TDM - OCTOBER 2020

[robbies]

TEST DRIVE MEME - OCTOBER 2020

Everyone's entitled to one good scare.
CW: Violence, death, mouth trauma, vomiting, needles, razors

---

“Help me. Please, help me…”

A child’s voice, calling out for aid. There’s no rhyme or reason for when it comes to you. It’s so quiet, a whisper in the deepest, darkest corners of your mind. Were it not for the sharp, stabbing pain it pulls out of you, you could ignore it. You could even pretend it’s just your imagination.

It all happens so quickly and powerfully. Left in the dust, your brain struggles to process it all. Blacking out is the least it can do, but it’s also all it can do, and it does so before you even have a chance to fully register just how young the voice is, and how deeply, heartbreakingly lost it sounds.

When you finally awaken with your bare feet tangled in soft sheets, a layer of fuzzy fleece or slinky silk clinging to your body like another layer of skin, the sunlight pouring in from the window next to your bed momentarily blinding you, and the cries of happy children playing baseball outside of it carrying faintly, it all becomes very clear—

Something is horribly wrong.

---

OCTOBER 1st.

It becomes very clear very quickly that this isn’t a simple kidnapping. If you’re twenty years old or older, the bedroom you wake up in is very clearly a couple’s bedroom — with separate beds like a modest, modern couple of course! A similarly lost and confused stranger is in the other. They are your counterpart, for everything in this room has a matching counterpart — the nightstand and lamp each of you have beside your beds, the framed pictures on the wall, even your pajamas. If you’re under twenty years old, your room is smaller but more personalized, filled with comic books, model kits, stray baseball cards littered around the floor. Dolls, fashion magazines of people dressed from a bygone era, stacks of vinyl records neatly arranged next to a record player. And then there are the pictures. They’re everywhere in the house — in a frame on your nightstand, hung on the walls, stuck in the photo albums and scrapbooks lying on your desk or tucked away in drawers. Here you are on your wedding day, exchanging vows with your partner. Here’s you sitting in a fishing boat with one of the younger members of your house. Here’s a picture of you at ten years old getting ready for the first day of school. All of the photographs are aged, sepia, even yellowed and dusty in frames hung for a long, long time. By the time you make it down to the living room, you’ll notice that the television is on; someone must have forgotten to turn it off before they went to bed. On it, a cartoon pack of cigarettes and accompanying cigarette dancers prance around a black and white pumpkin patch, joined by dancing skeletons, ghosts and witches as a cheerful little earworm blares: ”Thirty days til Halloween, Halloween, Halloween, thirty days til Halloween—“

---

GETTING TO KNOW THE NEIGHBORS.

As you get acclimated, you gradually begin to learn more about this strange new world you’ve found yourself in. You’re in a neighborhood on the east side of a town called Santa Rosita located… somewhere in California (wherever or whatever that might be). The year is 1961. If it wasn’t clear enough, your neighbors are more than willing to humor you if you ask. Even if you accost them with questions and demands. Sure, you and your family are a little kooky, and you have a very overactive imagination, but the key to any good joke is playing along! And how could something like “I’m from the future, from another world” be anything but a joke? A. AUNT MYRNA'S PARTY CHEESE SALAD. Over the course of the week, your neighbors will come by unannounced, each with a new homecooked meal to welcome you to their cozy little side of town. Meatloaf, potato salad, lamb chops. Gelatin molds — lots of gelatin molds. Someone even comes by to drop off a gelatinous yellow lump of pineapple, green peppers, celery and yellow cheese swimming in a soupy mixture of sour and whipped cream. “It’s my aunt Myrna’s recipe!” they gush once they drop the casserole tin into your hands, proceeding to rattle off every ingredient. Well, at least you won’t be starving anytime soon. When you bring it back in to your kitchen - and its cheery wallpaper and its floral patterned Pyrex dishware, you and your new...family(?) all stare at the cheese salad, the gelatin, the curiously frosted meatloaf spread. A smorgasbord courtesy of the insistent generosity! Who will take the first bite?

B. DON'T BE A SQUARE!

You can only avoid the cheer and the neighbors for so long, even as you sit inside enjoying all the amenities of your new home. The television can only turn its volume up to five, after all! One bright and sunny Saturday, the weather crisp and clear, news broadcasts and reruns of The Ed Sullivan Show are drowned out by the music in the neighborhood. Eventually it’s too much to bear — you simply must put on your shoes and go discover the source of that infernal racket.

Why, it’s the block party! Haven’t you seen the invitation — with instructions — sitting in your mailbox, silly? Wear a badge so everyone on the block can know you’re new and welcome you to their extended family!

