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soddersays2021-02-25 12:33 am
sodder) wrote in soddersays2021-02-25 12:33 am
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MARCH 2021 TEST DRIVE MEME
MARCH 2021 TEST DRIVE MEME
Welcome to MARCH's Test Drive Meme! This month's Test Drive's theme is: PSYCHOLOGICAL 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: psychological horror that deals with gaslighting, losing one's grip on reality, being trapped and restrained, threat of drowning, threat of being eaten, sensory deprivation, bleach, blood, violence, haunting apparition of a child, injury by rusty implements
Don't forget to tag content whenever necessary. Have fun!
IMPORTANT INFO FOR PROSPECTIVE PLAYERS: This past month we were excited to announce that Deerington will be entering a new chapter in a few short months. This new chapter will involve a permanent setting shift that you can read about in more detail on this post. All prospective players are welcome to ask any questions they have on the linked post.
THE WALLS HAVE EARS. AND EYES.
With all of the shifting in Deerington, it's not shocking when you start to feel like something in your home or workplace has begun to shift. You can't put your finger on what it is. Your furniture is exactly where it should be. Nothing seems moved. Maybe it's just Deerington paranoia acting up. God knows Sleepers have plenty to be paranoid about. Then you start to notice little oddities. Scratch marks on the baseboards of your bedroom. If you have a bedframe with posts you might notice what looks like human bite marks have taken out chunks of the material. Only surely no one's gone around biting your bed? When you walk by windows, you start to think you see a trick of the eye and you could swear you see bars on the other side of your window. What? No. You don't have bars on your bedroom windows...
You're just seeing things. You're just seeing things. But maybe you're hearing things too. You can hear scuttling in the walls - maybe the rats from February? No, no...This is different. It sounded too big. More of a sliding shuffle than a scuttle. Maybe you look into your vents just to make sure but there's nothing to find. Nothing at all.
Then you start to look at your walls. Was that stain always there? Was it just part of the wallpaper or paint? Hmm...You don't remember there being a stain there.
You keep looking at the stain. Maybe it only takes a few days or a few hours but eventually, you start to see a face in the stain. If the stain's big enough you could swear it looks like...a person crawling. No. No! That's ...Just your imagination. Get a grip. But that stain may start to look like it has eyes, eyes looking right at you. Or the design in your wallpaper might start to look like a face is tucked among the floral patterns, eyes staring right at you.
You start to notice creeping figures out and around Deerington. While you're shopping for groceries you swear you can see a woman crawling from one aisle to the next, quick and scurrying. Were you the only one who saw that? Surely not? Maybe others have too. Then you see more women crawling across yards and you feel paralyzed with fear because they all look like that stain on your wall.
When you come back the stain has moved.
This drives many mad. You start to obsess over the stain. Maybe you even break apart your walls to see if there's really a person behind them. Maybe you start to peel the wallpaper off your walls or try to repaint everything to hide it. But the more you do, the more you sink down into paranoia. Eventually you start crawling around, trying to see if you can conjure up these creeping figures. You find yourself scratching at the baseboards and gnawing on furniture, becoming the very creeping fiend you feared.
Maybe you even eventually start to creep into people's homes, into their walls, to start the cycle of madness all over again. The only way to break free of this cycle is to catch one of the people in the walls, take their hand and pull. If you win this tug of war, you and the figure you chased in your madness into the walls will fall back into the three dimensional space of regular Deerington and you'll find the person you were chasing was just another sleeper trapped in the cycle like you. If you lose... you find yourself falling into an endless void and when you slow to a stop--
WASH AWAY THE MADNESS. PURGE THE SIN.
--You find yourself floating in midair in the middle of a sterile white room. You lost the tug of war with the other sleeper in the walls, or perhaps you were just walking down the street and got distracted by your reflection moving strangely in the storefront window and touching it pulled you through the glass and landed you here. Regardless of how you got here, now you are in what looks like a room that belongs in a hospital. Somehow you are also dressed in white pants and a t-shirt and there's a hospital bracelet on your wrist that has your name and blood type printed on it as well as a patient number. Beside you is another sleeper, either the one who you lost the tug of war to or a completely new one. You are able to speak to each other in this space and there is a slight echo as you do, enjoy it while it lasts.After a moment of weightlessness, your bare feet touch the ground, which feels cold like concrete but is as white as the white subway tiled walls. There also appears to not be any light source, it just comes from everywhere and you may notice you're not casting a shadow. And neither is the albino german shepard that's appeared in the room with you. It looks friendly enough and you get the sense that it wants to guide you somewhere as it turns to walk through an open door that has suddenly appeared in the room.
