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!tdm

TDM - OCTOBER 2020

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.

▶ NAVIGATION ◀
COMMS	logs \| network \| ooc \| memes
OOC INFO	premise \| rules \| faq \| taken \| applications \| hiatus/drop/canon updates \| reserves \| mod contact
SETTING INFO	calendar \| setting \| housing \| npcs \| death and tranquilizing \| event suggestions/engagements

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

A) October 1st and thereabouts
[ Levi can’t figure out if the fake photographs or the fact that someone took the time to make sure there’s a wardrobe that’s to size are the creepiest parts of this absolute shitshow, but that’s where he’s at right now. He’s managed to get dressed in the least offensive clothes he could throw together, rather nicely so, and whoever has the absolute misfortune of living in his household is either going to get the experience of finding him tossing the place because it’s crazy and he has no idea of what’s going on, or—

Or, after he’s had a chance to come to terms with the fact that things are entirely out of control, they’ll run into him aggressively cleaning up. Reorganizing. Dusting. Scrubbing.

Give it a few hours and the house is going to be spotless. There’s a very real chance any housemate is going to get conscripted. ]

B) Don’t Be a Square
[ Fuck your entire block party? He is too old and tired for this, and a stranger actually had the balls to get into his personal space and force a party hat on his head. He is not, at present, wearing said hat.

So there’s this short, angry man sitting off somewhere relatively out of the way of foot traffic, a party hat crushed and set carefully off to one side, while he watches the neighborly proceedings with a dead-eyed stare. If he’s looking for something, he’s not finding it, but he does occasionally pick at some chips on a plate next to him. The chips were about the only saving grace here. If someone’s bored or unwise enough to stray too close, he’ll even have a comment to offer: ]

It’s like a nonstop bullshit parade. Almost impressive.

[ Yeah, that’s about where Levi’s at. It’s been a rough time for him lately and ending up here has only changed the flavor of absolute garbage he’s had to put up with. ]

C. Wildcard
[ Feel free to PM me or hit me up at

Dynamicrange if you want something unique. ]

[So, both Osomatsu and Levi have been forced into this situation. Neither wants to be at this party, both are just...resigning themselves to be here. Both agree that the chips are the only saving grace.

Which says a lot, because these are some B-tier chips. A solid B. Not an A. A B.

Nonetheless, he's at least wandering around and trying to somehow get out of the main foot traffic when he manages to wander off to the side and hear that voice. For a moment, he pauses, because it sounds distinctly familiar, but it's probably just a passing resemblance to someone he knows, and when he looks at the guy who said it, yeah, he definitely doesn't know him.

Not that he doesn't agree.]

Right, right? I don't wanna be here, but these yahoos kinda just pushed it on me. Kinda literally! [He notes what Levi has done with his hat......and crumples his own red party hat in similar fashion after taking it off his head.

This is a sign of true anger.] I don't even know what this is for! Just to bug everyone else?

[Probably not, but it sure feels like it.]

[ At least someone can understand this bitter middle-aged man’s low key animosity towards neighborhood functions. Never could he have counted on such solidarity from a stranger.

Really, the party hats had it coming. ]

If they aren’t trying with all this, they must have natural talent. [ Not that the deadpan tone he’s using seems all that aggravated. ] It’s some weird shit, isn’t it?

[Erwin has been here for a few days so far, and hasn't seen anyone he knows. He's gathered, by now, that people are from all different places and times, and he's been searching--hoping--that he'd find someone he knows. He doesn't know how likely that is, though; in the pictures of him in his house, the ones from the event called World War II, there are some familiar faces. He wonders if he got all of them killed in this world, too.]

[So when he sees someone he knows--and not just anyone from back home, Levi--Erwin hurries over. He's so enthralled with finding someone from home that he approaches Levi from behind, something he'd normally never do, especially not without announcing his presence. Levi can tell someone is walking over to him, though, and just before Erwin opens his mouth to say something, Levi speaks first and gives that spicy little comment.]

[Erwin stops, and smiles. It's so perfectly Levi, so fitting.]

[He clears his throat.]

They'll give you more food if you wear the hats.

[Is Erwin wearing one? Yes he is, and it looks almost as ridiculous as his wildly patterned shirt.]