Well! Each neighbor was supposed to set up a table with snacks and drinks and entertainment on their front lawn. Carter Mayhew, one of your Robbie neighbors, has a whole ring toss obstacle course set up for boys to play with, and his wife is cheerfully and blandly instructing a group of girls on jump rope rhymes. Colorful streamers hang from every lamppost and mailbox, balloons and party favors galore. Like you, there are even a few newcomers to Santa Rosita that are caught just as unaware of this event — though others are being welcomed in by husbands and wives and children, caught in conversations about building decks and the upcoming Halloween festivities.

Before you can decide if returning home or joining the party is your choice, a plate with chips and dips and yes, more gelatin is shoved into your hands and a party hat snapped on to your head.

“The guest of honor has arrived! Come and meet your neighbors, neighbor!”

---

THROUGHOUT OCTOBER.

Life falls into a peaceful haze for the next several days. Dull, unassuming, tranquil. As the month drags on, the spirit of Halloween begins to manifest in Santa Rosita, from the pumpkins people start putting out on their doorsteps to the smiling faces of paper skeletons pressed against their windows. And then, towards the end of the month, something terrible happens. You hear it first through word of mouth, rippling through Santa Rosita like a wave, dark murmurs accompanied by sad sighs and downturned eyes. Soon, you start to read about it. Grim business, they say. A tragedy. How could something like this happen. People stop talking about it by the end of the week. Best just to forget about it. Every day, that cigarette commercial comes on. It’s impossible to escape it. And every day, the number of days in the song changes, counting down. ”Thirteen days till Halloween—” “Eight more days til Halloween—” “Three more days til Halloween, Halloween, Halloween…”

---

HALLOWEEN.

CW: Violence, death, mouth trauma, vomiting, needles, razors

October 31st. It sneaks up on you whether you like it or not. When dawn breaks on Halloween day, things are as serene as they’ve ever been as men do yard work, raking leaves as their wives bake fresh pie and cookies in the house, the spicy scent of cinnamon, apple and pumpkin wafting through the neighborhood on chilly October wind. There’s a smile on every child’s face as they skip off the school bus in the afternoon, running into their houses to get their costumes ready. As it begins to get dark, the residents of Santa Rosita start lighting their jack-o-lanterns. One by one, little balls of light flicker to life on every porch and doorstep, jagged smiles grinning in the dark. For the entire night, nobody blows the candle inside their pumpkins out. It’s a tradition, a very old one, and traditions are just another way of saying rules. And Halloween in Santa Rosita, as it turns out, lives and dies by the rules.

A. ALWAYS CHECK YOUR CANDY.

Halloween isn’t just for the kids, although they certainly make up the bulk of who you’ll see out and about on the streets. Walking through Santa Rosita, your neighbors are as generous with handing out treats as they are with handing out gelatin molds and pot roasts, and they don’t discriminate. Adults are received just as warmly as children; the worst one can expect is a quirked eyebrow if they show up to a house without a costume.

Apples, packs of gum, homemade cookies. Chocolate bars, nickels, popcorn balls. Your neighbors hand out all sorts of treats, most of them homemade. The Robbies are no exception, and it’s their treats that seem a bit more high quality than most, some of the candy they hand out being obviously expensive, brand names. The good stuff. They drop each treat into your bag with those same pleasant, mild expressions and too-tight smiles you’ve grown used to in your short time here.

Eventually, as everyone winds up doing at some point in the night, you decide to start digging into your treat bag to sample some of your well-earned goods — maybe in the comfort of your home, maybe outside on the streets. And that’s when the fun begins.

Maybe you bite into metal, the razor sharp end of a blade embedded into the apple or candy bar you’ve picked out burying itself in your gums, or splitting your tongue. Maybe it’s a needle, impaling itself straight through the roof of your mouth or a cheek. Or maybe it’s nothing that obvious. Maybe the realization that something is wrong comes moments after you’ve devoured that chocolate bar or cookie, the bitter aftertaste of rat poison hitting the back of your throat along with bile and the rest of the contents of your stomach as they rise up and out of your mouth.

Or maybe you’ll bite into plain, sweet chocolate or fresh fruit. That’s also part of the surprise. You really don’t know what you’ll get until you start eating.

B. ALWAYS RESPECT THE DEAD.

At ten o’clock, all the television sets in the neighborhood turn on, blaring to life right in the middle of that omnipresent cigarette commercial. The volume begins to rise of its own accord as your television starts to pick up interference, bursts of static squealing amidst the rising, screaming chorus of ”HAPPY HAPPY HALLOWEEN, HALLOWEEN, HALLOWEEN!”

Breaking through the static, garbled and tinny, a child’s voice cries out.