Follow the dog and you'll find yourselves in an all white hallway, only there's a mirrored ceiling and the yellow stains of age on the peeling white wallpaper move in ways that make you uneasy. Almost immediately, you'll notice that there is no sound, not even from the dog or your own steps, not even your own heartbeat can be heard. But oddly, you can hear your own breathing, so loud in the otherwise utterly silent space that you speak to your companion just to have a different sound, but your voice is muted as well. Charades might be the only choice of communication between you two for some time. And as you continue on in this odd liminal space, out of your peripheral vision you'll notice your reflections on the ceiling above acting oddly, walking backwards or twirling in a childlike fashion while you are walking a straight line.
Spend long enough in this never ending silent white and bright hall with nothing but your breath to remind you that you're physically occupying this space and you start to feel on the edge of your sanity. After pulling your gaze from the disorienting reflections and stains on the wall, you look for the dog, but the dog is gone and in its place far down the hall is a small child dressed in white from head to toe with very little skin showing. It feels like it's been so long since you heard a voice that when the child speaks your ears hurt, blood trickles out. Wait, that can't be right... is it because of the silence from before or is the voice just supernaturally immense?
"GET OUT."
Is all the child says before water starts slowly rising up from the floor, but take a whiff and you catch the strong chemical scent of bleach. You and your companion must rush to find an exit or another creative solution to the problem at hand before you are drowned, and there will be no holding one's breath and swimming with your eyes open if you are submerged in bleach so you must act quickly. At the end of the long hall where the child stood there is a red light, but if you run towards it, it seems to only get further away.
If you can't go forward or back, then through the walls is the only solution. It is difficult though, at all the spots on the walls that are white, they are indestructible. It's the aged, yellow stains that are perpetually moving and shifting that are the weak points. Together, you must try to corner the shifting stains to stay still long enough for you to kick and punch your way through very thick walls. The stains seem to move away from anyone experiencing strong emotions and towards those who are calm and collected, and the key is to get them to stop moving entirely.
Once you burst through the thick wall and escape drowning by bleach, you'll either find yourself back in Deerington, or...
BREAK MY CHAINS AND I'LL BREAK YOURS.
You stumble into a mostly empty and dimly lit surgical room with blood on the floor and old dinge and rust on tiles and sinks. If you came here from the white hallway slowly filling with bleach, the pungent liquid will spill into the space as you enter, but turn around to look at the hole you and your companion made and you'll see it magically stitch itself up, like a wound in flesh speed healing rather than tile and drywall reorienting itself. However, it's possible to arrive here from Deerington without going through the white hall and that's by passing an empty lot in town. You could have sworn that lot had a house or a store the other day, but instead there's a dingy storage shed that draws you in with an intoxicating scent that wafts from a jagged hole in the side. No matter where you came here from, when you walk through, one or more other sleepers can walk through holes in the other walls at the same time and each hole will stitch up behind you.It's too late to turn back once you're in and you barely have time to realize the danger you're clearly in when you are struck from behind and knocked unconscious. No matter what your body is made of or what abilities you have, you are knocked out cold... and when you awaken you are chained in the center of the room to a rusy old cair. The other sleeper or sleepers you found yourself with in this place are in the same situation facing you and on the floor in between you is a pile of old rusted keys of varying shapes and made of all different kinds of metals. The only thing these keys seem to have in common is the look of sharpness on every edge, like if you picked them up too hastily you could slice open your hand and get a tetanus infection from the rust.
The next thing you might notice is the heavy breathing of another person nearby, and when you look you see a large man in a soiled button down, jacket and khakis. He looks like a pro wrestler that went to a court hearing that then got blown up and he was the only survivor. But more striking than his size and attire is the fact that in place of a human head is just a black smoky blur with what looks like hundreds of eyes poking through the darkness, and when he turns, his face is nothing but a gaping circular maw with rows and rows of jagged teeth that spin like a food processor. The man doesn't speak, the only sound that seems to come from that horrifying void that is his head is haunting and hard to describe. It gazes at its prisoners with its infinite eyes for a moment, washes blood from its hands in one of the sinks along the wall and then lumbers over to the only exit while sharpening a butcher's knife.
