wellcome | 7.0 Test Drive Meme

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7.0 Test Drive Meme

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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 August onward, and can happen concurrently with other events during August and September. This will be the only TDM for August, September, and October.

Applications are open July 27th until August 1st, and August 27th until September 1st. Invites are available for friends of current players.

Arrival: Catacombs

Content warnings: claustrophobia, caves, feeling of being watched, paranoia

You come to in a hotel. It seems like it was a nice hotel, once. It's missing a wall in the lobby, the floor cracked away. If you look out, it's dark and strange. You can't see much outside of the light of the lamp on the desk. It seems like there should be a receptionist there, but there's no one. No one at all to greet you, except, perhaps, each other.

If you venture out of the derelict hotel, you find youself having to climb down wreckage of buildings--many of which look the same as the hotel you were just in. The derelict buildings are unstable and strange--some seem to have been destroyed in floods, others are corroded away, one strangely covered in what seems to be dry blood. Be careful descending the several stories to the ground, although each subsequent hotel is more and more destroyed than the last.

Past the hotels are a dark series of tunnels and caverns. Some contain the magical, some the dangerous, some are open and free to be explored, to find remnants of people unknown.

One of the tunnels, lined around its entrance by the ragged edges of what looks like torn skin, opens up into a winding stone staircase that leads up, and up, and up. It's at least a hundred steps as you climb, but the most steps your climb, the lighter it gets. Up and up, until you step blinking into the glowing neon of the diner. There's a hole in the floor, the linoleum seemingly fallen away to let you through.

Once you step into the light, you feel a bit strange. Maybe it's the dazzle of the desert sun, or maybe it's the pervasive feeling of being watched. Out of the corner of your eye, you think you see someone watching you--but when you turn to look, there's no one and nothing there. But the feeling is always there. The only way to be free of it is to delve back down into the catacombs.

The sense of being watched may put you on edge. It might make you more snappy, or it might undermine your inhibitions, making you more likely to take risks, to try and prove whatever or whoever it is watching you that you are one to be watched. Prove them wrong, or right.

The waiter greets you with a smile, as if this is a totally normal way to enter his place of business.

"Welcome to the Stardust! What can I get for you? We have a nice cherry pie right now! How about I warm up a slice?"

Welcome to Wellstone! For those who have been here before, the town is repaired, the cracks in the earth gone--except for the one leading down the stairs in the diner. The saloon has cold drinks, the bathhouse has hot baths and a soggy coyote manning the towels. The receptionist hands you a key when you enter the hotel, the bulletin board is ready and waiting with multi-colored post-its. And the General Store is stocked to the gills with cowboy trinkets and paraphernalia, including massive stetson hats, headlamps, and lanterns. Somehow they work without any visible power source--weird! When you pick up a light source, the air crackles around you and if you have a walkie-talkie, it buzzes with static.

tl;dr:

You wake up in a derelict, destroyed version of the Staywell Hotel. You must make your way out of the hotel, down past many other destroyed versions of the Staywell, and through the catacombs to get to the surface.
On the surface, you step into the Stardust Diner, and immediately have the feeling of being watched.

Ride 'em Cowboy

Content warnings: mild bovine coercion, alcohol

Come on, hot stuff. You know you want to.

You don’t look too tough.

You think you can tame me?

In the saloon, you hear a voice in your head. It calls to you, the words seductive and enticing: you want to prove it wrong, you want to find out what it’s promising, you hate to lose. Whatever the motivation, you find yourself abandoning your drink and making your way to the new attraction at the back of the saloon: the bull.

It’s a big boy: a massive mechanical bull. Covered in spotted cowhide, with a bull head and big horns, this thing sits on a massive pedestal like a challenge. Around it is spread... relatively thin padding and a flimsy rope to keep the audience back an appropriate distance.

The compulsion keeps a hold on you until you’re on the bull. Maybe you’re on it with a friend, or a stranger, and it starts up with a mechanical buzzing. It starts to sway under you, and now you have just one job: stay on.

It starts easy, but gets harder as it goes along. It’s incredibly difficult to stay on for more than a few seconds. But during that time, you feel amazing. You feel hot as hell, in whatever way that works for you: sexy, powerful, bold, in control.

Until he throws you off onto the padding or into the crowd! When you get thrown, there's a good chance you'll go flying into the crowd. Hopefully they're ready to catch you!

If by some miracle you manage to stay on for more than 45 seconds, the bartender slides you a bullrider special: a spicy whiskey cocktail with a hint of lime. Feel free to leave it up to pure chance, and have the mods roll a die for you to see whether you manage to stay on or not.

tl;dr:

There's a mechanical bull in the back of the saloon!
There's a strange deep voice in your head, coercing you into giving it a shot.
It's hard to stay on, but when you're on it, you feel powerful, bold and in control.
The padding's pretty thin and you'll get thrown hard when you do. You might hit someone!
If you stay on for more than a 45 seconds, you'll get a fun little drink as a reward.