“Can’t— I can’t hold them— back— Pumpkin— don’t blow the— out—”

And just as quickly as it cut in, the voice cuts back out. Commercial jingle notwithstanding, you’re alone once more. But not for long.

The doorbell rings. You can see them outside from your window: costumed children. Their masks and clothes are grimy and ragged from the muddy, slimy water they’ve been decomposing in for over a week. When they come to your door, squelching wetly as they shamble up the porch steps, they ring the bell or knock, as all polite children do. If you don’t let them in, they’ll find their own way, always by force. And once they find you, all they can gurgle in their reedy, waterlogged voices is, ”Trick or treat.”

From there, they attack.

With superhuman strength and speed, they tear and rip at anything they can get their hands on — clothing, skin, muscle, face, eyes. Being short and small, despite their strength, they're at a distinct disadvantage. They can even be thrown off, with some effort. But they don’t stay down for long, and attempting to hurt or mortally wound them only stalls them for a few moments, if that. How can you kill something that’s already dead?

Some in the neighborhood are willing to try and find out.

The only houses they seem to ignore completely are the ones with lit jack-o-lanterns still outside. They’ll loiter outside these houses, staring straight ahead at your door or window like they can see exactly where you are. But sooner or later, they’ll pass by and move onto the next house.

As long as the candles in carved pumpkins stay lit.

---

OOC INFO

Hello, and welcome to We're Still Here's first TDM! Here's a few things we'd like you to keep in mind:

The TDM is canon. You can treat this as the game's first real event and pick and choose what threads you would like your character to remember when they enter the game. For characters who app into the game, the events of the TDM will be treated like a dream. Upon awakening from it, characters will find that time has jumped ahead to December 1st. You may also feel free to use similar reality and/or time distortions to explain why the family members your characters have in the TDM aren't the same as the ones they may be assigned to in the game proper.

If you would like to have Halloween content in your relaxed housing prompts, please feel free! You are not beholden to follow our prompts exactly so long as the spirit is maintained.

There is no Network prompt listed, but feel free to wildcard one for your characters anyway.

Although the TDM is canon in the sense that characters are free to remember its events when they app into the game, it does not count as an official plot heavy event, meaning that characters will not receive regains from participating in it.

With regards to the dead trick-or-treaters: you may NPC them however you'd like, but keep the details we've listed in their prompt in mind. They are supernaturally fast and strong, will ignore houses as long as they have a lit pumpkin on the porch outside, and will try to enter each house the moment the candle in the pumpkin goes out. Additionally, they can't be killed, but they can be momentarily stalled by injuring them. By November 1st, 6AM, they will disappear the moment the sun comes out.

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Comments

[13thcommander]

That's an excellent point.

[Definitely something worth thinking about.]

Have you tried to leave the town? Or gone at all to the outskirts of it?

[ribticklers]

Not yet. [Because Sans doesn't have any reason to believe he would be safer outside of the town than he would in it. He has no reason to trust the human world. But if this guy was always human, maybe he can give a better assessment here.] It'd be a pretty long walk all the way out there. What about you?

[13thcommander]

No.

[Erwin gestures at the empty sleeve where his right arm should be, and for the first time, his voice takes on a bitter tone.]

If there's anything out there, I wouldn't be any good in a fight.

[Stupid war injuries.]

It would be interesting to get access to one of the... cars? I believe they're called cars... that I've seen and try to steer it out of town.

[ribticklers]

[Well, if this guy is worried about getting into trouble, too, maybe Sans's worries aren't unfounded. Of course, he was also talking about being from a pretty different place... Well, better safe than sorry.] Did you check the garage? There was one of those where they stuck me, might be one in yours. But, uh, I can't drive.

[13thcommander]

[It's not that Erwin is worried about getting into trouble, exactly, but more that he wants to know exactly what trouble he's signing up for before he commits to it.]

There's one in there. [Erwin sighs and shakes his head.] I can't drive either.

[How do those things work, Sans? How?]

Too bad there aren't any horses around. I know how to work with a horse.

[ribticklers]

[Sans has heard of humans riding horses, and also horses in general, but he has never seen this.] Don't you have to give those food and water and a place to live and everything? [That sounds like a lot of work.]

[13thcommander]

Yes, that's all true.

[With everything else that's happened lately, Erwin is just rolling with it that Sans doesn't seem to know much about horses.]

They're wonderful animals, though.

[ribticklers]

Yeah, they're probably cool if you're responsible. Me, I've got a pet rock at home and I still forget to feed it. [The way Sans says it, it sounds like a joke, but actually that is completely true.]

[13thcommander]

How do you...

[You know what, never mind. Erwin abruptly stands up.]