[ He hasn’t heard that voice in years. So that’s intensely fucked up.

He exhales heavily before he turns his head and looks up. Erwin is standing there, dressed in absolutely ridiculous clothes like most of the people around here and there’s one of those stupid hats on his head. ]

I’m not wearing the shitty hat, Erwin. [ Then, without any hesitation: ] You look ridiculous.

I know.

[Erwin eases himself down to sit next to Levi, pushing Levi's crumpled hat out of the way with his foot.]

I'm trying to blend in.

You’re enjoying it.

[ Levi’s not not blending in. Slacks and a relatively plain button down shirt had been a perfectly acceptable combination. He leans forward, snatching up the discarded hat, and sets it by his plate. It gives him something to do for a moment. ]

Hey. Should I ask how you’re alive, or do you think that furry bastard managed to take me out with him? [ Erwin’s opinion mattered here, honestly, because he’s not sure. This is surreal. ]

I'm gathering information.

[For what, he can't say, but being observant and staying one step ahead has served Erwin pretty well so far, so he just kept it up when he arrived here.]

... what?

[Oh. Oh, that's not a good feeling. Erwin had kind of assumed something like that had happened, but having it confirmed is another thing all together. His hand goes to the scars on his left side, cupping around them protectively.]

Shinganshina?

[ Erwin put things together no one else could, and that required knowing everything that might be relevant. It doesn’t occur to him to be anything but entirely blunt and honest. Besides, one or both of them are dead, delicacy is probably off the table if he’d even been capable of it in the first place. ]

Yeah. We won, but the Beast titan escaped. [ That’s the relevant part. The messy details didn’t need discussed right now. The basement could be for later. The years after... well, that promise he’d made was what mattered. ] I finally got the chance to shove a thunderspear in his gut. In his real body.

[ And now he’s here. With Erwin. Who is wearing a stupid hat. ]

[It's fine, really; honest and blunt has always been Levi's style, and if he'd suddenly veered towards being cagey and subtle, Erwin would think something was wrong. It just hurts to hear, that's all. It hurts knowing that, whatever else happens in this world, your time in the old one is over.]

I knew you would.

[Erwin takes his hand off his side, letting it fall limply between them.]

I knew you'd be able to take him out.

[So the Beast titan is dead, at least. There is no other possible outcome that Erwin will consider.]

I wish I'd been there to see it.

Pretty sure it blew up in my face. [ He looks over at Erwin, something like exasperation reaching his voice. Being there seems like an unenviable position. Don’t start this with him.

Not that he actually recalls the explosion itself. He doesn’t know how this bullshit works.

The chips are no longer making up for any part of this terrible party. ] So. What do you think of the situation so far, Commander?

[Erwin had meant it more in the philosophical "I wish I'd been there, with you, instead of being dead" way, but he won't badger Levi about it. It looks like it's been a long, difficult path for him. From Erwin's perspective, he last saw Levi a few days ago, but now that he looks more closely, he can see signs of aging that weren't there before. Gods, how long has he been dead?]

I'm no one's Commander here.

[Except that's not true anymore, is it? Levi is here now, so maybe he's a commander of one.]

It's different. A good number of people in the town got pulled here from somewhere else, like we did. The locals are friendly, but there's something off about them. There's something off about the whole situation.

[A pause.]

There are pictures of you on my walls, in the house they put me in. They're war pictures, like we fought together in this World War II event.

There are... other members of the Survey Corps in the pictures too.

[Dead members of the Survey Corps, which led Erwin to believe Levi was dead too.]

TEST DRIVE MEME - OCTOBER 2020

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

OCTOBER 1st.

GETTING TO KNOW THE NEIGHBORS.

A. AUNT MYRNA'S PARTY CHEESE SALAD.

B. DON'T BE A SQUARE!

THROUGHOUT OCTOBER.

HALLOWEEN.

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

A. ALWAYS CHECK YOUR CANDY.

B. ALWAYS RESPECT THE DEAD.

OOC INFO

Levi | Attack on Titan

B

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being a square

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A!

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ahhh idk if i'm gonna commit to this game or not yet but! Here's Isabel!! | B

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