wellcome | 5.0 Test Drive Meme

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5.0 Test Drive Meme

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Welcome to Well! 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 February onward, and can happen concurrently with other events during February and March. This will be the only TDM for February, March, and April.

Applications are open January 27th until February 1st, and February 24th until March 1st. Invites are available for friends of current players.

Arrival: Six Feet Under

Content warnings: graves, being buried alive

You wake up in the ground. The hole you're in fits your body nicely. Just as you wake up, dirt spatters onto your face, into your eyes and mouth. Maybe that's what woke you up. Before you've had a chance to clear it, more dirt drops onto your body from above, again and again, in a grim rhythm. Until you get out of there it won't stop.

Unfortunately, you're six feet deep. You might want a hand.

More unfortunately, you won't get one from the person with the shovel. The gravedigger, silhouetted in black against the sky above you, will continue to shovel dirt onto you while you try to escape. Once you're out, she loses all interest and moves on to the next grave. She doesn't acknowledge you in any way.

Above the grave is a headstone: your own. It says your name and it might have your birthdate. The death date is unreadable. There may be an epitaph about your life. It doesn't look new. In fact, it looks as old and worn as the rest of the graveyard. Other open graves are scattered around in this graveyard, and other people are climbing up out of them, too. Maybe you want to lend them a hand, or maybe you want to get out of here as fast as possible.

A mossy wrought-iron gate leads out into greenery.

Now that you're out, you need to find your way... somewhere. Not here.

For current players, you're welcome to have your character wake up for the cycle like this.

tl;dr:

You wake up in your own grave! Someone's burying you alive! Better get out of there.

The only way out

Content warnings: being eaten alive, carnivorous flowers, intoxication

The graveyard is in the middle of the maze: a sprawling hedge maze on the outskirts of Wellstone town. The ground is soft with recent rain, and the hedges are just blooming green like it's early spring. Your shoes squelch in the muck.

It starts easily enough. As you make your way deeper, though, you'll start run into things that make the maze… harder. Gigantic flowers block the way down one path, and they titter together as you get close, swaying and moving in ways that flowers shouldn't. If you do get too close, a flower lurches forward and snaps its petals around you like jaws. Are those teeth?! They're like foot-long cactus spines, sharp and deadly. You might want to get out of there, and fast. The teeth hurt, and the inside of the flower isn't a cakewalk either. It hurts your skin, and if you're in there too long, your skin may start to burn off.

Down another path are more flowers. These are smaller, and oddly fleshy in color and scent. At the center of each flower is an eye. Some of them seem familiar, although you can't figure out why. As you pass, the eyes roll, following you closely. If you make eye contact and any of these flowers, you feel a chilling wave of fear that roots you to the spot. Your stuck in its gaze, staring back at it as it stares impassively at you. You have the horrible feeling that if you stay here, something awful will happen. It grows worse and worse, more acute, but no matter how strong that fear, you can't move your feet. Someone, or something, has to break your eye contact with the flower.

At a final turn in the maze, the sweet, soft scent of lilacs fills the air. You're sure that scent means you've found the end, and that you should follow it. Naturally, it doesn't. It leads to a dead end. Again. This one, at least, is beautiful: it's a little meadow surrounded by hedges, blooming in lilacs and lavender and little purple-headed poppies. The scent is heady and overwhelming. It fills you up. It settles into your head like a haze, making it hard to focus. It seems like an amazing idea to just… stay here. Lie down, maybe, among all those nice flowers. Just for a little while, you tell yourself.

Only, it may be more than a little while. The longer you sleep in this lovely little meadow, the more vines and flowers will grow over and around your body. Eventually, they'll make their way into your nose, your ears, your mouth and start to pull you down into the soft earth. Someone's going to have to wake you up and get those vines off unless you want to stay in this maze forever!

When at last you find your way out of the maze, past the treacherous flowers, you set your sights on Wellstone: a town in the first bloom of spring, a light mist making everything dewy and bright.

tl;dr:

After you leave the cemetery, you find yourself in the maze. There are flowers that are obstacles along your way.
There are large, flesh-eating flowers full of teeth that want to eat you.
There are fleshy flowers with eyes in the middle that, if you meet their gaze, hold you with fear.
There are lilacs that lull you and make you want to lie down and take a nap. If you do, vines will wrap you up, making it very difficult to get out.
Once you make it through all the obstacles, you can make it out of the maze into Wellstone.

