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

Quentin Coldwater | The Magicians | OTA - CW-mouth injury, gore

[moderatelymaladjusted]

OCTOBER 1st

There's nothing like waking up not even remembering when or how you went to sleep but. Sometimes that's just how the world works and Quentin blinks up at the white ceiling, trying to roll with it. Sure, he has no idea what happened, but that's not really a new thing and so far, waking up to a white ceiling hasn't been menacing or an omen of doom. But maybe there's a first time for everything.

Once the blinking is done, he gets up and holy shit. Everything kind of matches everything else, from his pajamas (what?) to the fuzzy slippers to the bedspread currently on the floor. Even the wallpaper is in on it and Quentin just-- stares, like an idiot, until the pictures on the wall (and on the dresser, on the window sill and there's even one framed and placed lovingly on the table in the bathroom) catches his attention and then it's a whole new kind of horror.

It's him, but a not-him. He can't remember any of this, not the snow fight or the kiss. Not the wedding and there's no way he'd want to spend that much time on a beach. But they are still there, flash-frozen memories of a life Quentin doesn't remember living.

The house yields nothing, even if he snoops in the drawers and pokes through the refrigerator.

Everything is violently normal, except for how nothing about Quentin or what he's used to could ever be called that. It's like something out of a tv show, the one his dad used to love watching late at night when he thought Quentin was asleep.

Only, Quentin is standing in the middle of it.

Which... tracks?

He sits back down on the bed, head in his hands and his eyes screwed shut, the few mental wards he's been able to learn pulled all the way down and he's thinking - Penny! P E N N Y! as loud as he can, even running through a few of TSwifts more ear-catching songs just to be extra annoying about it.

"Come on, Penny. This is not nothing and I know you can hear me."

Halloween - always check your candy.

He didn't want to go out for Trick or Treating. Hadn't done it in years, not since High School and that whole horrible thing that happened.

This is now. This is his house and his front porch that he's sitting on.

Or, it's a place in time that seems to be now unless Quentin is losing his mind (again), and he's picking up an apple, biting in to it as he flips through the magazine in his lap. Not a fantasy book, because fuck this place, but it's something to read. Something familiar, flipping pages and reading like a normal person.

The pain doesn't come before the blood. There's a bright, fresh taste of an ripe apple and then there's blood dripping down on the papers, smearing under his fingertips and there's something hard in his mouth and under his tongue, slicing even as Quentin tries to open his mouth back up - to get the apple away. The too-familiar taste of his own blood comes way later, it comes with the pain, stinging and tearing at his lips and tongue and teeth.

There's a wet gurgle as he pulls the razor-blade out and a fresh spray of blood down his chin and the magazine is ruined.

"What the fuc-?"

oct 1- drama up in here

[dramaquinn]

When it sets in that this is disturbingly realistic, Alice feels sick to her stomach— and then there's a picture in the bathroom, and that actually does make her sick. Fuck. No. She hasn't been in a place to even consider if she wants a family, and now this entire house is telling her she has one. She got married and had kids and oh god, her stomach churns again. The story the house tells is one where she, as she is right now, did things (or had things done to her) that she doesn't remember.

Deep breaths. Her stomach calms down enough that she can walk. Maybe some tea will help settle her stomach more, and then she can think.

It feels safest to be in the bedroom she woke up in, where at most one other person will ever be. Downstairs is communal space, and she's not in the mood to meet any of her supposed children. Cradling the mug in her hands, she walks back upstairs and into the master bedroom and almost drops her mug of tea because—

"Quentin."

She watched him die. She watched his minor mending spell rip him into pieces, beautiful dots of light, as the mirror realm distorted his intent. She watched the lights get sucked into the Seam as Penny carried her to safety and she screamed herself hoarse.

She made a golem of him, and his twelve-year-old self emerged, and he told her beautiful things and ate tacos and disappeared. She took his essence to Fillory, climbed the Mountain of Ghosts, and sent the little bottle containing a sliver of his soul all the way down to the underworld. She got closure. She kept living. She's still chasing the world seed, the quest he never got to begin. She's paid a heavy price to keep the page safe, and then failed anyway. The fingers of her right hand shift against the mug, like she needs to check they're still there.

