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

0.0: closed to equivo

Before Noelle even has a chance to open her eyes, something hits her face.

"Ow," she mutters, quietly, and dirt works its way into her mouth. The taste makes her gag; her stomach churns. Noelle does not heave, but it is a very near thing. Instead, Noelle opens her eyes. She sees a shadow far above her and is suddenly, horribly aware of how small the space is.

The shadow, apparently, is the source of the dirt. Grumbling "could you not" is met with silence and more dirt. This time, Noelle does gag a little, sitting up as she coughs. Once she's somewhat vertical, she realizes these cramped quarters aren't that deep, after all. Noelle is able to reach her arms up - goodness, her arms are rather bruised and skinny, but Noelle can't imagine why - and haul herself up to a standing position. Fortunately, she hasn't been laid that deep. The ground only goes up to Noelle's waist.

"Excuse me," she says, privately annoyed at the fact that she's being polite to someone who's shoveling dirt on her, but what else is she supposed to say? Noelle expects to haul herself out of this hole with ease, at least. She'll just jump up, and swing her legs around, and then -

- Noelle looks down. She sees what's become of her legs. She screams.

1.0: the only way out
cw: body horror

If you encounter Noelle in the hedge maze, you might initially think that she's an obstacle, and not a girl. Noelle wouldn't entirely disagree with you on that.

She's almost impossible to miss. From the waist up, Noelle looks like an ordinary, if sickly, teenage girl. She's tremendously gaunt, with deep bags under her eyes and a pronounced hollowness to her cheeks, all framed by limp, greasy hair. She doesn't exactly hold herself with confidence, instead opting to cross her arms in front of her chest and bring her shoulders close together. At least her top is cute - a red peasant blouse, with delicately puffy sleeves and a little string bow in front.

But while Noelle's upper half doesn't cut an imposing figure, her lower half does. From the waist down, the towering, eight-foot tall Noelle is an analgamation of body parts: flesh, limbs, heads. Blistered, eyeball-filled tentacles stretch out in one direction, while something that looks like a cross between the head of a dog and the head of a pig takes another. A mammalian leg is made from shiny green, reptilian skin, culminating in a talon. Some parts of her lower half breathe, others blink, and one or two faintly groan. There is far too many teeth. She is made up of scales, of tails, of exoskeleton - anything fit for a monster.

When she speaks, her voice is quiet, tentative, and hoarse. She raises her human arms, as if in surrender. As if that makes her any less frightening.

"Hi. I'm sorry." The apology comes out like a reflex. Noelle doesn't think much of it. "I'm lost, too. I promise I don't bite, but. Um. You should be careful of the flowers back there. They do."

Noelle's cheeks flush. Honestly, this is just embarrassing.

2.0: scent of death
cw: body horror

It takes a while for Noelle to work up the courage to venture into the courtyard. Running into a stray individual in the maze was bad enough. The possibility of confronting multiple people, all at once, in a public space? Agonizing. But if she's going to have a shot at leaving this place, or fixing herself, or getting a bite to eat, she's going to have to enter the breach sooner or later.

She visits the courtyard at night. Hopefully, under cover of darkness, no one will look at her.

Noelle gets as close as she can to the large flower. It feels... important, for some reason, like a landmark or a shrine. She doesn't manage to touch it with her human hands, and her lower half squirms and writhes away from it, as if frightened. Its smell is awfully strong, like a butcher's shop, but that's important, too. It's all information she can use to build a strategy.

Noelle breathes in. She breathes out. Her lower half gurgles, and as she steps away from the plant, her human face goes stricken.

Her lower half, meanwhile, burrows itself into the ground, scooping up dirt and grass and stone and shoving what it can into its many mouths and other orifices. Her lower half swallows; the eyes in her upper face go glassy.

"Please," she begs her body, "stop."

Noelle gets her wish. Noelle's lower half - all of its mass of heads, teeth, limbs and tentacles - reach for whoever comes within a few feet of her.

Unfortunately, that may be you.

3.0: channel one

[ One fine mid-morning, all walkie-talkies tuned to channel one will broadcast the hiss of static, followed by the soft, slightly timid voice of a young woman. ]

"Hi. My name's Noelle. I'm new here, so I don't really know if these things work or not, but I was wondering if someone could tell me some things about the town?"

A headstone halfway across the graveyard vanishes. In its place is a stumbling, unsteady figure, pivoting to the sound of Noelle's screaming before he even straightens up completely. In the next instant, the gravedigger snaps to the head of that distant open grave.

The boy in her place is nearly as frantic as Noelle is, dark eyes wide in their sunken hollows. The top hat he was wearing when he snapped awake in the dirt is at the gravedigger's feet, leaving his cropped hair a wild mess around his drawn features.

"Noelle," Krouse croaks, voice creaking with disuse, "Noelle, it's okay, I've got - "

He looks down at what she's screaming at and blanches, already strangely pallid brown skin as washed out as a corpse. A ripple of clashing emotions contort his expression - horror, dismay, panic - a whirl so complicated it'd be easy to miss, in the moment, that none of them are shock. His eyes snap back up to her face.

"Noelle," he repeats, gentling and intent, "Look at me, okay? Just look at me."

He drops to his knees by her grave, reaching out to her in entreaty, palms spread open. Something snags in his brain, hard and hurting, but he ignores it. Nothing else matters except the girl in front of him.

Noelle should look away. She doesn't want to see it - doesn't want to see herself, not how disgusting she's become, how revolting. This must be a nightmare. It has to be a nightmare, because she couldn't imagine anything worse. The smell of rotten meat wafts up from Noelle's grave. She's fairly certain she's going to be sick.

Throughout all the din and fear and disgust comes a voice. It cuts through the horror with an ease Noelle doesn't have time to reflect on right now. At last, she looks up.

And sees... Krouse? Krouse, from the Ransack team? But he looks so different, and it's not just the hair. He seems older. More worn-down. He speaks to her so gently. Noelle can't remember anyone ever talking like that to her, ever.

The screaming stops. Her breathing slows, first into a pant, then into something more measured. She doesn't take his hand - not quite - but she hovers her own human palms over his, as if too frightened to do anything more.

"Don't look," Noelle says, her voice frayed from screaming. "Don't look down."

The cessation of her screaming lets him take the first real breath he has since the ragged gasp that heralded his sudden consciousness. He winds down with her, the thudding hammer of his heart rate slowing from threatening to rip out of his chest to an uneven pounding against his ribs.

"I won't," he promises, and he's true to his word, no matter how much writhing movement tries to snag his attention.

He's too busy looking at her to see anything else. Noelle, but Noelle scrubbed down with steel wool and stretched tight over her own frame. It's worse than the fleeting impression burned on the back of his eyes of the fucking nightmare below her waist. It's the second worst thing he remembers ever seeing.

Consumed. The word floats across his scrambling thoughts, then plunges like a diving knife into his guts. He drags in a slicing inhale, breathes out through his nose.

"Can I - ?" He asks, his fingers curling up slightly underneath hers, not threatening to touch, only inviting the possibility. He doesn't want to scare her.

noelle meinhardt | worm

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MIC IS NOT HOT

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cw: body horror