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soddersays2020-12-27 12:14 pm
sodder) wrote in soddersays2020-12-27 12:14 pm
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JANUARY 2021 TDM
JANUARY 2021 TEST DRIVE MEME
Welcome to January’s Test Drive Meme!
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: Claustrophobia, panic attacks, ghosts, demons, hallucinations, blood, violence
Don't forget to tag content whenever necessary. Have fun!
THE ONLY ME IS ME
The room is unfamiliar. You're not even sure how you ended up in here. Had you fallen asleep? That has to be it. Even if you're not a being who ever sleeps (which must make being in a dream world feel that much more surreal), it feels like the answer. There’s no door, no windows, and the only source of light in the whole place is two tiny, extremely dim side table lamps that give a soft, orange glow to your surroundings. It’s hard to see and easy to bump into the sparse amount of hotel room furniture that seems to be scattered around the small space. Hopefully you don’t have bad knees.While there is no exit, if you look along the walls, you will eventually find a peep hole. The small hole in the wall makes you feel instantly uneasy, even if you’re someone who isn’t prone to fear in the first place. You’ll feel fidgety and tense, but there’s a part of you that still desperately wants to look through it. Avoiding the peep hole will make the tension disappear eventually, but it creeps back up every time you look at it.
If you woke up here alone, another person will appear in the bed you woke up in the moment you turn your back. It’s good to not be alone, right? But with the room so small, the air might start to feel a little thin. Is it getting hot in here? Is the ceiling feeling a little lower than it did last time? Are the walls closing in? It’s hard to tell if it’s all in your head or if the room really is getting smaller. Having to share it with another person, to share the limited air with someone else, is enough to make anyone panic a little.
Whenever one of you decides to look through the peep hole, you will see a man standing on the other side in a typical hotel hallway. He’s just waiting. Watching. Or at least you think he’s watching; it’s hard to tell when he doesn’t have a face at all. His presence makes that fear in you spike, your worst memories flashing before your eyes, and you won’t be able to look for long without going into a full panic attack. Getting as much distance between you and the peep hole is the fastest way to get a chance to calm down. If you can get yourself to calm down at all.
The key to getting out is the person beside you. If you choose to let them close, eventually the panic will start to ebb, and you’ll find yourself feeling more at ease the longer you sit beside them. Touching, whether it’s a hug, a hand on the shoulder, or more, will eventually make the room stop feeling so tight and the air won’t feel as thin. Eventually, you might start to feel some semblance of trust— trust that they can keep you safe. Approach the peep hole with your roommate and look through it together; while you’ll still see the painful memory from before, one of your happier memories will play soon after to soften the blow. Seeing both your dark and Your light is the best way for someone to truly get to know you, after all.
Once the memory fades, you’ll both be on the other side of the wall, and the man outside the door will be nowhere in sight, with no sign that he was ever really there at all.
DON'T TOUCH THAT DIAL NOW
Walk through a door, any door and you're not where you thought you'd be. Instead, what lies before you as well as to your right are what looks like perfectly normal hallways you'd find in an apartment building or a very large, fancy house. There's doors spread out along either side at varying intervals and one of them opens to let another person in, someone just like you who probably meant to go to the restroom and ended up here. If you try opening the doors, none of them budge no matter what you do and so it seems the only choice you have is to pick a direction and walk.There's a tingling sense of dread that creeps up your spine as you go. You pass what looks to be doors to restrooms, bedrooms, living rooms and recreational rooms, but none of them seem to be an exit. On the walls are pictures and paintings, it looks like there's a familial theme to them, there's group portraits and moments captured in time such as when someone's Dad spilled punch all over himself at the family barbecue. All wholesome and loving looking pictures but oddly not of just one family, in fact you might see some familiar faces in there. Along with pictures, there's narrow hall tables with vases and more photos in frames and all the drawers seem to be locked, though you get the sense there's something in there...
Eventually, you turn a couple corners and it almost feels like you've come full circle, but at the end of the hallway there's a clear exit. Three steps down to a cracked open door. It sort of looks like a garage from what you can see, but when you open it... you're right back where you started. Only now, the halls are colder, the lights overhead that were once warm and steady are flickering and the pictures on the walls are tilted, some even cracked. There's a creaking sound somewhere far off, like something heavy swinging from a rope. You feel as though something is watching you, following close behind as you hurry your way through the halls again to find another exit.
