4.0 Test Drive Meme

[wellie]

4.0 Test Drive Meme

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Welcome to Well! This cycle is a little different, if you've visited us before—this TDM takes place in Well's updated setting. See the first prompt for how your characters arrive in Well. Your character arrives with only a handful of memories, clad in a mix of Old Western clothes and clothes that might fit in at a renaissance fair, and 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 November onward, and can happen concurrently with other events during November and December. This will be the only TDM for November, December, and January.

Applications are open October 27th until November 1st, and November 27th until December 1st. Invites are available for friends of current players.

Into the Maze

Content warnings: deadly traps, aggressive foliage, vines, potential drowning, spikes

You wake up surrounded by green. Thick, dark hedges as tall as two adult humans stretch all around you. They're thick, nigh-impenetrable. You don’t quite know who you are, but you’re pretty sure that here, right here? Is not where you want to be.

You’re at a crossing: paths stretch out between the hedges on four sides of you. Which path do you take?

The sprawling hedge maze is vast and complex, especially if you’re not even sure where you should be going. Along your way, you hear giggling, shouts, excited screaming, low murmurs, and, sometimes, the sound of radio static. You might see the faint outline of someone slipping around a corner, and hear them giggling, a long, white dress or robe following them as they move. But you never find whoever, or whatever, is making these noises.

If you follow them, you instead come across:

• Thorny vines laying on the ground, or hidden in the hedges, that slowly wrap themselves around your ankles or your wrists, pulling you back, trying to subsume you into the hedge.
• A dark pond stretching clear across the path, blocking your way. You can wade into it, but when you do those voices get louder, so much louder, screaming in your ears. The bottom drops away from your feet. Strange things brush your ankles, turning into hands pulling you down into the oily water. The more you panic, the more difficult it is to get to the other side. Staying calm keeps the water at about chest height.
• Pieces of the path fallen away, down into a pit full of spiny cacti. You might not want to test this one, and instead trust yourself to jump across. It’s just short enough a gap to be scalable by most, but it sure isn’t a comfortable distance to cross. If you do fall in, boy howdy do those things hurt. You’ll need some help getting out!
• The graveyard. There’s nothing getting in your way in the graveyard, but you may simply stumble upon it. The graves are overgrown and covered in moss. The ground is moist and springy. In the middle you may find an old mossy well filled with clear water.

Thankfully, at these obstacles, you might find another person, equally as lost as you. They may have been following the same person. Once you join forces with each other, the way out is easier to find. Not easy, but possible. If you continue to forge on on your own, the exit will never reveal itself to you.

When you do finally stumble out of the maze, you’re greeted with the site of Wellstone.

tl;dr:

• You wake up lost in a hedge maze! You hear strange voices around you, and a figure dressed in white runs away from you.
• You run into obstacles: spiky vines, a deadly pond, a pit full of cacti, or the graveyard. Work with another character (or not) to escape the maze!

Welcome home

Content warnings: disorientation, feelings of being lost

When you stumble your way into the run-down old town of Wellstone, the deadly peril of the maze seems to be over. It’s cold and damp, sure, but at least you’re not in danger, and you’re in luck: up a small hill beyond some gates, you can see an ornate house with golden windows, practically beaming warmth.

Staywell Manor is a grand place, with high ceilings and exposed, ornate beams, lush carpets and tapestries, beautifully upholstered furniture. A man dressed like a butler (the old hotel receptionist, for those who’ve met him) greets you with a bland smile:

“Welcome to Wellstone. We’re so glad you’re here with us! What’s the name on your reservation?”

You remember your name, and you give it to him, and he offers you a heavy brass key. No matter the number, your room does exist in the four-story manor, and is decked out with a four-poster bed, a nice settee, and a closet full of clothes that fit you like they were made for you. They’re a strange mixture, though, a mishmash of old American Western rhinestones and denim and medieval fabrics and silhouettes in bright colors. You might find a fringed tunic dyed bright red, or a pair of cowboy boots with the toes curled up like a jester’s slippers, bell-tipped and absurd. Are those pantaloons made of denim? Weird!

