wellcome | 1.0 Test Drive Meme

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Welcome to Well! Characters arrive the same way every month. Your character arrives with only a handful of memories, clad in old west style clothes of your choosing, with 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.

Applications open on January 20th, and the game opens on February 1st. Invites are available for members of the mods' plurk lists.

Put on your dancing shoes

Content warning: Alcohol, intoxication, altered mental state

Something’s happening at the Cactus Pad Saloon. It’s lit up bright against the growing night, and music spills out onto the street. Seems like a fun time that you should check out. In fact, it’s hard not to check it out: the closer you get, the stronger the urge to join the fun. If you’ve been spending a lot of time alone, you’ll feel even more compelled to come get a drink.

The bartender serves up anything you can think of: from whiskey to apple juice to blood, if that’s your preference. She doesn’t blink an eye, no matter what’s ordered. The funny thing is, no matter what you order, once you take a sip, the world feels a little easier to deal with, your worries seem to melt away. You’re flush with sudden confidence.

If you strike up a conversation with the person next to you, conversation flows like you’re talking to an old friend. You feel a sense of kinship, deep and meaningful, good or bad, that bonds you together.

The old record player is playing a fun ditty, and the longer you stick around, the more you’re tempted to join, or start, the dancing. Whether you’re a great dancer or you have two left feet, you find that you feel capable of dancing like no one’s watching. No one knows you here, after all. You barely know yourself, so why not draw a partner into the fray? A party’s better together!

If you end up staying there til closing time, the bartender kicks you out with a gruff “come back tomorrow,” leaving you to stumble home with your new best friend. What was their name again?

Sand trap

Content warning: Quick sand, potential drowning in sand

You step through a door into a room you didn’t mean to enter. You were trying to head into the saloon, or your hotel room, or the bathroom, and instead you’re here: in a small, tight, windowless room in a white-washed building. The air here is old, stale, and thick. Hazy gold light bounces off the walls, but you can’t tell where it’s coming from, since there’s no visible ceiling. The walls just stretch up and up into bright nothingness.

Someone else is there, too, coming through an identical door on the opposite wall. Both doors snap shut, and won’t open again, no matter how hard you try. They won’t even break.

This might not be so bad, except that a sound starts to fill the space: sand, trickling down the walls. It’s just a dusting to start. It comes sprinkling down above, seeping through the cracks in the door. The longer you stand there, the faster it comes: sand flows down the walls in massive torrents, building up on the floor, shifting and thick, trapping you in place.

The only way out is up. When you look again at the walls, you’ll notice it: about 10 feet up the wall hangs a flimsy rope ladder, half-hidden by the waterfall of sand. You’ll have to work together to even reach it, or maybe let the ever-growing pile of shifting, slippery sand lift you up? Be careful, because even if you manage to reach the rope, you both have to get out of here, and the longer you’re here, the faster and harder the sand falls. The ladder seems to go on forever, tens of feet up an endless wall. The better you work together, the closer the top seems. No matter how well you collaborate, they're at least 50 feet high.

When you’ve fought your way through the sand and reached the top of the ladder, you finally see it: the sand is coming in through the open windows of a steeple. You can’t see where it’s from, not really. You can’t see much of anything, but it’s clear: the only way out is, well, out. You have to jump, trusting that yourself and your companion will be safe.

Once free, you land together outside of one of the buildings or rooms you were trying to enter, like nothing happened at all. It’s a calm day, after all.

Memories of the living

Content warning: Cemetery, contemplating mortality

Dusk settles purple over Wellstone. Early stars are out, the moon is thin, and you find yourself inexplicably drawn to the graveyard. You can resist, but the more days you do, the harder it gets. The graveyard is calling to you in a voice you can’t hear.

