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5.0 Test Drive Meme
5.0 Test Drive Meme
Premise & Arrival ֍ FAQ ֍ Apply ֍ Navigation
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 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:
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:
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:
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.
jessica richter blythe | oc
There's little more disorienting than waking up getting covered in dirt. She's not sure how she managed to pull herself out of it, but here she is, standing next to the headstone and the half-filled grave. Her coat is—she doesn't have one. That's fine. The frock she is wearing is plain and filthy white and open at the bottom to reveal scars along her abdomen, along the path of vital organs. She's brushing dirt out of her white hair so it smears against her black roots and accidentally forms a sloppy little gradient, and most of her attention is being directed to the headstone. Her golden eyes narrow as she tries to read it, and she's speaking it out loud in a raspy, tired sort of voice.
She mutters through the written there, then takes a clump of dirt and smears it against the first word. It's wrong in a couple different ways, but only one of them makes sense to her; the other gnaws at her in a way that she can't place. The epitaph is more viscerally frightening. "Died alone, unremarkably." Her breath hitches, but there's no time to focus on it. She snaps her head up suddenly, glaring at the latest movement in her field of vision like a predator.
"This is not mine." She's forceful, but certainly not trying to be impolite about it. "Explain to me what's happening here."
b. these darling angels singing in my ear [corpse flower]
She knows the smell of flesh. She's known for some time, it feels like, deep within her bones. Something that worms its way deeper than that, at times, as though it's encoded within her very soul. It's hard to remember where she's come into that little bit of knowledge, but whenever the door opens and the waft of the corpse flower floats to her nose, she finds herself with a sharp reminder.
She's sitting down, trying to get her bearings. Her skin is pale, and she looks somewhat sickly, as though she really has been dead for as long as the weathered headstone in the graveyard may imply. And, in a way that will get her no answers, she lifts her head and speaks to the first person who stops to listen.
"Did you know," she starts, ominously, "That you and I are nothing but meat with lightning running through us? Bundles of flesh and electrochemistry that spoils and rots and dies." She's smiling, though. Her teeth are flat but it's such a practiced gesture that it feels like it's still an implicit threat. "Everything has an expiration date. Everything has a time when it has outlived itself. Don't you think that's interesting?"
((here's some info about blythe! content warnings for death, disease, mortality, and abusive/controlling relationships just as a general rule for her.))
a
The young woman sitting in the dirt nearby, with a neat black frock and her pale pink hair piled into a high ponytail, smiled politely-- if vacantly-- at the other woman nearby. The furnishings of death around them, from the headstones to the silent digger that stalked the quiet rows, didn't seem to do anything to dim the spring-like cheer that she carried herself with.
Felicia, instead, was more concerned about the scars and dirty rags that her new companion was clothed in. Instead of properly explaining herself, she instead pulled off the thin cloak she had found herself in.
"Here," she said, "Take it. The cold doesn't bother me."
no subject
"Thank you," she says, and then, "You are not the one who put me in the ground. Are you used to these open graves?" Being curious isn't something that fits well in her mouth, rolling off her tongue with much less grace than she'd prefer. She feels like being surprised is a surprise in and of itself. "Do you know the keeper?"
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"Aahahahaha.... I'm sorry!" She explained, grinning sheepishly while simultaneously knocking against her head gently with a closed fist.
"I mean-- We've got some trouble. I don't know anything about what you're asking, and I don't know how to find who does!"
Despite the dour mood of the graveyard, Felicia's tone of voice was bright and chipper. The darkness in their surroundings couldn't do a thing to dampen her mood.
Truly, ignorance was bliss.
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"Are you the same as I am?" The quiet refusal to elaborate hung in the air, she hoped, and she kept puzzling over who exactly Jessica could have been. Was it her? Was this the closest thing she had to a proper name? A pressure built suddenly behind her eyes, and she pressed her fingertips to her forehead firmly to try to quell it. Nothing could stop the brief hiss of pain, though.
b.
The whoosh of his slurping fills up the hollow silence ringing in the wake of Blythe's dire words.
"Yeah," Alec says, letting the straw pop out of his mouth, "You're gonna fit in great around here."
And the damnedest thing about it is that he apparently means it as sincerely as a fifteen-year-old can mean anything.
"I'm Alec," he announces, which doesn't have the same heft as what Blythe said, "Welcome to the torture theme park nobody can escape. It sucks here. Has anybody given you the run down yet?"
no subject
"Blythe," she offers, sure of that name now that the haze has cleared and she's been walking and conscious for a while. "You would be the first." There's a detached air that clings to her words now that she isn't actively talking about flesh, but it's still on her mind, make no mistake. The interest is just being thinly paved over by a gentle coating of morbid humor. "But describing it like that, you may as well be talking about life anywhere. What makes this any different?"
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He plops himself on the low edge of a bench opposite her and stretches his legs out in front of him, toes idly splaying outwards. Blythe. It's got a ring to it.
"This one happens to be a fucked up mind games emporium run by mysterious unknown powers, so if you've got that figured out, maybe you don't even need the tourist's guide." He sips his lemonade. "You're already getting hit by one of them, right? This flower thing? That happens. Plants, food, the general atmosphere, it's all going to fuck with your head. If you feel like you're losing it, you can either ride it out or try to find whatever the trick is to getting it to stop. Let's see...last run, there was mistletoe that wanted us to kiss, which, personally? I found a little suspect."