While the manor is lovely and inviting, and much warmer than the outdoors, it is also pretty big. Well, it must be, because you keep getting lost! It’s incredibly difficult to find your way to your room this month. You might find your way to the wrong floor, to the parlor, to someone else's room. Remember to knock!

tl;dr:

• You're in the town of Wellstone, where it's cold, damp, and rainy.
• Staywell Manor is warm and inviting, but hard to navigate, and you're prone to getting lost in its halls.

Warm Your Bones

Content warnings: alcohol, intoxication, accidental consumption of blood, hallucinations of demons and shadow people

The town of Wellstone has clearly seen better days and warmer seasons. Cobblestoned streets trace their way between crumbling buildings overgrown with moss and ivy. The early-fall nip in the air is enough to make your breath fog up in front of your face. Clouds hang low and sulky over the down, spitting out little bursts of rain here and there. Wind whistles between the close-crowded buildings, blowing a few leaves and the odd tumbleweed along the damp stone.

With the heavy chill in the air and fog drifting the streets at night, thick and cold enough to creep into even the warmest clothes, it’s tempting just to stay indoors.

Luckily for everyone tired of the damp, the golden light spilling from the Cactus Pad Pub beckons. Just walking inside hits you with a blast of warmth. A fire blazes at full strength in the hearth, snapping and crackling, but more than that, every single table is set resplendently with mismatched fancy china: cups, saucers, creamers, little pots of sugar, and of course, tea, steaming and hot.

It’ll be hard to resist the urge to sit down at one of these little tables, and the moment you do, you’re stuck there for at least an hour. Truly: your butt is glued to that chair. At least there's tea, and there are cards on the table with conversation starters on them. But these conversation starters are a little, ah... odd? Comment below to get a conversation starter for you and your tablemate!

May as well have some tea while you’re here, and hope that it is in fact tea. You have a one-in-three shot. The steaming liquid in that pot might be:

• Piping hot black tea, caffeinated and bracing. Drinking it makes you energetic and exciteable and very eager to talk to your neighbors. It also makes you feel extremely fancy! Put that pinky up and use the biggest words you know to impress everyone around you.
• Dark mulled wine, spiced with ginger and cloves. Drinking it fills you with unbridled confidence bordering on arrogance. You'll feel lordly in whatever way makes sense: condescending and snotty, benevolent and patrician, whatever you might be prone to.
• Something… else. It’s dark, hot, and sweet, but there’s an odd metallic tang that sits strangely on your tongue. Whatever it is, it’s addictive. The more you drink, the stranger the world around you becomes: you’ll see faces in the shadows and glowing red in the eyes of your companions. Shadowy figures seem to haunt the walls of the pub, moving toward you. You’re filled with fear and paranoia but rooted to the spot.

Each of these effects lasts from half an hour to an hour, and longer if you drink more of whatever is in your respective pot. Once you're free from the table, if you sit down at another one, you'll be trapped there, too.

Feel free to ask the mods to roll for you to decide which teapot your character gets, and for a conversation starter, just for you!

tl;dr:

• There's a fancy tea party happening in the Cactus Pad Pub. It's sort of mandatory.
• Sitting at a table traps you at the tea party for an hour, and you'll be drinking one of three random drinks, each with different effects.
• There are conversation starters on the tables to help you get to know your fellow tea partiers!
• Tea makes you social and fancy, mulled wine makes you lordly and a bit drunk, and the last hot, sweet liquid tastes weird and makes you see demons.
• Ask the mods to roll a random teapot type for you if you'd like!

Comments

Gideon Nav | The Locked Tomb

[diosapatemajor]

i. hedge maze

Gideon Nav spends a lot longer trapped in the hedge maze that she maybe technically should have needed to. There are a few places that you can find her. Regardless of the her varying level of pissed, she's always got her black cape held up with one arm, shielding her face and squinting at anything she's looking at in a way that makes her look equal parts confused and angry.

i(a). For minimum piss, find her in the graveyard. She's shoving hard at a headstone with her boot with her free arm held out like a bird trying to take flight to keep her balance as she really shoves her entire weight into it. When she hears you, she'll stop her assaults and look over, body turning with her to keep her sun shield in place. Gideon blinks a few times, surprised there's someone else around here.