Scent of death

Content warnings: bad smells, potential for body horror

It isn't just the maze blooming with the coming of spring: Wellstone itself has burst into bloom. It seems that everywhere you look, flowers have invaded the town. Sweet snowdrops poke their heads up between cobblestones. Violets wink from shadowed corners. Morning glories climb walls and line windows. They all smell wonderful, good enough to make you want to bend down and take a good, long sniff.

Except for one. Blooming in the courtyard of the Staywell, just in front of the door in a little garden circle, is a corpse flower. The flower is massive: over three meters tall, giant stamen thrusting up to the sky with frilly red leaves around its base.

It's hard to avoid the flower: any time anyone opens the door to the courtyard, the scent enters the lobby, the parlor, the cafeteria. It seems to permeate the Staywell at random times. And the scent is strange: if you try to talk to anyone about it, they don't agree with you on how it smells. And they won't agree on how it affects you.

Smelling the corpse flower makes you feel a little... strange. Its effects vary by person, and even when a person smells it more than once, the effect might change. At first you feel a rush of disgust, then nausea, then--well.

When you smell the corpse flower, you might smell:

The most delicious thing you can imagine. You're suddenly extremely hungry and feel compelled to eat as much as possible.
The most wonderful, nostalgic scent. You feel compelled to proclaim your loyalty and friendship to the next person you see.
The most relaxing thing. Your body feels loose and relaxed and you feel at peace. You want to spread the love and feel compelled to get everyone else around you to chill the fuck out.
Sugary sweetness. You feel an intense draw of affection toward the people around you and feel compelled to compliment them in increasingly over the top ways.
The scent of raw, rotting meat. Everything around you suddenly look strangely... meaty. Is that chair made of meat? That wall? You're very acutely aware that you are made of meat, and that everyone around you is made of meat.
The smell of death. You feel a horrible, creeping sense of guilt and feel compelled to confess something awful you do or do not remember doing to the next person you see.

Comment below if you'd like a random smell (or feel free to select for yourself). Effects last anywhere from half an hour to an hour. Characters can experience different effects throughout the TDM. The corpse flower will be in bloom the first week of February and the first week of March, and closed the rest of the time.

tl;dr:

There's a corpse flower blooming in the courtyard of the Staywell.
When you smell its scent, you'll smell a scent that makes you do--something! Select from the list what you'd like to happen, or comment below for a random effect.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

1. the only way out: entangled

As you wander the maze, you might overhear the sound of a struggle around a nearby corner. If you pursue the source of the noise, you'll find a corridor of the gigantic snapping plants, and from the looks of the boots kicking out the end of one, you aren't the first to find them.

"Fuck!" A muffled voice snarls, timed with the imprint of a braced arm shoving from inside the enclosure of the plant's bulging mouth.

2. the only way out: fear

Another another corner, at a different time, an explorer might come across a young man in his late teens at the oldest transfixed by a flower's staring eye. His shoulders are draped in a black cloak with a high, popped collar framing him up to his jawline, underneath which he sports a striped red scarf worn loosely. On top of his head sits a short top hat banded in red to match the scarf.

His face is set with roiling outrage that nearly eclipses the panic in his dark eyes, which meet the flower's bulging one with piercing intent. His hands clench and unclench at his sides, working uselessly at the empty air.

3. the only way out: dazed

Finally, you might stumble across that same young man sitting in the middle of a field of purple flowers, the sharpness of his gaze clouded over. He's halfway hunched over his knees, fists planted against the earth at his sides, and muttering to himself.

"Get up," Krouse tells himself, his frustration struggling to cut through his drowsiness, "Get the fuck up."

If he's aware of the tendrils snaking up around his wrists, he doesn't show any sign of it.

4. the scent of death

Out of the maze, Krouse had kept exploring. Discovering the lay of the land is the first step to understanding what's going on here, and how to deal with it. The manor seemed like a good place to start looking for answers.

Well, so much for that, because he's ended up hit by another of this place's fucking status effects. The putrid (familiar?) smell had filled up his nostrils as soon as he stepped into the courtyard, and he can't -

He can't go back to her until he deals with it. So here he's sitting on a stone bench with his hat on the seat next to him, hands locked together so he can press his nose and mouth against them as he stares at the spring turf, hunkered over and wasting time he doesn't know he has.

At the sound of footsteps approaching the courtyard from any direction his head jerks up, a flicker of frantic energy skittering across his features before they set into resolution. He straightens up, dropping his hands to either side of his legs.

"Watch out for the flower," he says, tersely, like it's not already too late for whoever's gotten this close. He has to open with something.

5. two player co-op | with gastro

There's someone new behind the bathhouse.

