soddersays | MARCH 2021 TEST DRIVE MEME

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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.

Prompt One
Prompt Two Prompt Three
Character Arrival
Master Navigation

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.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

It'll be her bestseller, just you wait and see.

"Yes. It's a..." She wrinkles her nose, because this still seems so strange to her - a phone that can do all of the things that the fluid can do. It's captivating, and a bit terrifying.

"A phone, that has a little screen, and you can talk to other people on 'video'," yes, she uses air quotes, "and 'texting'. It's really...something else, I'd never seen anything like it before coming here." She's describing a smartphone, Sam.

"It ought to have been in a basket, probably in your kitchen. Have you looked? There are some rather important things in there you will likely want."

Oh he...

"No, I haven't," he answers and looks towards the door.

"I didn't really get a chance. I woke up here and the next thing I knew I was getting pulled through a wall."

A glance to the hole in his ceiling before he looks back at her. Exactly what he's just done to you, he explains without speaking. She seems bright, he doesn't have to spell it out.

But Sam takes that as a hint to get up and he scoots himself off his dusty bed to pull himself to his full height, dusting the debris off his chest and out of his shaggy, wild hair. He's having a hell of a night. Badum-tish.

His heart is starting to pound again. His blood boiling for realease- No, Sam get a hold of yourself! Cram all that shit down and lock it away. Now's not the time. He hears it so clearly in his brother's voice that he flicks his attention around the room just in case that leather jacket is standing somewhere close by.

Whoooosah, okay, you're okay. Pack it in. Sam shakes it off and takes a step before turning back to offer his hand.

No, no need to read her the alphabet here. She's got it under control. And, now that she's gotten over her shock of being dragged through a wall by her hair, she doesn't seem particularly unfazed by it.

"Well. We ought to take a look, yes?"

Evelyn flashes him a wry smile before taking his hand, keeping the throw wrapped around her shoulders with her free hand.

"It's a lot, for some people. They don't always handle it well, I'm told."

"Well," as he leads them out, carefully checking around corners like a soldier with his hand back against her before deciding whether they can advance or not. He checks the other bedroom. The bathroom. He has to.

"Believe it or not," once he's decided that they're alone and can cross the living room to the kitchen area. And, hey, it's actually a pretty nice place.

"This is not the weirdest thing that's ever happened to me."

Sam isn't usually one to divulge but when in Rome. Or Hell. Or, apparently, Deerington.

"Oh, me either," she says, almost dismissively, at this point. Clutching her makeshift cape, she trails after him, taking the apartment in, because oh goodness, this is so nice. It's different than her haunted mansion, but in a warm, familiar way. Probably all the brick, it makes her think of a library.

"I," she says, like she's telling a super serious secret as she follows his OCD ass from room to room, "had a mummy trying to kill me back home. Sounds like something out of those moving pictures, doesn't it?"

Edited 2021-03-11 02:24 (UTC)

..

He glances back at her and raises an eyebrow. He's got his knife at the ready incase they get attacked but so far so good. He hopes.

"What do you mean mummy?"

Because that sounds like his kind of thing.

"I mean a mummy. Raised from the dead, walking talking...mummy."

Handsome, if he hadn't been trying to kill her.

"There. That looks like your little basket. On the counter, see?"

Sam blinks and considers that for a moment before turning to look at the basket and approach it.

"I didn't see this before," putting down the kitchen knife he'd blindly pulled and picks up a buck knife in the basket. Far bigger and more ornate with intricate glyphs down the broad side of the blade. It feels right in his hand and it's like he can breathe a little bit. This is real. He can feel it.

Sam smiles and tucks it into his belt before checking the rest of his items. Bag with clothes and his laptop. A bracelet. Some little cloth bags, Fluid, some other things he's never seen before including a little jar of blueberries that he eyes with great suspicion before setting aside.

Then, finally, a set of car keys. For a moment he thinks it's the Impala's keys but he knows those like the back of his hand. These are different. Old, similar year, but different. Huh.

He sets those aside as well, everything from the basket laid out on the wooden counter in a neat, methodical grid.

Only then does he read the letter.

And then reads it again.

Then he looks up at Evelyn.

"And you believe all this?" It tracks with the strange dream he'd had just before waking up but he's so overwhelmed and overstimulated at the moment. His normal process is right out the damn window.

That's quite a knife. She'd like to look at it, but she isn't touching things that aren't hers, without permission - especially not after what happened with that bloody book.

It's a lot to absorb - so she lets him read it, peering around his kitchen, leaning against the counter as she waits for him to process.

