3.0 Test Drive Meme

[wellie]

3.0 Test Drive Meme

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Welcome to Well! Characters arrive a little differently this month (see the first prompt). Your character arrives this month in the middle of the formless desert with only a handful of memories, clad in old west style clothes of your choosing, with no items from home.

Anyone is free to play on the TDM, but you need an invite to apply. Feel free to use these prompts, and interact with the arrival or locations. NPCs are around, but only say a certain set of phrases. TDMs can be considered game canon.

This TDM takes place from the first week of August onward, and can happen concurrently with other events during August and September. This will be the only TDM for August, September, and October.

Applications are open July 26th until August 1st, and August 27th until September 1st. Invites are available for friends of current players.

A Little Lost

Content warnings: heat exhaustion, feelings of unreality

You wake up in a sea of sand. It’s hot, and dry, and it seems to go on forever. You don’t remember much about yourself except your name and a handful of memories that most likely aren’t useful right now.

The sand slip-slides under your feet with every step. Sun beats down heavy and hot on your neck and your head. You’re so thirsty. How did you get here? How long have you been walking? Where are you headed? You can’t know. You feel like you’ve been walking forever, but the sun stays high above you, like it’s always noon. It may have been hours, it may have been mere minutes. What are those things circling in the sky above you? Vultures? That can't mean anything good.

Eventually, you find someone else, another new arrival, maybe, or a resident of the town who may have wandered a little too far into the desert. Maybe they have some water on them? Either way, company is exactly what you need right now, because there sure isn’t anything else in this desolate place. Not a cactus, not an animal, not even hints of a town.

Once you’re together, it seems a little easier to move forward. Time starts to move, too. The sun dips in the sky, your feet tread through the sand, and together, eventually you find the town.

If you take too long after you find one another, and the sun sets, be careful. Cacti sprout up closer to town, and after the sun sets, the cacti start to move, and they seem hungry for blood.

tl;dr:

• This time, new arrivals wake up lost in the middle of a vast desert.
• There's too much sun, too much sand, vultures circling and too little water.
• Finding each other makes time start again, and lets you find the town.
• If you don't make it back to town before nightfall, vicious living cacti appear to attack you.

Face Your Fears

Content warnings: hallucinations, reality shifts

In this town, fear soaks the hot, dry air. It lurks in shadows and the corners of rooms, waiting for their moment. What is it that you fear? Monsters? Disappointing your parents? Maybe you’re afraid that everyone you love will leave you, or that you’ll end up alone. Whatever it is, right now, there’s a chance of becoming very real.

It happens suddenly. Your mind drifts. You lose focus on what you were doing, and when you look up again, the world around you has shifted. What was a nice lunch with a new friend or a fun visit to the saloon becomes a nightmare. What fear manifests is totally up to you, and it can be different every time. The person beside you could become a monster you think is trying to attack you, or you could be suddenly alone in a cold dark space, desolate and empty.

Whatever horror your mind conjures up for you, it will feel real in all ways and with all senses including, of course, your perception of pain. As far as you know, you’re trapped in a nightmare with no way out.

Except, of course, there is a way out: you just need to figure out that it isn’t real. Maybe you’re strong enough to do that on your own; maybe you’ll need help from a friend or a new pal, reaching through the illusion to pull you back. After all, these hallucinations are entirely in the mind of the beholder: to everyone around you, it sure just looks like you’re yelling at your pancakes!

tl;dr:

• You start hallucinating that the things you fear most are actually happening to you.
• These fears feel like real, concrete sensory experiences, even though they're only happening in your head.
• You can escape by recognizing that what's happening isn't real, either on your own or with help.

Bullrider

Content warnings: mild bovine coercion, alcohol

Come on, hot stuff. You know you want to.

Bet you can’t stay on for more than half a minute.

You don’t look too tough.

You think you can tame me?

In the saloon, you hear a voice in your head. It calls to you, the words seductive and enticing: you want to prove it wrong, you want to find out what it’s promising, you hate to lose. Whatever the motivation, you find yourself abandoning your drink and making your way to the new attraction at the back of the saloon: the bull.

It’s a big boy: a massive mechanical bull. Covered in spotted cowhide, with a bull head and big horns, this thing sits on a massive pedestal like a challenge. Around it is spread... relatively thin padding and a flimsy rope to keep the audience back an appropriate distance.

The compulsion keeps a hold on you until you’re on the bull. Maybe you’re on it with a friend, or a stranger, and it starts up with a mechanical buzzing. It starts to sway under you, and now you have just one job: stay on.