And she just stands there, staring. All she's lost, all he gave his life for, all these things she told Kady that maybe they should walk away from. They weigh her down, rooting her to the spot. What do you say to the man you loved, watched die, grieved, and started to move on from? To the person without whom you'd never have met the woman you think you're into, who you certainly trust with your whole, fucked up self, and who you endured torture for?

She doesn't know. So all she does is stare as the heat from the mug keeps her fingers from freezing from the shock.

All aboard the Dramaboat

[moderatelymaladjusted]

There’s no one in his head, but himself. Just his own shitty thoughts about all of this and the panic that’s gnawing at him somewhere deep inside. Something cold and hungry, and he is not not looking at the pictures, trying to calm himself down.

Trying to keep the principles of time magic and the rules of Three in mind, and NOT think about this. This isn’t real. It can’t be real, not in any timeline unless someone royally fucked something up.

Which, fair, could happen. It just wasn’t that likely. But he’s not looking at the woman in the pictures, the one who looks so much like Alice, with blonde hair and a red nose in the snow. Isn’t thinking about how he made Penny grab her and run before...

“Alice?”

Quentin almost falls off the side of the bed, turning to just—- maybe it’s all just a dream? Gods were real, so why not dreams after you died. It could be a thing.

“What—- no, wait.” Quentin shakes his head, holding out one hand, “Is this some screwed up version of Heaven and you’re here because you grew old and died back on earth?”

[dramaquinn]

Her mind goes at a million miles an hour, as she stands there and stares, as he does something so patently him that it makes her heart hurt. He's dead. He knows he's dead. So what in the world is going on?

"I don't know." It's shaky, so she clears her throat and tries again. "I don't know where this is. I'm not dead. I'm trying to get back the world seed. Or maybe..."

Or maybe abandon the quest, but that feels like the wrong thing to say.

For lack of a good idea what to do, Alice has a sip of tea, fresh ginger prickling all the way down. It's good, it gets heat flowing through her. It makes her feel like she can move again.

She walks further into the room, pushing the door gently shut behind her.

"This is all too real to be a dream, and too consistent to be a psychic construct." This isn't George Ball's work. She doesn't have anything he wants anymore. He won't hurt her again.

Feeling lightheaded again, Alice goes and sits on the bed she woke up in, putting the tea on the nightstand.

"Did— have you seen the pictures here?"

[moderatelymaladjusted]

"I was thinking a Web, but-- I don't really think it can catch ghosts?"

And it's just so absurd. It's beyond crazy, it's not even normal-for-them crazy, which was pretty fucking crazy to begin with. No, it's normal. The soft carpet under his feet and the fuzzy slippers at the foot of the bed. It's the pale pink cozy hiding a roll of toilet paper and it's the impressive stack of Tupperware in the kitchen.

It's Alice, pink-cheeked and sitting across from him on the other bed. Like, who even lives like this? Room mates? He glances at the nearest picture, it's of the two of them. Quentin looks like he's crashing in to her and Alice is doing her best to keep him upright. One arm around his neck and Quentin's face is in her hair. Piles of orange and brown leaves all around them and Quentin might have wished for exactly that at one point.

Had maybe wished for something like this, only less... creepy.

"I- yeah. I tried not to, but. It's us. Is it us? Did we--"

Do this. Did we become this? Dream this? Because Quentin still remembers Alice's face, frozen and screaming, as magic slammed in to him and tore him to pieces. He rubs his face. digging the heels of his hands in to his eyes before looking back up, an uncertain smile on his face.

"I didn't look for anyone else and-- oh wow, hey. So. Just. Hey, Alice."

[dramaquinn]

A Web. Maybe. Except, aren't these things not supposed to be able to trap people who are in the underworld? By any normal rules, Quentin shouldn't be here, solid and real like he is. And they shouldn't be married, because he's dead and she's moved on and there's no timeline where stopping Everett and sending the siblings to the seam ends with Alice and Quentin in a place like this. It's not real the way home is, but it's not unreal the way the Couple's fake Library was.