Again, the only exit is the garage door and with no other option, you step through. And you're back where you started only now other doors in the halls are cracked. In one you see the light of a television playing static in a dark room and someone sobbing and muttering to themselves, in another there's bright red light spilling out of the crack and you see movement, something swaying, the creaking is louder. Heart pounding, you make your way around the corner and the drawers of the tables in the hall all open at once to let damaged photos fly out, all of you and your friends and family in horrifying circumstances or dead.
Run to the exit again and you are back at the start and there's now spatters of blood over the walls like a grisly murder occurred in several locations along the halls. The creaking is louder and so are the wails of the person in the room with the television. More doors are open a crack here and there and each promises something horrifying should you open them. Maybe they're abstract manifestations of your greatest fears, painful memories coming through the static T.V. set, or a stereotypical ghostly spectre with unfinished business. There is a supernatural force in this place and it feeds on your deepest traumas and fears whatever they may be, or it'll be content to sip on the fear brought on by a jump scare or a ghostly shadow watching you from afar wherever your turn, waiting for the moment to suddenly appear beside you.
To escape this haunted loop of rising torment, you must bring the demonic spirit with you as you pass through the exit door. This can be any way you wish, though the easiest is to allow it somehow to possess your body while your companion wrestles it, and you, through. You can discover this solution through clues behind the pictures and scratched into the wood on the bottom of the drawers in the form of riddles, or you can stumble upon it by accident. Once the spirit is pulled through the door, it will break the loop and you will be back in Deerington, though perhaps not quite where you were when you opened the door the first time.
NOW'S THE TIME FOR ACTION
There's something watching you. You don't know what, but you can feel it in your bones. Sometimes you think you see it (them?) out of the corner of your eye, but you can't quite make out the who or the what that might be following your every move. Sometimes it looks supernatural, a mythical creature from your own world maybe, and other times... It looks like someone from home you never wanted to see again. People show up here all the time, it's not impossible...It doesn't stay just one being, though. Eventually you start to see small groups of people or things you can't quite make out before they disappear. It's hard to tell if they're really there at all or if it's all in your head. But the danger feels real. The inexplicable feeling of pure terror, the solid idea that they're going to kill you and you aren't going to be able to fight them off, the absolute assurance that they're evil. The longer this goes on, the more drawn to a crowd you'll begin to feel. There's safety in numbers, after all. But just being surrounded by people doesn't feel like enough, not when the other Sleepers you find feel just as on edge as you are.
In the center of the crowd are scattered tables. Each table has a bowl or jar filled with various party supplies. Bluetooth speakers that can connect to your Fluid to play music, noise makers, snap poppers, even pots, pans, and their lids. It's enough to make a real ruckus. And you're realizing that that might be the answer. You start encouraging the people around you to make as much noise as possible. Grab the things on the table and just start shouting whatever comes to mind. The more noise you make, the more the fear ebbs, and the shadows following you start to disappear. They almost seem like they're actually running from the noise. You keep shouting just to drive them as far away as possible.
You might notice that you're shouting out things you never expected— and so are the people around you. Emotions you wanted to keep buried, confessions you never planned on giving to someone, secrets you've been trying to keep to yourself. They come pouring out faster than you expect them to and they're there for anyone to hear before you can even stop yourself. Hopefully this doesn't have too big of a fall out for you.
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.
no subject
Dreams. Force dreams of the end of the war, the fall of the Republic.
[Those he remembered now, the days and nights he'd gone without sleep trying to avoid them, knowing how close his master's plan was to come to fruition. There had been no way to stop it, nothing he could do. Nothing besides tempt Obi-Wan to find him and try to end things that way.]
no subject
She pulls her thoughts away from the past to focus on the present. She knows where he's from now. Not an exact date but close enough. She hasn't led the Siege on Mandalore yet, hasn't captured him. He was still grasping at puzzle pieces in a desperate attempt to glimpse the grand plan he was not privy to and Ahsoka finds herself unable to stir even a hint of pity for him. ]
Visions are ever-changing and the future is always in motion.
no subject
[She had to be one if she was spouting off rhetoric like that. The Sith see the future as something different, something that is somehow within their control if they could only find the right way to use it. As usual, it was something that the Dark Side promised them, which ended up being a complete lie. Attempts to control the future always ended with it even worse than before, self-fulfilling prophecies so often being the case.
