6.0 Test Drive Meme

[wellie]

6.0 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 May onward, and can happen concurrently with other events during May and June. This will be the only TDM for May, June, and July.

Applications are open April 26th until May 1st, and May 27th until June 1st. Invites are available for friends of current players.

Arrival: Escape!

Content warnings: forced captivity, blood, eating eyes, drowning in sand, forced intimacy

The First Room

You wake up somewhere dark and damp. Maybe this is your first time waking up here, maybe it's your fourth, but the beginning is the same. You're in a small stone room. The only light comes from torches flicking on the walls. The room is bare except for a metal door. And you're not alone. You and someone (or someones) are here together, and you have to get out.

The door is locked, and to leave it you must just find one key. On the door is a note with a clue:

Freedom is hot!

The key is in fact in one of the torches! Depending on luck, you might find it on your first try, or your fourth. Find a way to extinguish the torches, and handle the hot, hot key to unlock the door.

After this, you find yourself in one of the following rooms. Choose one from the first set, then one from the second set, then one from the third set. You will always end in the final room. You must travel through five rooms to escape.

If you don't complete a task in five minutes, you will return to very first room and have to start again.

You can choose your own path, or comment below to have a random path set for you!

The Second Room

You find yourself in one of the following rooms:
1. There Ain't Room
2. Glitter Bomb
3. Riddles Three

1. There Ain't Room
In this room is a shooting game. There's a barrier with bebe guns attached to it, and at the far end are small cut outs of people. There's a sign on the far wall, in old-West style script, reading:

There Ain't Room

The cut outs look sort of familiar! There are cut outs of you and your compatriot(s), as well as some typical cowboy looking cut outs. Shoot your own cut out to escape! You each must shoot your own one, if you shoot each others', that person feels it as if they have been shot, and will start bleeding.

When you successfully hit all of your own cut outs, the floor under you opens up and you drop into the next room.

2. Glitter Bomb
As you walk through the doorway, you feel oddly.... sticky? Like your skin is covered in honey. Because it is! Yum.

In front of you is a room covered in glitter. There's so much glitter. You can't see a door, but you have to find a way out. Search the room to find the exit.

The exit is a trapped door in the floor. You'll need to make your way through the glitter, all the while it will stick to your very sticky skin. You'll need to dig a big enough path to get through, open the door and get into the next room! Too bad some glitter will come with you, and you'll still be sticky.

3. Riddles Three
A large hour glass in the middle of the room starts ticking down with sand as soon as you enter this room. One three of the walls are riddles engraved in the stone, and chalkboards in front of them. You must answer all three riddles correctly before the sand runs out to escape:

• Where waves kiss sand and breezes blow, where tropic dreams grow, I'm where you want to go. What am I? Answer: Kokomo
  
• With auburn locks and eyes of green, a rival, a threat, a beauty queen. Answer: Jolene
  
• With cowboy hats and boots that stride, no one told me where my horse I ride. Answer: Old Town Road

Once you answer correctly, the hour glass disappears, leaving a hole in the floor that you must jump through to exit.

The Third Room

Next, you find yourself in one of the following rooms:
A. Cry For Me
B. Love Me
C. Hold Me

A. Cry For Me
This room is beautiful and shiny, the walls made of crystals. In the middle of the room is a crystal plinth with a small crystal cup on it. In flowing script around the cup it reads:

Collect five tears

You must collect five tears in the cup to escape. Once you do, an entry way opens in the crystal in front of you.

B. Love Me
This room is very plain, and on a piece of paper dangling from a string in the middle of the room is the instructions for this room:

Exchange five sincere compliments each. Don't break eye contact.

You must do this within the alloted five minutes to escape. If the compliments are less than sincere, you may try again, but if you don't reach the five each by the end of the five minutes or if you break eye contact even once, you will be returned to the first room.

C. Hold Me
This room looks a lot like the pub in town. The walls are wood paneled and there's jangling piano music coming from--somewhere?

In the middle of the room is a mechanical bull, with a sign reading:

Stay on the bull together for 45 seconds.

If you succeed within the five minutes, you're free to continue on!

