3.0 Test Drive Meme

[wellie]

3.0 Test Drive Meme

Premise & Arrival ֍ FAQ ֍ Apply ֍ Navigation

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

01.

[hellonspectacles]

Due to some trick of the light, or mirage of the desert, or plain illogic of the little universe that is Wellstone (the Wellstone bubble Palamedes has begun to call it very recently, as his theory about its nature begins to coalesce), Camilla is, in fact, closer to town than she might realize. Just over the ridge, in fact, is a cluster of broken-down houses, once sheds and farmsteads, with Wellstone’s main street visible beyond. Palamedes walks among those houses now with a notebook in his hand, examining the buildings’ remains for possible changes after the latest storm. He’s lost in his own world, but when he pauses to take a drink of water from a canteen, his gaze falls on the horizon.

And that’s when he sees her.

In Palamedes’ head, Camilla Hect remains more a scattering of ever-growing but disparate images than a full person, the wild strings connecting them made of logic and reason more than emotion. But her face he knows. Pal has memories of that face gazing back at him from a mirror, and seen it, ghostly and pensive, on the dance floor, and heard Nona talk of it. He has drawn it dozens of times in nearly every notebook he owns. He knows it, as they say, like the back of his hand.

Better than the back of his hand. No one dreams about the back of their hand.

For a moment he remains still, heart in his throat. Does he run to her? Leap for joy? Hide? In the end, practicality wins out. She is probably dehydrated, and he has water.

He holds up his arms and waves. “Hello! Hello there! Over here, can you see me?”

Re: 01.

[go_loud]

Camilla's eyes catch on the shape breaking the monotonous dun of the rise, a shadow and then a figure drawing closer. She freezes for a moment, heart hammering in her chest, letting her hat fall back from her face and catch like some sort of huge backward pendant as she rises slowly to watch it. Him. Part of her is suspecting, uneasy in this strange place where the sun doesn't move and where there is so much nothing and practical enough to think that if she can't even remember -- most things, not for lack of trying and a pounding headache to match -- she's not past hallucination.

Part of her is desperate for any other sign of life.

He tips something to his mouth, tips his head back to drink and for a moment she's only and simply terribly jealous, struck by how thirsty she can't even remember being. (...Naturally.)

Then her mind takes in the sun's sketch of the man, the way light pools in recesses under cheekbones and throat and scales long limbs, the fingers of one hand clutching some sort of tablet or book, and her chest clenches around it. She's momentarily dizzied by familiarity, by the sudden respite granted to hours -- it feels like hours, anyway -- of not just confusion but isolation and the only memories she knows are true speaking of loss.

Then he shouts to her, waves his hands, and the voice is familiar too, though she's not sure if he does know her from what he says, or can see to know if he does.

It can't be real. It has to be a mirage, a trap; she can't trust anything here. Or he's real, and she's gone mad.

Who the fuck cares, right now?

"Yes," she says, and it's barely audible, half a whisper, half a choke against a parched throat. She resteels herself, raising a hand. "I see you," she calls, nodding, even as she starts moving, sand giving way under hasty feet, the world sliding backwards.

Re: 01.

[hellonspectacles]

For a few excruciating moments, Palamedes fears that she won't see him, that she will turn away and disappear into the desert, just another mirage that leaves him with the taste of his past life in his mouth, but nothing concrete to which he can cling. But then she looks his way, and she's calling back, and he replies, "Wonderful!" with pure relief. "Stay there, I'll come to you!"

He starts to jog at first, but jogging (as he learned all those weeks ago with Flynn) is not his forte, and the sand slows him down enough that finally he has to settle for walking. When he reaches her, the first thing he does is hand her the canteen.

"I'm afraid it's not very cold anymore, but at least it's wet. You must be parched. It's a dreadful thing they're doing now, dropping newcomers in the middle of the desert like this. We should probably set up patrols of some sort, just to ensure everyone's safety."

All of this he says rapidly and without preamble, still trying to catch his breath.

Re: 01.

[go_loud]

Even that wonderful! feels so familiar it's as though she's taken a big breath after having been holding it -- though there's nothing she can quite tie it to, no remembered sentence, just a sense of the way of his speaking being right.

