2.0 Test Drive Meme

[wellie]

2.0 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. This month, there is a strong possibility that those old west style clothes include a pair of jorts or daisy dukes.

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 April, May, and June.

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

All-Night Diner

Content warnings: feelings of euphoria and mild intoxication, exhaustion

There’s banner over the diner's doorway reading Welcome!, with colorful flags drooping in the heat. Inside, the waiter greets you with a wide smile and an announcement:

“Welcome to the Stardust Diner! Pie’s on the house today. Have a seat.”

During the day, the diner is just that: a diner. You can get anything on the very extensive menu, including prickly pear lemonade. The pie is free, and everything else is put on the tab for your room that will never come due, probably. It seems like a shame to eat that pie all alone! Accepting a piece of pie makes you feel like you should share this moment with someone. Luckily all the booths are plush and open, and it’s easy to plop down with a stranger to share this special moment.

At night, the mood shifts. The diner’s neon sign is a beacon against the thick darkness, beckoning you in with blinking lights and a line of text reading FORGET YOUR WORRIES. Inside, country-swing music rolls in time with throbbing red lights. The tables have been pushed aside to make room for a makeshift sticky dance floor, and the atmosphere is intoxicating.

It’s as easy as anything to be swept along with the vibes, the dancing, the intensity of it all. When you start dancing, you really do forget your worries. You forget that you don’t know how you got here and that you don’t may not even know the person beside you; you forget that you’re supposed to be anywhere else except here. Everything feels briefly perfect and beautiful, meant to be, no matter what else is happening to you.

When you stumble outside, it will be dawn, no matter how long you think you’ve been there, and you’ll be exhausted enough to simply curl up right there in the sand and fall asleep. Hope you made a friend kind enough to drag you home, or that someone wakes you up!

tl;dr:

• The diner is open and the pie is free.
• If you get a slice of pie, you feel compelled to share it with someone.
• At night, the diner transforms into essentially a nightclub. The vibes are intoxicating and you can forget all your worries and dance the night away.
• You can only leave at dawn, and your body will be exhausted. Better get help getting back to your room!

Something’s Coming

Content warnings: blood, blood-sucking, monsters

A few hours after dusk, strange creatures begin to scurry from shadow to shadow, chasing after anything that moves: chupacabras. Large ones. They’re big creatures, the size of large dogs with spikes down their spines and tails, dark and hairless with fearsome teeth. They are everywhere, and they are hungry.

They are indiscriminate in who they try to bite: the biggest among you is just as at risk as the smallest, but the bigger you are, the more of them might come for the fight. No matter where you are, there’s a risk: they seem adept at making their way into buildings. You might find one looming over your bed, resting on your chest, getting ready to bite; one might slip into the diner while you’re dancing and latch on when you’ve forgotten to be concerned.

If a chupacabra manages to bite you, it will suck your blood, and it won’t stop until you’re completely drained unless you do something about it. Having your blood sucked by one is not a pleasant experience, it’s excruciatingly painful and the creatures will do their best to keep you prone while eating their fill. The more they drink, the more exhausted you’ll get, until it’s very difficult to fight them off.

They can be killed or scared off, but the further they are into a fight or into their meal, the harder they are to get rid of. If a chupacabra has latched on to you, you’ll need help escaping!

tl;dr:

• Chupacabras strike the town at dusk.
• They want to suck your blood, and are indiscriminate in who they attack. They will try and drain you completely.
• They can be fought or scared off. It's easier to get rid of them if you have a pal.

The Walls Have Eyes

Content warnings: eyes, trypophobia

There are eyes everywhere. They peer out of cracks in walls, the floor, the grout in your shower, an open cut in your skin. There are even eyes in the craters on the moon, staring down at you unblinking.

These eyes seem familiar, even if you don’t remember them. You feel like you do. You feel a heavy weight settle over you when you look at them, guilt curdling in the pit of your gut.

The eyes belong to someone, or someones, who you’ve hurt or let down. They belong to your greatest mistake, to someone who you left behind, to someone who you regret. The same eyes over and over again, or the eyes of many who you’ve hurt, watching you, judging you, pleading for you to save them or apologize or make up for the mistakes you may not even remember making. You just know that you made them. They eyes don't lie.

The more you ignore these eyes, the more they seem to encroach on you: appearing in the walls, following you around corners, in the creases of your knuckles, the fold of your sheets. They replace the eyes of the people around you, the same eyes staring at you from everywhere you look.

Your skin itches with the constant feeling of being watched. Your head feels tight, and your own eyes feel too full, like there’s too much of you inside your skin. You’d do anything to get away from this feeling.

Soon enough, the mounting pressure explodes: you have to confront them and your guilt and your mistakes, and beg for the forgiveness they’re asking of you. Even if you don’t remember what those mistakes were, or why you should feel guilty, you have to tell someone. If you don't, the feeling will only mount, until all you can see are eyes. Eyes, just eyes.

tl;dr:

• The eyes of someone(s) who embodies your regret appear in the cracks of the world around you.
• The more you ignore the eyes, the more of them appear, and the more you feel an intense, heavy sense of guilt.
• The guilt you feel can be based on things you remember, or things you don't. If it's based on things you don't know, your head will also hurt.
• The eyes will ease if you admit your guilt, to the best of your ability. Tell someone your guilt, and the eyes will recede.
• If you don't, your whole world will become eyes.

Comments

[hallucinogem]

[emerald doesn't move; maybe she's too scared to do it, or maybe meeting somebody else in the same position as her is having the opposite effect. maybe it's making it easier to handle. misery loves company, right?]

