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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
Top Ransack captain in America draws Noelle out of her battle with her lower half. If she'll thank Krouse for anything, after this is all said and done and they're both awake, it's that. A little steel creeps into Noelle's gaze, a little confidence. She sets her jaw and she thinks.
"You're right. It's a map. Which means if we stay here, we can't progress. And if we don't progress, nothing changes - we don't wake up, we don't figure out what's going on." Noelle takes a deep breath, hoping that it steels herself. It doesn't. She'll just have to trust her instincts.
"I'm going to climb out of this hole. Don't look at me while I do, okay? It's not - I don't think it's going to look good."
Another understatement. But maybe if she doesn't say she's going to look frightening, Krouse won't be frightened by her. That's not how the world works at all, of course, but Noelle can hope.
no subject
She's coming up with a plan, and that's another, less fraught kind of relief. He wasn't trying to be flattering - not trying more than he's always trying, at least - when he said she'd figure it out. Noelle's good like that. She puts things together on the big picture scale.
Together, it's enough to keep the sharp pang of his heart in check when she asks him not to look at her. He gets it; of course he gets it. He wants to respect her boundaries about who looks at her, and how, and when. It's the reason she asks that makes him hurt for her.
"Yeah," he says, with a single, short nod, "If you don't want me to. No problem."
He should leave it at that. Not draw any more attention to something she doesn't want him to pay attention to.
"But I'm not going to freak out," he says, instead of keeping his mouth shut, a determined, aching light of his own kindling in his eyes, "Okay? I promise. However it looks. I just want you to hear that, first."
"And - " Why is he still talking, coming up with this bruised gush of words? " - this isn't exactly a tactical ask, but - can I - "
He's holding her hands like he's afraid they'll come apart if he doesn't, or that he will if he lets go. It's still gentle, but that's because he's making it that way.
"Can I give you a hug?" He asks, with jagged heartbreak snagged below the waterline of his shaky voice.
cw: implied body dysmorphia, eye gore
The only context Noelle can summon for that urgency, besides this bizarre dreamscape, is her accident. Does he know? Is this how you're spoken to, on your deathbed?
Noelle remembers someone calling her name. They cradled her skull in their hands, and it hurt horribly. Krouse's touch doesn't feel anything like that. He's so gentle.
Then Krouse asks for a hug, and Noelle knows with icy clarity that this is not a dream. She cannot pretend otherwise. In a dream, no one would ask to touch her. In the best dreams, Noelle does not have a body at all.
Krouse promised not to freak out, but Noelle isn't so sure she can reciprocate his promise. Already, she can feel her heart beating faster. Her lower half tries to push its way through the dirt. Noelle swallows, because she isn't sure what to say. She doesn't know if a hug would make her feel better or worse. She knows that Krouse seems to want it, more than anything else in the world, but she can't understand why.
Maybe, if he holds her tight enough, her heart won't leap out of her chest. Maybe Noelle can imagine herself small again.
Or maybe it will all go wrong. Her touch could sicken him, somehow. The more Noelle thinks about it, the more her head hurts, like someone pushing their thumbs into her eyeballs.
She's already waited too long. Krouse needs an answer. (What does she need?)
"Okay. Yeah, okay," Noelle decides. If things get worse, she'll deal with it. She's good at figuring out what to do.
cw: body horror, eye horror
Half realization, half remembrance. He knows this look in her eyes. The withdrawal, the flinch, the trapped and pleading panic lapsing into helplessness. He must have seen it a thousand times, to know it so well.
He doesn't remember any of them. He remembers a too-huge eye rolling in a roughened blister wheeling until it landed on him. Accusatory.
Krouse has known the whole time. He just hadn't put the pieces together. There are really only two. The third is everything crushed into a hot red pulp from throat to belly between them.
He did this to her.
The world is grey at the edges. His head swims in ice water.
He's not doing it again.
"Noelle," he says, with more soft, measured carefulness than he may have ever said anything in his life, "You can say no."
He doesn't know how to sound like he means it. He only means it, this one true thing found bloodied and honest in the wreck that's left of him. It's a regret; it's a promise. It's one last chance to get it right.