"Hey."

i(b). For maximum piss, move towards the sound of angry, loud, increasingly stupid expletives. Here at this random section of hedge, she's twisted up in vines; her ankle and creeping up her calf, around her wrist. Her cape is tangled in the thorns. She's fighting like a cornered animal, ripping vines without care for injuring her hands.

"Piss off! You can't fucking afford this piece of meat!"

ii. cactus pad

After trudging out of the maze, finding the hotel, and riffling through the entire selection of the closet and turning over the blankets like a feral cat with the zoomies, it takes no time at all to find the Cactus Pad. It is, really, the first thing she zeroes in on, as if the concept of a bar attracts her like a trouble magnet.

Good thing, too. It's a great decision. It feels so nice in here that she immediately wants to stay forever. Which is great, because it takes about two minutes before her ass is stuck to a chair right in the middle of the room and she's got a cup of something that's not necessarily good, but it's warm, and that's good enough. Really, though, by the time you join her, she's so content to drink and vibe and enjoy the weird sensation racketing her chest that she hasn't actually tried to get up.

When you sit, Gideon Nav is reading a card from the stack on the table.

"Yeah, no idea what that says," she says, and tosses it onto the table between the two of you. It reads, Your taste in music is so unique that it inspires sentient pineapples to dance until they burst whenever they hear your favorite song. What's that song, and how do you handle the messy pineapple dance parties?

"Hey, do you know what the fuck a pineapple is?"

i (b)

[vibing]

At least the loud cursing makes it pretty clear where to go, and as soon as Yuri hears it he starts to run in that direction. It's nice to have a direction to go, a goal, instead of just wandering around uselessly.

It still takes him a few tries to get the right path, and as soon as he spots her tangled up there he pulls his sword from its sheath and dashes in to cut at the vines around her ankles.

"Hold on! Jeez, this thing really wants you."

[diosapatemajor]

Now free at the ankle, Gideon yanks her cloak free and drops to a crouch to start pulling the severed vines from her wrists and ankles.

"I, uh-- thanks." This is not a great first impression to be making. "Where'd you get a sword?"

[vibing]

She doesn't seem to really need him anymore, so he steps back, sword at the ready in case he needs it.

"Uh, long story," he says, and just as he does, a vine sneaks out and wraps around his ankle, yanking him back toward the other wall of the maze. "Fuck!"

[diosapatemajor]

Gideon rips the vine away from her ankle and throws herself forward, grabbing Yuri's sword-free hand. "Second sword would be great about now," she says, hoping he'll have a second sword so she can even out this first meeting. Gideon digs her heels into the dirt, using more of her weight than she would have thought necessary to fight one vine.

[aniketos]

Honestly, Pyrrha should have been expecting this.

Like Gideon, Pyrrha gets stuck to her chair. Like Gideon, it doesn't take her long to decide that fighting the inevitable is pointless. Like most people in Wellstone, she's actually been having kind of a shitty time lately. She's not going to make things worse for herself.

Pyrrha investigates the card on the table and judges the contents to be coherent, but completely absurd. When Gideon asks her question, Pyrrha laughs.

But the laugh goes on for a while–uncomfortably so. It's the genuine but somewhat unhinged giggling of someone that's been just a little too stressed for a little too long, and so at the first hint of something that bears a kinship to joy her brain has decided to take the emotion and run with it.

"I'm sorry," she wheezes once she finally gets her laughter under control. "It just took me off guard... Um, a pineapple is a type of fruit. Their skin is spiky."

[diosapatemajor]

Gideon stares at Pyrrha as she laughs, and she feels good about herself. Really, really good about herself. She chalks it up to the ego-feeding confirmation that she's just really funny even when she's not trying to be.

She's leaning forward on her elbow by the time Pyrrha manages to get any words out.

"Look," she says. "Really not trying to be funny." Only half a lie. "But what's a fruit?"

