5.0 Test Drive Meme

[wellie]

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.

Comments

[toxicyuri]

"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.

[equivo]

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."

[toxicyuri]

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."

[equivo]

Krouse flinches very slightly when she coughs, but the wrinkle that crosses his determined expression isn't one of fear. There's an almost furtive reluctance to his sympathy, like he'd prefer that neither of them had to deal with it.

"I don't see a reason I should be," he says, shortly, his right hand coming up to pat his chest. His brow furrows after he does it, fingers curling in place before he drops them. There it is again, that compulsion to reach for something when he's trying to gather his thoughts. He'd feel less antsy with something between his fingers.

"We're on the same side." Like repeating the concept will help it stick. "Unless that changes, there's no problem. Just broadens the scope."

He wants to sound like he knows what he's talking about. He feels like he should know what he's talking about. It's not going to help either of them if he acts like some scared kid out of his depth.

He's not even sure he is scared of her, and maybe that's the fucked up part.

"And circling back - not exactly. I can tell whether you're about the same as something else. It's not like sticking you on a scale." He's not completely sure what it's like.

"...does that usually happen when you use your power?" It's a pivot, he knows, but he thinks he should ask.

[toxicyuri]

She recognizes the gesture this time; it calls to mind something that she can only vaguely remember doing, as well. The illness is more prominent, though, the aftermath of whatever it was that she had been doing when making that kind of gesture, going through those motions. So she doesn't press it, because she doesn't know how to.

"I have been sick for as long as I can remember. It happens... it happens," she corrects herself, after seconds of thinking and hovering around the answer for something that feels sealed behind glass. "I have always been this way. I am limbs that are too long and angles that are too sharp, and... scars on my torso and blood in my throat. It's who I am. It isn't part of what I can do."

It has to be a lie that she tells herself, since the idea of holes inside her memory is too... frightening, too harrowing to approach right now. It has to be a lie she tells Krouse so he can believe that she knows what's happening, that she isn't just as lost. She has a task to focus on with him, and that needs to be what she directs her energy towards. So she says "come along" and she walks forward, in the same direction they had both been traveling, without waiting to see if he will follow. Something like dread drips down her back as she goes, as though under the gaze of a thousand plants.

[equivo]

That's a fucking weird thing to say.

He knows it is even as he falls into measured step behind her, staring at the back of her head as she advances. He doesn't mean not taking point. He's not in a hurry to fall into any new traps first, and it gives him time to turn over what she's saying unobserved.

It's a weird fucking thing to say, and it's not very fucking funny that the first person he's met here reminds him of the only person he knows in an even more frustrating way than her powers nag at a different set of snarled mental threads.

"Yeah, well." He taps the outside of his thigh with his fingertips, then readjusts his cloak. "Just tell me if you need to stop for a minute. This won't be any easier if I have to carry you out."

His tone aims for dismissive, terse. He can't help the throb of muted concern that breaks through. There's no good amount of blood to cough up, but that was veering to the 'very bad' side. He thinks. But what does he know?

[toxicyuri]

"I will," she says, but the words are quiet and almost get clipped off as her footsteps grind to a halt. She sees one of the same plants that she'd saved Krouse from right in front of her, at eye level, growing from the hedge. It has this... intoxicatingly violet eye, almost neon in its intensity. And the dread only gets worse. Sweat trickles down her temple despite the weather, and she feels two massive, clawed hands digging into her shoulders, holding her in place.

There's nothing there, of course. Nothing she can see, but only ever something she can sense. Thoughts, her only sanctuary as her lips refuse to behave and her body will not move, flood her mind. Don't ignore Me. I am here. I cannot leave you. I love you. I am here. I am yours. You are Mine. I love you. Let Me free. I am here. They feel like they belong to another person entirely, but everything layers over itself in a horrible cacophony and she's barely being given the chance to pick each individual thought apart. It's only after that horrible burst of words that she finds her own thoughts, in a mental voice that's far less angry.

help me.

She doesn't know what else to do but stand here and silently beg with her own eyes utterly transfixed on the plant.

[equivo]

"Fuck," Krouse sighs, tipping the brim of his hat down as he lowers his gaze to the ground.

He skirts Blythe's transfixed body carefully, holding a hand wrapped in the edge of his cloak up in front of him as he maneuvers. It makes him look like a cut-rate vampire stalking the castle grounds, or some creep haunting an opera house, but he thinks Blythe is too far gone to care.

