wellcome | 4.0 Test Drive Meme

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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!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"Yup," she says. This guy is talking like a necromancer, and giving even weirder vibes than she thought they were supposed to give. He has her curious, though, so it feels worth hanging around despite his expression starting to express she might get punched with her own tooth sometime soon.

So many skeletons laying around doing nothing feels bizarre in a way that tickles the inside of her brain. "You know anything about them?"

"What, these guys? Not a lot." He frowns out at the graveyard with a pinch of real concern between his brows. "But I figure they're like us... people who showed up with their heads empty, tried their best not to die. Didn't go so well, I guess."

Which raises a lot of interesting questions, but that's stuff he's still working on. Probably not comforting for a total newcomer.

"Look, if you're not a fan of bones, there are other scenic features. Like trees, apparently." He spreads his hands to the forest as though showing off his own personal crib. "They're new. Recent upgrade."

"Hate bones." She is neutral on bones. Bones are just a constant thing of the universe, aren't they? Unsure what this guy is hoping for, she follows his gesture to look and just says, "Okay. What else?"

John just splays his palms in a exaggerated shrug like Wow, okay, tough crowd. Not everyone can have taste, apparently.

"Well, we have grass. Birds and bees. Creepy hedge mazes." He ticks these off on his fingers, the last with a tip of his head towards the silent green walls that border their graveyard. "Sure I can't change your mind on bones? With a little bit of necromancy they can be fun and useful. And it's not all grinning human skulls. Some people will tell you raccoons are cuter with the fur on, but I'm not sold."

"You're pushing bones too hard. You sound like a tomb nun." She's gotta get in early how much she is not a tomb nun, apparently. Her hand drifts to her waist to rest idly on something that isn't there. She figures she'd missed her pocket and tucks her thumb there instead. "I prefer raccoons fur on, thanks."

Whatever a raccoon is.

Tomb nun clicks something in his head. John's not sure what, exactly, or why his heart says Annabel like a reflex. There's the poem— but she can't be genuinely dead, not after the beach— unless it was only him keeping her alive, that whole time. Maybe he stopped.

Maybe that's why he feels the way he does, when he thinks her name.

"Do I look like a tomb nun?" It comes a little delayed, his smile a less less convincing, but still he leaves his palms open like he's presenting himself for assessment. There's a more pressing itch of interest in his head, a feeling like there's something here, and maybe it's not just the eyes. "Help me out here. I'm lacking context."

Gideon thinks about defining tomb nun, then holds up a hand and ticks off the defining traits on her fingers. "Creepy tomb cult. Black robes. Skull paint. Bones. Ninth."

This answers a few questions John had been circling, and raises a new one he hadn't thought to ask. Tomb cult. Okay. So maybe Annabel isn't heading the other side: maybe she's its martyr.

That's actually worse.

"Skull paint is a cool touch," John admits. "Not quite my style. Look, sorry, I know I should be able to place this, but: where does that put you?"

Is the Ninth, what, a house of defectors? It never came up once in Marriage Season, which was maddeningly vague about who was actually on the other side of those tragic front lines.

"Cohort," she says it almost like it's a question, and then amends as her hand returns to her hip, "best guess." She doesn't try to guess to his face, because she had been wrong with Palamedes, and then he'd pissed her off, and the whole exchange had been humbling. (Her bet is on Fifth again).

"Nice." That's easy. That's simple, honestly. It doesn't feel right— makes him want to dig his nails into his own brain, scratch out the itch that her eyes mean something— but it gives them steady ground to work with, and that's in short supply. A few months ago, he would've wondered why anyone in the Cohort would go skittish around skeletons. Now that he knows which side Pal is on, it tracks; he apparently didn't get all the necromancers in the divorce.

"I would have guessed, but you probably remember more than I do." And, because he can't resist: "Tag me, next. Just for fun. No wrong answers."

Because, if you think about it, he probably founded all of them.

The lack of resistance to it makes her feel a little better, weirdly. Makes it easier to distance herself from the weird, creeping sensation that had scrambled up her insides when she'd been accused of Ninth.

It's enough to make Gideon willing to play along, so she sizes him up. "Okay. Any hints? Give me, like, two more John facts."

John blows out a thoughtful breath, rocks back on his heels, and considers. He lets the moment hang.

"Alright. Tell me if this is anything: I have a background in necromantic research." He might have invented the field. "New areas of study, new applications, the real cutting-edge of bone science." Half his memories are steel-grated floors and antiseptic, snapping on those little blue gloves, arguing over protocol. The Sixth defected, sure, but he can't have lost the only House for nerds.

That's one of two. With the same drawn-out, thoughtful gravitas, he arrives at their final John fact: "But I'd trade it all for the proper study of bone puns. If there's a humerus House, that's the one."

This is a normal setup for And by the way, I'm God.

Humerus House is funny. It's enough to get a ghost of a smile on her face, erase the suspicious edge from her features.