Sighing shakily, Alice listens to him, glad death hasn't changed him, scared because she loves him but she's not in love with him, because that love is quieter now and not the whirling storm it used to be, because she doesn't want to hurt him by admitting she went on with life after he sacrificed himself.

For a few seconds after he stops, she's quiet, and then she manages, "Hey," with a small, shaky smile.

And then, as emotion turns into impulse like boiling water becoming steam, she all but launches herself out of bed and to him, hugging him tight and god, he's really here. He's not some ghost, not a golem. It's really him, and all else aside, she's happy to see him.

[moderatelymaladjusted]

There's nothing like being hugged by Alice, her small arms around his shoulders and Quentin buries his face in her hair (like the picture) and just-- holds on for dear life. Which might even be halfway true? Who the fuck knows, because none of this makes any sense.

But Alice is familiar and real in ways nothing else in this place is, or ever could be. She smells like tea and herbs, like home and like someone's else laundry detergent. Or maybe that's just all in his mind, because when he squeezes her, she feels just like she's always felt.

"I'm so sorry." That I died. That you had to see it. All of the above, and for a thousand mistakes he made when it came to Alice, to them.

[dramaquinn]

God, this feels so good. He's familiar and safe, the jagged edges of his younger days dulled by tragedy and broken dreams and death itself. Yes, he hurt her before, more than once, in ways that marked her forever; but that's why she'll always love him, why he'll always be part of her. The scars healed and helped her become who she is. She dares to do more now, takes risks, fucks up, pays the price— but she's still moving forward. She knows now that when this ends and she's back home, she'll walk this path side by side with Kady and the others.

"I'm sorry too."

Because they both fucked up. Because Quentin forced her back into a human life and chose to save her rather than let her throw her life away and into the seam, and because this all started thanks to her, thanks to her obsession, her need to know. So many times since meeting him, she'd been willing to die to achieve her goal. He made the choice for her in the end, and gave her the chance to live a new life.

Alice pulls away because she has to, and stares up at his face. There's so much she wants to tell him, but right now they're in this new world with god only knows what kind of powerful magic holding it together. It's going to take them time to figure it out, so it's probably best not to rush and overwhelm them both with information and emotions.

"So, I... I went downstairs." She glances away a little, a nervous habit, and starts talking again on a sigh. "Apparently, we have kids. God, I can't even—"

She can't help but glance down at her abdomen. They can't be her flesh and blood, can they? She... ugh, what a nightmare.

Sighing again, shakily, stretching it out into an "ugh" sound, she looks back up at Quentin. A dead man brought back to life seems less strange and is more welcome than the mere idea of her bearing children without actually having chosen to.

"That's why I made ginger tea."

This entire thing is nauseating nightmare-fuel.

[moderatelymaladjusted]

"--kids?"

Quentin blinks, because this is not the time or the place to think about- any of that. About what had been and never was and how he had to tell his dad, just before magic came back and killed him. And Quentin never for to say goodbye, because fuck it, making horrible choices seems to go hand in hand with being a magician. They should probably think about making it a regular scheduled class at Brakebills - This Is How You Will Fuck It Up and How Not To Fix It.

"You made tea because... we have kids. Oookay. That's-- yeah, sure. Why not."

Alice feels... exactly like always in his arms. Like he's been doing this a million times before, and he had but he'd also been blown in to tiny magical pieces and met Penny. The pictures on the wall seems especially cruel, showing snap-shot memories of lives they didn't lead. Would never lead because of, well, dying.

Showing pictures of what Quentin had once dreamed of having.

"So, we're trapped. In this place and we're not living alone. Pocket universe, maybe. Did you touch a key or anything before you woke up here? I remember the Underworld and then... I really hope this isn't the Afterlife."

Quest questions are so much easier than trying to find a way to ask about everyone else, or deal with how things ended between them.