His yellow eyes give her a piercing look, trying to figure out what's going on in her head. She knows him even if he does not reciprocate, that much is certain. So she would know what happened to him in that vast fog of memory in his mind that lay between him and that last memory he had of dying by Obi-Wan's hand.]
It happened, didn't it? Just as I had foreseen.
no subject
It has a Will of its own.
[ Aware of his dwindling patience, Ahsoka meets his gaze with a calm one of her own. If he thought to read her, then let him try. Soon, he'd learn he would gain nothing from her. She knew what he was after - a glimpse of the future. A sign that he was right or wrong. Anything to further clear up the picture he was building in his mind. When she faced him, he'd been grasping at details however small, anything to help him see the bigger picture, and Ahsoka had no intention of clearing that fog that surrounded him. Let him wander in it. It was better than the chaos he'd unleash once he was free of it.
Folding her hands in front of her, blue eyes regard him with an even look. Her aura remains free of any hatred or hint of violence. It radiates a sense of commitment to whatever cause kept her silent now. ]
You'll have to live through it to find out. Just like everyone else.
no subject
But Maul isn't so sure he is a Sith anymore. He's not sure what he is after being in this strange town for so long. Still, he will hardly confide that in a Jedi.]
I doubt I was wrong. My master's triumph....it is inevitable.
[He sounds resigned and tired, but beyond that, he's full of fear.. Nothing has ever stopped Sidious before, no matter how much they have tried. Maul did so and it cost him everything he held dear. Darth Sidious isn't so much a Sith as a force of nature, like a black hole that slowly and inexorably pulled everything towards it no matter how much they tried to escape it.]
no subject
Her lips purse together in dismay. She walked away from the order before she ever got the chance to pass the trials. She was no Jedi. Perhaps that's why she lingers on the weariness in his voice. He was lost just like she'd been after she was cast out of the Order and turned over to the Republic to stand trial. It took years before she found her way back from that dark period in her life. She understood him from that regard - the failed apprentice. But she also knew that's where their similarities ended. She wanted to help people, Maul only wanted to help himself. She'd moved on from her former Master, while he still considered himself his student. That was the difference between them, what set them apart. ]
Everything comes to pass at one point. The Jedi rise, then the Sith. Then back to the Jedi. Nothing lasts. We're all merely balancing acts for the Force while it finds equilibrium.
no subject
[Maul had a lot of time to contemplate his purpose in it everything that had happened in his galaxy since he'd been sent to Deerington. He'd heard many perspectives on this, some from those who had fourth-wall knowledge of the Star Wars franchise, and some that merely had learned about the Force from Maul himself. It had given him much to meditate on, but at the end of the day, Maul was the one who had to make his own decisions on where he stood in the grand scheme of things.
This Togruta's stance on things was very different from other Jedi Maul had encountered. He was used to their arrogance and hypocrisy having led to corruption that none of them were ever willing to admit. He stares at her again, trying to will the fog in his mind to lift, where it stubbornly remains instead.]
Who are you?
[He asks, trying to place why the Force keeps insisting there is a connection betwixt the two of them.]
no subject
[ The Jedi. The Sith. Both sides held such strong beliefs about the Force. Laying claim to the intangible. Unattainable. Maybe one side was right. But their structure was too rigid. Unyielding. It lacked the fluidity that filled her every time she reached for the Force seeking its guidance. Even Maul was breaking under his own rigid views. He was stuck. Too stubborn to let go of the past, his mind was trapped by days gone by. And when he wasn't looking to the past, he obsessed with the future, blind to the one thing that mattered the most. The present. This moment. Perhaps she did pity him after all. ]
Ahsoka Tano.
[ She answers, her aura steady and calm, overlaid with a layer of confidence that came from experience. She knew him and didn't try to hide it. She suspected it was pointless. One way or another, Maul would find out. ]
You will come to know me.