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

1:

[hellonspectacles]

The Staywell only has four floors now, which means his own room on the sixth floor should be gone, and yet, by some baffling miracle, Palamedes had found the room with the lock that fit his key. What’s more, despite the changes in decor, despite the floods and the horrors, everything is as he left it. Notebooks cover the dresser and the desk, pens have been discarded on every surface, a few dry teacups sit, abandoned long ago. Even The Necromancer’s Marriage Season lies splayed-open on the bedside table.

Still, Pal isn’t about to take it on faith that nothing has been lost. He’s collecting the notebooks that lay around the room and sorting them into piles by date and topic when the knock comes to the door. He opens it and blinks with surprise when he sees that the young man he met outside earlier that day is standing on the other side.

“…Oh! Hello again. Glad to see you made it in. Can I help you with something?”

[more_magic]

"Making it here seems only half the problem," Darlington admits, his shoulders relaxing at the sight of an even mildly familiar face on the other side of the door. "I must've taken a wrong turn on the way to my room. I tried asking directions, but..." He sighs. "The gentleman at the desk was hardly forthcoming." If he'd wanted a refresher on his room number, or a reassurance that there'd be breakfast in the morning, he'd have had it, but nothing more than that.

Behind Palamedes, Darlington can see the clutter of notebooks and discarded cups and plates, the paradoxical erratic disarray of focused industry. It's familiar in a way that it shouldn't be, given how blank everything else is--and yet, the sight is a comfort all the same, and interest sparkles unguardedly in his eyes. He nods towards the piles. "I didn't mean to interrupt, but I think I understand now what you meant downstairs when you mentioned some of your more salient notebooks."

[hellonspectacles]

“The floorplan is a bit puzzling, isn’t it?” Pal says wryly. “I still need to map it, though I’m already half convinced that the result will be nonsense. We can’t really rely on stability of place, you see.” That had been true before, but now, with trees and swamps where cacti and deserts had once been, Wellstone’s stability seems seems even more precarious.

He dismisses the apology with a wave. “No need—I’m just checking to see if anything’s missing after the latest disaster. So far, so good. If you’re still interested, I’m happy to share some of my notes.”

[more_magic]

"Definitely still interested," he says, his eyebrows going up as he takes note of the other bits of information there. "I'm afraid to ask what kind of disaster...or that there's enough for this to be the latest in a series."

The idea that there's danger here is disconcerting, to be sure. It still does little to dim the interest in Darlington's expression.

[hellonspectacles]

"The answer won't make you happy, but I think it's better to know than otherwise, particularly given that something similar will probably happen again." With this rather ominous statement, offered fairly cheerfully, Palamedes beckons Darlington in. Despite the chaos of the notebooks, it's probably easy to see that someone with a well-developed sense of order lives here: the bed is precisely made, shoes have been lined up by the wardrobe in an orderly manner, and a stack of unused notebooks sits in a neat pile on a side table.

"Some sort of apocalyptic event happens every three months, by my count," he explains. "Three have happened thus far, the most recent just a couple of days ago." Pal goes to the bookshelf and takes down a slightly battered looking notebook with a cactus on the cover. "I've been recording each one, noting the differences and similarities among the particular catastrophes. Thus far, it has always entailed some sort of storm, and often--" a grimace-- "a flood or burial, but the exact nature has varied."

[more_magic]

Darlington follows him in, watching as Pal takes down the notebook and taking in the clutter and the order both. Again, there's that sense of familiarity, and not; another of the many things lost to the void of his past, another piece that may never be made completely whole. Pal's explanation is enough to focus on, at least, and Darlington nods.

"So there's a pattern," he says, looking at the notebook's battered cover where it rests in Pal's hands, as though there might be hints or evidence held in its scuffs and creases. "A framework to make plans for accordingly, even if the details change?"

[hellonspectacles]

“Precisely. Though I’m afraid we haven’t found any way to stave off destruction, I think we’ve gotten better at keeping more people alive for longer.” Ruefully, he adds, “I know that doesn’t sound like much, but it’s something. And death is less, ah, permanent here than it is in most places, so it’s not so dire as it sounds.”

He hands Daniel the battered notebook. “I have all the information I’ve collected about the disasters here, if you’d like to take a look.” Inside, Pal has detailed the unsettling weather that seems to hit them at every third month, as well as the disasters themselves—the sand, the insects, the blood storms—and the few things they’ve managed to do to keep themselves safe, like Darin’s attempts to barricade the Staywell and their more recent effort to herd everyone into the seemingly-untouched graveyard.

[more_magic]

"Not so dire, but interesting all on its own," Darlington says, marveling at the off-handedness at which Pal says death is less permanent here. He takes the notebook when offered, scanning the notes and conjecture within, the meticulous entries on blood and sand and catastrophe. Seen all together, it's overwhelming, or should be; instead, Darlington finds himself reading with fascination, the pieces of whatever the puzzle of Well might be starting to take form in his mind.

"So the cycle repeats," he says. "Never identical, but similar enough? Storms, and blood, and a plague of insects...feels almost biblical."

[hellonspectacles]

Daniel appears more intrigued than frightened as he peruses the notes—just as Palamedes would be if he hadn’t experienced those terrible disasters himself. In fact, even having witnessed the storms and the floods, he can still look back on them with a detached curiosity. If he couldn’t, he wouldn’t have been able to spot the patterns at all.

“You’re not the first person to say that,” he says, though he doesn’t admit that he isn’t sure what biblical actually means. “Thoughts on what comes next, based on that assessment?”

[more_magic]

"Hopefully not boils," he says, the quip coming with an automatic, wry confidence he can't tell the source of. It might not matter, in the mystery of everything else, but it's another curious point of information; whoever he was before this, he knew that well enough to joke about it.

"I don't relish the thought of waiting to see if I'm right or wrong, but...if this is a cycle, I suppose we have little choice."

[hellonspectacles]

Palamedes makes a face. "Maybe we should have some salves at the ready," he says, only half joking. He doesn't know where Daniel's hypothesis about boils comes from, or even how serious it is, but at this point Pal would gladly follow any lead.

"If the pattern follows, we'll begin to get hints regarding the next disaster in two months' time, perhaps even sooner. I recommend taking copious notes, and seeing what patterns emerge. We've yet to properly predict what's to come, but we must keep trying."

[more_magic]

It feels like another clue about who he was before this that just the phrase copious notes relaxes something in him. "I'll find a blank one of these and get started," he says, handing back the notebook. "If I start to see anything significant, I'll let you know."

Two months to wait seems like no time and forever. He'll have to see what clues, if any, they get before then.