Would you like a cup of coffee?

[They've got the real stuff here and he can't get enough of it.]

[ribticklers]

If you're offering. [Sans is happy to let any of Erwin's potential rock questions slide entirely off the metaphorical back of this conversation. Maybe keeping as much of his life as plausibly deniable as possible has become too much of a habit.] Whoever kidnapped us is sure givin' us a lot of time to ourselves.

[Isn't there supposed to be a ransom involved or something? That's how it works in movies.]

[13thcommander]

They are, aren't they?

[Erwin busies himself with the coffee maker and two mugs. It took him a few tries to figure the machine out, but he was highly motivated once he realized it made coffee, and that coffee tastes a lot better here than what he's used to.]

That seems strange, doesn't it? Why kidnap so many people and then leave them to their own devices?

[ribticklers]

Yeah, it ain't like I've ever been kidnapped before, but nobody ever told me you might get a house out of the deal. [And also somehow get pulled out of a magic barrier under a mountain, and also given a new body.] And I'm not sayin' it couldn't be one of them, but all the people I've met who live here don't, uh, seem like the type.

[They don't even really seem like actual people, honestly.]

[13thcommander]

Yes. None of it adds up.

[The coffee is finished, and Erwin brings the pot to the table, then goes to the refrigerator to get the milk. There's already a bowl of sugar on the table.]

And I agree on that as well: no one I've met so far seems to have much ill intent. If anything, quite the opposite.

[He sits down across from Sans and starts doctoring his own cup of coffee. For someone who looks like he's in pretty good shape, Erwin piles on the milk and sugar.]

They're almost too friendly.

then I had to deeply contemplate sans having actual taste buds

[ribticklers]

[Sans almost takes it black--then he pauses, takes a test sip, and adds some milk to it while trying not to die from just how bitter that was. Sans had no expectations for the gelatin thing's taste, but wow, when it comes to coffee, apparently having real physical taste buds is a bit of a trip.

He's just going to pretend that black coffee taste test thing didn't happen, though.]

Yeah, it's kinda creepin' me out. I guess it's workin' out right now, 'cause it's not like I've got a job here, and they keep givin' us food, but... [It's creepy.]

he made the right choice with the coffee

[13thcommander]

[Erwin isn't going to question Sans adding milk to his coffee. The milk is here, and sugar too, and it's cheap enough to really splash it around, and Erwin faults no one for taking advantage.]

It seems like we'll have to get jobs at some point, doesn't it?

[Erwin has his own coffee to the perfect sludgey ratio of mostly sugar and milk, and he pauses in stirring it to consider this new idea.]

I don't suppose they have a military here, or that they'd allow anyone new to join it.

personally I'm on Erwin's side

[ribticklers]

[Sans raises an eyebrow. Not that he is really aware he's doing that.] You get kidnapped and think about joining their--army, or whatever they've got here? [Sans has seen no signs of a castle or royalty, so he is guessing there's no Royal Guard.] But hey, if that's what you know, I get it.

oh man, just wait until they discover pumpkin spice

[13thcommander]

Not joining, necessarily, but... seeing what they're all about.

[Erwin shrugs.]

I was a commander in the military back home. It's what I know, and what I'm good at. It would only make sense to do something similar here.

What about you? What was your work like, back home?

[ribticklers]

[Sans shrugs.] Whatever I could get that didn't make me work too hard. Think the hot dog stand's my favorite. [Actually, being a sentry like four times over might also technically make him part of the military, but only in the loosest possible sense. Nobody was expecting him to fight any humans any time soon.]

[13thcommander]

What's a hot dog stand?

[Yeeeeah, Erwin didn't think Sans was military, but he also didn't want to presume. Maybe this hot dog thing involves canines in some capacity?]

[ribticklers]

A place you stand at to sell hot dogs. [A place that is also a sentry station that he should probably be using to do sentry things. But hot dogs are better. Wait.] D'you know what a hot dog is?

[13thcommander]

I'm afraid I don't.

[Sentry duty combined with salesmanship would remind Erwin of the Garrison Corps, honestly.]

Is it some kind of canine?

[ribticklers]

It's food--you've gotta try it sometime, if they've got it here. [If not, Sans figures he can work something out. He sold a lot of weird hot dog-adjacent things at that stand.] Course, if they do have it here, someone's probably stuck it in some gelatin by now.

[Sans would definitely try that.]

[13thcommander]

That... is not a ringing endorsement.

[It makes Erwin smile, though. They would put it in gelatin, whatever it is.]

[ribticklers]

A hot dog bun's traditional, [Sans says, as if he is now a food expert,] but I ain't gonna stop anybody from innovatin'.