It is rather clear what his intentions are. But why leave a pile of keys and not kill and eat you now? Who cares what game he's playing, what test you're undergoing? Time to figure out how to get free and obviously the keys are important. The chairs can be moved, tilted over and pushed, but they are heavy and you'll have to work together to get the right leverage to start picking up keys and testing them on each other's locks which are placed by your hands bound behind your backs. Your hands are so tightly bound that you have to use the keys blindly on the other person's lock, and don't forget that those keys are sharp and hard to hold too. One of you will get free first, but then the haunting sound and the thump of his feet can be heard in the next room. Do you leave your companion to the monster or risk it and try the other keys?
Whatever your choice, the door to get out is locked and unbreakable, but there's a vent high above it that you can get through alone with great difficulty, but will be much easier and faster with the help of your fellow sleeper. The moment you are inside and moving through the vents, the hulking man with the void head will let out an ear shattering screech and chase you from below, the butcher knife and other stabbing objects will slice through the bottom of the vent and you'll have to dodge and weave until you see the light at the end. Kick the exit vent open and you'll crawl out onto grass outside any building in town.
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.
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Alright, and what created this dream? The Abyss Order? [But even as he says it he knows that's not correct. He frowns.] No, sorry. Forget I said that.
Just tell me what you know about it. That thing is like nothing I'd ever seen before.
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[He's still tired, and he's had to lean more and more on Diluc as they walk. He can keep going, he wants to keep going until maybe they get to the hospital to get this knife removed, but it's hard.]
This dream...it belongs to a girl, but it's still as real as our lives in Teyvat. I could still bleed out and die right here, if you chose to remove this blade right now. Situations like our own are not uncommon, and are to be expected. It is a vortex of chaos.
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It will get them there faster but, not over tax them.] ‘Like our own’ who else is here?
[He glances at him to gauge his expression but also to check on his condition. If he has to just sling over his shoulder and sprint for the hospital. He’ll do it.
To think he’d save the life of one of the more quirky Harbingers. But right now, he is the only damn one around he knows and he needs what he knows.
And he isn’t a complete bastard.] ...what else should I know about this girl.
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[He understands Diluc's want to know as much as possible. But Childe isn't sure if he has the strength right now to process anything more than one at a time. His expression shows it- the blood loss is slowed because the blade is still in his shoulder, but with the head blow and that, it gets harder to walk by the second.]
You are the only other one here from our homeworld, as far as I know. As for the girl, well... [His voice trails off as he tries to find something mildly acceptable as an answer.] I don't know much, other than we are trapped here because of her. She has powers we could never dream of possesing...I'm still trying to do research. I can...show you how I've come across this information later.
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Show me when you’ve recovered. I’ll check out the town in the meantime.
[The hospital staff are moving rapidly around and look swamped. He has never seen the inside of a hospital like this. It looks so different from anything he’s used to. But he doesn’t let it stop him from leading Childe in and calling out.] Hey, we need assistance or he’ll bleed out!
[Handling the public training kicks in as he guides him to the front desk where a Nurse is already pointing them to an exam room with a hurried flick of her hand. Diluc doesn’t waste time but tosses a polite thank you over his shoulder. That’s when his own injuries finally throb with pain he’s been ignoring this whole time. Not yet. He has to keep going for a bit longer.] ...after some rest.
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I don't know when I'll be released from here but...rest assured, I will try to be of assistance with anything you have questions about. [He looks at Diluc and weakly smiles.]
Thank you again. Please, take care- I don't want to hear of a nasty fate befalling you while I'm here. Once you've found your care package, and find your Fluid- [He lifts his wrist up feebly to show the device-] I can help show you how to use it.
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He drops his leg back down and looks back up at Childe, briefly conflicted. There's no choice. Until he confirms Childe's words are true he can't sear this bridge to ash.] ...and thank you. [The words feel weird to use. Diluc leans back in his chair, wincing slightly at the twinge in his hands. One last question.]
Exactly where can I find this package?
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[A nurse rushes in and immediately sees the blade- then rushes out to get a doctor and more instructions. Childe only laughs, he's sure they'd take him to another room where they can better handle the blood. This room wasn't equipped for his injury.]