(Maybe he never could have gotten it right.)
no subject
The carefulness comes through. Krouse sounds like he means it. And at first, Noelle has no idea what to do with that. Her mind, again, goes back to the accident, like it's the closest thing she has to a clue.
Noelle strains against the edges of her memory. She was in a room, sitting at a round table. An apartment, a kitchen table. Several computers, several bodies. It must have been the team. They must have been playing Ransack. The room tips, she falls, and the pain sets in.
Blood trickles down one of the nostrils in Noelle's face. Her head and heart pound in sync. The team. Krouse is on the team. He was there, for the accident, and now he's looking at her like he's lost her because he has.
"I can't do it," she says, and her voice is choked and awful and sickening. "I'm sorry. I don't - I don't think I feel very well."
The hand-holding is good. That's safe. The idea of him coming any closer, of him making contact with what she's become, makes her stomach drop and her skin crawl.
"It's not your fault," she adds. It's not that Noelle doesn't want to touch him, it's that she's bad to touch. She forces herself to meet his eyes, swallows. "Something happened. After the accident."
no subject
He wants to hold her if she wants him to hold her. The idea he almost touched her when she doesn't want it makes his guts and heart lurch in sync with a sludge of repulsed guilt, and then her fucking nose is bleeding, and he's done thinking about what he feels.
"You don't have to be sorry," he tells her, in a rush, "You don't have to - fuck, No'."
He releases one of her hands and reaches around his side, dragging the edge of his cloak (why is he wearing a cloak?) around to offer her a piece of its hem that has the least amount of dirt clinging to it. His face twists as he tries to shake some more off, until it looks clean.
"Here." He holds it up to her, his hand still holding hers like an anchor. "It's okay. Don't even worry about it, all right? You don't have to do anything for me. I don't want you to feel like you ever have to. I don't - I don't want to be that guy."
He draws a circle on the back of her hand, so fucking hapless. Useless. He doesn't ever want to be that guy, but here he was, right on the cusp without even thinking about it, and what's he supposed to do with that?
Something happened after her accident, all right. He fucking happened.
She doesn't remember. The other shoe drops, reverberating through the big, empty nothing in every part of his head that doesn't have her in it. She doesn't even know what's wrong, and she was still going to just let him -
"It's okay," he says, again, even though it's so far from fucking okay that okay isn't even on the horizon, "You don't have to do anything. Just take a minute."
cw: internalized ableism
She dabs the corner of her nose. She licks her lips, and those things are not related. All the while, Noelle doesn't let go of Krouse's other hand. She could, now, but she's found she doesn't want to, despite everything.
"I want to do things," she says, at last. "If - if I'm a freak, now, I can at least be one that doesn't sit around in a hole in the ground."
She knows what Krouse will say to that. You're okay, it's okay, don't be sorry. Nice words, but just words. Talk is cheap. Noelle looks down at the monster that is attached to her, and wishes she could make it go away just by saying something.
Noelle doesn't want Krouse to see her. She wants him to understand her concerns. And it's completely, utterly unfair that she can't have both.
"When I was yelling," Noelle starts, carefully, trying to have both anyway, "did you see what happened?"
cw: ableism
He's better at keeping it together than this. He's sure he is. But he can't stop the flinch that drags his lips into a half-part of speechlessness, and he doesn't know what it looks like when his eyes are this hot and screwed up.
There are things people say they can't take back. Irrevocable, however you spin it. He wants her to take it back anyway. He wants to tell her he doesn't think she's a freak, and there's another fucking joke, because he wants it in the same instant he knows that he'd mean it. This is something that happened to her. This isn't her.
Except it is. It is, and he doesn't know how to fix it. He can't cut her in half and pulls a curtain aside to reveal a new set of legs, he can't come up with the right words in the right order to convince her that it doesn't matter when it so very obviously does. He wants to fix it more than he wants to keep breathing, and he doesn't know what she needs him to do.
You were screaming, Noelle. You looked at yourself and you started screaming, and the rest of you screamed back, and I already knew what that sounded like.
"Some," he says, and he sounds so fucking small, and she needs him to do better, and he can't, "It wasn't..."
