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

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."

Edited 2024-01-23 13:49 (UTC)

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."

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."

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."

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.

Edited 2024-01-23 20:50 (UTC)

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."

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.

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."

Any other place, any other time, and Krouse thinks he'd appreciate Blythe being impressed by this like he should have appreciated her thinking he's a nice guy. There's some part of him that remembers that the way plants in a desert remember rain.

But whatever tries to wake up and bloom in his chest over it is too fragile to survive. It wilts in the bitterness of knowing that he is lucky, having a power like this, so effortless and useful.

He gives her a nod of acknowledgement for the compliment anyway, because he's trying not to be a complete asshole.

"...that could work," he says, turning the idea over, "Except we can think bigger than something your size. It'd take a minute, but it's doable."

He couldn't have come up with a better place to try something like that than this unless they were working with a set of incremental rectangular blocks. The gradient of options he has to pull from means nothing should be too much of a shift.

"Go stand by the hedge for me." He's already scouting again, weighing one object after another. "Let's give it a shot."

And she's quick to obey the order once more, like she's used to it, like she knows the benefits of listening. It helps that she can already see what Krouse is going for, and she almost wants to make fun of herself for overcomplicating something so easy.

"A stairway. Of course," is all she says instead, once she's in position. Her hands feel empty, her body useless as she just waits there, unsure of how she can even help. "I could bring things into alignment for you, but you would have to do the heavier lifting... whether that's metaphorical or not." She breathes out and feels her ribcage sink into her chest.

"I hope it can support both of us up there," she muses idly, but doubts that it will be much of an issue. If it's strong enough to be a wall, it must have some kind of density behind it.

Perhaps surprisingly, Krouse trails after Blythe on her trip to the hedge, taking up a position a few feet away from her when she stops. He smiles thinly, the touch of amusement in his dark eyes not at her expense.

"Relax." He tags her with his power, as simple as reaching out with a hand he doesn't have. "I've got it from here."

A stairway is a good way to think about it. Nesting dolls is another. It's just a spatial sorting puzzle, and he even gets to move two of the pieces as freely as he wants. He's been focused on the mobility that his power offers, but looking out at the field, building the steps of what he's going to do next, he starts thinking about the battlefield control possibilities. It's not just being able to move the players. It's being able to move the squares on the board.

He swaps Blythe out for a stolid squared off pawn, then takes up a place next to it. He swaps himself for a matching piece, then trots back to set up a third, fourth, and fifth pawn in the line. It's slightly stupid looking groundwork, but he needs something to tether off of. He falls back, estimating the gaps between them, and decides it's good enough.

The swaps that follow take a few seconds at a time. Krouse has to drag in air around objects with a mass disparity to compensate for the difference, and that means every swap can only be so much of a shift. Statues all across the field exchange places, sometimes with each other, sometimes with the rapidly altering line up against the hedge maze. Krouse doesn't move except to turn his head for new angles and the flickering of his eyes from one point to another.

All in all, he'd guess it takes about five to seven minutes to build the rough staircase of heavy-based statues with climbable looking upper halves leading the the top of the hedge.

It didn't even feel like making an effort. He moved thousands of pounds of solid stone like he was shuffling cards, and the scope of what else he might be able to do brushes light fingers across the back of his neck.

"See if you can get up that." He tells Blythe, steadily (as easy to step into leadership as it is to move stone). "If you fall, I'll catch you."

He imagines she can guess he doesn't mean with his hands.

It's a phenomenal display of power. After she's brought to the sidelines and finds herself content to leave him to it, she begins wondering how exactly it's all working. While Jessica feels as though she's usually very good at observing, Krouse is exercising his abilities with such confidence and speed that it's hard to keep a bead on everything. Scarcely has she turned her head to predict what piece of stonework will form each part of this path before Krouse has already moved it and turned his attention to the next.

By the end, after six or so minutes of learning the patterns at play, she thinks she can make the prediction faster than he can move. But it doesn't answer the question of how he's making things work when they aren't the same (even though she knows they don't have to be exactly the same). There must be more to it that he isn't ready to explain; otherwise, it must not matter. And right now, she is finding herself of the belief that the specifics aren't strictly important.

No, instead she walks in front of the first landing and looks up with some light wonder on her face. "Impressive," she says, but it's less stilted than most things have been. She begins to climb, then, and her weight-or-mass is doing her what feels like an enormous favor. Her limbs may be weak, but there's not much strength required to lift a body that has always skirted close to critically underweight. And she starts her ascent, and really, her balance is going to be the bigger problem. Something swirls intensely in her ear about halfway up, and though she tries to bend down quickly and stabilize herself, the sudden movement makes her ankle roll, and she falls off the side of the staircase.