While it seems small before you enter, once you start walking through the crumbling graves, it seems to stretch endlessly. You pass elaborate dust-covered crypts carved with strange angels; bleached wooden crosses overgrown with cacti; a crumbling old well, long gone dry; worn-down headstones jut at odd angles. Some graves have old offerings on them, brightly colored beads or candles or framed photos, sun-bleached beyond recognition.

You may have been walking for five minutes or fifty, but when you look around, you can’t see to find the exit. You hear howling, and see the flicker of lights from behind the graves, but you can never find their source, no matter how much you look. No matter how long you spend in the graveyard, the sun never seems to sink lower in the sky. An oppressive sense of being watched grows to the point that you whip around, expecting to find someone there until—

You do. You find each other. Others drawn here to the graveyard, walking among the crumbling stones, will end up by the same headstones. Exploring together eases the watchful feeling just a little, but it won’t help you get out. No, you’re looking for something. The exit? No, you’re sure there’s something more important than that.

If you follow your impulses, you may just find it: a gravestone, weathered, old, with a familiar name on it: yours. Your date of birth can be visible, but the date of death is too weathered to read. You may find an offering there, something small and meaningful to you, a small shiny coin or some bright beads.

Once you find your grave, when you look up, you’ll see the exit. You’re really not that far from it, after all, the rusted iron arch barely a stone's throw feet away. Your companion won’t see it yet. You can make a dash for it, get out of this awful place, or help your companion find their own gravestone. When your companion finds their stone, they will also be able to see the exit. Exiting together will alleviate the impulse to come back to this place. Leaving alone will only draw you back, making it more difficult to find your grave again.

You can take the offerings left on your grave if you want, but the sense of being watched will only grow greater until you’re compelled to return them, and leave another offering of your own.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"I don't remember murdering a single person my whole life," she says, and with the shift in light she is smiling, even if it is only a slight, small one.

She lets a moment stretch before she tilts her head to the left and lets her smile go a little crooked.

"Sorry. Bad joke. But I don't feel like a murderer...and I don't feel like murdering you. So don't worry." She pulls her delicate shawl closer around her shoulders and mirrors his step towards her, her full grey skirt swishing as she moves. "I'm glad to have found anyone else out here. I think I've gotten myself lost."

But Palamedes grins. He is learning something new about himself today: he enjoys morbid jokes. “And for that, I will be forever grateful,” he says wryly. The woman’s observation begs the question, though—is one a product of one’s memories? Or is there something innate to one’s character? If Palamedes is going to learn who he is and where he has been unceremoniously dropped (two mysteries he has already determined to solve) he may need to puzzle out that very philosophical question as well.

He puts a hand to his brow as he turns round in a circle. “There is something strange about space here—have you noticed? I swear I could see the other side of the graveyard when I stepped inside, and yet...” He stops and points. “I came from that direction. Let’s go.”

The stranger's good cheer stokes her own. Being lost in the dark is much less daunting a prospect with company. She doesn't feel like a murderer, but she does feel like she's a person who doesn't do very well without anyone else around her.

She thinks most people are that way, which is more than enough reason to nod her head and dutifully keep pace with his longer legs when they set off in the direction he's chosen.

"I've noticed." The oscillation of space, the unending stretches of graves and the creeping sense of observation that she is doing all in her power to behave as if she doesn't feel. "I almost wish you hadn't. Then I could tell myself I was insane. Wouldn't that be a neat answer to all of this? Being locked up in a room somewhere, staring at the wallpaper, imagining conversations with men in spectacles."

“Well.” Pointedly, Palamedes pushes up his own spectacles. “You’re halfway there? No wallpaper, though. Sorry.” As they walk, his step remains confident—at least at first. While he couldn’t tell you his mother’s name, Palamedes is certain that he came from this direction. Surely, the gates will soon appear—a little more distant than they should be, perhaps, but indubitably there, showing them the way out.