His hand bumps into the stalk of the eyeball, and he grimaces as he takes hold of it through his flimsy layer of protection. He wraps his other hand up the same way and grips the plant at the base of the flower, then snaps the stem and wrenches it clear. He drops it eyeball down on the ground and, after a moment's decision making, stomps it under his heel.

"Eye contact," he mutters, "Got it."

Krouse lifts his head and flicks up the brim of his hat, giving Blythe a sideways look now that she's presumably had a few seconds to get her shit together. His dark eyes are intent and clear, and he stays quietly watchful as he waits for her to speak first.

cw: blood

[toxicyuri]

It's when the eye contact is broken, not when she hears the squishing of an eyeball underneath Krouse's foot, that the spell shatters and she feels everything fade away. But the first thing that she manages to bark out, like she's been straining to do it this entire time, is loud enough that she hadn't known her throat was even capable of it. The only thing she screams is "No!", a forceful noise that ravages her throat with blood and sends her into a coughing fit so bad that she sinks to her knees.

She looks up at Krouse as she goes through it, still coughing, still bleeding, red lines still dribbling down her chin. Her eyes seem suddenly much more intense, almost predatory. Like she's a beast who forgot her purpose. It's the adrenaline, the cortisol, the chemicals that wouldn't fill her up to the brim on her own working overtime to catch up after her veins had run cold.

"We need to run," she struggles out, and the tone isn't that of a hunter at all. "Something worse than death will come if we stay." She knows it to be true. It must be. She's felt it on her shoulders. It's within her. It is here.

cw: blood

[equivo]

Krouse keeps watching her as she has her coughing fit, the hard mask of his expression cracking at the edges until it breaks. He curses again and steps over to Blythe, rewrapping his hand in his cloak to extend to her.

"You can't run," he says, firmness layered over a spongy underlayer of dismay, "We can move, but we're not running. You'll hack up a fucking lung. Come on."

He doesn't know if she's right. Something worse than death sounds pretty fucking unpleasant to take a risk with. It could be the flower getting to her, because he felt more or less the same thing, but it could be real. If it is, the smart thing to do, even the right thing to do, is to leave her. Get back to Noelle and get the fuck out of here.

It's still a possibility. He's not committing to anything by not bolting yet, or he can tell himself that.

He still wants to get back to Noelle. Anything could be happening to her. He didn't know about these plants when he left to scout, and the idea of her stuck somewhere, terrified, pinned down - his stomach didn't lurch for the blood, but it lurches for that.

[toxicyuri]

There's something in her mind that pushes through everything else, and for the first time in the past apparent-eternity it's not something horrible; it's relief. That she's found someone who won't simply run and leave her behind to die. To suffer a fate worse than death. Her lungs go from collapsing to filling with air as she breathes in deep and thick. The taste of iron fills her mouth even more than it already had, but she can handle it; she holds her breath, and makes sure that she is stable again.

She turns her head towards her companion, and her hair falls into her face, and her nails dig into the dirt. She needs to be ready to stand and to move again. Krouse isn't abandoning her, and that needs to be enough for her right now. It needs to be stronger than the terror.

"I am—" she clears her throat and ignores the taste. "I'm well. Well enough to move." She opens her hands and stops tilling the soil with her spindly fingers, and only then does she reach for Krouse's hand. (Touching her directly feels dangerous right now; he is smarter than she anticipated.) She pulls herself upward, her body still as slight as it looks, and asks, "Why would you not just save yourself?"

[equivo]

He's not expecting the question. With his brittle teenaged composure already shaken, Blythe can watch his eyes widen up close thanks to their proximity.

He doesn't answer right away. It's not because the answer doesn't come to him, swift and certain. It's because he has to take a second to try to process what it means.

"Because that's not how allies work," he lies, releasing her hand and stepping back to readjust his hat. "Let's go."

Even though he says it with a degree of brusque impatience, he waits for her to start moving to set their pace.

"If you're right, we should double back." He evaluates the maze's turns ahead as far as he can see them, comparing them to the map he's been sketching out in his head. He isn't sure how reliable it is, but as long as they get somewhere with reasonable clearance over the hedges, he'll have an anchor to guide him. "We'll meet up with my team leader."

