wellcome | 2.0 Test Drive Meme

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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.

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By sheer coincidence, Palamedes has slowly been making his way towards the man over the past twenty minutes or so. Every few plots he pauses, crouching down to look at the gravestone; sometimes he takes a notebook out of his pocket and writes in it, sometimes he briefly rests his hands on the rock. Sometimes, he just seems to look at it for a moment, and then move on.

Pal has been in Wellstone five months now, and it hasn’t escaped his notice that sometimes the graves change. There’s a pattern to it, he’s sure—if only he can find it.

He doesn’t even notice the newcomer until they’re nearly on top of each other, and when he speaks, Pal looks up sharply from where he’s crouched at a grave nearby and blinks his luminous grey eyes at the man.

“Not precisely how I would put it…but yes. More or less.”

At this, some tension goes out of the man's shoulders, and he exhales a long breath.

"Well, cheers for that," he says, and turns to face Palamades; his smile is faintly wry, under the horrible eyes. "I was beginning to worry it was just me. How would you put it?"

To be entirely fair to John, Palamedes once called the graveyard death-y; in comparison can you feel the skeletons is a lot more precise.

Pal begins to smile as well, though his expression falters slightly as the man's eclipse-like eyes suddenly bore into him. It's almost enough to make him hesitate--but it's not like anyone can help what their eyes look like, right?

He brushes himself off as he stands. "I would say that I can sense the presence of buried organic material consisting of a mix of protein, collagen, calcium, and phosphorus. But that's just a fancy way of saying 'bones.'" This time he does smile, awed and hopeful. Nearly everyone in town can tap into some ability or other, but none of them have described anything so familiar as this. "You really can sense it?"

John catches the hesitation, and his smile goes a little lopsided, awkward; he knows how he looks. But this is more interesting, so he seizes on the question.

"I really can. Except it's," and here he waves a hand, vague, "less collagen and phosphorus and more a dead body. I can see you," he tips a hand to Palamedes, "and that headstone, and the fellow six feet under the dirt. A bit like looking into a pond and seeing the fish under the water, except it's not really looking. Hell of a thing to put into words."

Palamedes nods eagerly, excitedly. Whatever discomfort had briefly made him hesitate has fully evaporated. What the man describes isn't precisely the same, but it's remarkably close to his own experience. "No, no, I know what you mean--only, Emperor's bones, it took me weeks to figure it out. For me, it's like the pond has lots of muck in it, and I can only see one bit of the fish at a time. So I have to piece what I'm seeing together from its disparate parts."

He offers his hand. "Palamedes Sextus. Would you mind if I tried something?"

Emperor's bones, he says, and that's— that's almost something. It itches in the back of his head, another little migraine-burst of familiarity. But digging at those has only given him dizzy spells and nosebleeds, so John shoulders right past it.

"Palamedes Sextus," he repeats, which is another almost-something, "I'm John."

He reaches out to clasp the man's hand.

"Be my guest."

“Pal, if you prefer.” There is something odd about the feel of the man’s hand in his own. It isn’t lifeless, exactly, but it’s missing a certain spark. The word inert floats up through Palamedes mind.

But he can’t make sense of it, and so he lets it go. It may even be his imagination.

With a sly sort of smile, Palamedes takes something out of his pocket that resembles a white oblong pebble. Once it had been a cow’s rib bone, discarded in the desert, but Pal has practiced with it so much that there’s nothing rib-shaped about it anymore.

He places it in John’s palm. “What do you make of this?”

John says, with open delight: "I could use a pal." Then Palamedes places the bit of cow's bone in his palm, and his expression crumples like he's been punched.

It's just a bit of cow's bone. He rolls it between the creases of his palm, frowning down at it with the bewildered alarm of a man holding a live hornet. The migraine behind his eyes is doing backflips. He can't help but probe at the gap in his mind, like worrying a loose tooth. It makes his eyes water.

He gives up and holds the bone back out, a little too eager to be rid of it.

"What did you do to that cow?"

Pal doesn’t know what John’s reaction will be to the bit of misshapen cow’s bone, but he js certainly not expecting that look of pained horror. Perhaps he has said too much. Perhaps he has gone too far. Perhaps cow bones means something different to this man, or perhaps he feels the same creeping disgust that Pal so often does when he contemplates the power at his fingertips.

But it cannot be denied that John sees something in that lump of calcium phosphate that no one but him does, and so he grasps that fact and runs with it.

“Well, the cow was already dead,” he begins, immediately realizing that that might not sound much better. “Perhaps you’ve noticed the piles of bones at the edge of town? My only hypothesis is that some past residents took care of the animals, and when they disappeared, the poor things starved. Which is dreadful, but—well, as far as I can tell, it happened a long time ago.”

He rolls the bit of bone back and forth between his thumb and forefinger like a worry stone. “…it was a rib when I found it. But I’ve found that with the right kind of concentration, I can turn it into other things.” He winces. “Sorry, that was a bit much, was it?”