The lie is right there. He has it balanced on his tongue, gentle and easy. His throat works, bobbing up and down on air.
"It looked like it hurts," he tells her, honesty soft and horrible in his mouth, "Does it hurt?"
no subject
Noelle should feel worse about his flinch. She doesn't feel good about it, but it means he's being honest. Something terrible did happen, and it's difficult to look at, and when Noelle woke up screaming it wasn't because she's too fragile. Krouse flinches, and he stays anyway, and in another time, Noelle might have been able to hug him for that. She settles for squeezing his hand instead.
The platitude Noelle has braced herself for doesn't come. She's able to look at Krouse again, at his features hardened by pain and exhaustion, and softened by something Noelle is far too frightened to name. Noelle realizes, in the way that one might notice a sunset or a full moon, that he is handsome.
It should be easier to be honest with Krouse, now that he's been honest with her. Unfortunately, Noelle is finding that it doesn't work like that. The pit in her stomach is still there; she feels like she wants to swallow again even though she already has. Still: nothing to do but try.
"I'm hungry," Noelle admits, her voice a shudder. "Really fucking hungry, but I don't - every time I think about eating, I feel sick. I feel sick a lot. It's a lot of... sensation, down there, I guess. If I think about it for too long, it gets overwhelming. But it doesn't hurt, not technically."
That doesn't mean it feels good, but at least it isn't the pain that Krouse was worried about.
no subject
Krouse doesn't take her other hand back. He brings his empty one to fold over hers where the rest of his other hand doesn't cover, navigating by touch instead of sight. He's still not looking down, which means he has to let her watch his face threaten to crack all over again.
There were mouths down there, wet and gaping. He'd have to be an idiot to not get that hungry and sick doesn't exactly equate to a bad stomach flu. He doesn't think ginger ale and saltines are going to cut it on this one.
He squeezes her hand back hard enough that he can feel the outline of her finger bones against his palm, but not nearly hard enough to hurt her. Pressure. Competition for whatever a lot of sensation is underselling. It can't possibly make a difference. He still tries.
He has to get his shit together. If he can't do anything else, he can do that.
"Okay," he says, with steadiness he dredges out of thin air and resolution, "Just tell me if anything changes, all right? Keep me in the loop."
He has a hundred more things he wants to know before they get moving. He doesn't want her to have to move at all. He wants to keep holding her hand.
He loosens his fingers until they're easy to slide out of, with one more furtive brush of his thumb over the soft pad of hers.
"Where do you want me for this?"
She wants out. They can do out.
no subject
Noelle still doesn't want anyone else to look at her. She's finding she doesn't mind it as much as when Krouse does it, though. He hasn't screamed or looked down once, and not even Noelle can claim that.
She's relieved to go back to the plan. Noelle nods once, a quick, brisk little thing, before letting his hand go at last. Now that they've separated, it's easier for Noelle to keep her upper arms wrapped around her torso rather than hanging down at her side, so that's what she does.
"Stand back a few feet. I don't know what'll happen if my lower half touches you. It's hungry, and I don't want -"
Noelle chokes on the rest of that sentence. I don't want to hurt you, except she knows, based on the lines in Krouse's face, that they're well past that. I don't want to kill you, and that's not something Noelle can say out loud. Not now, and hopefully not ever.
"- I don't know what'll happen," she concludes, instead. A sorry bubbles up into the back of her throat; she chokes it down.
Once Krouse is safely in position, Noelle takes a deep breath. Compared to her lower half, her upper arms are practically useless, so she doesn't try to lift herself out of there. She's fairly sure her arms can't support her weight. Instead, she puts her weight on her hindquarters, and uses her front appendages that end in claws, talons, and the like to dig their way through the dirt. She flanks a set of tentacles out on either side, reaching them upwards to press against the flat ground.
Ultimately, it's not that hard to haul herself out of the grave. It's much more difficult to meet Krouse's eyes, afterwards. Now that there's no grave to shield her, the full expanse of Noelle's monstrosity is on display. A few of her appendages are panting from the exertion.
