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

gelatin

[13thcommander]

[Erwin is out wandering the neighborhood when someone shoves a gelatin mold in his face. He flails at it, startled, but quickly realizes it's... food?]

What is it?

[He pokes at it, and the way it wobbles is weirdly engaging.]

We're supposed to eat these, aren't we?

Re: gelatin

[ribticklers]

[This is the best worst food he's ever seen, maybe. He's thrilled.] That's the polite thing, yeah? Gotta be neighborly. Make sure we gel with the community. [Puns always intended.]

[13thcommander]

[Sorry, buddy, Erwin comes from a remarkably humorless world, and that pun is going to go straight over his head. Once you teach him the ways of punning, though... oh god, the dad jokes. The endless, shitty dad jokes...]

How?

[Do you just reach out and stick your hand in it and then eat it? Or is this something that requires a fork and knife?]

[Erwin uses his head to gesture behind them.]

My house is over there, if you want to use the kitchen. You can cut yourself a slice of it.

[ribticklers]

[Sans's note to self: make the next pun even more obvious. BUT FIRST: this gelatin.]

If I'm usin' your kitchen, you should get a piece, too. [Also Sans wants to make other people eat this thing too.]

[13thcommander]

That sounds like a fair trade.

[Did you know there's this thing in the kitchen called a dishwasher? It does the dishes for you. Amazing invention.]

[Erwin leads the way back to his house, and to the kitchen.]

I'm going to have to ask you to slice and serve it. [Erwin gestures at his empty right sleeve. Something that jiggles that much probably requires two hands.] I'll get the plates ready.

[ribticklers]

Okay, but I've got no idea what it's supposed to look like cut up. [But even as Sans says that he will grab a knife, because that is not going to stop him! Not when it's funny. As soon as he takes a slice away, all the tuna and olives in the center pour out.]

So, think we're just supposed to scoop that on top, or what?

[13thcommander]

That's fine, neither do it.

[Although a bunch of fish and olives spilling out definitely isn't what Erwin thought it would do.]

I... think so?

[Erwin sets the plates down and finds a spoon.]

What is it supposed to taste like?

[ribticklers]

[Sans shrugs.] We're gonna find out. Or maybe not. But I guess it ain't like we'll know if they messed up, right? [He is going to plate two slices of gelatin and a scoop of tuna and olive and whatever on top. It's very messy.]

[13thcommander]

That's true.

[It can't be any worse than some of the other stuff Erwin's eaten, right? At least it's not a yeast bar.]

[With that excellent attitude, he takes a forkful of tuna and olive and gelatin and tries it.]

It's... oh gods...

[ribticklers]

[Sans gamely takes a bite at the same time. This taste... Is indescribable.]

Oh my god, is that mayo? It's got mayo in it, right? [Sans is talking with his mouth full.]

[13thcommander]

[Erwin can't help it; he gags.]

Why is it so salty?

[ribticklers]

Maybe it's on purpose? [Sans succeeds in consuming his bite! But he's had practice with weird food.] Is salt good for you?

[That might be kind of a weird question, but Sans's previous diet consisted of magic, so.]

[13thcommander]

It must be.

[Erwin manages to swallow, but it's a near thing.]

I think so? It's so expensive, there must be a reason for that.

[Erwin's previous diet consisted of yeast bars, so yeah, he doesn't think that question is weird at all.]

[ribticklers]

So does that make this place like, full of rich people? [Oh boy, Sans better not be expected to play keep up with the Joneses, if that's the case.]

[13thcommander]

This doesn't all seem wildly luxurious to you?

[OH SNAP, this guy isn't a local either! Erwin leans in, his eyes bright and intense.</small.] You're from somewhere else too, aren't you?

[ribticklers]

[Oh, so this guy isn't from around here, either. That makes sense, actually--he probably would have recognized the food if he was, right? Sans is getting better at picking out people who are in a weird situation too, but it's a process.] Yeah, this place seems pretty far from my neck of the woods. You just move here, too? [Or rather, get moved here through mysterious circumstances.]

[13thcommander]

I woke up here.

[Erwin pushes aside the plate of mush, although he'll definitely pick through it later to get the meat out, and studies his companion.]

Was your world anything like this one?

[ribticklers]

[Sans still isn't used to his face moving around--going right to another world is surprising, and it shows in his expression, though the gears in his brain are clearly whirling wildly at the same time.] Nope. This whole thing's been pretty wild so far. [He isn't about to get into the details, but that's not a lie.] Not how I expected to start out my week, y'know?

[13thcommander]

[For the first time, Erwin makes a sound that's almost surprised laughter, and he smiles a little.]

No, me neither.

[He shakes his head.]

I have to say, it's a bit of an improvement from where I was. Even with the... [he gestures at the gelatin] local cuisine.

[ribticklers]

I dunno, I think that part's pretty great. [He gives the remaining gelatin another shake.] Don't really know how to take the rest of it yet.

[He's still kind of expecting things to reset to the way they were. It's too early to assume it won't happen.]

Wherever you're from must be pretty rough.

[13thcommander]

It's certainly plentiful, I'll give it that.

[Even if it is super salty and kind of gross, Erwin has been stuffing food away like a madman. If he doesn't watch himself, he's going to start packing on weight.]

We were in the middle of a war.

[Which is all he wants to say about that. Instead, Erwin offers Sans his hand.]

I'm Erwin Smith. It's a pleasure to meet you.

[ribticklers]

[Well, damn. Sans shakes Erwin's hand.] Sans. Guess that kinda puts the food in perspective, huh?

[13thcommander]

It really does.

[Now they're all properly introduced.]

So, Sans... what are your impressions of this place?

[ribticklers]

Well, I never thought I'd be kidnapped, but I kinda figured if it happened, I'd notice before they got me wherever they were takin' me. [And also he figured he'd still be a skeleton.] But they're not really stopping us from just wandering around, either, so maybe they're new at it.

[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?