"No," says John, in a hurry to soothe him, but there's still a crease of discomfort between his brows. He keeps frowning at the bit of bone, tracking its movement between Pal's fingers. "Don't worry about it. Cows are overrated."

He finds that he means it: fuck cows, honestly. The headache has built to an ugly heat in his sinuses, and he sniffs ungracefully, reaches up to smudge away blood on the edge of his wrist.

"Reminds me of something." Here he slants a humorless smile at Pal and tips his wrist to show the blood, which might be interesting or might just be gross. At least it isn't still running; for whatever reason, his nosebleeds end as soon as they've started. "Not very comfortable, that."

“I wasn’t aware that cows were ‘rated’ at all,” says Palamedes, relaxing ever-so-slightly when the man reassures him. His own brows crease in sympathy when John’s nose starts to bleed; he takes a handkerchief out of his pocket and hands it over. “Yes, you have to be careful of that. I have found that it is possible to tap into unusual abilities without being subjected to the symptoms associated with memory retrieval, but it’s a delicate dance. Better to approach one’s talents carefully, in my experience.”

"Cheers," murmurs John, and he takes the handkerchief. Handing it back smudged scarlet with his blood feels— wrong, in the migraine sort of way, which he's growing impatient with. He dismisses it as rude regardless and tucks the dirty handkerchief in his pocket. He can give it back when no one's bleeding from the face about cows.

"Any advice on where to start? I'm finding headaches under every stone. Literally, here."

Pal smiles sympathetically. “The trick, in my experience, is to separate the effort to remember from the effort to learn. You’re not trying to recall something you used to know, you’re discovering something new—about yourself, yes, but also about this place in which we’ve found ourselves. If you feel yourself begin to remember something, don’t pursue it. Let it go.” He shrugs ruefully. “It takes some practice, and a bit of mental gymnastics, but it is possible.”

He takes something else out of his pocket. It’s a coin, or at least it’s coin-shaped—any identifiable markers are long rubbed off—that Palamedes found in the depths of one of the chasms that has appeared in Wellstone. It’s a thousand years old, at least, and once belonged to someone, though who, he cannot figure out.

“Take this, and tell me what you see. Don’t try anything, just observe.”

This one doesn't hurt to touch, so John takes it readily. He smooths the pads of his fingers over the worn-away face of the thing, fidgets his blunt thumbnail against its edge.

"This might be less my wheelhouse than cow bones," he says, slowly. "It feels like a grave. The bones are like beacons, they catch your eye. But everything here is lit by the same glow... it's all one big soup of death."

He flips the coin and catches it. Without remorse, he adds:

"And I can't make heads or tails of it."

Palamedes allows a crooked smile in response to the pun. “It is, isn’t it? I’ve come to believe that that aura of death may be quite literal. There are the graves, of course. But, more than that, I fear that innumerable people have died in this town, over and over, for a very long time. It’s happened so often, in fact, that even simple objects carry some sort of residue.”

He takes back the coin. “But that’s a bit heavy for your first day, isn’t it? As for your own abilities, if you don’t mind me speculating, I have to wonder if they are trigged by organic matter specifically. Or maybe it’s just bones. Gives you a starting point, at least.”

John hands the coin back readily enough, lifts a shoulder in a half-shrug at a bit heavy. It all sounds bleak on paper, maybe, but it hadn't quite occurred to him to be creeped out. It doesn't feel spooky. The hum of death-energy feels vast and steady as the desert around them, and has the same sort of majesty: beautiful, ancient, uncaring.

"I'm alright with being the bone guy. Happy to help with some death-themed archaeology— though maybe that's all archaeology, when you think about it." He snaps his fingers in sudden, pleased revelation: "You and me, we'll be Indiana Bones."

Indiana Bones. Palamedes faintly mouths the two words, as though maybe that will make their meaning clear. But they remain absolutely nonsensical.

He decides to smile politely and move on. “There are an awful lot of bones about, so we could use a bone guy, to be honest. I’ve found a few here—on the surface that is, I’m not about to go digging—and more in the canyons that cut through town. To be frank, it paints an unsettling picture of the town’s past.”

“But that's where the death archeology comes in," and here he does smile; that quip he thinks he understands. "The more we can discover about what might have happened here previously, the more we can prepare for what may be to come.”

Pal doesn't get it, and that feels— something. Another almost-something, another crack in his mind he could dig his fingers into. Pry it open for more headache.

But maybe Pal has the right idea, here: he just notes that as new information and carries on.

"Sounds ominous," he agrees, mildly. "I'm in. Next expedition, just point me at the bones."

Maybe they'll all freak him out like the cow's rib; maybe they won't. He'll be learning something, either way. Sooner or later, it'll be something he can use.

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2.0 Test Drive Meme

graveyard smash

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