She looks down at Krouse, her face partially obscured by a curtain of limp hair. Her skin crawls as she awaits his horror.
cw: body horror
He doesn't say it. He just keeps looking at her until she's done talking, and a lingering moment after that. He nods back once, then pushes up to his feet, dusting his knees off to have something to do with his hands before he turns around. He said he wouldn't watch.
A few feet isn't far. He can't mark the distance, because with every step all he wants to do is turn around. For the second time, he's glad he woke up with something draped over his shoulders, so she can't see his hands turn into fists.
The sound is worse than he expects it to be, the churn of dirt under a panting, sick animal. Some dumb knot of instinct buried in the back of his mind twitches with a spurt of hot adrenal fear, but he pins it down and holds it still. Once the noise of movement stops, he takes a breath, and he turns around.
He was wrong about there not being anything worse.
It's not just the raw, staggering mess of it all, a twisted whorl of nightmare flesh heaving and glistening in the open air, eyes and mouths and appendages and misshapen gnarls less than any of those things. It's all of that, and that she still looks so fucking small and wrecked above it, a ghost hovering over the offal pit of hell's slaughterhouse.
His wide eyes flick back up to her half-hidden face. His shoulders tilt forward like he's about to start back towards her, only the thin tether of her remembered warning holding him in place, and that brief interruption is enough to snap him all rest of the way back into sharp clarity.
He promised he wouldn't freak out. Somehow, he's not freaking out, and there's a vast, blank gulf of horror right past the edge of that realization he could fall into, if he lets himself.
"Hey, captain," he calls up to her, softly, "How are we doing?"
cw: body horror
Noelle keeps hugging herself. She can see Krouse's shoulders move when he takes his breath, see his eyes widen when he finally looks at her. It would be so easy to scream again. You promised, she would howl, until he dropped to his knees and apologized. You weren't going to freak out. Don't look at me.
Krouse rallies. Noelle bites her lip, and manages to do the same.
She's not sure how to answer his question, though. For some reason, being called captain has worked her way into her chest and planted something warm there. Warm and a little bittersweet, maybe. Noelle can't help but feel like she misses something. It's probably the team, or playing Ransack altogether. She's not entirely sure how she'd game like this.
Noelle picks her head up a little, revealing some more of her face. The glassiness in her eyes hasn't quite left, and there's a nervous tension running through her jaw. She promised to keep him in the loop. Here she goes.
"Okay. I - I still don't really want people to see me." Is Krouse people? Unclear. "But we can't stay here, so I'll deal."
There's a headstone behind her. Even though she isn't technically facing it, she still has eyes in her hindquarters that can read what it says. It doesn't matter. The death date is illegible.
"Let's go."
cw: body horror
The last time he remembers calling her captain, she'd blushed. She didn't want people to stare even over something that harmless. This isn't harmless, and maybe she can deal, but he doesn't want her to have to try. He just doesn't see any way they can get her help and keep her safe at the same time. Not yet.
There isn't anyone else here besides them and the silent gravedigger. He pushes that bundle of problems to the back of the queue, glancing sideways to see where the only other person on the field is. She's not walking towards them anymore, and that's almost as unnerving as her relentless approach was.
Now that Noelle's out of the dirt, everything else he's been picking up about their surroundings presses back in on him like the world itself has opened up. The fact they're in a graveyard, that they were both in graves, that the entire thing is dotted with other blank holes at the feet of weathered monuments and encircled by a wall of hedges. He doesn't know what any of it means yet, but he notices it. (He doesn't let himself notice the headstone behind her, even though he's already caught it out of the corner of his eye. He's a fast reader.)
"It looks like that's the way out." He nods at an iron wrought gateway. "Just stay here a second. I'll be right back." He looks back up at her, quietly intent. "Right back."
He turns his head back in the direction he came from, and another stone monument hits the grass where he was standing. He stoops halfway across the graveyard, picking up an indistinct black shape, and blinks back into place before the fine dust thrown up by toppling stone has a chance to settle.
"At least that'll come in handy," he says, quietly, half to himself. He balances the brim of the top hat he retrieved between his hands, contemplating it, and then gives it a deft, showy spin over his fingers before he sets it on top of his messy hair. It catches a few strands over his field of vision, and he smooths them back in a motion that feels all too practised.