A protest catches on Camilla's lips, and she pauses for a moment, rocking up on her toes in indecision. Her mind is rocked by instinct countered by memory, every bit of filed information her brain has retained in some fold somewhere flooding into her at once. She does, at times, follow his instruction, doesn't she? Stay her hand, hold back on her instinct. And he's coming from the opposite direction, too: maybe he knows something she doesn't about what's behind him.

When she sees him attempting a jog toward her, though, an ungraceful, lanky but earnest lope made all the sillier by sand and being uphill from her for the beginning, she can't just stand there and let him try to run to her. Tired as she is, she closes the last few feet to him.

She has a million things in her mind -- not the least of which is the horrible realization that she doesn't know his name, but she's too desperately grateful for the canteen he presses into her hands, nodding and tipping it back. The water isn't icy, but it's still cold to her, and she has a stern word with herself at the urge to just guzzle half his canteen; she takes a long swallow that still feels greedy and pulls back, relishing the cool of it.

Cam has a million questions just based on everything he's said, glancing up to meet his eyes. They almost shimmer in the sunlight, and she's held there, not struck by them -- though they're objectively lovely -- but by his face. In her mind's eye, she sees the architecture of a skull trace occipital ridge, the beginning of a cheekbone, the dip at the temple that -- thank god -- is right now covered by very alive hair and the beginning dew of sweat. He's rattled off a whole paragraph, and she has so much she doesn't know -- who are they? where are we? who is everyone? how did we get here? -- and so much she's angry she can't remember, but the worst part is that she doesn't even know if he's seeing what she's seeing.

Her head throbs. When she wipes the remaining water away from her lips, the back of her hand comes away with a streak of blood and she glances at it distractedly before pressing her lips together. "Warden," she says, because she may not know enough, but she knows that.
And, she thinks, she has asked him to slow down with just a word before.

The world shifts around her and she can only see one way to still it.

"Do you know me?"

She wants to ask do you remember me but she can't ask that of him.

[hellonspectacles]

Warden makes him hesitate. It isn’t a name he quite associates with himself, though it floats through his memories: emblazoned on a fine paper invitation, spoken by a tape player. Indubitably, Warden. There’s an admonishment in her tone, something telling him to slow down, back up, start from the beginning.

The beginning.

Do you know me?

“I would know you blindfolded, Camilla Hect.”

He takes back the canteen and hands her a handkerchief, slightly clammy from his pocket.

“Be careful. There’s a bit of a trick to it, when you feel a memory might surface. You have to let it float away. The best you can do is make note of the trigger.”

[go_loud]

She doesn't have enough context for his slight pause, and too much relief at his answer, to interrogate what it means. Camilla lets out a long breath she didn't realize she was holding, feeling her muscles relax a little all the way down to her toes.

"All right," she says, as much to herself as anything else. "All right."

He knows her. He hasn't had his memory of her taken; he even knows that he would always know her, as she is certain she would know him. That's enough to start with; it has to be. But how is it that you can be certain of your love for someone and not know their name?

On impulse, she catches at his hand as he hands her the handkerchief, holds it between her own for just a moment as if to prove he's real, before straightening up and less sentimentally taking the cloth and pinching her nose, checking it again. "It's just a nosebleed," she says, affectionately bemused. "I'll live."

There's so much else that's worse. His worry. Appearing here, with the bizarre sun that doesn't move; knowing so little, so much of her self missing -- though unfortunately not devoid of the sense that she usually knows things. How little she can recall of specifics of the Master Warden but how much she can feel, under her skin, inside her ribs, reaching, stretching, longing: as though the two of them standing here facing each other is still not close enough.

She ought to be able to command the minutae of them: how they met, what they've been through, what it means to be his Hand. His name, at least, by the Emperor and all his Saints.

(That's new --
The pain behind her eye twinges insistently, and she can feel her nose wet and warm with new blood.)

She blinks at it, pinching it closed and leaning forward, making a little bit of a protesting noise in reaction to both the burst blood vessel and his words. "But --" She sighs, taking a long breath and trying to calm her heart rate. After a moment she lifts her eyes to his. "I don't have to make a note. You're my catalyst."

And isn't he always?