Noelle will appreciate that. She'll be happy he went out of his way to help someone else. That's still not why he didn't just leave Blythe behind.

He's just hasn't been thinking about saving himself. He hasn't thought about it once since he woke up to Noelle screaming. The knowledge floats uneasily in the void where everything else he doesn't know should be. It implies things.

It doesn't matter. They have to get back to Noelle.

[toxicyuri]

It's as good an answer as any—better, really, because it stuns her enough to give her time to come back to her senses. Is that it? They are allies, and they are not leaving each other behind? There is a void within her, a void named loneliness, and for the first time she can remember, she thinks she can hear something hit the bottom of it. (It seems to have surprised Krouse as well. Interesting.) The fear still gnaws at her heels, but the goal before them is clearer and more urgent. They have to escape first.

"You have a leader," she says once she's back on her feet. "You do not strike me as a follower." That is quieter, more an idle statement than any sort of judgment against him. It's an observation as normal as anything else she's decided to comment on so far, in her mind. She turns to face the direction they'd come from.

"It is not your leader who is coming for us," she says with unearned surety. "That which is coming for us feels far closer and may only mean me harm. Let us go." She quickens her stride, but her feet begin to ache only after a few paces; she returns to a normal pace, then. She can handle this. Krouse will be able to keep up with her easily anyway. He isn't dying, as far as she can tell.

[equivo]

"She's an exception," Krouse says, two disparate tones overlapping again. The first is staunch, almost dismissive, answering Blythe's answer in the affirmative even as he rejects it under these circumstances. The second is a warm throb of affection for said exception, paired with a softening of the tension set around his eyes.

"And she wouldn't want to hurt you," he says, quietly, and that's not nearly as complicated. "Noelle's a good person."

He doesn't know how Blythe will take seeing her. Maybe he can hope for some solidarity between the two of them. He knows Noelle will be okay with Blythe, even if he can't point to any specific evidence for that knowledge.

Except that she is a good person. One of the best. He knows that like he knows he loves her, more than he knows anything about himself except that she's the most important person in the world to him.

"We should go over what we know." Krouse fixes his gaze ahead, scanning the environment with nearly twitchy rapidity as they walk. "We can put holes in the hedges. That'll help us scout. We also know that things here can affect us through eye contact, so we should avoid that. Is there anything else you've noticed?"

[toxicyuri]

"Venus flytraps," she says quickly, though she doesn't know why she knows the name of what she'd seen. Still, it's hard to think of what else they could have been, with their massive teeth and clamping jaws, and maybe it's just part of her muddled memory that's sorting itself out. "If I came too close to their territory, they began gnashing their teeth at me. We run the risk of being eaten alive in a very real way," she concludes, and the thought more or less ends there no matter how much of a shudder it sends down her spine.

"The hedges will grow back, as well. I can only kill them temporarily, as though they're... resistant to my blight." That's an interesting word to pluck from her memory, as well. It feels somehow like the correct choice. "But not immune." She needs to focus; there's a different ache in her chest, one that won't slow her down but one that won't stop as easily, either. She's trying to think of other things that she's noticed, but there's been so little else that hasn't already been covered.

"The graveyard I woke in," she starts, "Is part of this maze, as well. Which means Noelle is likely still in here, unless she has found her way out before us. Do you have any other way to contact her outside of wandering aimlessly?" she asks, a stupid question that won't stop itself from spilling from her lips. "Her phone number?" She pats the pockets of her corded brown pants and finds them empty. Maybe he had better luck.

[equivo]

Krouse listens intently as Blythe runs through her experiences in the maze so far. The more information they pool, the better they understand the puzzle, the easier it is to solve.

Thinking of it that way helps. Focus on the concrete, not the abstract. Every problem they have that's bigger than the one ahead of them is a problem they can solve once they're out, which is something he tells himself even while his brain keeps matching up scattered little hints at the looming possibilities.

This thing is designed. There's a reason that it exists, and it's not just to kill them. So the questions are what that reason is, and if Krouse can infer from the design what kind of solution the designers intended - and what solutions they didn't intend that might get them through it faster.

"I'm not giving out her phone number without checking with her first," he says, absent-mindedly, and hearing himself snaps him back into the present. He touches the bridge of his nose irritably.

