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

[hellonspectacles]

I’m not making any more skeletons. I’m not a skeleton-making machine.

[He also isn’t in any way cool and is quite aware of the fact, and therefore fully ignores this comment from Alec.]

How long have you been in town, Imp? [Goodness, that feels like a silly thing to call the girl—and this is coming from someone named Palamedes Sextus.]

[diablotin]

Three hours. [ Not entirely accurate, but she hasn't exactly been checking her watch, and three hours sounds like plenty of time to cause an obscene amount of trouble. ] You promised me a skeleton army in the blink of an eye. How could you lie like that on your official application?

And you! [ Alec! ] What kind of terrible teammate are you? Holy shit. I told him to sick it on me, stupid, so you could use my fists and your intel. Now we just look uncoordinated.

[ Imp's tone is upbeat despite the critical words. To Palamedes, as she lowers her knife and takes on an air of great consideration and magnanimously allowed negotiation: ]

You get one question per skeleton. No upper limit. I answered that one on good faith, and on account of the first skeleton. I can answer many questions, like 'What's Regent's embarrassing middle name?' and 'What's his power's inconquerable weakness?'

Choose carefully.

[anglophone]

You were involving me in unwanted skeleton combat. I have a right to defend myself.

[ He's unruffled by Aisha's accusations of being a terrible teammate. She's a very critical person sometimes. He'd never get anywhere if he took it too seriously.

But he might as well try to smooth things over, so he slides off the bed and strolls over to where she's standing to loop a companionable arm around her shoulders. Not so uncoordinated when they present as a set. ]

I don't have a middle name, and my inconquerable weakness is my vulnerability to physical attack. [ He'll even sell himself out for her, that's how considerate he is - down to the slightly unorthodox word choice. ] You can't make him make too many skeletons. He gets sweaty. It's gross.

[hellonspectacles]

He’s not wrong, I’m afraid. [Palamedes dips his head towards Alec.] I could give you a skeleton army, but it takes a lot of work. And frankly, you haven’t given me a good enough reason to go through all the effort. Sorry.

But I am curious about one thing, so— [He shrugs and sets his bone shard on the desk, where it grows into a new full-grown skeleton. This one can’t do much of anything. Aside from being able to sit upright at the edge of the desk, it’s as inert as a biology class anatomical model.]

Am I right about how your powers work? That is, you don’t literally become invisible: you manipulate our perceptions to make yourself seem invisible.

[diablotin]

[ Aisha stares sadly at the useless, dumb skeleton. With feeling, ]

Yeah, well, fuck you too.

[ As punishment for his betrayals, Alec's lap becomes victim and pillow for Aisha as she throws herself back on the bed, sighing with emphasized melancholgy, throwing a hand over her forehead like a damsel in distress. Her boots kick up onto a beam of Palamedes' bed, marking satisfying dark lines where the rubber and wood connect.

Her face falls to the side, away from Palamedes. He's a liar who has done nothing but betray her over and over, so she lies, ] Yeah.

[ But truthfully, ] It's not like I have a manual. Can't give you the parahuman equation that spawned Imp.

[ Aisha pulls her mask down, letting it fall over her throat as she asks Alec, ] Is the four-eyes always like this?

[anglophone]

[ Alec follows suit in removing his mask, pushing it up and back until he hits the point where he has to unclasp a hidden mechanism to pull it loose and toss it behind him on the bed where he's been pressed into service as another piece of furniture. He shifts his narrow legs a little underneath her, trying to manifest more of a lap than he actually has and mostly succeeding in some light Aisha-jostling.

He settles one hand with unstudied casualness on her side, below her ribcage, and puts the other slightly behind him to prop himself up. ]

Pretty much. But it's not his fault. He was raised in a library by textbooks and skeletons.

He's not trying to figure out your power so he can get one over on you. He's just nosy. I know it seems suspicious, but he's actually a sucker. He puts up with me, so you know it's true.

[ He gives Palamedes a quick glance and a shrug after mounting this stellar defense. ]

[hellonspectacles]

[Palamedes can't really argue with Alec's assessment, and he doesn't try.] 'Academic' is just a fancy word for 'nosy' anyway. We just tend to be nosy about a wider, more esoteric range of subjects.

[He flicks his wrist, and the skeleton becomes a dog, not unlike the ones John has sometimes constructed. It can't do much of anything, either, but it does sit on its haunches and wag its tail.] Though my reasoning isn't entirely impersonal. Alec and I have noticed certain parallels between our abilities, and comparing them has helped us both understand our capabilities and limits.

[He shrugs.] It's interesting.

[diablotin]

[ The dog doesn't win her over or regain her attention. Aisha's all languid sprawl and smooth contours now, draped comfortably over the bed and Alec in a way that suggests everything here but Palamedes and his weird bone dog have been marked as Permanent Aisha Territory. ]

Yeah. Really interesting.

[ And then, like it's nothing, like it's the weight behind a blink, she's perched in Alec's lap, arms lazily looped around his shoulders — at least until she starts using a hand to emphasize her speech. ]

I can totally see the parallels. You both have a power where you go 'oh, look at me, I'm so powerful, I can control fifty evil henchmen skeletons' — in or out of a nervous system sack, shut up — and then you go, 'please, cooler power user, accept my application so I don't have to be a lonely lame-power loser all by myself, have pity,' and then it's like, bam! You had me going for a second and I have no choice but to admit it, but then the house of cards comes crumbling down because you don't want to sweat a little blood.

[ A sigh. ]

You know what this reminds me of? That time where Alec got lectured because he said he could be a warlord and then totally blew it because he just lounged around with ice-cream and video games all day instead.

Yeah. [ Aisha sighs, nodding sagely, a press of dark cheek to pale forehead as her arms come to retake Alec's neck, ] I see the parallels.