There's already one pair of Sixth here. Maybe he's Sixth, and she's Sixth too, and this is all just one weird in-depth research project. She tries, "Sixth?"

Ouch.

"Solid guess." He kind of deflates, though, like he's disappointed. Maybe he did lose the only nerd House. That hurts more than it has any right to. At least she cracks a smile at the joke, and that's enough to keep him going. "Any runners-up?"

Fuck.

"My first guess was going to be Fifth," she says, trying to maintain an air of unearned confidence, because at this rate he's either got to be Fifth or she's really got to stick to the bit. "You threw me off with bone science."

That kind of tracks. He's peripherally aware of the Fifth, because The Necromancer's Marriage Season seemed to think it was the only House worth acknowledging past the Third. He has the impression of civilized society, people with more titles than sense, but that might've just been every character in Marriage Season.

"Fair enough." He does have more titles than anyone should. "What about me says Fifth? Forgive the interrogation. I'm just trying to get caught up."

He didn't say no, and fair enough is basically a yes. That, or he doesn't remember either and the bit is mutual, which would be the best possible outcome here.

"You're in a graveyard and you do research." Meeting Palamedes kind of threw a wrench in her mental sorting of House archetypes, but she's giving it a go anyway. There's this long pause, and then she adds, like it's something she just turned over in the back of her mind. "And you're name's boring. So, yeah. Fifth."

Okay, so there is a second nerd House, and it's the big fancy upper-crust one. He probably kept the Fifth in the divorce. Speculation, sure, but it's more than he's had to go on until now.

That last bit startles a little laugh from him, as though she's said something genuinely bold.

"Are there a lot of Johns in the Empire?" That would be hilarious, honestly. It feels like a boring name, which makes the pile-up of titles even better. "I don't think I caught yours."

He really ought to tell her, right? Is it funnier if he doesn't tell her, and waits to see how long until she kicks down his door in incredulity? But then Cam and Pal get time to put a spin on things, paint him a liar for not being upfront. That still strikes him as kind of unfair. Some things are just too weird to be upfront about.

And she'd probably look at him with that same frozen, cornered-rabbit politeness they wore. No. Better to have it off like a band-aid.

"I'll trade you for it: this is where I have a confession to make." His tone goes drawn-out and hedging, like this is going to get awkward. "It was a trick question. I'm not actually Fifth."

Fuck, she thinks with her whole chest. All that, and this is just some guy fucking with her. Whatever goodwill he'd started to win over with his joke vanishes in an instant. She's on guard all again; it ripples into her stance and creeps back into the edges of her tone.

"You get a name with you fess up where you're from."

Edited 2023-11-07 01:57 (UTC)

She braces like he'll say something dire, but that's more credit to the whole civil-war theory, right? House against House. Bone against bone and not in a sex way.

But she's Cohort, so she'll be cool about this. Relatively speaking. He's holding out hope.

"Not Second, not Third, not Fourth or Seventh or Eighth." He spreads his hands like ta-da: the big reveal is some guy with a mundane goth outfit and a boring name, anticlimactic enough to be kind of hilarious. "First House, founding member."

Whatever she'd been expecting, that wasn't it. She's trying to rack her brain. She's trying really hard to rack her brain. So hard, actually, that a headache starts creeping over the front of her head and her eyes form slits to compensate for the sudden visual fuzz.

Blatantly annoyed now, "Nobody's from the First House. Seriously, where are you from? Stop messing with me. Are you just Cohort?"

Damn. That kind of ruins the joke, if he got it wrong. John drops his hands and looks kind of sheepish.

"Pretty embarrassing to forget the details of your own empire, right?" He's watching her for a response, waiting for it to hit, the lines around his black-hole eyes gone tight with his smile. "I'm not actually going to smite you for having bad taste in bones. Be not afraid."

It's not hitting. (Or, at least, what he's suggesting is so stupid she's actively refusing to make the leap). She says, scathingly, "I'm not afraid of being smote by some old dick lurking around a graveyard seeing how many bullshit sentences he can string together before the first person he's gotten to talk to him in three months gives up." And then, "You're worse than Sextus."

Wow, okay. Not that he doesn't deserve it, but that's a little harsh.

"Damn," John murmurs, and then amends, "Goddamn," like that'll be the thing to stick the landing.

Finally he goes for: "You know, I've never been asked to prove it. This is a new one for me. We could start speedrunning miracles, but I can't remember any of the greatest hits, so I'd rather we skip that bit and save me the embarrassment. Would it help if we got out of the graveyard? I like the ambience, but it does seem a little on-the-nose."

"You cannot seriously be trying to convince me you're the Emperor." She's so fed up. She doesn't know why she isn't just turning around and taking her chances with the hedge maze. "You know what? Sure. Let's say I'm such a tool that I'm going to take your word, no proof needed, that you, some guy named John, are the Man Who Became God, the God Who Became Man, and I'll say I'm Gideon, the fucking Saint of Gullibility. Piss off."

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