The Fourth Room

Next, you find yourself in one of the following rooms:
I. Blood
II. Sweat
III. Tears

I. Blood
This room is very tall. There's a rope dangling down one wall. On the wall it reads:

Climb!

And that's what you have to do. The word "Climb" starts to bleed. And then the walls start to bleed. The room will fill up with blood within five minutes, so you better get climbing!

At the top of the room is a hatch that will let you escape through a hatch in the ceiling.

II. Sweat
When you enter this room, one of you finds that you are alone. You're standing at the edge of a pool, and that pool is full of sand. It's also searingly hot in here. On the wall, it reads:

Rescue your partner!

One person is chained at the bottom of a swimming pool full of sand. A counter on the wall counts down until they will suffocate. Better get swimming!

Once you've rescued your partner, a door on the other side of the pool will open up. Better move fast to get there!

III. Tears
This room is dark, very dark. You can just barely see, except for a glow-in-the-dark sign reading:

Eat some eyes!

And that's what you need to do! In the walls are eyes. They're watching you. You must each eat an eye to continue on. Once you do, a door cracks open in the far wall.

The Fifth Room

No matter the path you took to get here, the final room is the same:

The last room you end up in, even though you enter through the same door, you find yourselves separated by a wall. There is a door for each of you at the far side of the room. You can hear each other, but you can't see each other. Each of you have a plinth in front of you, which reads:

Who should escape?

In front of you are the names of yourself and your partner(s). You place the name of the person you believe should escape in a slot in the table.

Once everyone has made a selection, the names will light up:

• If you all chose each other, your room lights up green.
• If you all chose yourselves, your room lights up green.
• If someone chose themselves, and someone else chose another person, the room of the person with the most "votes" lights up green. The others light up red.

If your room is green, when you open the final door, you've escaped! Welcome to Wellstone.

If your room is red, when you open the door, you find yourself back in the first room. Good luck!

When you escape, you step into the lobby of the Staywell. It's bright and airy with beautiful white stone. When you look behind you, it seems that you've stepped out of a supply closet. Weird!

The receptionist greets you as he always does, welcoming you home.

New characters arrive using this prompt. Characters can return from death from the previous cycle using this prompt. You can also just wake up and be in this prompt, so you can do this as many times as you like.

tl;dr:

• You wake up in an escape room! You must finish (at least) five rooms to escape. You have five minutes to finish each room. If you fail, you'll be taken back to the beginning of the dungeon.

It's alive!

Content warnings: public shaming

When you shake off the glitter and the sand, it might be time to head on down into Wellstone town. The air is full of a shimmering warmth that might be familiar to some. It's like the sun has been baked into the very stones and is radiating back up at you. Run-down buildings lean against each other for support, made out of mostly weathered stone with a few old boards here and there to keep structures up. Desiccated, skeletal fingers of dried-out ivy climb them, waving occasionally as you pass. Waving, and… whispering? For more information about how the town has changed, check out this month's Wellstone Post or read the Locations Page.

The town is alive with sneering, whispering voices. It's unclear where exactly they're coming from, but they're everywhere. Step into the Cactus Pad Tavern and you might hear a decisive no manners! spat sharply from the doorway. Make your way to the steaming bathhouse to wash off that honey, but be careful when you're undressing: you might just hear rude snickering from the air around you. Wow, the walls might say, your toes are so long. What weird feet!

The voices might interrupt a conversation at breakfast to make fun of something you said. Your mirror and your wardrobe might question your outfit choices. They're loud enough to be heard by everyone in a public space and seem to delight in saying cutting things at the worst possible moment. You don't recognize the voices, exactly, but they seem just familiar enough to really hurt, and the voices seem to know you well enough. They might even call you out when you tell a little white lie, or let everyone know exactly how loud you snore.

There's no way, seemingly, to get them to shut up, so... may as well get used to it?

tl;dr:

• The town is alive, and it is judging you. Your outfits, your words, your body, your habits: nothing is off-limits.
• The voices sound just familiar enough to feel like voices you know, but aren't able to be pinpointed to a single person.

Comments

Aisha Laborn (Imp) | Worm

[diablotin]

i. escape room

[ Aisha Laborn wakes up in an outfit she probably would have hit someone to avoid wearing, but she's too dazed to process the cowboy boots quite yet.