She'll be back soon. Perhaps you should think about letting them see to your injuries as well.
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So there is a place already set out for me. That keeps getting better and better. [A dream. A girl. It’s a lot of information. He takes his boot off and peels his pant leg up to expose the cut. It looks about like he expected it to.]
As for letting them treat me. That’s the plan. I’ll confirm everything you’ve told me while you’re recovering.
[Common goal or not, he has survived on caution and that isn’t changing any time soon. He turns his hands palm up and rests them on his thighs.] ...and watch that knife. It might be ordinary. It might not. I’ll be in here while they treat you.
[Ready to burst out of the room and into the fray once more if the knife turns out the creature’s means of being somewhere.]
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Now I think you're just saying that to try to scare me. [A feeble attempt at humor, but on edge just in case what Diluc suggested might be true.]
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Anyway, just expressing a suspicion. If it is more dangerous than it appears it will be dealt with. I’ll destroy it once it’s out of your shoulder.
[He is a ruthless man. He makes no qualms about it. At present they have a common goal and he puts his full dedication into it. He taps the cut on his palm.] How are your hands? Let me see.
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It's not the worst thing that could have happened to me. [He still has his hands. That he won't complain about.] Honestly, I'm happy we both got out of there with all of our limbs intact.
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Maybe. Diluc leans back in his chair and lifts his own hands up. The cuts on his own hands stand out clearly.] You’re right, we got lucky.
I think it was playing with us. It realized we were more capable when it was too late.
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That's what it deserves. It should of been more weary of us, it even had the advantage. Come to think of it... [Maybe this isn't the right time to ask, but...]
I've heard you're pretty strong...Master Diluc, isn't it? And you've most certainly lived up to your reputation. Mind being my sparring partner so we don't get rusty while we're here?
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It’s an opportunity in more than one way. And a risk in so many others. He recovers enough to say mildly. I don’t mind. You’ve more than proven you could match me.
You live up to your reputation as one of the eleven, Childe.
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Now that introductions are out of the way, I think I'll focus on trying to recover. I wouldn't want to be a second-rate opponent for you.
[He relaxes, despite the pain that still sears through his body. No sooner does a doctor and several nurses and assistants come back into the room. Two nurses immediately turn to Diluc to help- and the doctor and assistants begin to instruct Childe on what they were going to do. One assistant grabs the blade and removes it from his shoulder, and all Childe can do is bite his lip to keep him from crying out in pain. It's not the first time but it always hurts. The butcher knife is taken away, and they begin to administer aid to his shoulder. There's a lot of blood, but thankfully it hadn't hit anything serious.]
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He bites his bottom lip and ducks his head. His chest rises and falls slowly as they clean out the wounds on his palms and dress them. His breath comes out in a hiss but he doesn’t jerk or twitch.
It appears as if he has done things like this many, many times. Once they’re bandaged his leg is seen to. It’s a gash that needs sewn up. He makes the mistake of attempting to grip his chair arms. Pain rips through him and he bows his head. His curse is short and sharp, like a blade. It’s the only thing he utters as they sew up the gash. But he isn’t bad enough to warrant an overnight stay. He will have to leave soon enough.]
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Any more bandages and the mages of Sumeru Academia might come try to study me as an archaeology project, hahahaha...
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Are they keeping you here over night, after all or do you need a hand up?
[He carefully takes a bit of bandage they hadn't used on his hands and ties his hair up in a high ponytail. Better. Much better.]
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[Basically code for "I'm probably going to open my wound again somehow."]
What about your leg? That looked pretty nasty from here.
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It's nothing that will slow me down that much. I've been worse. [Basically code for the same thing, "probably going to open it again somehow." He offers his hand and grips the table in his other hand.
He just has to be smart about how he handles this injury and it should be alright.]
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I think that's been enough excitement for one day. Let's get out of here.
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[If he needs to walk with him he will. For now he lets go of him and stands on his own, watching him. Childe is nothing like he expected and yet he can see why the other Harbingers eye him warily.
In a way he's very like those the Fauti war against.]
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[He does, at least, look a little better sans the bandages.]
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But, I agree. We should rest and get some water in us before we figure out how to proceed. If we decide to part ways after resting, that will be fine too. I'm sure we'll cross paths again soon enough so contact won't be an issue either.
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