"She doesn't have it with her anyway." He doesn't remember what Noelle's phone number is; another frantic blurt of mystifying loss punches him under the ribs. "And she's not in the graveyard. We split up to cover more ground. I shouldn't have - "

He shakes his head, touches his chest, still finds nothing under his hand.

"Fuck." He drops his arm with a scowl. "I'll tell you when we're close. Just keep walking."

[toxicyuri]

And Blythe falls silent.

Not out of fear, no. She isn't worried about someone speaking loudly, working through all number of crises right in front of her eyes. She isn't afraid of Krouse and has no real idea whether she should be or not. There is a voice inside her mouth that almost wills her to whisper "yes", but she bites her lips closed so nothing can escape.

And she walks. She keeps walking, quiet and obedient in a way that almost seems trancelike. It's too easy of a request for her. She doesn't interrogate why. Instead, when they've been walking for at least some time, she deigns to speak again.

"You care about her deeply," she says, and she doesn't say the girl's name. It feels outside her place in this moment. "I understand. I assume there... must be someone like that for me." She ignores the pain that shoots down her leg, writing it off as a side effect of all this wandering, but grits her teeth as it sends a lightning bolt down through the arch of her foot and into the ground.

Like it matters, like she hasn't already consented, she speaks further. "I will help you find her first. Then you both will escape." That doesn't do overmuch to help the two of them actually find an exit, but maybe it will help Krouse feel more comfortable. "Is there more you can tell me about her?" she tries.

[equivo]

The lapse into silence doesn't bother Krouse as much as it should. He's not exactly keeping group morale up. He should say something, extend an olive branch of encouragement, and he's in the middle of thinking about how to do that when Blythe ends the break in conversation for him.

And of all the things she could have said, she goes and says that. The look he shoots her starts brittly defensive, then turns into distrustful semi-relief, and finally lands on the bloodied softness of a deep bruise.

Which is to say: he looks like it hurts.

He glances away from Blythe and drags a mask back on, rearranging the sensed disorder of his expression by thinning his mouth and picking a point on the hedge ahead to examine.

Is he really being that obvious? If this stranger can tell, has Noelle been able to see it?

Blythe said care. There's plausible deniability in care. A person can care about a friend, someone they respect. It doesn't come with the same baggage.

"She's smart," Krouse says, after seconds that stretched interminably in his head, "She's good at working out things like this. That's why she's team captain."

He could leave it at that. It'd be better if he leaves it at that. That's all Blythe needs to know.

"She's good at a lot of things," he says, quietly, "Pretty much anything she tries. She picks things up fast, and she gets it right the first time. Whatever the way out of here is, she's going to be the one who puts it together. And she doesn't really go for leaving people behind, so I'd drop the 'you both' bit, in your position. Save everyone the debate."

[toxicyuri]

All she knows is care. All she can guess at is care, and anything beyond that is beyond her. Anything more specific than caring is something that's for other people, and in her own case it's just... empty. There is a void where something more than that should be. She will choose to ignore this while she listens to Krouse explain the depth of his care, and by the end of it she truly believes she understands the kind of person Noelle is.

"She sounds like exactly the right person to encounter in this maze," and there's the soft dread of but unfortunately you've encountered me instead underpinning it. It isn't useful, so she ignores that, as well. Some of her thoughts are not yet fast enough to escape her mouth, and she's grateful for it every day it's true.

"I apologize for saying something hurtful." Her gaze has been wandering idly, but she's focusing back on Krouse now. "I am... I have often been a poor person to speak to even when I feel normal." Whatever that means. Whatever normal is. "But since rising from that grave—you must know the feeling. Walking through a new world feeling as incomplete as a ghost. Barely even knowing your own name." She curls her fingers into her palms at the idea that something as simple as a name should be difficult for her.

"My point is that I would not have blamed you for leaving me behind. And I appreciate that you are not."

[equivo]

The way Blythe is talking, a person might think Krouse is a nice guy. Even a little heroic, if he stands in the right light. He should feel gratified by hearing such a glowing review.

He doesn't, and it's not because he feels guilty about her misconception, or even has a curling question mark about what kind of miserable life she must have led to be grateful for what amounts to basically nothing. He doesn't feel anything about it. It's something happening with her that really doesn't seem to have much to do with him.

"You're fine," he lies, conjuring up a quick, if tense, smile, "It's not a problem. Like I said, we're allies. All the more so because we have the same problem, right? Besides - you stopped for me first. So just call it returning a favour."

