes, and certainly uncharitably, he thinks that everything above a certain degree north is just too old and Elvish.

The more charitable version, of course, is that Faramir ought to have made the journey. Recent events have certainly proven that point.

All of which is to say - waking up in a strange city where he understands precisely nothing? Sure. That may as well happen today and he probably deserves it anyhow. This place goes far beyond anything he's seen before. He doesn't recognize the people's manner of dress, or the architecture. They don't even have normally-colored hair! Boromir, meanwhile, is still covered in mud and blood, leaf litter in his hair, just sort of walking in hopes that he'll eventually see something familiar or someone who looks like a normal person.

Grim determination carries him pretty okay, until he encounters a car.]

What the fuck - ?

[Gods. He never thought he’d see the day when he’d miss Imladris.

b. cryptids

[As long as we're talking about what's familiar and what isn't - there are things in the woods.

Good sense would have told him to stay closer to civilization, but civilization is full of foul air and unfriendly people, all rather putting him in mind of how Mithrandir described Orthanc, and Boromir is not in a mood to deal with Any Of That right now. He stopped back at the house he woke up in, to clean up and try to come to grips with any of this, but he found himself too restless to stay. So now he's out trying to familiarize himself with the perimeters of the town, or maybe just find something familiar in it at all.

The fluttering and creepy eyes of a mothman in the darkness is...well, not quite familiar either, but we're making leaps and bounds towards it! He stops to look around, hand on the pommel of his sword, and sees that someone else is out wandering as well.]

Careful. There's something out here.

I believe I said the same thing the first time one of those lumbering, smog belching behemoths nearly ran me over in the streets.

[That came from a woman in a red dress that clung a bit like elven outfits, wearing a white lace mantle that came all the way up to her chin on her throat and gave her a posture that would have made Galadriel pleased. Her hair was tied back in a long braid behind her head, revealing a pair of sharp-pointed ears that were a little short for an elf but definitely not human... though the third eye almost certainly spoiled the lack of humanity as she walked towards him, one hand resting on an ornate hammer polearm that looked mystical enough to have belonged in a sorcerer's hands.

She smiled and gave a small inclination of the head. As much as she dared in the brace.]

They stay on the roads. As long as children don't try to drive them.

[The bushes nearest to him rustle as if something large is rummaging about in them. Clearly not a predator, since it's making little attempt at stealth.]

Yeah. I've been tracking it all evening. It's elusive as they come, but I think I got the drop on it.

[The whispering voice sounds masculine to match the shadowed figure in a long coat which emerges from the bushes, carrying what looks like a fishing net on the end of a long staff.]

[......okay, what]

You know what it is?

[tell him there's some logic to this, my guy]

Think it's called a mothman in the stories I've heard and read. No one's entirely sure what it is: could be a critter, could be something else. Doesn't seem to mean folk harm, but it sometimes gets ornery.

[He'll shake out the folds of the net.] And that's why I'm out here to catch it. Or try at least.]

[Boromir listens to this with...bemusement, he's going to settle on bemusement. Wary as he is, of course it's nice to think that this is some sort of...harmless large moth one might capture in a net, like a child.]

And what are you going to do with it then? Keep it in a jar?

Maybe! Get a good look at it and bring it home for a friend who likes weird critters. Though he'll probably have me let it go about five minutes later.

[He gives the net a few trial swipes.]

Care to flank me while I move in on it, the next time it swoops past?

Why not?

[Yeah, we can entertain this. It's been a hell of a day. Boromir has a sword and a shield, and if we're trying not to murder the horrible beast in the woods today he guesses he'll heft the latter.]

[The leaves on the trees rustle and the branches bend slightly in a sudden breeze. A dark shape at least as tall as either of them swoops through, vanishing into the shadows under the trees. The cocky fellow takes a swing at the thing with the butterfly net. And misses.]

Swing and a miss. Damn. If at first I didn't succeed, try again the next time. [He's quite sanguine about it.]

[ Raven smells blood, and filth.

Her nose tips up slightly in disdain, as she looks at the flabbergasted man who has stumbled onto a sidewalk in her newly adopted neighborhood up and down. He looks in sorry shape indeed. By contrast, Raven stands tall, with a proud set to her shoulders and a slight curl on her lip. The black feathers tied into her long hair and into a boa at her hip do suggest something wild about her, but she doesn't appear as if she feels out of place here in the city. ]

You sure look like you've rolled in it.

[Boromir snorts. Yes, it's rude, but you can't deny the accuracy.]

You could say that. What is this place?

[ At least he's a man who knows that there's no use in taking offense at the plain truth. If his disheveled and disoriented appearance didn't give away his status as a new arrival, the question sure did. ]

I'm told it's a dream, except you don't wake up and everything feels real.

[ Raven shrugs, dismissive. It isn't like she totally buys it but it's also the best explanation she's got, even after all her careful observation. ]

Anyway, it's a place called Earth. Take it you're not from around here?

No.

[What, like Middle-Earth? But it's ludicrous to think that he could've left all of Middle-Earth. Except for, well, the typical way:]

I hadn't expected to wake up. [...] Hell of a dying dream, if that is what it is.

[couldn't have been something nice and normal? couldn't have been wearing a clean shirt?]

Oh, so you're dead?

[ She sounds remarkably unsurprised by that, merely folding her arms over her chest as she regards the man more closely. It's almost like her opinion of the stranger has eased up somewhat with this newfound knowledge.

At least Raven can now assume he died in battle, rather than simply rolled in a pile of mud. ]

That's unfortunate. You won't get much rest here.