She sits up, dazed, her curls falling into her face as her hands slide to find purchase on the damp-slick stone. ]

What the fuck?

ii. network | channel 1

[ The radio crackles to life. There’s a breath in, the rustling of movement and swallowed would-be titter of a laugh. The voice is all serious bravado, if you can get past that it's coming out of a thirteen-year-old girl. ]

Imp speaking. This is a courtesy announcement from your new overlords on behalf of myself and Regent: Wellstone is our territory now.

If you want on my good side, I'm recruiting henchman. Send in your applications to me or Regent.

iii. co-op w/alec | anglophone

[ The two teenagers lounging in the Staywell’s lobby are covered in caked layers of glitter, but they don’t really seem to care.

The boy is a Alec, the same as ever. The girl with him is new, unless you've seen her in his memories. She’s a little younger than he is: dark skin, tight black curls with a bright streak of purple. She’s sprawled next to him, leaning back against the wall. Her leg is draped casually over his lap in her sprawl; her hands are curled around the milkshake she slurps. The glass's condensation collects stray glitter from her fingers.

They’re chatting. She's watching the supply closet, waiting for the next escapees of the Wellstone Funhouse, and he's watching her. When Aisha spots the emerging victim, her eyes brighten, glittering brighter than the glitter flecked onto her nose. He's slow to turn to look, even as she calls out, ]

Worst time yet!

ii

[gastro]

[ Noelle spends a lot of time curled up in her room, walkie-talkie set up on the dresser. It locks from the inside, which means that her situation is - different. From the last one.

When the walkie-talkie crackles to life with a voice Noelle shouldn't know, but nonetheless does, she forgets all about locked doors. ]

I can offer a lair. And muscle.

[ Says a soft voice, even and a little flat. It's best to play along. Less likely to make things weird, that way.

And then, because she can't help but ask: ]

What are your qualifications?

[diablotin]

A lair and muscle are good. We'll need plenty of that to make up for Regent's noodle arms.

[ Said with the air of ancient and sage wisdom. ]

I'm Imp. Superpowered territory-running supervillain. You'd already be shaking in the knees at the mention of my name if you remembered my reign of terrorism. Amnesia fucking sucks for reputation.

How much do you bench?

[gastro]

[ Noelle shouldn't have brought up her strength. That's a massive tactical error on her part. Now she has to answer questions about it, like how much do you bench, followed by the inevitable what the fuck is wrong with you. The worst part is, Noelle is fairly sure she's never benched anything in her life. She does e-sports, not sports-sports. ]

A lot.

[ And now it's time to deflect!!! ]

How much territory? And how well-resourced?

[ Hello, Imp. Have you ever played: Sid Meier's Civilization? ]

i. escape room

[anglophone]

[ Alec wakes up.

It's always a little bit of a surprise, after what happens at the end. One minute, he's listening to the walls caving in, and the next he's flat on his back, splayed bonelessly on a chilly stone floor. He blinks at the smoke-stained ceiling above, takes a shallow breath into clean, intact lungs, and keeps breathing.

So far, so good.

The next step in the routine is a reflex. He reaches out with his power, seeking out familiar points.

He doesn't get very far.

Alec sits up so fast that his head spins, not helped by whipping it sideways to look at the person starting to wake up a few feet away from him. He twists onto hands and knees to scramble over to her, utterly undignified, and lurches to a stop leaning over her face.

He stares at her for a split second, eyes wide and electric, and then, with all the thoughtless urgency of an inhale after breaking the surface of deep water, he drags her up into a clutching hug.

(He doesn't stop to think she might not know him. There's no universe where she doesn't know him.) ]

[diablotin]

[ Aisha doesn’t need to look at Alec to recognize the pulse that thrums under her skin. She’s barely registered his face hovering over hers when a smile, lazy and instinctive and a little confused, spreads over her features.

She’ll always know him. Not even this hellhole could take that away from her.

She makes a little, overdramatic oof as he pulls her up. She crashes into him and her arms wrap around his neck as natural as anything. Alec holding her isn’t anything new, but Alec grabbing onto her like she’s the most important thing in the world makes her heart — ]

Hey, stupid.