From the waist up, she's a slight, worn out looking teen girl with long brown hair that brushes over her cheeks whenever she bows her head. From the waist down, she's something else. A profusion of confused flesh spanning the animal kingdom, wet, denuded red entangled with expanses of rubbery bile-green, limbs and tentacles and misshapen heads jumbled together without order or grace. She towers against the backdrop of the stone wall behind her, several feet taller than the average adult human being.

Anyone who spots her or approaches might be forgiven for missing the smaller figure that hovers in her shadow, a cloaked and behatted young man who keeps looking up at her like he's afraid he somehow might lose track of where she is. Any such oversight of his presence is one he corrects as soon as he sees anyone else in the vicinity.

It might be almost funny to see him step between the girl-creature and a stranger with set shoulders and a hard line to his mouth. He's unarmed and unimposing, dressed up like the closet cosplay of a teenager short on spare cash and long on an overdeveloped interest in magic tricks. It's only the stark and somehow cornered intensity of the look he pins any observer with that might give them pause.

"Hey," Krouse says, with smoothness belied by crackling tension, "Can I help you?"

disclaimer
[ Just throwing him on here for fun; not apping. ]

A woman, or some creature wearing one's body, walks up behind the occupied flower without a word. She has a loose white shirt on, open along the stomach, and a pair of plain brown pants that tie with a cord drawn slightly too tight. Without so much as a word or a gesture or even a glance towards this captive person, she pinches a leaf of the plant that has him so transfixed.

It rots under her touch, the vibrant colors turning black and the leaves withering. The eyeball shrinks as though drying out, and the entire plant wilts within moments. Only when she's certain it's dead does she look up at the person it had entranced. Her gold eyes are calm, as though this is something she's done thousands of times before.

"Don't look so livid," she says, and her voice matches the way she stares. Her eyes are at the same level as his, which she takes as a comfort. If there's any fear in the way she's approaching this conversation, she thinks she's hiding it very well indeed. "They are only plants."

Krouse watches the plant wither and blacken with satisfaction bordering on spiteful. When the spell breaks as the eye collapses in on itself he takes a step back, just because he can, and shakes his hands out at his sides with a snap of his wrists.

"Paralyzing plants," he points out, finally able to meet his rescuer's golden-eyed impassivity. "Not exactly Home and Garden Centre material."

There's something off about her, but it's an offness that feels frustratingly familiar, like a refrain of a song he should be able to call to mind and can't quite grasp. The confidence, the indifference to the eyeball-plants, that power of hers, it all resonates, but if he tries to pin it down, it just gives him another fucking headache.

"Thanks," he says, tipping the brim of his hat to her, "I really can't afford to be tied up all day. How do you feel about doing a little more weeding?"

There's still a hard knot of that hideously fucked up impending doom sitting firmly in the centre of his chest, but like hell is he letting that show in the face of her fearlessness. He can afford to look scared less than he can afford to be stuck here, and that's saying something.

"If it's necessary," she says, barely reacting to any of the gratitude she's being shown. It's better being useful than being kind, isn't it? That thought seems correct, but even now she's feeling the echoes of something that's been with her since she rose from the open grave she'd arrived in. Like she's trying to exist as an incomplete version of herself, and like she needs to relearn whatever it is that has gone missing.

Maybe that's what causes her to say what she says next. "My name is Jessica." It's a pleasantry, perhaps, but it comes out with this uncertainty, this churn in her stomach that twists her lips and leaves a stale taste in her mouth. Her eyes only barely get wider, just visible by the way her thinning eyebrows raise up. If there's fear to be had, it presents here. "Have you met me before?"

"Krouse," he answers, stepping forward and offering her his hand, rotted plant or no rotted plant. It's a calculated decision, but only just, and there's a tug of trepidation at the idea of actually making contact.

He's not backing down from it. His instincts tell him that backing down is a mistake in a situation like whatever the fuck this situation is, and aside from a few maze missteps, his instincts have gotten him this far.

"And I'm afraid the answers to your questions are 'it looks like it is' and 'not that I remember'." His diction is smoothing out, shifting into a rehearsed register of almost bored self-assurance. "It sounds like you're suffering from a similar problem, which means it sounds like we already have one good reason to work together."

As she reaches towards the offered hand, towards Krouse's unrecognized hand, she finds herself thinking the word No., quite like that. Firmly, and with precisely no ambiguity. She doesn't know why, but it's by her own will, and it's only milliseconds before her skin makes contact with his, so quick as to be instinctual. And nothing happens; it's a normal handshake. It's what she assumes people like her must do all the time. Her shoulder blades lower and relax.