It's hard for her to know exactly how high up it all is. The way her brain begins playing tricks on her as she tumbles off makes the distance to the ground seem so very vast, and as the sting of anxious prickles runs its way through her body, she wonders if this is her fault.

Impressive, she says, and for the first time he's able to be truly grateful for one of her compliments. Not so much for the compliment itself, but for leaving it at that.

Krouse has been able to put a few things together from his fragmented memories. He has a working theory. He doesn't want to talk about it. He especially doesn't want to talk about it with someone he's taking to meet Noelle.

Blythe's fall ends a split-second after it starts, the momentum she started to pick up transferred to the grass under her back with a slight jar Krouse can't do anything about. The angel he swapped her with seems to hang in mid-air like an old cartoon before it drops, hitting the ground with a sharp, ugly crack as its left wing snaps off, and now he knows a little bit more about moving parts.

He walks over to Blythe's new position instead of teleporting, bending over to offer her a hand without the cover of his cape this time.

"New idea," he says, "I'll climb it and swap you up." He eyes her, and adds: "You okay?"

Her back cracks slightly with an impact that comes far sooner than she was expecting, and the much louder noise of the statue crashing down sends a chill through her body. Her head is still swimming, but stops almost as suddenly as it starts once she can actually recognize that she's safe and on the ground.

"I'm... sorry," she says almost before anything else has happened, and only then does she recognize that Krouse is trying to help her up. He doesn't seem worried about whether she'll do anything to him this time, and part of her wonders what exactly has changed. She doesn't have time to interrogate it, though, and lets herself get pulled up to her feet yet again.

"It was like I was suddenly ten thousand feet up," she says, the confusion writ as strongly on her voice as in her face. She puts a little weight on her ankle and feels the pain shoot up, but it's milder than most of the pain she feels normally and all the time, so she can ignore it easily enough. Just add it to the list. "I don't know what happened. I do not think I have a problem with heights." She shifts her weight to her good foot and slowly breathes out to re-center herself.

"It is stable at least to the point I reached. But be safe."

There's a twinge of an urge to steady Blythe on her feet when she tests out her injured ankle, but Krouse holds himself back. They both need to know if she can handle keeping herself upright, and it looks like she can.

He should have climbed it himself in the first place. Playground inclusiveness isn't going to get them anywhere. Blythe is good at what she's good at, and trying to be fair about sharing participation just got her hurt. Lesson learned.

"I always am," he lies, undoing the clasp of his cape and shrugging it off to bundle up in his arms. He takes his hat off and sets it on top, then foists the whole thing on Blythe. Compromises. "Hang onto these for me?"

It's not really a question if he asks after he's already dropped them on her, but it makes it feel like a favour.

"Vertigo might be another effect of the maze," he muses, turning away and walking back to the 'staircase'. "I guess we'll find out."

Krouse doesn't remember being particularly athletic. He'd still say that he's not, but as he boosts himself onto the first platform, muscles he didn't have before press lightly against the black sleeves of his shirt. The cape's helped hide that his skinniness has turned into whipcord leanness. It's like the haircut. It's like the scar he rolled up his sleeve to look at when he was around a corner from Noelle. It doesn't matter.

He hops to the next platform, and then the next. On the fourth, the slick stone and his flat soled shoes don't quite get along, and he lets out a sharp, short "Fuck!" as he nearly overshoots to the other side of the minotaur's hunched shoulders. He snags one of its horns and clings for a second, heart racing, face pressed against cold stone.

"Fuck," he repeats, quietly, and drags himself together to make it to the top of the next platform. He crouches there on top of the wild cloud of snakes that make up some abstract take on Medusa (or so he guesses, from the woman's face pressing out of them halfway down the stature) and surveys the maze.

It stretches out farther than seems possible. He knows that much already. The important thing is he thinks he recognizes a landmark.

"Okay." He twists to look over his shoulder. "Whatever happened to you didn't happen to me. Maybe it was a one off. I think I see where I want to head next. Are you ready?"

For what she is certain cannot be the first time, Jessica curses her own uselessness. She knows that this is because of her, because of something that is wrong with her body and not Krouse's, and the thoughts are only reinforced as she stands there, holding his things. Watching him ascend. Watching him (very politely) nearly eat shit but still finding a way to right himself. Her fingernails dig into the fabric of his cape, shielding her from leaving marks in her own arm. There is nothing she can do to help him if he falls; she finds herself standing at the ready anyway.

