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

[icecrown]

I'm not sure anyone is good at these riddles because they all sound like complete nonsense.

[ This is more of a grumbled attempt to save face over his own (repeated) failures than it is a friendly reassurance, but at least if they end up right back where they started, he's not assigning any blame.

For now, Arthas steps over the remnants of the torches and stands ready to see what's on the other side of the door when it opens. It might seem like he's holding his breath, but it's equally possible he was never breathing to begin with. ]

But it looks like you got lucky for once.

[ The dice were kind this time. Some of the dread Arthas had felt since the key had been in the wrong torch dissipates at the sight of the shooting range in the next room, relieved to know they might actually get somewhere with this. ]

[lord_daigonis]

Heh. About time, I say.

[He walks over to examine the BB guns, noting their surface similarity to crossbows. He's not sure why that comparison springs to mind--he's never looked at a crossbow close up, as far as he knows--but the familiarity is reassuring.]

You've been in here before, yeah? So how's this supposed to work?

[icecrown]

It's fairly straightforward — shooting the targets opens the door.

[ Which targets? He doesn't specify, mostly because he doesn't know it makes a difference.

Arthas might've gotten bounced back to the start a lot, but on those occasions when he'd found himself here, he had never wanted to risk trying anything just to see what would happen. If it worked once, he assumes it'll work the same way again; he isn't inquisitive in that way.

Once again, the gun feels too small and unsubstantial in his hands, and Arthas wishes this place would give him a sword instead. Not that a sword would do much good here, but it would feel better just to have one, right?

And then there's his image on the cutout, which he's getting used to by now. It's hard to believe the ghoulish person is him, but maybe it's just a particularly unflattering image. It's not like he's had access to a mirror. ]

[lord_daigonis]

Hit the targets. Right.

[Ademnet looks over the gallery, his eyes narrowing at the cutout of himself. Best to avoid that one, he thinks, and the pale copy of Arthas as well. He'd be far more confident in his aim with a proper weapon, but surely these weird crossbows can't be that hard...

He wrests his gun up to point in the general direction of the targets, hopes for the best, and pulls the trigger. The shot punches through one of the shadowy cowboys, and Ademnet grins at his success. He adjusts the gun and fires again, delighted.]

Well, this ain't so hard.

[icecrown]

That's the thing. Nothing seems to require any particular skill. If you find the right combination of rooms, I'm sure you can get through to the end.

[ The "end" as a goal would make far more sense if Arthas knew where he was trying to get to, but wherever it is, he's sure it has to be better than this. His missing memory, the endlessly looping rooms... it's madness. Maybe something worse. Maybe that's the point. It's a line of thought too existential to have right in the middle of it when his dead face mocks him from across the shooting gallery, icy eyes leering at him. Anger rises in him so abruptly he's startled by it, unaware he that was capable of it. Blind to its source. He finds no satisfaction in the squeeze of a trigger and chooses not to think about how his longing for a sword feels something like a craving.

Ademnet's next shot startles him out of his thoughts, and he realises he has no idea how long he has been standing there in a daze. He knows the shot he had taken had missed the shadowy cowboy he'd been aiming for by a wide margin because it's still there, his aim having been negatively affected by the death grip he'd had upon the gun a moment ago.

It's fine. One thing changed, but they ended up here. Things are looking up; no need to panic... ]

[lord_daigonis]

[Ademnet is too invested in his own shooting to pay much attention to Arthas's existential crisis. He misses one or two shots, and most of the rest are nowhere near a bullseye, but soon enough every vague silhouette of a cowboy has a hole in it somewhere. Grinning, Ademnet releases his gun and looks around expectantly--

--and the room remains unchanged.

All right. Shooting the targets means all of them. Good to know. He looks over to see how Arthas is doing with the last two, blissfully unaware of the danger he's in.]

So what sort of rooms did you find after this? Just for the sake of preparin'.

[icecrown]

[ Arthas is grateful that the rest of the trash has been taken care of and his momentary lapse has gone unnoticed. His hands still tremble a little, but it's not enough to prevent him from cleanly taking out his own cutout this time.

He thinks about the next room. One thing at a time. It's easier to avoid spiralling into the horrible possibilities if he focuses only on what's directly ahead. ]

We have to give each other compliments, and there's a time limit.

[ Answering the question delays lining up the last shot as he looks over at Ademnet. ]

And it can tell if you're lying.

[lord_daigonis]

Hey, now. You ain't callin' me a liar, are you?

[Ademnet takes out his own cutout, still blissfully unaware of what the room requirement actually is. Regardless, it works: with a loud creak, the floor falls away beneath them both.]