But the horizon doesn’t change, it doesn’t shift. No gate reveals itself to have been hidden from view behind a tomb or a hill. After a minute or two, Pal stops. “The entrance is this way, it must be. I have a very good memory.” A beat. “I usually do.” Troublingly, he has no evidence to back this up (quite the contrary, in fact!) but he finds himself oddly sure of it all the same.

She laughs very softly after Palamedes pushes up his spectacles, lifting her shoulders and then letting them fall in a gesture almost too languorous to be a shrug.

"I won't hold the wallpaper against you," she murmurs, and lapses into an easy silence as they keep on their chosen course. When he stops, she stops in time with him, and her eyes roam around their immediate surroundings as he grapples aloud with this troubling new development. She doesn't know what she's looking for, but the looking - that feels like a habit.

"When I went looking for the way I came in, I couldn't find it either." There's an undertone of easy belief in her response; he says he has a good memory, so he does. "When we were outside, did it seem this big to you? It didn't to me."

The looking feels familiar to Palamedes, too. He senses, rather than remembers, that examining his surroundings is something he has done numerous times before, that seeking clues and solving puzzles has gotten him out of tight corners. At the edge of his memory, there’s a flash of something—there had been an exam or a test…? No, he can’t quite grasp it.

He shakes his head, almost as though to clear it, though the gesture serves as an answer to the question as well. “I was certain I could see where it ended, and the desert beyond…I’d hypothesize that it was an optical illusion, but I also haven’t walked far enough to lose sight of the entrance.” Palamedes huffs a sigh. “Which leads us back to the first theory: time and space are fucking with us. Delightful.”

The lilt of her laughter is as soft as the distant calls of desert wildlife. It settles on the graves like the rest of the dust. It isn't a very amused kind of laughter, but there's a rueful acceptance to it that comes close.

"First our minds, then the world. Very surrealist." She shakes her head, fine blonde hair shaking loose in the wind. She likes the feel of the word 'surrealist' on her tongue. She doesn't like much of the rest of this, but what's to be done about it?

"I hope someone left some wine on the graves, if we're going to be stuck here. If I'm going to perish in a folding landscape, I'd prefer not to have to think so much about it...let's see." With apparent seriousness, she roves her attention over the nearby graves, assessing what goods have been left out for their potential thieving.

So there's another thing she's learned about herself. She isn't sentimental about dead bodies.

“The land expands whilst our memories shrink.” Palamedes screws up his face. “No, no, I don’t like that at all.” There’s a ruefulness in his voice, though. For now, it’s the shifting, changing ground beneath their feet that they need to worry about. Once they have escaped this strange, eerie cemetery, maybe he can return to the puzzle of his identity.

He follows her gaze over the plots, looking at them with avid curiosity now. “Do you know if they leave bottles of wine for the dead where you’re from?” he asks as he approaches one of the stones, which has a small pile of trinkets at its base. “If you don’t mind me saying, it sounds like a waste.”

"Does it? I'd like to think someone would send me off with one for the voyage..." She picks past a few of the graves, trailing her fingertips just above, but not touching, the arc of a winged statuette's bowed head. "I haven't the least idea if people do that where I come from."

She circles around to the front of another row, and she stops.

There are tiny white flowers on this grave. She doesn't recognize them. They send a sick, grating shudder down her spine. When she bends over, she half-thinks it's because she might vomit, and her hands extend without her permission to brush at a patina of dust over the name on the headstone.

She looks at it for a while. She looks up.

"Oh," she says, with a tiny frisson of surprise, "There it is."

While staying within conversational distance, Palamedes does a bit of exploring as well, peering at the trinkets left on one grave, tracing the illegible marks on the tombstones that once might have been names. “If you could drink it, I suppose. I’m inclined to hypothesize that eating and drinking are entirely the purview of the living, but what do I know? Perhaps you have a point.”

He continues to examine gravestones, realizing only belatedly that his companion has stopped in front of one in particular and gone awfully quiet. Slowly he turns to her, frowning faintly. “Everything all right?”

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