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

[necrolord]

He pauses, at this, and gives her the sort of sidelong look that means he hopes that's a metaphor. It is clear from her face that it isn't. For a moment his brow scrunches in confusion, nearly impressed.

"Okay," he says, more solid now, "this is probably an improvement over that."

He drinks a bit more water, then spares a handful of it to scrub the worst of the blood off his face. Dodgy use of resources, maybe, but it helps. He looks rumpled but more awake, combing a damp and dirty hand through his hair.

"It's like... I can feel every grain of sand. Every weird old rock in the sand. Have you ever," and he's hitting his stride, "been lying in bed, in the dark, and you hear something move down the hall? I'm here, but I keep trying to pay attention to something over there, except with everything."

The screaming eyes might be the better deal, honestly.

[hallucinogem]

He starts talking and she ignores what he'd been doing with the water; it's not like she's worried about running out anyway, not with the town still technically nearby. But what he describes is something... that shouldn't ring familiar. It doesn't—not in all the same ways. But she thinks she understands it in broad strokes.

"And you can't shake it off no matter what you do," she says as though finishing a sentence. "It's there and you can't ignore it, but you can't get up and do anything about it, either." What she's describing sounds a bit more sinister and probably makes it clear she doesn't exactly get it, but anxiety and whatever he's feeling both buzz.

What she asks has a bit of awe behind it, like she hadn't considered the scale of her question before it came to her lips. "The whole desert is like that for you?"

[necrolord]

He shuts his eyes like the question hurts. Breathes slow through his nose.

"The whole desert." Right? Maybe? There are bones in the dirt sixty meters down and he's going fucking insane because he knows the shape of them, he can feel caverns in the earth like the dead hollows of lungs, he can feel the way blood moves in his body and hers. He knows her heartbeat and he doesn't even know her name, which sounds like bad poetry. "When I think too hard about it things get a bit gory, so, maybe let's not."

He scrapes flakes of blood from his ears in demonstration.

[hallucinogem]

"Oh, shit," she says in wonder as it clicks. He didn't get messed up by some creature at all, which does at least make her feel slightly more safe. "Yeah, that's kind of what happens around here when you try to remember things that got taken from you. I don't really know why... on, like, any of those questions that that definitely just raised," she says, looking away with the tone of someone who should be rubbing the back of her head, "But that is how it works around here."

She offers him her hand. "My name's Emerald. I haven't been here for very long, but it's not a bad town to live in if you want some help getting back there."

[necrolord]

His face crumples in— fear? anger?— at taken from you, but he scrubs a hand over his face again and puts it away. He crooks an awkward half-smile as he has to wipe that hand on his shirt, but she doesn't seem to flinch when he finally takes her hand, so maybe it's not the actual worst introduction in the world.

"John. Any town sounds like an improvement."

Getting up out of the sand makes him feel a little more human, anyway, if he doesn't think too closely about the dissociative lurch of moving his body when the whole landscape feels like a phantom limb.

[hallucinogem]

She got locked in a worm-eaten house and nearly drowned in sand; a slightly oogy hand is nothing to her.

"Nice to meet you, John," she says, as genial as the day is long. He's taller than her, Emerald notices first, and by not a small amount. Shame that that just makes him closer to the sun, but they'll be back at the hotel in no time.

"We don't have much, but there's a hotel, a pool, a diner... more than enough space for everyone. And there's," and she thinks quickly to the day-long pool party, "Maybe about thirty people here? We're all in the same situation: We remember maybe a handful of things about what happened before we ended up here." There's a small pause as she thinks on the memory of Penny, and when she finishes it's a little more somber. "Nobody really knows why. If we think too hard about it, the bleeding starts."

[necrolord]

He tips his head and takes this in, falling into step beside her.

"At least that's not just me," he says, trying for affable and landing a little too weary. It's harder to play anything off when there are still bloodstains at the edges of his face. "No pattern in what we remember? I'd tell you where I'm from if I had the first idea."

[hallucinogem]

"No pattern as far as any of us have been able to tell," she says while they walk, like she's giving a casual little debrief of a wildly messed up situation. Which, really, she kind of is. "We all remember our names so far. I vaguely remember the place I grew up, and I remember a couple other things that feel big—" though she's choosing right now not to share what those things are "—but maybe I just think they are because they're one of the only things I remember."

She pauses. It's out of consideration, but not for what it might seem. "...A friend of mine only seems to remember miserable things about her life. So it feels random, or like someone's trying to have some fun with us if you believe in conspiracies. But it's not like you're stuck with everything you know right now forever or anything."

[necrolord]

He listens. It gives him time to steady out a little, to match the thin attempt at casual. Putting together a puzzle, staying upright, nothing to see here. No one's been crying blood.

"It comes back over time." He says it half like a question, half like reassurance. Maybe he needs it. Big things and miserable things are both more concrete than what he has: bleach and saline, footsteps on steel grating, barbecue smoke, Cappuccino Tuesdays. Someone's hair, someone's fingers on a cigarette. The poem. The black hole in his chest that goes with it.

"Well," he amends, trying to rally, "let's hope so. The pickings are slim over here."

He waves a hand towards his head but doesn't quite manage the smile.

[hallucinogem]

She can't blame him. She's been lucky enough to only remember one instance of a horrible and brutal murder that somehow, she'd been responsible for—if that's the kind of thing that lives within Ruby's head normally, it isn't any wonder that smiles aren't always the easiest to come by.

"Hey, you'll get something one way or another. It took me a couple months—around when the sandstorms showed up, which is... probably gonna happen again soon," she says, wondering if she should go into the whole time loop thing right now or if she should wait until he has a place to sit. Two isn't a pattern, she thinks. Two is a coincidence. This cycle, if everything even is a cycle, could be very weird. She's not going to warn John of it, and her face shows that lack of uncertainty once she decides on it.

"It's like clockwork," she settles on, "The kinds of things that happen in this town. Or at least that's what everyone tells me, 'cause I've only been here for around three months and I think even the longest have only been here for six."

probably a wrap

[necrolord]

"Gives me something to look forward to," he agrees, half-kidding. Scheduled sandstorms and the awakening of old traumas, what's not to love. "Guess I'll take it over nosebleeds out in the middle of nowhere. We're starting the bar nice and low."

He's regaining composure as they go, steadying out in his gait and the way he holds his shoulders. Less like a thing found half-dead in the sand, more like someone used to tired half-smiles. With her leading him towards something, it's easier to steady out, bear the weight, and follow.