[ Her words are a mumble against his neck, as incredulous as they are pleased. His skin against her nose and the shirt clutched in her hands a grounding presence in the disorientation of arrival. ]

What the fuck are you doing?

[anglophone]

[ It's her. It's really, actually her, the neon imprint of her nervous system glowing against the dull fray of his.

When a car crashes into something, there's a moment where the world disconnects, and everything goes weightless and incomprehensible past the swirl of the body disoriented. It's not a bad feeling.

Hearing Aisha's voice, feeling it in the tiny vibrations of her throat and the puff of her breath, is like that. He makes a noise a little like laughter, a little like surprise, muffled against the firm line of her shoulder. ]

It's called a 'hug', dumbass.

[ Had he ever actually hugged her before like this? He doesn't remember doing it. He remembers almost wanting to, and the almost-want veering off in less embarrassing directions.

Whatever. ]

I can't believe you got amnesia so bad you forgot what a hug is. Even I remembered that. What the fuck, Aisha? That's tragic.

III

[magician_0f_words]

[It's instant. It's thoughtless. It's—]

You do better, then!

[—an utterly nonsensical comeback! He is pointing dramatically at the two horrid goblins that have come to taunt him, and then blinks.]

Wait, Alec? Hey, do we have a new recruit?

[He definitely isn't trying to move on from the complete failure of a response.]

[anglophone]

[ Alec gives Keiichi an archly pitying look. Woe be upon him, a humble peasant, for his grave error. ]

'A new recruit?'

[ Alec shakes his head, lifting one finger dramatically in the air to waggle it at him. ]

Try 'your new overlord'. This, my escape room challenged friend, is - [ he makes a show of sweeping his hand in Aisha's direction, and a bigger one of lifting his arm and draping it over her shoulder in conspicuous camaraderie ] - the infamous and nefarious Imp, villainous scourge and reigning champion of the bullshit labyrinth. Remember the name, or risk your doom.

[ He smirks, cutting Aisha a sidelong glance brimming over with horrid goblin collusion. ]

And this is Keiichi. He plays cards.

[diablotin]

[ As inclined as Aisha is to use her power and drop the contents of a straw of cream and glitter down Keiichi's collar as punishment for this horrible trespass, she's too comfortable to move.

Instead, she raises a hand, leaving smears of glitter caked on her glass, and wiggles her condensation-damp fingers in the direction of Keiichi's friends. Something about it, combined with the tilt of her head, makes it at least a little bit of a threat. ]

Don't try and change the subject, loser. We beat you here by hours. [ Not true. ] What's your justification, huh? Answer your overlord.

ii

[oniicursed]

[Satoko's own radio cracks to life, she speaks into the radio, her voice lit up in amusement.]

Ah, a fellow fiendish villain. As much faith as I have in Alec-san's ability to take his place as our supreme overlord, I'm going to need some credentials.

[diablotin]

Be serious.

[ Aisha may as well be kicking her feet and twirling her phone cord, for how serious she sounds. ]

We're having a serious villain-to-villain negotiation. Have some respect and call him Regent.

What's your codename?

[oniicursed]

Of course, I mean no disrespect.

[She has no idea what to do with a villain name. She's never had to think about it before!]

You may address me as Trapmaster, master of the traps.

iii - cw: blood

[pereatmundus]

[At the sight of the glittery pair, Light smirks in amusement. Considering he's been drenched head to toe in drying blood--not his best look, but he's wearing it with confidence--the expression looks more than a little unhinged.]

Hey, be fair. You got a much better partner.

cw: blood

[anglophone]

[ Alec raises his eyebrows at Light, taking in his gory coating with a distinctly unimpressed listlessness.

He also skims his power through Light's nerves, stimulus just below the threshold of response or sensation. All clean, and once again half-foreign, which is good and bad. Good, because that means their fungal issues are probably over; bad, because knocking him down to prevent a fungus zombie attack would have made Aisha laugh.

Maybe he could still do it and pretend he didn't know better. Something to keep on the back burner. ]

Excuses, excuses.

[ He tsks with a shake of his head, then turns to consult his colleague. ]

Imp, are we giving latitude for recruitment issues?

