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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.
no subject
It's the right play, objectively. As soon as she makes the call, he knows that. He's not hung up on the kind of thick-headed macho self-delusion that'd be necessary to deny basic physical reality. It'd be pointless to stand on posturing that'd end up getting him hurt in a way where he'd turn into a liability instead of an asset.
And all of that being true doesn't make him like the idea of protecting himself at her expense any better.
He's almost ready to string an opening counter together when he catches himself on the firm line of her mouth. The half-formed alternative suggestion drowns in a spurt of perplexingly muddled self-awareness.
Was he seriously about to try to argue with her over this? Embarrassment curdles at the base of his throat. He loosen his fingers around the rock (when did he close them?) and tosses it into the air again, giving her an overdue nod.
"I'll leave you space to back up," he says, falling back to give himself the lead necessary to make that easy. He squints at the plants and picks out one of the smallest ones at the front as he winds up, and the mortifying possibility he might miss helps distract him slightly from all the worse possibilities of what might happen if he doesn't.
"On zero." He opens his eyes fully, lining up the target. "Three. Two. One." He breathes out. "Zero."
He's not going to miss. He can tell as soon as the rock leaves his hand and he steps towards the fragile-feeling safety of her shadow.
cw: gore, blood, body horror
Noelle returns his nod. "Okay," she says, and her voice is remarkably free of fear. In a kinder world, a switch might have been flipped in Noelle's brain. That's not what this feels like, not quite. It's just that everything else that isn't the execution of their plan is a little quieter, now, and that includes all of Noelle's doubts.
The rock comes up. It comes back down. It exits Krouse's hand in a perfect parabola, and it strikes a flower directly in its center.
Turns out the swaying was just a warm-up. The flowers open their petals to reveal sharp, toothy maws. The stems grow thorns like roses; the leaves produce spines like cacti. They lunge towards Noelle and Krouse, and Krouse better be behind her, because these things hurt.
"Move," Noelle growls, and she hates that she growls now, and the hate only makes her want to do it more. She meets those monstrous flowers with a monster of her own. She raises a clawed hoof, brings it down. A canine head takes its own bite. Blood-like nectar mixes with Noelle's own. A tongue escapes from a mouth to lick it up. It hurts - sharp, terrible agony - and yet Noelle does not lose focus. Some skin sizzles and burns from the acid, but it grows back just as quickly, thicker and more blistered. A scaly primate's hand grabs the remainder of the plant mass, squeezes, and smears it on the ground.
What is left of the flowers retreat back into the hedges. The way is clear.
Noelle finally turns back to face Krouse, her brow slick with sweat. She didn't look afraid before. Her shoulders shake now. All of her eyes are too wide.
"That's why," she whispers. That's why he can't touch her.
cw: gore, blood, body horror
The massacre of deadly flowers isn't the part that reaches into the already pulped mass of his heart and rips out another layer of fibrous tissue. He couldn't give less of a fuck about Noelle's capacity to hurt things that want to hurt her. If she could do it any other way than this, fling projectiles from her hands or incinerate every hungry petal with a thought, he'd be weak in the knees with relief. In a newly irrelevant way, Krouse would have liked the idea that Noelle could defend herself.
What hurts him (so much less than it hurts her) is realizing, in vivid splashes of organic colour, that Noelle can't hurt anything without hurting herself. He watches mutely as the mass of her flesh dimples, rends, and sizzles, grows back in thicker gnarled sheets, grasping and ripping and chewing in an orgy of mindless hunger, and for what might be the first time in his life, he wishes he wasn't so good at putting things together. He wishes he was stupid enough not to get it.
When Noelle turns around, his eyes are nearly as wide as her own. It may or may not be a mercy that they go to her face first, that they stay there, brimming with inchoate guilt as they are.
"No'," he says, with an absolutely unacceptable tremor, and an even worse step towards her in all of her shuddering terror. He can't help himself. He cannot fucking help himself. He only ever makes it worse.
"Are you," and he can't finish it, because she's not. His hands are half-raised at his sides even though she just told him, showed him, why he shouldn't want to reach for her. He drags them down and hides them in the folds of his cape, his back going straight and still as he roots himself to the earth under his feet.
"Deep breaths," he says, and if he was going to start crying again, it'd be right then, at the absolute staggering fucking uselessness of every stupid word coming out of his idiot mouth, "Just take a minute."
cw: body horror, eating disorder
Fine. She'll show him this, too, since showing seems to work marginally better than telling. After all, now he knows why he shouldn't touch her. He probably won't touch Noelle ever again.
Nobody will touch Noelle ever again.
She turns away from him. A few remaining flowers scrape at Noelle's sides as she crawls through the clearing. Noelle wishes turning away meant anything. The eyes in Noelle's hindquarters still watch him. The lips pull back and bear teeth.
