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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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[He ventures with a cock of his head. Then returns his attention to the dog as it turns away from Diluc's hand. Then he raises his eyebrow, not seeing any open door... yet.]
Follow it to where?
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No. A Vision is a focus of elemental forces. Sorry, I keep forgetting this isn't home.
[He shakes his head and when he looks up there is a doorway ahead of the dog to a white hallway. That's never a good sign.] That way, apparently.
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[He says with a shrug, and then lets out a shuddered breath, shaking out his arms before he moves to follow the dog. It wasn't too long ago that he was mentally spiraling over moving wallpaper people and he's still trying to recover from that. But now they're going into another fresh hell, probably and he just... needs a second.]
... Whew, okay. Let's do this.
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His face has adopted a composed expression as if this is just another day. He scans the white hallway subtly with slight tilts of his head. The hall has some stains on pale white walls. Had they moved? They seem to drift towards him and he relaxes further, leaving himself loose and ready to be highly violent.]
Do you see them? [He asks out of the side of his mouth and blinks. He had shapes the words but nothing came out. Diluc frowns and lifts a hand pointing at the wall to their left then right.
It could be a one off thing but silent communication is safer.]
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And as difficult as those voices are to live with and how much they have pushed him towards his darkest moments... he's gotten used to them. In a weird way, some of them are kind of his friends. His very... ill-advised and not real friends. Well, probably not real.]
Dude, what's with the- [He's not sure why he expected his voice to come out when he can't hear even his own footsteps, but he did. And the fact that no sound is come out of him has him starting to panic. He reaches out to grab Diluc's shoulder and turns him to look up at his face.] THERE'S NO SOUND! Even they're gone, and dude yelling isn't fixing it! WHY ISN'T YELLING FIXING IT??
[Yes, he's now starting to shake the other guy forward and back.]
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He plants his feet. It will now be a lot harder to shake him. He points at Lance then gestures to the hallway ahead of them.
Then he narrows his eyes and shakes his head.]
This is not the time. [He mouths. Before he shrugs off the hand and starts forward. Only to stop. The dog was moving towards a child.]
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Then he looks over to the dog and a strange child all in white... he can't even tell what gender they are. It's creepy, like classic horror movie levels of creepy, but it's the only way to head to. The kid just seems to be standing there silently, so... take a step towards them? The dog was nice enough seeming and it's heading towards them, right?]
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But it’s easy to fall into the role of being the lead. He faces the child warily as he motions - in visible range for Lance - that he’s starting forward again.
Diluc walks ahead, taking in the strangeness around them at a side glance. Odd. The stains seem to be following him.
He shouldn’t be so calm but, what else is there? The child looks at them. It’s hard to tell their gender but he reads the tension in their body. He stops immediately and holds out an arm for Lance to stop too.]
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So what the hell? But his thoughts are interrupted by the deafening boom of the child's voice, again genderless:] GET OUT.
[His hands go up to slam over his ears on instinct and he yells 'what the hell?!' but still, there is no sound that comes out of him. It isn't until the smell of bleach hits his nose from below that he realizes there was nothing to smell as well as hear until now. He looks down and then up over at Diluc with a confused expression.]
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Then he looks at the walls. He needs to calm down or he can’t figure out their way out. He motions for Lance to come closer as he forces down his fear and panic, embracing the stillness in his head.
Last time he touched a stain, he was pulled here. He points to the yellow stain closest to them and reaches out. He presses his hand to it.
Nothing.
Wait.
He taps it. The wall feels weaker in that spot. He pulls his fist back and swings. There’s a feeling of the wall starting to give in that spot. He swings again. It’s desperate but, maybe.]
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What is he doing?? The bleach is already up to their knees!!]
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He glances at Lance and jerks his head towards the now cracked wall. Come on his eyes seem to say. Then he turns and hammers another punch at the wall, feeling the sting of wood against his knuckles. But the wall gives a little bit more...]