Off into the sunset

Content warnings: coercion, body horror, monsters, flesh-eating acid, altered mental states, eyes

Come on, hot stuff. You know you want to.

You don’t look too tough.

You think you can tame me?

Those same words in a similar voice call out to you no matter where you are in Wellstone: in the hotel corridors, in the desert, the tunnels of the catacombs. It's again hard to resist the call, and you move toward the voice.

A silhouette looms before you. It looks a lot like a bull, but you can't make out any specific features except the horns and its sheer size. It's still while you mount it, still for a moment to let you get your balance, before it's racing through Wellstone on fast hooves.

There may be someone already on it, or someone coming to the beast at the same moment as you. You mount it together, in a strange headspace where all you can do is mount the beast.

You don't know where it's heading, but you know it can't be good, for now that you're on the creature, you can see it for what it is. It's a bull, sort of. A bull without skin or fur, flesh and muscle undulating under your thighs, flexing and pulling in a way that you shouldn't be able to see. Between the fibers of muscle, you see eyes peering at you, eyes looking at you, eyes blinking, eyes crying. The beast is a kind of horror, and when you look at those eyes, that horror pierces into you, deep into your core.

Now, you probably want to get off. Your body is frozen, holding on to flesh and horns. The only way to get off is either to rally yourself, digging into the depths of determination in your soul, or to have someone encourage you. If you're on the beast together, you can either spiral into despair, or encourage each other to let go, to get off of there. If someone is watching from the sidelines, they can help, even if they probably can't keep up with the beast.

If you're able to get your body to unclench, you'll be thrown off the beast, falling heavily to the ground in a pile of pain. But at least you aren't being carried where it wants to take you: If you're on the surface, it takes you to the well in the middle of the graveyard and dumps you into it, letting you fall the long, long fall into the cistern below. If you're in the catacombs, it will dump you right into the acidic water of the cistern to be eaten alive.

tl;dr:

A voice calls out to you, no matter where you are in town. A bull appears, and you feel compelled to ride it, either alone or with a friend.
As soon as the bull begins to run, you see that it isn't really a bull at all, but an awful fleshy, eye-full monster.
It wants to dump you into the acid of the cistern, and the only way to get off is to rally the depths of your determination. It's a lot easier to do that with a friend!

Threaded | Flat

Comment here to find out how well you do on the mechanical bull!

gray wolf lodge
Daine, an enormous wolf, lurks around the edges of the lobby, mostly in the shadows but with her eyes reflecting white as she looks long and hard at whoever you are. Presumably you're human-ish. She has a sense that she's human-ish too - she remembers running with wolves as a human and probably a couple other things - but isn't entirely certain what to do with that information.

She might start to transform, but not immediately, especially if you do something more interesting than stare back.

the necromancy option
In the catacombs somewhere ahead of you, there's a brief flash of white light and a canine yelp, soon followed by bones clattering against rock and one another. This may have happened multiple times by now. This time it's close enough to catch up.

A massive, weary-looking gray wolf is sitting licking the hands and arm bones of a kneeling human skeleton. Daine-the-wolf is whining and telling it odd's bobs. you have to go back to sleep! be like the others! but if you aren't an animal or have animal communication powers her speech is entirely undetectable. The skeleton seems to understand but cannot talk. Something about its body language suggests protest or a gentle form of defiance, despite its submissively bowed skull.

bully
A bull? Daine is unafraid at first. Animals are always coming to her, she's probably got a collection of desert creatures around her at all times. She reaches to touch the beast's nose as fearlessly and affectionately as she would any animal, hello horn-brother, but doesn't get the kind of response she wants. Whatever she picks up, it's bad.

She shivers violently, a pattern of fur growing and shrinking back across her skin, but can't break the compulsion to climb on. "Don't you dare," she growls, but she doesn't have command over this creature at all.

bullfight
There's a second bull out here in the dark, charging about following after the monster. A more normal bull, with bovine vision that can't make out the eyes very well, though Daine-the-bull is quite conscious that they're very there and very wrong. Snorting, she closes the distance and veers into it, slamming horns against its shoulder.

This might give you the chance to get off. You could fall, or try to get on Daine-the-bull's back instead. It's just furry hide over a lot of bone and muscle. Is that better?

ARRIVAL
Pickle Inspector rises, disconcerted by the disorder. A welcome desk without a receptionist is little more than a table. Not so welcoming at all. Pickle Inspector stands in front of the desk for a moment, pretends to ring a little bell. No one comes. He moves to the other side of the desk and stands there for a few moments more. Now that's a proper welcome.

