TDM - OCTOBER 2020

[robbies]

TEST DRIVE MEME - OCTOBER 2020

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

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“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—“

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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

elphelt valentine - guilty gear

[marryonette]

[ october 1st ]

[ It felt like a bizarre dream, well more bizarre than any she'd had before. Which was saying something, considering how wild her imagination could be. She'd done a pinch test, but she still wasn't entirely sure this was not, still, a dream. Nothing in the room felt like hers, darling as it all was. The pretty dolls lined neatly on the shelf, the magazines full of fashion tips, makeup techniques, cute boys and other such wonderful things, it all seemed fanciful but hardly something she "owned". She thumbed through the record collection, even recognizing some of the old world artists, but still nothing she actually had...

The pictures made it seem even more bizarre. Was this really her? As she wandered down the stairs, she stopped at each one, seeing visions of herself in a childhood she never got to have, with what appeared to be a loving mother and father. A little girl with blonde, bobbed hair, growing into a young woman, joy and exuberance in her expression.

By the time she's on the couch downstairs, she barely notices the jingle on the television.

She's crying into her hands. ]

[ neighbors - b ]

[ She was a little aged out of the jump rope games, so El found herself largely surrounded by other girls closer to her own age, gushing about boys and whispers of less than scrupulous (but still fairly tame) rebellious activities they might get up to while the kids and parents were distracted with trick-or-treating. El tried her best to follow along with the talk, definitely not wanting to feel anymore lost and alienated than she already was by this strange world, but she couldn't help but feel like she had no place in those kind of activities.

She tried to find other Fellow Teens who looked as out of place as she did, to gravitate towards them and try to find some commonality with her fellow "dreamers" ]

Some... party, huh?

[ The uncertainty in her voice was probably the tell that this blonde gal was not among the "native" folk, despite looking the part. Well, that and what came next. ]

Still, I don't think I'll be finding a future husband here...

[ What... a weird thing to say. ]

[ halloween - a ]

[ Well, she'd been there long enough to realize it wasn't really a dream at all. She didn't have enough understanding of how it could have happened, but she had definitely been transported into some point in history, before the Dawn of Revival, and had taken a form appropriate to the time. No access to her stuff, her powers, or really anything besides her memory and knowledge of human history. Which was... not actually that great.

But hey, she could at least try to ease her anxieties and enjoy some Halloween candy while she tried to find out what was going on! She was happily chewing on a premium bit of chocolate, digging in her bag to hand another to a friend passing by. ]

You gotta try this! It's super tasty!

[ She hadn't come across anything tampered with just yet, or heard of it. How unfortunate. Despite the clover hairpin she wore, her luck probably wouldn't last... ]

[ halloween - b ]

[ As it turns out, the BB gun that Elphelt had bought wasn't that effective on zombie children! Not that she *wanted* to kill them, though she did have that thought of how did it even count as killing if they were already dead. Frantically she dashes around the property, popping them when she can to keep them from crowding her, but it was getting tough. It was then she started to notice something as she looped back around to the front of the house... ]

The jack-o-lanterns! They're pushed back by those!

[ She shouts it to someone near by also struggling with the kid horde. Damnit, she didn't have a lighter or matches of any kind on her to relight the one on their porch. And there was definitely no chance the BB gun was going to do that. ]

I need some fire!

[ wildcard! ]

[ got a prompt idea that i didn't cover here? just hit me up! i'm down to clown with anything ]

october 1st

[uncommonsense]

[ Haruhi had come from looking around in the other room, continuing her initial investigation in finding out where she was and whether anything was super out of place.

Her MO at the moment was to ask questions and learn this house's secrets... but she's immediately hesitant to go near this crying girl?

Hm. ]

Uh... hey. Everything alright?

[ Clearly not, but it was a start. ]

[marryonette]

[ Elphelt gasped. She recognized the girl from the other pictures, the younger sister in all of them. At first she thought that was meant to be Ram, but... that definitely wasn't her. That was it's own knife, pushing deep, but she tried to keep it from showing. ]

N-nothing! I was just... just...

[ She didn't know who this was, what aspect of her dream she was meant to represent. She had no idea how to really respond, how this "version" of her should. ]

October 1st

[bustywolf]

[Well. On the list of things to wake up to after being defeated in a fight in this body, this was... not on the list. At all. How had she ended up dressed in a sheer peignoir edged with frills, waking up in a shared room with a strange man and fake photos all through the house that declared them a happily married couple, with children? Everything looks like it's taken right out of an old TV show. It's a lot to deal with first thing in the morning. But first things first, she scours the room to find something she can use to get her hair tamed back in its usual ponytail... which turns out to be a clumsily tied hair ribbon. Once that's done, Terry takes it upon herself to be the first to head downstairs and see what else is in this weird probably-dreamed-up house.

Or she thought she was the first. But as she steps into the living room, she sees a both strange and familiar young woman sitting on the couch, paying no attention to the vintage television and old-timey jingle in front of her. Terry doesn't know the girl, but she thinks she's seen her... in the pictures? The girl that's supposed to be her "daughter"?

That's ridiculous, of course. She's not a parent, and certainly not a mother. She's not even old enough to be this girl's mother! Or maybe she is, just barely? But still... it hurts to see any girl crying like this...]

Hey...

[The gentle tone her voice comes out in is a surprise even to Terry. She'd been ready for a confrontation with some kind of kidnappers, not finding an innocent victim.]

You okay? Someone hurt you, or something?

me: "hey snk? how old *is* terry?" snk: has me assassinated

[marryonette]

[ There was a lot for her to process, but it seemed the weird dreamscape wasn't done with her yet. The woman's voice was gentle enough not to startle her, but the sight of what was ostensibly her "mother", this version of her's mother, still set her on edge, and she backed her way across the sofa, away from Terry. ]

I-I'm... I'm fine, I...

[ No she wasn't, but her response was born purely from confusion, from the maelstrom of emotions she'd just been through. It couldn't seem to form into anything definitive, any idea of what she should do. What does this dream version of herself do with her mother? She doens't know. Her own 'mother', after all, was... ]

Halloween B

[vulcanblazer]

[Fire. Of course. Under normal circumstances, that wouldn't have been an issue at all. Then again, under normal circumstances, a few zombies wouldn't even be a workout for a demon hunter like Adell. His powers may have been absent or sealed in this place, but they couldn't totally take away his fighting experience so readily. ...Even if he felt more sluggish than he usually would. But still, it was enough to keep kid-sized zombies at bay. He used his reach and his near-peak strength and sweeping kicks to keep the zombies unsteady as he moved around the yard, trying to keep them away from the house.

His neightbor Elphelt's voice carried to him, and he turned his attention to her after sweeping away a zombie. While he moved to build more space, the wheels in his head turned quickly. Trying to think of where he could get fire quickly... without risking others. And then an idea hit him.]

Come on, there's a charcoal grill in my backyard! We keep some matches kept out there! We can get 'em together, let's go!

[He sprinted to meet up with her partway. Better to move in a group to keep each other safe.]

[marryonette]

[ She laid down some cover fire, for whatever it was worth, to keep any zombies off his tail. The gun had little in the way of stopping power, so it only did so much. ]

Lead the way! I'll cover you!

[ Well. Try to, at any rate. ]