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Nothing happens. His powers are off and now the bleach is up to his crotch and he's getting light headed, oh no is it gonna hurt his junk? He is panicking again and starts clawing at the stain with his hands.]
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Then nothing happens. Diluc shakes his head and motions for Lance to hit the side of the stain. Then he hammers his side, putting his full speed and power behind it. He draws back one fist to hammer the other, letting himself settle into a rhythm. The wall gives with each hit.
It looks like a hole in a body with each successful strike. There's a gap forming and he can't see into the darkness beyond but it's better than dying horribly.]
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And sound blessed SOUND. He can hear things all at once and he almost weeps with joy. Even if it's creepy butcher basement of a psycho creepy things.] YES! Holy shit, we made i-!
[And that's when he's knocket out.]
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Except. The fire also lets him see it. He has a moment of surprise and it costs him.
—-
His head aches. Someone is sharpening a blade with precision and care. But the lack of pounding after means he isn’t near a smithy. Diluc’s eyes flutter open and peers out through his bangs. His eyes fall on the red and black metal of his claymore resting against the far wall. His belt with his Vision is wrapped around the hilt.
He straightens up slowly, mindful of his head so he doesn’t cause himself a dizzy spell. The room looks like a hospital of some sort but he can taste the coppery tang in the air of blood spilled and done so often.
His eyes narrow before he relaxes and starts to slowly look about. The chains wrapped around him are held in place by something. He moves his arms slightly. A lock. Ah.]
From one trouble into another.
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Yeah, that's how it goes sometimes. I'm Lance, by the way. Y'know, now that we can talk. God it feels so good to talk, this psycho doesn't do that and I think he's planning to eat us, so uh...
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His eyes narrow and he leans all his weight to the right then shoves abruptly to the left. His chair scoots a little closer. He does it again, eyes on the slightly open door he's heard the sharpening from.]
We'll continue as before. These are keys. [He has moved his chair just enough he can grab a key and the edge cuts through his glove into his palm. He clamps his mouth shut against the pain. The scent of blood was already in the air. Fresh blood doesn't change it that much.]
Move a bit closer, I'll test this in the padlock.
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What ends up happening is, he topples over onto his side in the exact wrong direction needed for that to happen.]
... Shit.
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Or a knife. He reaches out with his foot to try and push on the chair. But then he remembers the heat that burned him just a little bit. He takes a breath.] Your power.
Can you use it?
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[Mostly. It's a hard thing to forget about, he just avoids thinking about it or ever using it unless he's in an altered state of mind or he has to. He lets out a resigned breath, seeing it as the fastest way out of this.]
Well, here goes nothing. You might wanna shield your eyes.
[And with that he starts to glow all over since he isn't the best at focusing it to one place. He has figured out how to focus it away from his clothes so they don't burn, though. Blue and gold solar plasma arcs off his body like it's the surface of the sun and quickly the chains are melted so severely that their molecular composition hovers between liquid and gas.]
Guess the answer is yes.
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He shoves down his surprise as he says,] I can get out if you bring me the red broach.
I’ll get my sword once I’m free. [It’s a massive blade. Someone with the right amount of muscle could wield it but no one else.]
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You sure a piece of jewelry is gonna help you?
[He brings it over to Diluc all the same, but he also grabs the sword just in case. It's a heavy thing, and he's strong enough to carry it, but no way would he fight with it.]
Dude, you fight with this thing?
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Then he reaches for his sword.] Yes, I do.
[His hand closes around the hilt and he lifts it smoothly, turning the weapon. The cuts on his palms hurt but he ignores them.] Let’s go.
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Uh, right.
[Just then, they hear more movement and odd noises coming from the void man in the other room and Lance heads to the door. He tugs and it doesn't budge. Then he tries his powers on it and again nothing happens.]
The chains can be incinerated but not the door? What kinda logic is that?
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