It starts easy, but gets harder as it goes along. It’s incredibly difficult to stay on for more than a minute. But during that minute, you feel amazing. You feel hot as hell, in whatever way that works for you: sexy, powerful, bold, in control.

Until he throws you off onto the padding or into the crowd! When you get thrown, there's a good chance you'll go flying into the crowd. Hopefully they're ready to catch you!

If by some miracle you manage to stay on for more than a minute and a half, the bartender slides you a bullrider special: a spicy whiskey cocktail with a hint of lime. Feel free to leave it up to pure chance, and have the mods roll a die for you to see whether you manage to stay on or not.


tl;dr:

• There's a mechanical bull in the back of the saloon!
• There's a strange deep voice in your head, coercing you into giving it a shot.
• It's hard to stay on, but when you're on it, you feel powerful, bold and in control.
• The padding's pretty thin and you'll get thrown hard when you do. You might hit someone!
• If you stay on for more than a minute and a half, you'll get a fun little drink as a reward.

Comments

2

[toteninsel]

Ariane takes a seat beside the man in black, and she watches him work. They're a pair of corpses, the two of them: covered in bandages, white-haired, and rail-thin, Ariane looks like the desert wind could easily pick her up and carry her away.

His unnatural black eyes look into her equally-unsettling red ones, and he asks the first sensible question Ariane has heard in this place.

"Song of my soul, my voice is dead; Die thou, unsung, as tears unshed; shall dry and die in Lost Carcosa."

Too bad her answer isn't sensible at all. But it makes sense to Ariane. Carcosa, the ancient city, just out of reach. Wellstone, the town at the edge of an endless desert.

"Is it calling to you?"

[necrolord]

It's the cadence of a poem that cuts through to him, jars him out of his reverie. He looks at her, properly, for the first time; those eclipse eyes focus, tighten at the edges. There are flecks of blood in his eyelashes.

"I don't know that one." He sounds a little impressed about it, even more when he parses the wreck of her: bandages, creepy eyes, a supernova of something-else under her skin. It's like she glows under blacklight. He doesn't have the words for it yet. "Yeah— yeah. I don't know what it is," and here he chews his lip, digs his fingers into the sand in fitful little clenches, "but it's everywhere. It's in the dirt, in the air, in us.

"I know it sounds insane," he adds, impatiently, like that's a caveat they need to get out of the way. "But— do you know what I mean?"

[toteninsel]

It doesn't sound insane. It sounds like having words for what's finally on the tip of your tongue. It's like remembering, but memories always hurt in this place, and right now, all Ariane feels is relief.

"I think I do." You can never be too sure, with words. That's why pictures are better. "I don't feel it all the time." Only when she's really happy, or frightened, or angry. "But when I do... it's like something I can reach out and touch. Something that's more real than any of us can see or hear or feel." A river, maybe.

No, bigger than that: a sea.

"It's from the King in Yellow." Ariane tries to smile. She's almost good at it. "I found it in a pit." Cool, huh?

[necrolord]

The wound tension begins to drop out of him. He lets go of the sand, and exhales a low, slow breath. With her at his side under the beating sun and the too-blue sky, he settles.

"Buried out in a mystery desert. Maybe someone didn't like the poetry." But he says it like it's cool. He reaches up again, a little more gently, to wipe the crusting blood from his eyes. "Can I hear the rest of it?"

[toteninsel]

Ariane smiles ruefully at the idea that someone threw the book into the pit because they didn't like the poem inside. The thing is, she remembers plenty of people who would do that. This person doesn't seem like the type, though, and when he asks to hear the rest of the poem, Ariane doesn't wonder whether he's humoring her. That's not the kind of thing that people who look like they've been crying blood do.

The poem is a long one, so Ariane gets herself a little more settled in before beginning.

"Along the shore the cloud waves break,
The twin suns sink behind the lake,
The shadows lengthen
In Carcosa.

Strange is the night where black stars rise,
And strange moons circle through the skies
But stranger still is
Lost Carcosa.

Songs that the Hyades shall sing,
Where flap the tatters of the King,
Must die unheard in
Dim Carcosa.

Song of my soul, my voice is dead;
Die thou, unsung, as tears unshed
Shall dry and die in
Lost Carcosa."

Ariane's speaking voice isn't much louder than a whisper. But out here, in this expanse, with no one around, it's not hard to hear her. What's a little bit more difficult to pick up on is the sound of waves crashing against a shore, despite the fact that they're both miles away from water.