"I am not the only one," she says, a reassurance. "Then this will be easy." And she takes her other hand, once she's certain that she's not shaking Krouse's anymore, and presses her palm against the wall of the hedge maze. The leaves directly under her touch shudder and turn grey, but only for a moment before the color and life both return, as though draining it from the world around them. She stares at the patch of vivified foliage and returns her hand to her side.

"This will not be easy. Were you already on a path before I arrived, Krouse?"

Watching her sap the life out of the hedge scratches the unhealed itch again.

He should be freaked out. It's not normal for someone to be able to do that, but he watches her with keen evaluative interest instead of shock or horror. He's thinking about utility. That it's touch based, not ranged, or at least it seems to be. That the eyeball plant died, but the hedge bounces back.

Maybe it's because of Noelle. Figuring this place out and finding a way to help her is more important than letting himself freak out about women who can rot plants (and what else?) or his own new, strange power.

Thinking about Noelle and powers sparks a connection. If Jessica can wither away plant life, could she - ?

Absolutely fucking not. He shuts the thought down with hard revulsion.

"What ever is easy?" He affects a weary sigh, turning half away from her to look down the direction he was originally headed. More eyeball plants, whose gaze he's avoiding.

"I've been working by process of elimination." He wants to do something with his hands. He still hasn't figured out what. "When I went down the right over there, I ended up at a dead end, so either this is the way forward, or we're backtracking two turns and going down the right hand path there. Or..."

He turns back to her: "Could you try making a hole in the hedge? It doesn't have to be big. I just need to be able to see through it."

"I was trying," she says simply, without really turning around from where she'd been looking. Her neck has only turned a scant handful of degrees, more attuning herself to the direction of Krouse's voice rather than trying to see his face. When he mentions navigating the maze, that's when she actually starts looking, but beyond that she's standing in place, that same almost-sway that she's been carrying herself with this entire time.

She looks down at her fist, her fingers slender, her wrist thinner than it should be. And she curls her hand up and pushes it into the hedge, finding breaks in the foliage until she's up to her elbow. She grips something inside and, this time, whispers the word "yes" out loud. The plant life crumbles from the interior, leaves turning black and branches going white, and the detritus falls to the nadir of the small hole she's left. Her eyes flit to the clipped ends at the perimeter and how they're trembling as though they want to grow again.

"I think it will grow back," she says, pulling her hand away. "Be quick." She steps backwards once and looks at her arm, bleeding slightly from nicks that she hadn't remembered feeling. And there's something else, and it sounds different than most other things she's said—perhaps because it's lost that detached affect and it just sounds like a normal person speaking. Whatever a normal person sounds like. All she says is, "Maybe I won't be useless after all." And there's relief to it.

She looks up towards Krouse and hopes desperately that the hole she's made will show some way towards the exit.

Krouse stoops slightly to peer through the hole, holding his hat in place to keep it from shifting in a reflexive motion he gives no thought to.

"Fuck," he says, unhappily, after a second. He steps back from the hole and closes his eyes, frustration drawing harder lines at the edges of his eyes than typical of a teenager.

"I can teleport things," he explains, tersely, opening his weary eyes and returning his attention to Blythe, "But I have to swap them with something about the same mass. I was hoping I'd see some statuary I could switch us with."

There's no point keeping that to himself. She'll probably see it in action soon enough if things keep going the way they have been, and if they're working together, it's useful for her to know what his capabilities are.

"You won't be useless," he adds, matter of fact. "A plant withering power in a hedge maze? That's damage and environment control." He gestures at the open hole. "You can let it close. We'll try again somewhere else. Maybe it'll skip us ahead a couple sections."

Teleportation. How curious. "And you can guess my mass from looking at me?" she asks, and it's the closest thing to a joke she's made so far if only in that she doesn't expect an answer. The hedge closes back up like muscle and bone knitting back together, and there's something else curious about the way Krouse described her own abilities that comes to mind as she watches it.

"It is not... only plants," she says, and she looks him in the eyes this time. He has been honest with her; she can return the favor. Balance, yes? "It is any living creature. I can cause any kind of disease in anything that lives. I—do not remember many things about what I did before waking in that grave, but I remember that." She turns her head away and coughs loudly, covering her mouth with her balled fist. When she pulls it away, it's been spattered with thick, wet blood; she examines it, but doesn't otherwise seem disturbed. In fact, she wipes it on the hem of her white shirt and steadies herself again.

In another moment of sincerity, maybe only because he was kind enough to overhear and reassure her on her usefulness, she says, "Please do not be afraid of me."

francis krouse | worm

fear

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5

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4

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cw: jokes about alcoholism, mention of tooth horror

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5. one billion years later. cw john gaius

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