PI explores. Someone needs to learn to take better care of their hotels. He stops at one covered in red. Gustatory investigation confirms it is indeed dried blood. Ducking as the catacombs continue, PI makes his way up endless stairs and through the linoleum hole into the Stardust Diner. Accosted by a friendly waiter, PI only ogles in response.

I WANNA BE A COWBOY BABY
A coercing voice pulls his stolid gaze to the mechanical bull in the back of the room. PI suspects he only imagined it, but a faint familiarity tells him this is not the voice of his imagination. The bull undulates undeniably. It is time to ride.

The promise of libations compels PI. He locks his lengthy thighs around the cowhide, mounts the big boy. Quickly PI realizes physical strength is not one of his primary attributes, but the task at hand demands more bravado than brawn. Unfortunately, he hasn't got that either.

Soon PI makes a heap beneath a barstool, his launch from the bull so dramatic as to carry him across the crowd and into the waiting embrace of inebriation. He orders drinks until his speech is too slurred to ask for another.

YOU GET THE HORNS
That same voice that Pickle Inspector now knows not to be one of his impeccable imaginates draws him from his stool and into the street. His path through the alleyways is erratic yet certain. Before he has even noticed the bull he has mounted it. And off they run!

Pickle Inspector panics as his fingers stick to flesh beneath which eyes match his ogle a hundred times over. He has know idea where he's going. Quickly he forgets where he has been. Locked in the bull's endless gaze his many thoughts of letting go never amount to action.

When it is done with him, the bull flings Pickle Inspector aside. His fall, longer than he thought possible, through a well and deep into the ground below, is broken by his back against the water of the cistern. Immediately the acid eats into his brand new duds. Soon it will eat into his flesh.

dug too deep

It's the Staywell. He can't remember what happened before he woke up, but it's still the Staywell, just half-collapsed and surrounded by dark, stale air. Or is it the Staywell again? As Nicholas steps up into what should be a second floor but instead appears to be a second lobby, he decides that again is probably the right word. Is this why they found their own things in those ravines, months ago? Because the Staywell is built on the Staywell which is built on the Staywell?

More importantly, how the fuck did he get down here?

"Hey! Anyone?"

So far, no one has been home.

damn fine pie

He'd expected the graveyard, honestly. Nicholas blinks up at the waiter.

"Er, thanks?" He is actually pretty hungry. As long as it's actually cherry pie, and not ketchup pie, or something worse.

He glances around for a booth with someone else in it, and heads for the nearest one. Probably no one knows what's going on, but probably someone has a better idea than he does.

how hard could it be?

The longer Nicholas considers the bull from his seat at the bar, the stupider the whole idea seems. Sure, there's not much padding on the mechanical bull, and the thing's probably slippery. But it doesn't move that fast, really. It's not so big that you can't get a good grip on it.

He turns to the person seated next to him. "Hey, could you make sure no one takes my drink?"

Even if he wins a fancy drink, he would like to finish the tequila.

Arrival

[Halfway to the surface there is a shadow on the way. To those with magical sense there is a feeling of death and the divine. To others it just feels like someone is there.

A tall dark haired man with tapered ears steps out. He looks at his companion then down the stairs.] Is your head as empty as hell too or am I just really special?

bull riding

[As you fall there is again someone there. Vax grins and offers a hand to you.] Nice job.

Feels like you deserve another drink for that. [Or if you get that special drink he raises an eyebrow. Or maybe you catch him just as he falls off. He lands with a heavy thud and a roll. But he laughs before slapping a hand to his chest and golden threads of light curl over his chest then fade.]

It’s fine, it’s fine. Let’s get a drink. I think we need several.

Off into the Sunset.

You need to get off! [The fact they’re both on this beast is a problem. He can’t figure out why he did it. But his senses are screaming. This feels more in line with the things he is keeping close to his chest. He grabs tighter to a horn and yells.]

I’m going to do something. Then we’re disengaging from this thing! Count me off!

Wildcard
[Got an idea? Toss it at me in pms and I’ll make a custom starter.]

1. catacombs

He surfaces to bleary awareness on the floor of an old hotel. Stagnant air moves through the open and crumbling wounds in the walls of the building. The window is broken. This is familiar.

Not your first rodeo, boiadeiro, sneers something deep and low. Then it is crowded out by the rest.

(This building is not structurally sound.)

(A boiadeiro is a frontiersman, traditionally a cow-herder, from a distant time and place. They smoked a lot of cigarettes.)

(Someone left you here like a corpse. Get up before they come back.)

(Your shoulder twinges and your hip aches. But you're not bleeding.)

(You are not alone.)