[necrolord]

He's sure the waves must be in his head: it feels too achingly, awfully familiar to be real. The sound of a ruined beach, the sound of a river. He lets it muddle together beneath the rhythm of her voice.

The silence feels thick and almost ringing, after.

"Strange is the night where black stars rise," he echoes, because he can almost picture it. Dead stars, corpse-stars, way out past anything. It hurts to think of, but sweetly, like pressing on a loose tooth. It makes the backs of his eyes prickle red.

"Thank you," he says, genuinely, and lets his hands settle to the hot sand. He doesn't disturb it, this time. "I've got one, if you want it. Couldn't tell you what book it's from."

[toteninsel]

"You're welcome." Ariane is glad it helped. She's not exactly sure how - maybe it's just nice to hear someone else's voice? It doesn't really matter. She soaks up that silence, and in the meantime, tries to reach out to the sea, but she can't quite make it. Things are too peaceful out here. The man in black must be a much more powerful bioresonant than she is.

"Sure. I'd like to hear it. It's not every day you get to hear a poem from another world."

cw: bleeding from the face

[necrolord]

That's the thing. It might be a poem from another world, but it hits the same feeling— the same deep dark wistful ache— as the one in his head. That must mean something, right? That they're out here with nothing but poetry and the awareness that it means something big, something he isn't able to think about.

"It was many and many a year ago," he begins, and this comes as easy as breathing. He knows this rhythm better than he knows his own name. He gets to "I was a child and she was a child," and there is something on the tip of his tongue, so sweetly out of reach he could cry from it.

His voice goes funny on "To shut her up in a sepulchre," twisted aching in his throat. The sound isn't an ocean, he's thinking, it's a lake— cold, black, with little pinprick stars above— and the blood's back at the corners of his eyes, wet in his ear canals.

If Ariane had any question where all the blood had come from, this should solve it. His voice breaks again at "the demons down under the sea," and he has to raise clumsy, sandy fingers to wipe fresh red out of his eyes. He has to sniff back an ugly heat in his sinuses, impatient. He's so close to getting it.

"In her tomb by the sounding sea," he finishes, breathing harder than when he began. It's fine. The headaches never last long, and the bleeding's done as soon as he quits pressing at it. The breathlessness is a choke chain: worse the longer he strains against it, gone the moment he relents.

He relents. Into this second silence is the impatient rustle of John scrubbing at his face again, the hitch and steady of his breathing.

"Sorry. Tears unshed would be less gross, here." Ha ha.

cw: bleeding from the face

[toteninsel]

But our love it was stronger by far than the love of those who were older than we - Of many far wiser than we-

Ariane doesn't bleed, but part of her thinks she should. It'd be so easy. She could just peel off a bandage, and pick at a scab, and maybe she'd finally understand what went so wrong.

It's a beautiful poem. The sound of the waves slow, to match the man in black's cadence, and when he finishes, the tide recedes. Now it's just the two of them, and the sand, and the blood, and the reminder that they have to breathe. At least the man in black can tell a joke. Ariane smiles and laughs a little, if that sandpaper-thin sound can be called a laugh.

"It's all right. I don't mind. That was a beautiful poem." To show she doesn't mind, she unwinds her scarf and offers it out. "Here. I have more bandages at the hotel."

She's still thinking about the poem as the man in black gets cleaned up, or stares off into the desert, or does whatever he needs to do. "Of course the angels wanted to take her. Things like that - perfect things - they don't understand. I imagine they could never love the way the poet loves."

[necrolord]

It helps that she laughs. He rallies, and takes the scarf with a murmur of thanks. It helps him get the worst of it off his face and hands while she waits patient beside him.

"Lot of good it did them," he says, which seems a bit too bleak, but he can't help it. Thinking is like trying to find his footing on sand, and this is a rare solid patch. "That's what brought the angels down on them, right?"

He's not sure if it's meant to be complaint or commiseration or what, just that he's getting sick of this gnawing headache. He rubs at his eyes again, blows out a sigh.

"There's a hotel?"

[toteninsel]

"But they won, didn't they?" Ariane doesn't think the man sounds bleak at all. "The poet's still beside her. Neither the angels in Heaven above, nor the demons down under the sea can ever dissever my soul from the soul of the beautiful Annabel Lee."

Ariane doesn't really know what angels are, or what heaven is, but she does know that it's good that they failed.

But oh, right - the hotel. Practicalities. Ariane nods. "Yes. Since you woke up here, you'll probably have a room. There's clothes and food for you, too. They do a very nice breakfast pastry. And most of the other people who are staying there are all right." That last fact is still a little surprising to Ariane, even if she is glad for it.