[aniketos]

Okay, okay. Pyrrha can be serious, and treat this seriously. It helps that now she does feel a little bad. Gideon doesn't seem upset to have been laughed at, which helps, but she was asking a sincere question. Pyrrha can't undo her reaction, but she can at least offer a sincere answer to the second sincere question.

"It's something that grows on certain types of plant."

Hopefully she won't need to explain plants, though she's aware that she might.

"Almost all of them are sweet, and many of them can also be sour or bitter. Pineapples in particular are mostly sweet and a little sour."

[diosapatemajor]

Gideon's good on the concept of plants, and being upset in Pyrrha's direction isn't even in the stratosphere of possible emotions Gideon Nav could be experiencing right now. She didn't even think Pyrrha laughed that long.

"First part of the puzzle sorted out." She thinks it might look cooler if she puts her forearm down on the table, so she tries that. "Okay. What's your pineapple dance song?"

where else but the graveyard

[necrolord]

He freezes when he sees her eyes.

There's a moment of embarrassing silence before John catches up to himself— it's not her, he already knows it's not her— and he cracks an apologetic smile, raises a hand in a lame little wave. Something in the back of his head is on fire, a great weight within his mind shifting in unease, but that isn't news.

"Hey," he says, "cool cape."

His matches, except that it's done up with goofy rhinestone trim. Otherwise, similar energy: he looks like a low-effort goth walked out of a ren faire, in black shirtsleeves and waistcoat. At least it all goes with the eyes. John knows he doesn't have a lot of room to stare at anybody's eyes.

"What did this guy do?" He tips a hand to the headstone she's apparently, ineffectively, trying to fuck with.

[diosapatemajor]

"Checking for bone traps," she says in an answer that's not an actual answer, even though she doesn't know how she'll explain the intense paranoia that had sprung forward to create a jackhammer in her chest upon coming across the graveyard.

Well, nothing to do now but commit. Gideon looks away, digging the heel of her boot into the dirt a foot or so in front of the stone.

"Who're you?"

[necrolord]

Something odd spasms across his face: guilt, maybe. John's smile goes shuttered, something tight and uncomfortable in the lines around his eyes.

"None here," he says, surprisingly genuine. He doesn't even question bone traps, as though hers is a reasonable worry to have. "Just a normal number of skeletons. Trust me, I'm the local expert."

This graveyard has maybe seen its share of bone-related dangers, lately. Or, not this graveyard, but its desert equivalent. He'd thought the whole everyone-gets-an-evil-twin thing ran the gamut from unsettling to unsettling and kind of hot, but then his double walked into town.

He can't fault anyone for being a little twitchy around skeletons, considering.

"John. You new in town? This is my second rodeo." He splays his hands in exaggerated defeat. "And it's not even a rodeo anymore. Just when you start getting to know a place."

[diosapatemajor]

Gideon looks around the graveyard's general lack of skeletons. Gideon looks at the tombstone. Gideon looks at John. Gideon looks at the dirt. Ah, fuck. This entire situation must be worse than she thought.

"All right. Define normal number of skeletons."

ii

[lunartes]

Estelle is quite enamoured with this conversation method--the cards are so interesting!--that she isn't hesitant at all to sit across from Gideon with a sweet and polite smile...that only falters a little at the cursing.

"Yes, I-" the words die on her tongue, because she can't explain why she knows, even though she feels like she wants to... After a moment's awkward pause, though, she brushes past it and carries on. "Um...it's a plant with spiked leaves and sweet fruit that grows in tropical climates."

Her head tilts curiously as she tries to think further. "I don't think they're sentient, though..."

Yeeeahhhhh graveyard

[hellonspectacles]

There's a young man crouched by another gravestone who looks up at the sound of Gideon's grunts and groans as she pushes over the granite marker. His spindly limbs are are the more accentuated by the long grey cloak he wears, which pools on the ground and has already collected a layer of dust on it hem. For all intents and purposes, he seems to be communing with the gravestone, his fingertips pressed to it, and a faint frown on his face, when the noise interrupts him.