(There is a second body on the floor.)

The man— broad and heavyset, middle-aged, with unruly muttonchops and an outfit composed mostly of tassels and rhinestones— sits up. He blinks through the lamplight to the other figure stirring in the rubble.

2. the wreckage

Without hesitation, he goes rummaging through the rubble. If you visit the carcasses of old Staywells or the wreckage of the shipyard, you might find a middle-aged man heaving aside broken doors, slamming through already-broken windows, and inspecting errant bits of trash.

As salvage operations go, it's not... elegant. His pants are ripped and acid-eaten, there are bits of glass in his bloody knuckles, and his pockets are weighed down with trinkets. When he finds a promisingly gaudy outfit in a smashed-open bedroom— it might even be one of yours— he drops what he's doing and starts to peel off his tattered pants.

3. ride 'em cowboy

Watch out: there's a large and graceless man getting bucked clear across the room. He slams face-first into an unfortunate passerby and takes an entire bar table down with him. (That will hurt in the morning.) (It was worth it.)

"HA!" crows the man. He rears up, blood streaming from his nose, to point a victorious finger at... the mechanical bull. He does not get off the person he's crushing: this is more important. "DID YOU SEE THAT?! DID YOU FEEL ME? THAT WAS AN ETERNITY. I'M FUCKING ETERNAL. FUCK YOU, BULL."

He was on the bull for twenty seconds.

4. literally anywhere

Are you an interesting non-human? Are you an uninteresting human doing something unusual? Are you genuinely a boring person just trying to brood in a corner?

Awesome. There's a man looking intently at you and jogging over to chat. You have never seen a person less interested in minding their own business.

Arrival: The Following Dark

Sam Vimes awakes in a cave.

His back aches, his head aches, and he remembers nothing. Aside from the obvious,* he has a hunch that this isn’t the first time he’s had this particular experience before. But back when he drank (past tense, right?? asks some panicked voice in the back of his head that he swiftly handcuffs and throws into the deepest depths of his mind dungeon**), he never forgot this much. He never forgot who he was.

He’s sure of that. Well, he’s mostly sure. Well, he thinks that must be the case. Stands to reason, right?

At least this cave seems to be surprisingly well-lit. In fact, what would be deep gloom to anyone else’s eyes appears as bright as a sunny day to his own. Vimes can’t tell where the brightness is coming from, which is really fucking weird, and definitely something he’ll be stewing over later. For now, just wants to get the hell out of here and find his way home. Wherever the hell that is.

So he gets to his feet, brushes himself down, and proceeds into the dark.

*The cave.

**Some detectives have Mind Palaces. Vimes has a Mind Dungeon because certain thoughts deserve to be arrested and locked up for the safety of society.

Ride 'em Cowboy: The Summoning Dark

“Pull the other one. It’s got bells on.”

It didn’t take long for Vimes to find his way out of the cave, and it didn’t take much longer than that to find a cheap cigar, which he’s now smoking as he stands in the town’s only bar, eyebrow cocked as he stares down the currently-unoccupied mechanical bull. Come on, hot stuff, whispers a voice that seems to come from an invisible speaker standing just beside him. Somehow, he knows it’s talking about riding the stupid bull. It’s been happening for a while now, and he’s given up trying to figure out who’s talking.

You think you can tame me?

“No, no, I really don’t, and I’m perfectly fine with that,” he announces to the empty air, taking a pull on his cigar. Yet something still draws him forward; something makes him stare at the bull like a criminal about to be arrested, or a rich toff who called him the wrong name. In fact, despite his protests, Vimes is beginning to smile. And that smile says, Like hell I can’t.

i. jump scare

[ When Aisha Laborn reappears in Wellstone, she's a little older, a little taller. Her hair is dark and long tied back in colorful braids tied back at the base of her neck. Just like last time, her dark eyes shine under layers of glitter. She interrupts the next person who passes her. To the victim, it's as if she'd come out of nowhere, appearing suddenly from just outside their peripheral. ]

Hey. Is Regent here? Alec? This tall, black hair, can't leave his room without three layers of frills?

ii. the walls have eyes | eye gore

[ If you come across Aisha on the end of her scouting of the bathhouse, she turns to you, slowly, hands splayed over her eyes. In the crease of each palm, she holds an eye in artistic replacement of her own. They're mismatched and unblinking, and the effect is horrible. ]

Edited 2024-08-14 22:27 (UTC)

Threaded | Flat

Questions?

Bull rider randomization

veralidaine sarrasri | tortall

no subject

Nicholas D. Wolfwood | Trigun Maximum

Vax’ildan Vessar | Critical Role

Harrier Du Bois | Disco Elysium

Sam Vimes | Discworld

Aisha Laborn (Imp) | Worm