5.0 Test Drive Meme

[wellie]

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 your own grave! Someone's burying you alive! Better get out of there.

The only way out

Content warnings: being eaten alive, carnivorous flowers, intoxication

The graveyard is in the middle of the maze: a sprawling hedge maze on the outskirts of Wellstone town. The ground is soft with recent rain, and the hedges are just blooming green like it's early spring. Your shoes squelch in the muck.

It starts easily enough. As you make your way deeper, though, you'll start run into things that make the maze… harder. Gigantic flowers block the way down one path, and they titter together as you get close, swaying and moving in ways that flowers shouldn't. If you do get too close, a flower lurches forward and snaps its petals around you like jaws. Are those teeth?! They're like foot-long cactus spines, sharp and deadly. You might want to get out of there, and fast. The teeth hurt, and the inside of the flower isn't a cakewalk either. It hurts your skin, and if you're in there too long, your skin may start to burn off.

Down another path are more flowers. These are smaller, and oddly fleshy in color and scent. At the center of each flower is an eye. Some of them seem familiar, although you can't figure out why. As you pass, the eyes roll, following you closely. If you make eye contact and any of these flowers, you feel a chilling wave of fear that roots you to the spot. Your stuck in its gaze, staring back at it as it stares impassively at you. You have the horrible feeling that if you stay here, something awful will happen. It grows worse and worse, more acute, but no matter how strong that fear, you can't move your feet. Someone, or something, has to break your eye contact with the flower.

At a final turn in the maze, the sweet, soft scent of lilacs fills the air. You're sure that scent means you've found the end, and that you should follow it. Naturally, it doesn't. It leads to a dead end. Again. This one, at least, is beautiful: it's a little meadow surrounded by hedges, blooming in lilacs and lavender and little purple-headed poppies. The scent is heady and overwhelming. It fills you up. It settles into your head like a haze, making it hard to focus. It seems like an amazing idea to just… stay here. Lie down, maybe, among all those nice flowers. Just for a little while, you tell yourself.

Only, it may be more than a little while. The longer you sleep in this lovely little meadow, the more vines and flowers will grow over and around your body. Eventually, they'll make their way into your nose, your ears, your mouth and start to pull you down into the soft earth. Someone's going to have to wake you up and get those vines off unless you want to stay in this maze forever!

When at last you find your way out of the maze, past the treacherous flowers, you set your sights on Wellstone: a town in the first bloom of spring, a light mist making everything dewy and bright.

tl;dr:

• After you leave the cemetery, you find yourself in the maze. There are flowers that are obstacles along your way.
• There are large, flesh-eating flowers full of teeth that want to eat you.
• There are fleshy flowers with eyes in the middle that, if you meet their gaze, hold you with fear.
• There are lilacs that lull you and make you want to lie down and take a nap. If you do, vines will wrap you up, making it very difficult to get out.
• Once you make it through all the obstacles, you can make it out of the maze into Wellstone.

Scent of death

Content warnings: bad smells, potential for body horror

It isn't just the maze blooming with the coming of spring: Wellstone itself has burst into bloom. It seems that everywhere you look, flowers have invaded the town. Sweet snowdrops poke their heads up between cobblestones. Violets wink from shadowed corners. Morning glories climb walls and line windows. They all smell wonderful, good enough to make you want to bend down and take a good, long sniff.

Except for one. Blooming in the courtyard of the Staywell, just in front of the door in a little garden circle, is a corpse flower. The flower is massive: over three meters tall, giant stamen thrusting up to the sky with frilly red leaves around its base.

It's hard to avoid the flower: any time anyone opens the door to the courtyard, the scent enters the lobby, the parlor, the cafeteria. It seems to permeate the Staywell at random times. And the scent is strange: if you try to talk to anyone about it, they don't agree with you on how it smells. And they won't agree on how it affects you.

Smelling the corpse flower makes you feel a little... strange. Its effects vary by person, and even when a person smells it more than once, the effect might change. At first you feel a rush of disgust, then nausea, then--well.

When you smell the corpse flower, you might smell:

• The most delicious thing you can imagine. You're suddenly extremely hungry and feel compelled to eat as much as possible.
  
• The most wonderful, nostalgic scent. You feel compelled to proclaim your loyalty and friendship to the next person you see.
  
• The most relaxing thing. Your body feels loose and relaxed and you feel at peace. You want to spread the love and feel compelled to get everyone else around you to chill the fuck out.
  