He watches her for a long moment and blinks his bespectacled grey eyes. "Out of curiosity, do you have any reason for the casual desecration, or is this some new sort of exercise routine?"

[diosapatemajor]

Gideon lowers her arm. Her foot stays propped on the felled tombstone. She's not even sure what she had been expecting. The springing of bones? Some ghastly omen to lift an ominous hand to point her the right way out of this maze from hell so she would leave the boneyard alone?

"Leg day," she supplies, on some level pleased by his assumption she works out. "Which way did you come from?"

[hellonspectacles]

To be fair, Palamedes looks like he has never lifted anything heavier than a book. Working out, and what it entails, is not something he knows much about.

He quirks an eyebrow. "I should be asking you that. You've only recently arrived, haven't you." But he gestures towards the graveyard gates, barely visible from their current location. "I came through the maze. Took me nearly two hours, which was quite the surprise. Our of scientific curiosity, did you appear here, among the graves?"

[diosapatemajor]

Nope, don’t make it fair, making it fair walks back the compliment, and Gideon’s a big fan of the compliment.

“Woke up in the middle of nowhere,” she says, pulling her hood over her head. “Walked for hours,” five minutes, “and ended up here — hold on. Are you saying you walked in here on purpose?”

ii

[anglophone]

The shortish, scrawny teenage boy who's plopped himself down in the seat across from Gideon examines the card, propping his sharp chin in the palm of his hand. The amount of white lace around his wrist makes him look a little like a mutant boy-flower, and the extent of it everywhere else doesn't detract from that impression.

"Does anyone really know what a pineapple is?" Alec muses, bringing his too-pale blue eyes up to Gideon's face. "Like, what kind of fruit tries to eat you back? Why do we tolerate that? Kind of fucked up."

[diosapatemajor]

She feels like it's probably some kind of instinct to be wary of scrawny kids who look like they're going to fall over and wilt if you blow on them too hard, so she squints to meet his pale blue with melted gold.

"Why the fuck would anyone eat something that's going to eat you back?"

[anglophone]

"Dunno," Alec says, with a little shrug, "People are stupid."

It's smart of her to be wary about him, which either bodes well or badly for however long they're stuck here. He stays nonchalant under her scrutiny, figuring that might help tip things towards 'well'.

"It's okay on pizza." Which happens to be the vector of most of Alec's fruit and vegetable consumption. "Never heard of sentient ones before, but, you know. Amnesia, and all. Maybe we kill and eat them as an example to the others, or because they keep exploding their people-digesting juice on our stuff."

[diosapatemajor]

"Feels like it's buying into their plot if we're eating them anyway." Gideon's attempt to try to guess what Alec's deal is is redirected into a healthy assumption that he's just fucking with her after all. "Who's the example for, anyway? Other sentient exploding food?"

i(b)

[guidemyway]

Ruby hears the shouting and she's a little quicker than she normally would to round the corner to see what's going on. Only to see Gideon hanging there in a mess of vines and thorns. She reaches for the gun she usually carries with her, but for once this seems like a situation that Problem Solving Gun-chan can't help her out with.

Instead she makes a dash toward Gideon and starts trying to pull on the vines too.

"It's okay. We'll get you and your meat out of here."

What Gideon meant.

Ruby's head.

[diosapatemajor]

Okay. Being saved by a pretty girl isn't the worst thing that could be happening here. With Ruby's help, Gideon almost pulls free, but falls right on her face as vines start pulling her towards the hedge.

"Fuck," she yells again, grabbing a fistful of dirt as she flips herself over and catches sight of vines creeping along the ground towards Ruby's shoe. "Watch your meat—!"

[guidemyway]

Ruby wishes she carried a blade or something on her and not just a pistol. That would make this so much easier. As it is though she quickly kneels down and starts to try pulling at the vines holding Gideon's arms.

"My what?" She really should have caught the meaning of meat by this point. Instead she feels the tug along her ankle.

...And her priorities continue on trying to pull Gideon loose from her situation. That was definitely what mattered most here.