"I don't have a minute," Noelle says dully. She doesn't bother facing Krouse to speak, even though she's probably not easy to hear from that high up. I, not we. It's a mean thing to say to someone who's stuck with her this long. Maybe it's a dare, to see if he'll stay. Noelle doesn't know. All she knows is, when Krouse was about to ask her how she was doing, all Noelle could think about is how hungry she's getting.
A plant with jaws like that needs prey. The prey needs to move into the plant's range of motion, implying the existence of mobile animals. They should try to find at least one of those animals. She's so hungry. Maybe its features could give clues as to how to survive in, if not navigate, the maze. She's so hungry.
The pain from the cuts and burns has long since subsided. All that remains is a throbbing, nauseating craving. It's clouding her judgment. She needs
fooda strategy. Something beyond justhuntingwandering around.Regardless of what Krouse is doing, Noelle keeps moving. It's for the best that she doesn't get too close to him while she's like this. Safer this way.
cw: body horror
Noelle's rebuke shuts him up for a while. He can't know how much the rest of her eyes see, what they relay all the way up to her head facing away from him, but it seems like a good idea to keep his face from crumpling further all the same. One of those things easier to stop from happening in the first place than reign in after the fact.
He knows he's fucking it up anyway. He takes off his hat and holds it in his hands, looking inside, for the sake of having an excuse to let his hair fall forward. He wishes it was longer, like it should be. He thinks about the saying, hat in hand, wonders if she'd think it was almost funny the way he thinks it's almost funny. The way it's not even a little funny.
He's walking too close to her. He's staying too far away. Her teeth, all the too many of them, shine with viscous, hungry drool.
"You know," Krouse says, quietly, spinning his hat over between his fingers, "I'm not an easy guy to scare off."
It's not bravado. He's not even sure it's necessarily a good thing, or even close to what she wants to hear. Given how things have been going, she'd probably prefer not hearing anything from him at all. But it feels like one of those things that has to get said, eventually, if she doesn't remember that.
"And I'll stop slowing us down," he promises, raising his head to look at her back, resolution setting his jaw and sharpening his eyes. "That's on me."
cw: body horror
Noelle keeps moving anyway. There's not much else to do. She's slowly coming around to the fact that if she stays in this maze indefinitely, she'll starve, and that frightens her more than any worries of isolation or exposure. She can handle both of those things. She doesn't want to learn any more about what her body does when it's hungry.
At least she leaves tracks. They'll never go the same way twice.
Krouse is saying something. Noelle stops, against her better judgment, so she can hear him. A set of dull, yellow eyes meet Krouse's. They size him up like a predator. Krouse stands tall, his shoulders set by resolve while Noelle's own shoulders buckle.
"You're not slowing us down," Noelle says, and she's convinced Krouse can't hear her over the pulsating wreck of her body. She still can't find it in herself to talk much louder.
"I just - I don't get it. You're not scared of me, but I'm scared of me."
cw: body horror
They're hard to look at. All of this is hard. Krouse can do hard things, as much as he prefers to make it easy. He wanted to make this easier, postpone this conversation until she felt better, which he realizes (with another unpleasant crumple of self-directed disappointment) meant more or less putting it off indefinitely.
"I should say thanks," he says, and can't help but still sound a little bruisedly grateful, "But neither of those are really true. You'd be faster without me. And - "
Krouse's eyes screw up with wanting to look away. He gets why Noelle isn't turning around. If there's something they have in common, it's that they don't like being seen when they feel like this, humiliatingly soft-bellied, awkward, failing.
But Noelle can't get away from being seen. It's all out there, insides hooked out glistening and wet. Keeping his hidden under the facade of self-assurance isn't helping her. It's just making her think she's worse than alone.
"I am scared," he admits, "I'm scared for you, of you being scared of you. And it's not that I'm not getting what you're trying to tell me, about keeping my distance. It's just, maybe this is one of those times I'm trying not to be a selfish prick, spill my problems all over the place while you're dealing with something worse. I know - trust me. I'm as surprised as you are. I guess - " his eyes dart down, just for a second, his voice dropping with them " - all that team spirit had to get to me eventually."
cw: body horror, ableism
That's not the point. It's so far from the point that Noelle is an asshole to keep harping on it, so she shuts the idiot mouth that's in her face. If only she could shut the other mouths, too. They keep drooling, leaving a slick tingle of saline on the parts of her skin not covered by scales, blisters, or exoskeleton.
Krouse's eyes do something funny. He looks at the ground, and Noelle could let out a sigh of relief. He looks back up, and the sigh doesn't come.
Team spirit. If they were just teammates, Krouse wouldn't have followed her into this maze. He wouldn't have taken a glimpse at her lower half and held her hands anyway, and he certainly wouldn't have given her a hug. Whatever he means by team spirit, it sure as hell is clouding his judgment.
Noelle isn't stupid. She may look more animal than human, but she doesn't think like one. (Most of the time.)