And then he makes it, and she feels some tension drain from her body, and she wants very much to let go of the hatred that she's holding towards her incomplete failure of a human form. Her meat fails her, but it does not fail others, and as long as there are others, she cannot truly fail. "It was a problem with my body," she says, almost emotionless, and doesn't elaborate. "Bring me up, Krouse." Her fingers are still pressing into the fabric of the cape.

(It fits him better, she finds herself thinking. He has a personality fit for someone who would wear a cape, and it would have looked a good deal more impressive to have ascended the statue staircase with it on. Oh well.)

Blythe is even less substantial from this angle. He's not so far away that she's small, but the shift from being level with her eyes to looking down is enough to somehow make her painful thinness stand out.

A problem with her body. She says it like a mechanic diagnosing machine error. It's a good effort. If he didn't know any better, he'd take it at face value. It isn't like she's wrong. It's certainly not like he cares.

"It's fine, Jess," he says, quiet enough to verge on gentle, "Don't worry about it."

He swaps them, then straightens up from his crouch to turn around and look up at her. He crosses the distance between them and holds out his arms in mute expectation.

"All good up there?" He asks, instead of just asking for his cape back. She can figure out that request from context. It's the show of concern he thinks she'd benefit from hearing.

Jess. There's familiarity to it that makes her feel like she should hate it. Something roils inside her skull to have to hear it, but she swallows it down as she has swallowed everything else down and gives a quiet and just as familiar smile back up to Krouse. Beyond that undercurrent, it still doesn't feel right, but maybe she can let herself get used to it. Maybe this is how she makes friends.

"I am well," she says from this new perspsctive. She breathes out and steadies herself, but can't contain the amazement on her face as she looks out at the true scope of this maze. How vast and winding it all is, and how, at the end of it, there really does seem to be something like a town. She can see the graveyard she came from, too, and though her body is weary she takes the time to appreciate just how far she's come from pulling herself out of that hole in the ground.

It doesn't feel insurmountable from up here. She, they can actually get out of here. She speaks with life and confidence, if not with many words. "I'm okay. Here." And she bends her knees and dangles the cape and hat down towards Krouse, then lets them go gently so he won't have to struggle to catch them. Leaves press against her legs, but it doesn't feel like she's about to fall through.

"Nobody's given me a nickname before, that I can remember." And, "I think I like it."

He didn't realize he gave her a nickname.

Jess. Pinpricks moving in a wave over the back of his eyes, watery sting of distant pain. He tries to drag the faces of the rest of the team forward, since they're the only other ones he even starts to know. There were other girls besides Noelle.

But they were girls, and Jessica - Jess - isn't. He doesn't know her. It should be seriously embarrassing that he tried to tag her with a nickname after all of their hour, at best, of knowing each other.

But she likes it. He can see how much she likes it, radiating off her like a lesser fever.

Krouse's smile tips over into a slightly complicated brightness, ruefully resigned to the absurdity of their circumstances. Jess. Why not.

"Glad to hear it," he says, to her well-being and her acceptance of whatever sleight of tongue he just pulled, "You seem like a Jess."

He dons his hat, and, smile tugging up higher on one side, tips it to her.

"This was a good plan," he tells her, honestly. "Keep it up, and you're going to end up recruited. We've got open slots. Just something to keep in mind."

"Oh?" she asks, utterly curious at the idea of belonging to some kind of team. First she makes one friend, who feels like he may in fact be her first friend ever, and now he's proposing the idea of an entire group of friends who are also friends with each other, and also Jess can be there.

If all she needed to do was show some initiative, she would've been doing this way sooner. (Hasn't she? Doesn't she always show initiative? Isn't that who she is?) She ignores those thoughts as she's ignored so many confusing others and tries to keep herself in the moment. "Recruiting for the team that Noelle leads? What does the team do?"

She's keeping that curiosity on her face even as she returns to her feet on top of the hedge. She doesn't bother brushing off her clothing, letting the trimmings stick to her front as she tilts her head. "I don't know that anyone's ever made this kind of offer to me before, either."

There's no way Jess knows how sad that sounds. He's almost embarrassed for her, the kind of embarrassment that makes him want to do that mysterious reaching gesture one more time. Up until now, he hadn't considered the possibility that they could have forgotten more than the obvious kind of memories, but unless Jess was raised in a barn - and he's not sure he can rule it out - he's starting to think she's forgotten a lot about how to act normal.

Which is a shitty thing for him to think about her, and unlike most of the shitty things he's thought about her so far, he actually manages to feel bad about this one. It's not her fault any more than her dizziness was, and he can see how hard she's trying.

He doesn't think he's a particularly protective person, as a rule. It doesn't fit. At the end of the day, he's not going to go that far out of his way for anyone but Noelle. But Jess doesn't seem to need a lot. Given how she's talking, maybe she's never gotten a lot. It makes a little go a long way.