She's making an effort. He might as well do the same.

"And it wasn't hurtful. I'm just worried about her." Half true. "I wasn't expecting this place to be this dangerous."

[toxicyuri]

She nods, content with most of his response. She locks something down within herself, though, and makes herself recognize that she has overstepped, and that it's better to focus on the goal instead of on her own emotions right now. It's just a lapse in judgment. She usually knows better.

"Nor I," she says, her voice still quiet. And then, "Do you suppose we've gone far enough to carve another hole?" But it's a rhetorical question, and she's already wandering forward a little, pressing her open palm to the hedge wall. There's no reason to wait once the idea strikes her, and though there's a small delay this time, the blight infects nonetheless. The plants grey and die as they had before, and this time, she is the one who looks through.

"Here," she says, pulling her head away to reveal a peephole into a small statuary garden. Equally grey monoliths carved in the form of animals and chess pieces and enough other things to make it clear that it's not something truly cohesive. A dumping ground, almost. "It looks like a stone menagerie."

[equivo]

Back to work. It doesn't make Krouse less tense, but it gives him somewhere to direct the tension. He waits for Blythe to bore another of the ash-grey holes, then steps forward to sight through it after she moves aside.

He'd practised some back in the graveyard. Whatever it is that he's doing, it comes easily to him, as intuitive as making his eyes focus. The sensation of intangible heft makes itself known as he scans the potential targets, searching for the resonance of the chord between things that will connect. Stone weighs more than they do, so he checks things smaller than either of them. Blythe is his height, but she weighs less. Weaker chord, even smaller object. Easy.

"I can get us through," he declares, angling himself to keep a staggered pair of chess pieces in his line of sight, a slender white bishop and sharp-hewed black knight clearly from two different sets. "Stand there, and I'll move you."

He doesn't know what teleporting another person is like, but every jump he's made has been fine. He's pretty sure he can't teleport anything into anything, for one thing. With that risk assessment done, he points at a spot for Blythe to position herself.

[toxicyuri]

Blythe knows not what to expect either, and on some level she recognizes that she is exercising an enormous amount of trust in a stranger. It's the sort of thing that raises bile in her throat, a stinging sensation that worries and aggravates her in equal measure. She makes a small face as she swallows it back down, then rolls her neck and stands up. Her spine straightens in a way that looks like she's never done it before in her life.

"I am as ready as I can get," she says, but her eyes flit to that hole and she hopes it will stay open long enough to get both of them through. There's no way of knowing how long this process will take or if she'll even come out in one piece on the other end of it, and it's that thought that seems to shoot dread through her body more than anything else. "At your leisure."

[equivo]

Krouse offers her a cocky smile, and it transforms the stress-tightened lines of his face. He looks seventeen and self-assured about it, about to pull a trick out of his sleeve with a casual flourish.

Blythe is standing in one place, and then she's standing in another. The transition is instant and sensationless. In the next half-second, the sharp black knight she's standing next to disappears, and Krouse raises his hands in an ironic (and not) ta-da.

"See?" He says, with a bubble of excitement finding its way through the weariness of his voice despite himself. "Teamwork. It gets you places."

He shades his eyes with one hand as he turns on his heels, surveying the menagerie from their new angle on this side of the hedge. Nothing jumps out as a threat. The statues don't come to life to start trying to drag them into some kind of fucked up magical chess game. So far, so good.

"That way," he decides, pointing out one end of the statuary strewn hidden park.

[toxicyuri]

She had expected some sort of lurching feeling, or the idea of being sucked across some interdimensional space, as though she knows quite what that would feel like. That makes her surprise all the more palpable when she simply is on the other side of the hedge, and while she's examining herself to make sure nothing had been left behind, Krouse pops in next to her.

"That was something special," she says with something close to awe in her words. She joins him in looking around, ignoring some of the statues that look like they may be perhaps too accurate representations of humans, and quickly ends up on the same page. And then... she has another thought.

"Wait. Before we leave here," she says, and her eyes go from a stone that looks like it may be a good match for her to the tops of the hedges, "What if we could bring something to the upper edge of these walls? Something that weighs the same as I do." She points at the thing she'd been looking at that even just from sight is heavier than herself, but it's not like it's the only thing here. "Then you could do the same thing you've just done, but I can find the correct way out from a higher vantage point and be your navigator."