"I know you were there," Noelle says, slowly, each word as delicate as a click in Minesweeper. "For the accident. We were having a tournament, just before. I don't remember a lot of it, but... it was bad, wasn't it?"
At last, an exhale. A couple of Noelle's tentacles wind their way around her lower half, as if imitating her arms squeezing her torso.
He's so tired, so much more haggard than he appears in any of Noelle's memories. It would be unfair to make him put himself on display any more than he already has. Noelle knows too much about what that's like.
"So it's, um. Okay. If you're scared. Even if you're scared of me. I get it."
cw: ableism
In this world, his fingers dent the brim of his hat as Noelle says it was bad, wasn't it?
If Krouse looks away this time, if he cracks, she'll know. He doesn't know how he's so sure about that, but he feels it like a sword hanging over him by a thread more fragile than Noelle's drawn thin voice. He breaks, and she'll see it, scrawled over him in pitch-dark guilt. The truth will bleed out of the split carved all the way through him by her so-careful question.
For one wild, hideous second, he almost lets it happen.
"It was bad," Krouse says, hollowly, "I don't remember the accident. I just - I remember you in the hospital. After. And it was - "
If he can't look away, then he can not look at all, closing his eyes with crushed corners and a shaky half-inhale. It doesn't help. It just lets him see it clearer. Noelle pale and terrified, a crumpled paper doll lost in hospital sheets, caught up in wires and lines.
"You were so scared," he tells her, "And I didn't know what to do. I didn't know how to help. I just wanted you to be okay."
When he opens his eyes, they shine, full of that terrible, backed into a corner determination he gets when all the odds are stacked against him.
"That's what scares me, No'. Not you. Everything else - I can deal. So if you're waiting for me to decide I can't handle this, or I don't want to be here for you, you might as well stop. It's not going to happen. I don't care how bad it gets. I really don't. Because the only thing worse than seeing you like that would've been not seeing you."
cw: ableism
A person would set a hand on Krouse's shoulder. Maybe even pull him into a hug. She knows that's what Krouse wants. He asked for it, and she couldn't give it to him, and Krouse told her it was okay, like he's telling her he'll stay by her. Noelle still doesn't understand why. It seems like all she's capable of doing anymore is making him sad.
Noelle could test him. She could scream and stomp and tear his limbs from his sockets and see what he does then, see if he still wants to be around her. But that, selfishly, would hurt her almost as much as it would hurt him. Skin-to-skin contact is still revolting.
Krouse is the type of person to spin a top hat on his index finger. He's got a sharp, incisive grin. People like that have senses of humor, and they're almost always sarcastic.
"Well," Noelle says, and she can't keep the tremor out of her voice, because if she looks horrible, she apparently has to sound horrible too, "At least I woke up."
It's not a joke. It's not even a silver lining, and Noelle doesn't bother dignifying it with a smile.
"It was during a tournament. The accident." Noelle swallows. Her throat is still parched. "We had just gotten set up, and then all the lights went out, and we were falling." The eyes in her face go out of focus, but her lower half can still see Krouse crystal clear. "I hit my head, and then stuff hit me, and I don't really remember much after that."
Now he knows. It makes Noelle feel a little better, to share a memory in return. Like they're strategizing, keeping each other in the loop, instead of licking their wounds.
cw: suicide
Krouse shouldn't let that help him, not when Noelle is still so miserable. There's a sense of solidarity in staying unhappy with her, trying to feel what she feels as much as he can imagine it's like. There's a rightness in staying guilty. He's not letting go of either of those things.
But she says it, and he knows he's grasping at straws trying to believe she means it. Or trying to believe she's trying to mean it, however much that counts for, which would be nothing, if not for the alternative.
There's no one moment in the messy watercolour impressions he has of her before now that tells him exactly why he's afraid of yet another thing he's afraid of and won't tell her about. Maybe it's no more than an educated guess built out of all the horror movies he doesn't remember either, presenting the idea of a trope he can't give an example of. Krouse isn't optimistic enough to think that's it.
His breath goes down to the bottom of his lungs, deeper than any he's taken yet. Something as silky and staining as ash comes up on the exhale, and only the smallest part of it dissipates invisibly in front of his mouth.
Noelle still wants to be here. It so happens that Noelle still being here is the only thing Krouse really needs.
"Maybe it was a gas line," he says, like it matters, "Something like that. But at least you were with us, right? So we must have taken care of you. Made sure you got to the hospital."
He's patching together a narrative. Saying we and not me, even though he knows that absent Noelle taking charge, he would have stepped up. She would have been his priority. It's not that he wouldn't have looked out for everything else, but he can be honest with himself about where his focus would have been. Still is.
"If it helps, I don't remember anyone else being there, or thinking about who else I had to see. So chances are they're okay." Which is a good thing. He doesn't really remember the rest of they, but he can't imagine having anything against them to the extent he'd want them to suffer just because Noelle is too. The question of whether he'd want any of them to trade places with her is moot.