I don't know what that means either. [she shakes her head, and there's just a hint of regret to it. as she works herself up to tell this person what the eyes are telling her, she can feel tension rise in her chest and an ache growing inside her skull.] They keep telling me "it's your fault she's dead", but... but I've never killed anyone. I don't know what they're talking about. I just want it to stop.

[toteninsel]

[ That's worse than any old promise. That's a lie. Ariane is no longer confused. For the first time since coming here, she's angry.

Slowly, still a little uncertain in her own body, Ariane lowers herself to the ground. She reaches out to one of the woman's hands that's wrapped around her head. If she doesn't pull away, Ariane makes the lightest, gentlest touch, like a spiderweb on the wind. ]

If you've never killed anyone, then it can't be your fault. It's not your fault.

[ It's not your fault when they push you, or kick you, or call you names. It's not your fault when you have to run away. ]

Is there anything I can do? To make it stop.

[hallucinogem]

[that makes sense. and... and the touch helps. the touch feels like a comfort, like something familiar to her. even if it's just something that light, so light to be almost imperceptible. emerald feels like she's had someone talk her down like this in the past just from that. she breathes out slowly and tries to collect her thoughts.]

[it doesn't come easy, but why would it?]

I don't know. I don't know what you can do. It doesn't... it doesn't hurt as bad now that I told you, I don't think. [she doesn't stop her own thoughts long enough to focus on the pain, or maybe she can't. either way, her words feel woefully inadequate right now at conveying the worry, the fear behind them.]

It's not the kind of thing we would forget, is it? Killing someone?

[toteninsel]

[ If it doesn't hurt as bad now that she's told Ariane, then Ariane will stay. She keeps here hand there, but increases the pressure just a little, now that she's confident this person doesn't want to pull away. ]

Okay. That's good. I'm here, if you need to keep talking.

[ Is that the kind of thing they'd forget? Ariane doesn't answer right away, and when she speaks up next, her voice is a little softer, a little more unsure. ]

I don't know. I'm sorry. I know I've forgotten years of my life, but... I still remember I made a promise to someone. And if I can remember something like that, then I think you'd remember killing someone.

[hallucinogem]

[emerald listens and just... lets herself be comforted. by the touch, by the words of this person she doesn't know. there's a nagging feeling that this should be strange, that all of this shouldn't be the way she would normally do it, but she shuts it up more easily than even she could have predicted. she sighs and presses back a little bit into the touch.]

I would... if I did kill someone, I would feel miserable about it. I need these stupid eyes to know that. [she's trying to bring herself back to reality. it's definitely all starting to hurt less.] I feel like I know that that's how the world works... that sometimes people have to kill people to get by. But I don't think I'm the kind of person who would do that. I feel like I'm the kind of person who just wants to live, and kind of... just do things that make me happy.

[toteninsel]

[ Even though she sees nothing out of the ordinary, Ariane glares in the eyes' direction. She's just as unsettling, after all. Maybe, if she focuses hard enough, she can scare them off. She wants to do that for this person. She's rarely wanted to do anything for anyone else since coming here, but she wants this. ]

[ When Ariane speaks again, her soft voice is low, the little rasp in it like static. ] Some people - they hate that. When others are happy. Maybe the eyes hate it.

Don't listen to them. [ Urgent, now. ] You have to be happy. There's nothing else.

[hallucinogem]

[right now, of the things in the immediate vicinity that are unsettling, emerald will take the sickly girl who's trying to help her out over the rapidly-shrinking number of judging eyes any day of the week. it takes a second for her to come fully back to reality, but the tone shift in this woman's voice is helping a surprising amount. it cuts through the noise, and it's easy to listen to maybe because of how insistent it is. maybe it's relatable. maybe emerald's used that tone of voice before herself.]

I have to be happy? [she repeats it like the solution to a riddle and lets a smile creep its way to the corners of her mouth. she can force herself into happiness about as well as she can handle everything else on her own, so it doesn't quite hit her heart yet—but it's a start. maybe because there's an easier emotion to tap into.]

You're talking about doing it out of spite, right? I can do spite. [her smile shows some teeth. she looks ahead of her and the eyes are vanishing even more quickly, leaving behind exactly what should have been underneath them this whole time. and she breathes out.] It sounds like you've got some experience with spite, too.

[toteninsel]

[ Ariane matches that smile with a rare one of her own. It shows her teeth and everything, and for once, Ariane doesn't feel self-conscious about the missing ones. She doesn't think this person will judge her. That's the one part of this strange exchange she's actually heard about. ]

Maybe I am. I can't remember if I have any experience with spite, but I don't think you're wrong, so thanks. [ She means that genuinely. ] I guess I just learned something about myself.

My name is Ariane, by the way. There's food and drink at the hotel, and I have a room there, if you need some space to catch your breath.

[hallucinogem]

[ariane. she commits it to memory, the way it's pronounced, the way it fits with the person she's looking at. she doesn't think twice about the missing teeth. some people don't have them for whatever reason. and the rest of it? well, some people are sick. some people... ha, maybe they're all sick here. that would be funny. it would make a lot of things make sense.]

[she keeps the pleasant look on her face, letting relief fill the space left by fear. and she offers her hand.]

Emerald. I live in the hotel too, I guess. [and she almost lets that trail off before saying with confidence,] I can go up with you to your room, yeah. Just until I feel a little less... insane, you know?