[glances back at the car]

Yes, I was starting to think that. [well, hell, maybe he deserves it] What is here?

[ At first, she only answers with a beleaguered sigh under her breath. He must want more explanation than 'a dream,' and with the way he keeps glancing back at that car... Raven suspects he is a man who has a lot of catching up to do with this world.

Well. He was big and from the look of him, a fighter. Raven wasn't the type to hand out charity, but she did come from a tribe who often took in strays - as long as they appeared useful. ]

If we're going to talk, you'll have to clean up. You stink.

[ She turns back towards her house, motioning him towards the door as she opens it. ]

You can use my shower.

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steadfastjewel - 2020-09-15 03:32 (UTC) - Expand

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kindredlinks - 2020-09-15 18:19 (UTC) - Expand

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steadfastjewel - 2020-09-21 03:47 (UTC) - Expand

[ Arya likes the woods. It’s a place for wolves, and when the town gets to be too much, the woods feel familiar. And familiar feels safe.

Arya mostly comes here to hunt squirrels and rabbits, but lately, she’s also spent time stalking the strange new creatures. They’re fascinating, and Arya wants to get closer to them, to learn more about them. Tonight, Arya is crouched behind some bushes, watching the mothman with wide eyes. She doesn’t seem the least bit scared.

If anything, the arrival of another person startles Arya more. As soon as she hears a voice, she stands, spins towards it, and draws her skinny sword. ]

I know there’s something out there! That’s why I’m here.

[She lowers the sword immediately, however, when she sees who’s in front of her. The color drains out of Arya’s face — it looks like she’s just seen a ghost. Which is fitting, because to Arya, she has. ]

Are you real?

[ Arya whispers the question. She can’t believe it. This must be another ghost. Why is it here, in the woods? Why does her father appear so young? ]

...I like to think so.

[It sounds like an attempt at a joke, but of course it promptly falls flat. For one, Boromir finds reality rather disagreeing with him of late. Maybe she's got a point.

For two, well - only one other person has gone quite so drawn at the mere sight of him. It's a fresh memory, and not a happy one. He can't think what he might have done to frighten this girl; he didn't even draw his sword when she drew on him, though he's not approaching either.]

Are you alright?

[ Mako knows about cars. In theory. Sure, where he comes from they're called something different, but he knows how to drive one, he's flown an airship, he's ridden a motorcycle.

But the cars here, along with just about everything else, are like no things he's ever seen. So when a bloody, dazed-looking man stops dead on the sidewalk, staring at the car parked in front of him, and then curses at it?

Mako gets that. He really does. Feels it, deep in his soul.

Also, this guy looks like... he needs help. Abandoning his shopping trip, Mako snorts and moves closer to Boromir instead. At least Mako has dark hair and gold eyes and doesn't look like someone took a paintbrush to all of him and forgot to stop? ] Yeah. I know. It doesn't get any less weird. You just woke up. [ It isn't a question. ]

Yes.

[Boromir visibly looks Mako up and down before deciding - yeah, you know what, he'll take it! The unusual clothes are not even on his list of concerns.]

Where - what is this place? [oh also he didn't eat shit from his basket so that'll be fun later]

[ Mako's already had to help his best friend through the trauma of: immediately trying to leave, after not eating the shit from the basket, so. Honestly, he's an old hand, if you can call helping one person through a deeply bizarre experience old hand.

Mako really sympathizes, though. This guy looks like he's had a real rough time of it. ] That's a complicated question. And I still don't... I mean, I'm not an expert. It's called Deerington, and it's in someplace called Maine, and apparently we're all dreaming, but we can still sleep. And die. I'm Mako. I'm not from here. [ A good storyteller Mako is Not. ]

[Boromir takes all of this in - wow, none of those names mean anything to him - and reaches up to touch one of the bloody holes in his chest again.

In...in his tunic. There is no hole in his chest now, and all the blood is only what was already soaked into the cloth. But he remembers the pain, and here is the evidence.]

I've heard that dying men see strange visions, sometimes. This isn't quite what I imagined.

[He draws back his hand to look at his fingers. No blood on them; it's all dried up.]

I'd better not be ruining my last words.

[As last words go, what he said before was better than raving about metal beasts in the street!]

You're dying? [ Well now Mako is alarmed, especially because he keeps touching those bloody holes in his clothes.

Although, honestly, he doesn't look like he's dying. Pale and upset, sure, but his fingers aren't coming away covered in blood, and the stains don't seem to be getting any bigger. ] And if you are, then I am. This is... I don't want to say it's real, but it's real enough, right now. Are you hurt? Do you need help? My friend is a healer, she could take care of...

I don't...

[By all logic, he should be dying. Hurt, at least, definitely. But he doesn't appear to be. Nothing actually hurts. He feels fine?]

I should be. I was shot, only a few minutes ago.

A few— let me see. [ Okay, it's PROBABLY rude to just like, start pawing at a dude he doesn't know, but Mako's worried and he isn't about to let this guy die in front of him, so, sorry, Boromir, he's kind of pulling at your tunic. Or, at least, he's moving in that direction, if Boromir will let him do it. ]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

SEPTEMBER 2020 TEST DRIVE MEME

SEPTEMBER 2020 TEST DRIVE MEME

THE EVIL DOLLHOUSE

THOSE PESKY KIDS

Character Arrival

Boromir | you know............. ;)

Not in Gondor anymore, are ya big guy?

b. cryptids

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a. i know, buddy

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