Krouse gets that.

"We're an e-sports team." He hooks his thumbs in his belt loops, for lack of anywhere better to put his hands. "That means we play a video game professionally. We're qualifying for internationals, which means we're pretty fucking good at it. I don't know if we're going to be picking that up here, but the point is, we're good at solving problems cooperatively, making decisions on the fly, adapting to challenges."

Some people might think it's a stretch to think those skills apply to the real world. Krouse thinks those hypothetical people are narrow minded. Jess has seen how he works. She knows he's not just talk.

"If no one's made you an offer like that before, I guess you've mostly been running into idiots. I haven't seen anything that we wouldn't want." Coughing up blood and nearly breaking her arm and all. They can deal. Compared to Noelle, it doesn't seem that bad. "It's Noelle's say, but I think she'll agree with me. Not much of a team with two people, right?"

She knows Krouse is speaking from the heart as much as the head, and she agrees with him. These are important skills. If it weren't for being able to think quickly, to solve problems together, then the two of them would not be where they are now. She would not be looking down at him, feeling a little lighter in her whole body, calling him her first friend in a very, very long time. Listening to him talk about how absurd it is.

And that brings some weight back to her body, and she looks past him. It should be easy to laugh off the idea that she's only encountered idiots. People who can't appreciate her. And maybe that's the case, but the memories do not bear that out. The memories are grimmer, and... and because they are friends, she can share this, right?

"I am sick," she starts, and her voice doesn't have as much of that life in it anymore. "And I think that people must have found excuses not to be near me, because I have been sick for a very long time." She'll figure out more about this later, but at least right now she's avoiding making this too morbid; instead, it's just depressing. She slowly sits down on the hedge again, dangling her legs over the side, giving Krouse enough time to process that.

"I think you would have been justified leaving me behind the second you saw me bleed. I truly have no memories of anyone ever giving me a second glance."

Another ripple of guilt goes through Krouse listening to Jess outline one of the options he'd considered when he first saw her cough. Inside his head, it hadn't sounded so bad. It had been a practical consideration. Just keeping himself aware of the choices he had available.

Would he have left her behind if she hadn't been useful? He wants to be able to tell himself that the answer is no. The thing is, he thinks it probably would have been no, but how much of that is only because they never ran into a good reason for him to make it a yes? What kind of person lets a yes even be one of the possibilities on the table?

He knows he's not a great guy, but something about the way his mind seems to work is a little less than not great. He doesn't know what could have pushed him so far, but the educated guesses he's able to make all point to scenarios he doesn't like contemplating as much as he has been.

But this is a different scenario. He can make different choices. He can be better.

"Yeah, well." He shrugs, still smiling, his dark eyes gone a little darker with the shadow of his thoughts. "I don't think most people are keen on giving me second glances, either. I guess we have that in common."

Then, softer: "Noelle's good about that. Giving people the benefit of the doubt. So if there's anybody you should be thankful for, it's her."

Perhaps they do have that in common. Perhaps they are both, in their own way, misfits. Outcasts. People who have been disregarded by the world. It's... something encouraging, to know that she can relate to someone she's just met like this. Even if it is only in this context, in the depressing sort of way that people like this can only ever get to know each other.

She doesn't know how she knows any of that. But that's what she thinks she knows, and she keeps it all inside, because she also thinks she knows that it's too much to say all of that out loud.

"Can I choose to be thankful for both of you instead?" she asks, and it's an innocent question, something that has all the words of something that might be a joke but is spoken with sincerity. "I do not believe there would be anything wrong with that. But—we should get back to trying to find her." She doesn't want to make this strange. No stranger than she already is, anyway.

Krouse blinks up at her, silhouetted against the strangely constant lightness of the sky, and breaks into a low, throaty, and half-surprised laugh. It's surprising because it's warm and easy, where he's fairly sure he's never much of either of those things.

"Yeah," he says, "Go for it. Pretty fucking thankful I bumped into you, too, while we're at it."

It's like popping his sternum, a sensation he didn't know he was familiar with until this echoed it. A weird, not quite painful release of pressure, radiating out through his ribs and settling the hang of his shoulderblades to a more casual slant.

He can take a win.

"But yeah. Time to get back to it. Keep an eye out for me." When he gathers himself up to head out, it's with more of the casual confidence he had sorting the statues, and a handful less of the weight that's hung off of him since they met.

Still smiling, he flicks the brim of his hat up and swirls out his cape as he turns to walk away, his stride long and snappy.

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5.0 Test Drive Meme

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