• Sugary sweetness. You feel an intense draw of affection toward the people around you and feel compelled to compliment them in increasingly over the top ways.
  
• The scent of raw, rotting meat. Everything around you suddenly look strangely... meaty. Is that chair made of meat? That wall? You're very acutely aware that you are made of meat, and that everyone around you is made of meat.
  
• The smell of death. You feel a horrible, creeping sense of guilt and feel compelled to confess something awful you do or do not remember doing to the next person you see.

Comment below if you'd like a random smell (or feel free to select for yourself). Effects last anywhere from half an hour to an hour. Characters can experience different effects throughout the TDM. The corpse flower will be in bloom the first week of February and the first week of March, and closed the rest of the time.

tl;dr:

• There's a corpse flower blooming in the courtyard of the Staywell.
• When you smell its scent, you'll smell a scent that makes you do--something! Select from the list what you'd like to happen, or comment below for a random effect.

Comments

[toxicyuri]

"Of course," she says, and while there should be some dryness there, she mostly just takes it at face value. It makes as much sense as anything else. It has to, doesn't it?

She takes the offered hand, but just before she makes contact, she mutters the word "no" quickly and clearly. It's like she doesn't even know she's done it. Then she accepts his help and pulls herself away from the grave to stand more or less on her own two feet. Her hand feels full of bones, the skin almost too thin to contain them, but she's not especially old so much as she is frail.

"I have not... yet had time to think of the things I should know. To trace back my memory. But I already know that something feels. Empty," she says after trying for the word. "I know I am incomplete."

[more_magic]

That she does take his hand makes that initial rejection all the more puzzling, but it's a question that matters less than the birdlike fragility of her hand as it holds his. Wherever she had been before this, whatever life she'd lead, the toll it had taken is immense--even accounting for the trial of being buried here and digging one's way to freedom, as they'd all had to do. Incomplete, when she says it, seems to encompass that and more besides.

"We all have spaces we keep blank," he says. "But anywhere else, we get to choose that. Here, it's chosen for us."

[toxicyuri]

"Do we?" she asks quietly, like it's not something worth spending much time on. She would be curious how he knows about the spaces that they keep blank, whatever that might mean, when everyone must be as blank as she is to begin with, but she decides quickly that it is not worth the line of questioning. Not when there is something far more important to discuss, at least, and her eyes sharpen slightly.

"By whom?" It comes out with more clarity and intent, a desire to truly know if at all possible. "We are the only ones who should be able to choose the things that happen in our lives."

[more_magic]

"I don't disagree," he says. "I wish I had a better answer for you. A more complete one, anyway." He looks at the graveyard, the emptied plots and those still filled, headstones bearing names he recognizes and some worn into illegibility--along with the epitaphs beneath. "If you believe the few crumbs left behind, we're not the first to be trapped here," he says. "Whoever our captors are, they've done this before."

[toxicyuri]

"There are people running the show," she says, more colloquially than she would like, and her eyes follow his on a noticeable delay. Too many of these graves have been here too long to fathom. She nods slowly.

"And they have done this so often as to bring it to a science." It makes sense. She will take the victory. "We are exhibits for them, and when they grow tired of their current crop, they summon more, somehow. They pluck us from whatever we had been doing and bring us here, devoid of all but a small amount of memories. How juvenile."

[more_magic]

His laugh at that is soft, even polite, though hardly dismissive. It is blunt and crudely immature, this process of deserting them here with nothing of their own pasts to fall back on--and an additional cruelty on top of it to force them into the kinds of hazards he's only just beginning to understand. In a way, he almost envies that Jessica was able to assess the situation before them so quickly, and with such clarity.

"Immaturity and a lazy mind, I'm sure," he agrees. "Or minds. Whatever their science is, I think as little of it as you do."

[toxicyuri]

"It is a shame," she says after another brief pause; she's finding these words as they come to her, and it is rare, she thinks, that she knows exactly where a sentence will end until she begins it. (It chafes on her. This is not the way she should be.)

"With the ability to reach into the mind and remove memories, surely they could do more than create a hostage situation—and yet we find ourselves here." While speaking, she sets her eyes on the entrance into the hedge maze and understands that it will be the only way to return to a more lively form of civilization. "It seems they consider themselves botanists as well. How convoluted do you think the path to freedom will be?"