"Oh, yes. Well -- not at first, no. It was a bit ridiculous, but I've been here since December, and I can assure you, it's all very true."

"Huh." That's all he's got.

Sam tongues his teeth while he thinks before setting the letter down on the counter.

"I'd really like to believe that."

In the grand scheme of things it would be a lot easier. If there was a way, any way he could test and prove that.. Prove that Evelyn isn't a demon or a figment of his imagination. That this was actually a dream and not a clever maze created to torture him..

In hindsight it will be arrogant of him to assume that this is all for him.. but right now he can't help but think it.

And anything he says to point out the theory will just dig him deeper into the emersion. He doesn't know if that's a good idea or not. If he should play along or reject it all so violently that it breaks the illusion. The mind is too powerful and he doesn't- can't let himself trust anything's face value.

Well. If you happen to have a crucifix in that Mary Poppins bag of yours, by all means bless some water and throw it on her. She'll only be mildly pissed.

"It takes time, for some." She smiles, not unkindly, because it took her a little bit to come to terms with it, too.

"I'd offer to make you some tea, I find it helps settle the nerves, but I don't know my way around your kitchen."

"Oh, uh.. Yeah, neither do I," Sam laughs and gestures for her to go ahead and do whatever she wants.

"You don't have to stay. You probably.. have a bed you want to be getting back to. I'm sorry about the, uh," he gestures.

"Ceiling thing."

"Oh, it's alright, I don't mind - about the kitchen tea situation, not the hair yanking. I suppose it wasn't your fault, but goodness," she huffs, making herself at home, scrounging around his cabinets until she finds something drinkable that they can both tolerate.

"You could have been more polite, Sam."

"Sorry," sheepish but almost wry as he watches her navigate his little kitchen. Teacups, kettle, some basic options waiting to be discovered. English breakfast, peppermint and chamomile.

"But in my defense Evelyn, do you always go through walls head first?"

She does know her way around, at least - it takes no time to get accustomed to what's around.

"No," she says, defensively, pulling the chamomile out, because you, sir -- need to calm down. "But when I see a stain that looks like a face on my wall, I do tend to usually investigate it, and generally speaking, a hand doesn't normally come out and grab me by the bloody hair."

Snerk.

It's not funny but the way she says it is just so charming. The accent helps, too.

Sam clears his throat.

"Fair enough. What can I do to make it up to you?"

That's a good question. She ponders it, letting him hang on tenterhooks while she boils water and makes tea, fussing about in his kitchen like it's her own.

This is what happens when Evelyn Carnahan bursts into your life.

"I'd say, working a week at my shop ought to call it even."

Sam's brows pin high on his forehead, hip checking the counter, arms folded over his chest.

Not what he was expecting.

"Your shop. Huh. And what shop might that be?"

Not surprising. She hadn't really thought of it herself until it spilled out of her mouth. But it seems like perfectly fair trade, in her opinion.

"I own a bookstore here," she says, setting the kettle on his stove and letting the water heat. "Spellbound Book Co. I can always use a nice, tall man to help with shelving books and keeping the aisles straightened up."

Sam considers it for a moment.

He really... really wants to believe that this is all Kosher.

So, so very badly.

"Spellbound, huh. Like witchcraft?"

Oh...she wouldn't say it's kosher. It's been one thing after another since she arrived. The walkers, the hotel, her heart being shoved back into her chest by a near stranger...

But, it's probably distinctly better than Hell, and being stuck in a cage with Lucifer. Right?

"Oh, heavens no. I just liked the name. But, I can get books on witchcraft, if you'd like."

Ah, a small relief and then nope- no that. Right back to worrying.

"Oh no. That's.. not really my thing. Those are dangerous books. That doesn't bother you?"

With his powers on high he can sense without touching her that Evelyn isn't a demon. In fact she feels distinctly human. Doesn't mean she isn't dangerous, though.

Sam doesn't look but he is acutely aware of the hex bags on the counter behind him.

She actually laughs, reaching for the kettle when it whistles, carefully pouring out two cups, one for each.

"Not really. I've seen far more dangerous books, truthfully."

"Call me crazy but I'm not sure how reassuring that is to hear."

"Oh, don't be so uptight. At least here, they don't seem to raise the dead."

She pushes a mug in front of him.

"Honestly."

MARCH 2021 TEST DRIVE MEME

THE WALLS HAVE EARS. AND EYES.

WASH AWAY THE MADNESS. PURGE THE SIN.

BREAK MY CHAINS AND I'LL BREAK YOURS.

Character Arrival

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