This is definitely a coherent, easy to follow explanation so far.
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"And this feeling of being incomplete," she starts, with no frame of reference, "This... un-whole-iness. That is from the fucked up mind games emporium as well?" She feels the corner of her mouth twitch upward to say it using the same words. Like she's part of this conversation for real. "What is the trick, then? Or is it not so simple?"
no subject
He knows it's not actually great news, an understanding underlined by his eye roll when he says it. He actually rolls his eyes in their sockets, as opposed to the usual flicked upward gesture mean by the phrase.
"It's usually pretty simple. It's just it usually changes. You have to kind of feel it out. For example - " He jerks his thumb at the flower behind him. "I have no fucking idea what we're supposed to do about this."
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cw: meat horror
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b.
[ ryouma isn't sure what he makes of that. there's no judgement because whatever this person has to say, he's into it. all the precious scents of a childhood ryouma fails to remember mesh together into something that makes his heart ache with familiarity, not at all the scent of death that she is experiencing. what he smells makes him feel warm and friendly. ]
Everyone has a soul, though, which is what's important.
[ he's not sure how he knows that, but he feels pretty confident about it. ]
no subject
Do we? [a normal question. she doesn't know why that idea sends a prickle to the back of her neck.] What is a soul, then? Can you touch it? Do you feel it inside you as you push air through your meat?
[she won't admit to something more than professional curiosity here, but something tells her that it's easy to see through this. maybe she'll get lucky.]
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[ ryouma pauses, giving a lot of thought to this very unusual line of questioning as he scratches at his cheek idly. he's pretty sure he's never thought of breathing in that specific way, but he's not one to judge someone for being strange. ]
We aren't just meat, though, are we? That's the whole point. It's what makes someone who they are. I can feel it because I'm me!
[ there's probably a better, far more technical way someone could explain this, but metaphysics has never been his area. ]
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[the answer placates her for a moment, but it sends equal amounts of doubt and worry through her brain that get filtered into an insidious desire to confront, to push back. she hears a hiss that sounds like a voice but it only comes from within.]
And for those of us who do not know who we are. Do we have souls, as well? Is a soul only counted as existing if we know the name that we have given our meat? [she's staring ahead, almost blank.] I am Blythe, but I am incomplete. My soul is in tatters, then?
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[ he thinks about it a little bit further and feels pretty satisfied with that. it makes the most sense, after all — he can't remember everything, but he's still someone, he's still ryouma, whoever that's supposed to be. he can only trust his gut and hope he's being true to the person he's meant to be. ]
You call it incomplete, but I think everybody goes through that sort of thing. Everybody has to figure out how much their heart and their head can agree on things.
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b
"Oh, are we talking about impermanence? It's very interesting, but that's not how I think of it. Like it's an ending. Every body dies, but all the little things that make it up go on to make new life. That's what rot is. When that life dies it all becomes something else. And on, and on, and on..." She sighs a little, wistful. There's an ache in her chest that got stronger when she said that.
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"And at the end of it all? When there is nothing but stardust and the cold, inescapable entropy of the final Death?" She's not sure why the word spills from her lips with such weight to it. She tilts her head upwards, appreciative of the conversation, the new angle with which to consider all of this. Even if she's already sure she's right for reasons that she can't pinpoint. "Can the spittle of the desperate, dying gasps of this universe go on to create new life with nowhere to settle?"
a
When he looks over, the golden flash of her eyes only gives him a momentary pause. "Beginning of a new cycle," he says. "I heard about this when I first arrived. Everything breaks down, and we all wake up again in the graveyard, somehow little the worse for wear."
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"If we are in a cycle, then I do not recall ever being asked consent to enter it." It's not that kind of thing, something tells her in the back of her mind, but it doesn't matter. "My name is Jessica," and that same something tells her that that isn't right either, "And I have no desire to leave it behind. Nor have I ever, if this is merely the first time that you and I have spoken in this loop."
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He moves back, away from the grave's edge, getting up and approaching her carefully. "You and I haven't met before," he says. "I'm pretty sure of that."
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"I do not know whether I am memorable," she says, her voice still gentle, "But this is encouraging. Are we—meant to slowly gather pieces back together? To rediscover who we are?"
Her body language isn't particularly welcoming, but she's not outright closing herself off, either. With her head in such a haze, empty but still muddled, she stands like she doesn't quite know what to do with herself.
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B
Then she catches what Blythe says and she feels a grind to her teeth. ...And fists clench lightly. It's the mentions of death, and a expiration date that get her the most. How did this person know? How did she know when even Ash hadn't known?
"You think that's interesting? You think I don't know that!? Listen here, you!" She points a finger at Blythe with venom. "Come back and tell me that after you've killed your parents! Then. Maybe then you'll be on my level!"
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"My parents do not need my help," she says once she's finished with the small moment of playfulness she's allowing herself. There's more than enough room for hypocrisy to follow, after all. "Do you open all your conversations this way?"
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"What if I do? Do you think it's a little much to give people a heads up that they're hanging out with a parent killer?" Don't mind her as she still seems to relax and move to more properly join, Blythe.
"Plus, give it time. Maybe they'll ask for it one day."
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"I do not feel the need to introduce myself as a billionaire killer," she says simply, and this is one memory of hers that she's content with. It fits with her ideals. Of course she wouldn't be perturbed by it. Her face remains steady, no specific emotion making its way out. "Because I don't associate with billionaires. I doubt you will be associating with your parents again."
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