"A haircut and a hat." When he turns his attention back up to her, he's smiling crookedly, eyes too bright above the rueful twist of his mouth. "I can't help but feel like I'm getting notes."
It's a stupid, out of place joke. They're a couple steps past this being her dream, but neither of them have said that out loud yet. But maybe if she's thinking about what an idiot he is, she's thinking less about anything else.
"All right, fearless leader." He tips the hat back on his head, chin lifted with it. "Lead on."
no subject
Noelle barely has a chance to flinch in between the time Krouse leaves and returns. It's a neat trick. So is Krouse's little flair with the hat. That makes one half of the mouth in Noelle's face quirk upwards into something like a smile.
The hat is probably the dumbest thing she's ever seen. The trick only makes it worse. Noelle likes it anyway, likes this Krouse the best out of all the ones she's seen. He's sweet.
"Hey, it might be your subconscious, not mine." The slightly-teasing note in Noelle's voice surprises even her, but it feels right. She and Krouse must spend a lot of time together, for her to feel comfortable talking to him like this. Maybe they hang out outside of Ransack? It doesn't matter. She's just glad he's still here.
Noelle nods back, as if she's tipping a hat that she's not wearing, and leads.
She doesn't really walk so much as her lower half crawls, but Noelle is surprised at her own speed. She keeps looking down to make sure Krouse is still there, but soon enough, they're through the gate, and inside what looks like a large hedge maze. Noelle presses her lower half together, trying to give herself as much height as she can, but even looking over the tops of the hedges doesn't yield much. The place is vast.
"It's a maze," she confirms with Krouse, even though it's fairly obvious. "But I think we can treat it like a dungeon. Assume there are traps, but also assume there's a logic to it. We just need to work out the pattern."
Noelle picks a direction, and then another, going mostly on instinct until the pattern reveals itself. The first obstacle makes itself obvious fairly quickly: a wall of flowers, gigantic and eerily swaying despite the lack of a breeze, blocks their way.
no subject
He could do anything for that smile. Doesn't matter what the rock above her empty grave says, or whatever the one above his did. They're together, and they're alive, and they're going to make it out. He adjusts the hat again, for the hell of it, as the ice over his eyes cracks with warmth.
(Whatever happened, he didn't leave her. He's right here.)
His back is straight as he walks beside her, lengthening his stride so he can keep up. The view in his periphery is still bad, but he tells himself he'll get used to it. (He's already used to it.) If this is a dungeon, he can think of it like a curse. If this is a dream, it's just part of a nightmare. If this is real, he can cope.
Maybe the hat is a subconscious gesture of solidarity. Noelle might look like that through no fault of her own, but Krouse looks like a dick on purpose. It seems like the kind of thing he'd come up with.
"I'm guessing that's our first trap," he says, stopping nearby. He's not surprised she called it. He stoops to pick up a stray pebble and bounces it in his palm, eyeing the weirdly mobile plants.
"Do you want to try to get past it, or double back?" He glances up at her. "I could try to set it off. See what it does."
no subject
(She doesn't know what him holding her hands feels like. It's too electric to be good or bad. It makes her skin crawl, like most contact does, and she needs it so badly. The best way she knows how to categorize it is that it's like eating, both necessary and revolting.
There's too much to figure out. Noelle doesn't need to work that out, not right now, and maybe not ever.)
Strategizing is good, too. The one thing her lower half is good for is that Noelle can look at Krouse's tiny rock and the swaying flowers at the same time. For some reason, her mind parses the two scenes simultaneously without much of a hitch, which Noelle decides to attribute to her experience with dual computer monitors.
"We should try to get past it. I doubt this place is nice enough to let us go without a single obstacle, so we might as well figure out how it works now." She gives Krouse a little nod, then delegates. "Throw the rock, and then get behind me. I can take the hit."
She's confident about that, if nothing else. Noelle isn't giving an order, not really, but her tone doesn't sound like there's much room for negotiation.
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
cw: ableism
cw: suicide