[ That partners are randomly assigned is not the point. Still counts as a recruitment issue. ]

[diablotin]

Absolutely not.

[ She sucks her thumb clean of glitter and cream, then goes right back to holding the messy glass with the same hand. Not even the acknowledment of Alec's superiority, even being as useless as Alec is, can win Light any points. She smells blood. ]

Do you know what we call that? Skill issue.

[ There's no sympathy: only the age-old wiseness of someone mature and seasoned who knows all the nuance of how important choice in a partner is. Random or not, the rooms gave her Regent. It's not her fault nobody else got to choose. ]

If you were any good, you'd be able to carry your team.

ii.

[hellonspectacles]

[Palamedes answers without so much as a flicker of jest.]

What sort of qualifications are you looking for in a henchman?

[diablotin]

Nuh-uh.

[ He's all business, and that's exactly what she wants to hear. ]

I'm not going to tell you that. You'll just tell me what you think I want to hear. I'm too seasoned a ruling criminal mastermind to be fooled so easily.

Cough it up. Right off the old dome, tell me what you can offer my empire.

[hellonspectacles]

[There is a long pause. Palamedes doesn’t know who this girl is, but she doesn’t sound like a criminal mastermind, despite the invocations of empire. Appearances can be deceiving, and yet…

Regardless of her intentions, Palamedes decides to play it straight.]

I can create an army of skeletons in the blink of an eye.

[Okay, maybe a slight exaggeration, but close enough.]

2.

[guidemyway]

[Ruby is going along with this full throttle.]

I'm going to fight you and your lackies until the bitter end!

You wont take this place from all the people out here just doing their best!

[diablotin]

[ A laugh comes over the radio - a perfect villain cackle, full of fervor and gusto. ]

It's too late. Kneel before me or face a fate worse than death!

[guidemyway]

[Wow. Way to be diabolical.

Ruby responds with all that heroic defiance she can muster.]

Do you're worst, I'll never surrender!

If I can't stop you. I'll pave the way for someone else to!

iii

[gastro]

[ Noelle emerges from the escape room, her upper half covered in a fine layer of sweat and grime, her lower breathing heavily.

This wasn't her personal best - that was a few reps ago, thanks to a particularly favorable ordering of the rooms - but this wasn't terrible. Noelle tucks her hair behind her ears, shaking her head. ]

No. My worst time was the one that gave me duplicate rooms. [ A beat, followed by a concession: ] This time, I did okay.

Do you want to know the layout?

[ Better to talk strategy than to address the scene head-on. Noelle has seen Aisha before. She's seen Alec and Aisha before. It was weird, when she and Alec had to talk about it, and Noelle is determined to not make it weird this time.

(Aisha may or may not stay. Krouse didn't stay. And if Alec only gets a few moments, Noelle won't be what spoils them.) ]

[anglophone]

[ Alec hasn't been thinking about the possibility of an after. He's never been very good at imagining a future. Aisha is here now, and now is where he's staying.

He slips his free sticky, glittery hand down to curl loosely over Aisha's shin draped over his legs, just below her knee, when he looks away from Noelle to catch her eyes. An unspoken message crackles over the gap between them: she's cool. ]

If you want to?

[ He's not sure how it's relevant, but Noelle is the one who knows about games. Maybe it's information worth knowing, which is more than he expects from most people. ]

Imp, Noelle. Noelle, Imp. She's the other person who actually knows what a 'computer' is.

[diablotin]

[ The lingering, silent exchange with Alec tampers Aisha's initial impulses. Alec says Noelle is cool. That's all there is to it.

She slumps back against the wall, against Alec's shoulder, in a softening of her body language that goes off the offensive and into the more casual posture of a good ol' gamer-to-gamer-to-gamer scheming session.

Aisha doesn't really care about the layout someone else had to deal with in the evil escape room she's already made it out of and has no intention of getting herself back into. But it sounds like Noelle will be able to mourn video games with them. She gets it. They've got to get in the rep building before moving onto more serious things, like a funeral for Mortal Kombat 3. ]

Yeah, okay. What room did you get duplicates of? You fuck up and go backwards, or something?