"Just...let it float away. Perfect." She takes another long breath, rocking forward and back and feeling herself sink in the sand, then opens her eyes abruptly, all done with dwelling. "Current events, then. Who's they and what is this place?"

[hellonspectacles]

She says you’re my catalyst, and Palamedes’ chest tightens almost unbearably, with a sadness that tastes sweet, and a relief laden with guilt. How can he feel so much when looking into this woman’s eyes, and yet remember so little? He knows her face, her name, the practical cadence of her voice on a tape recorder. He knows she saved his life, probably at the cost of her own. He knows she looked after Nona, and that Nona would have been so very glad to see her.

He knows they have been apart for so very long, in one way or another, and to just have her standing in front of him is an opportunity so unfathomable he hadn’t even hoped for it in some time.

Their hands touch, pinkies hooking together, grounding them to each other. Pal nods encouragingly as she dabs her nose, even through the protests, and then his mouth twists in a dark smile because what is this place is such a complicated question to answer.

“They are…well, I don’t actually know, which is half driving me mad, believe you me.” He huffs, half a laugh, half a frustrated sigh. “Even the pronoun is more of a theory than an entity; I’m of the mind that someone, or someones, built this reality and are manipulating it in order to study our reactions to certain stimuli, but I can’t prove that. Do you think you can walk a bit further?” He looks her over with a faint frown. “Town is about ten minutes that way, and while it has its faults, it’s much more comfortable than here.”

[go_loud]

He hooks his pinky into hers, and the emotions that wash over her are so affecting as to be almost silly. It’s so little a thing, objectively, just the barest of intimacies, to raise a lump in her throat, and so familiar. There’s that familiarity — like muscle memory but for emotion: connection, almost a lightness, the instinct to smile — but with no expected flood of connected memories. And over the top of it a shattering, unsteadying loss — a sense of having not ever expected that little gesture again.

She almost wants to burst into tears like a child, but it’s so absurd, and she swallows against it; she does curl her own pinky, squeezing back, and looks back up at him to give him a steadying, if slightly apologetic, smile.

(The only thing Camilla can think all that grief must come from is the skull. She wants, badly, to tell him, but how do you tell someone you’ve just reunited with — and in some ways, just met — that they might be dead? No: they are honest with each other, she’s sure of that, but she has to be pragmatic. She would barely be able to tell him anything, anyway. And what does it matter? He’s not dead here. However uncertain she was of seeing him again, they have each other now, and also, they have to figure out this place.)

Camilla frowns as she listens, taking it in with a crease between her brows and a slow rock from her heels to the balls of her feet, and presses her lips together. She starts to reply, a million questions on the tip of her tongue, but he asks if she can walk and she nods. It’s a quick sharp movement; she lifts an eyebrow in faint judgement at his once over. “Yes, of course.”

As a small concession to his concern — she is exhausted, and her muscles are complaining, whether or not she wants him to know that — she adds, “It’ll be safer to walk a little to be out of the sun.” She pauses. “And I …” Cam exhales, forcing herself past feeling mad. “I don’t think town was just here until you saw me. I’d been walking in this direction for — hours, I think — and…the sun hadn’t even moved. I’d love to be done with dunes for a while.”

[hellonspectacles]

“Is that so?” Palamedes shades his eyes and looks back the way Camilla came. The dunes appear unending, barely even interrupted by scrub or cacti. He grimaces. “I shouldn’t be surprised. The desert plays tricks; it tries to swallow us whole, literally and figuratively. I can only hope that everyone who appeared out here eventually found their way back.”

It frightens him, this new twist to their already-precarious life. It isn’t only newcomers who woke up in the desert, either; thus far, there has been no evidence that anyone was permanently lost out there, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. Or that it couldn’t happen next time.

“Jaune already suggested we remain in pairs whenever possible. Now I’m beginning to think we should always be carrying water. Precautions won’t help newcomers, unfortunately, but at least they might give all of us already here some safety. But I’m getting ahead of myself.” He flashes a rueful smile. “Such serious conversations are better had inside, with something cool to drink at hand. Come on.”

[go_loud]

[ooc: bc this is such a good ending - did you want to segue here rather than keep going? i'm fine with either]

[hellonspectacles]

[ooc: sounds perfect to me! We can pick it up in our next thread. :D ]