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memesville2020-10-25 11:03 pm
robbies) wrote in memesville2020-10-25 11:03 pm
Entry tags:
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.
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.
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? |
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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.
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.
Ickis | Aaahh!!! Real Monsters | OTA
[It had been a while since he'd woken up and had his initial freak out. Enough time to at least calm down some and move on from panicking to investigating his new "home". Which mostly involved searching the drawers and cupboards to pocket anything that looked useful, avoiding the mirrors, messing with the few electronics, and leaving on the TV and blender for background noise while he examined the pictures in the hallways.
That Halloween jingle started playing on the TV in the other room again, just adding to the surreal moment of looking at photos of the human he'd apparently become and the family that came with him. He couldn't deal with mirrors right now, but this was a little easier to process.
They were mostly various family photos, with the occasional kid's photos of him and "his sibling" as they'd aged. He'd even found one of his human self on a baseball team. Apparently, even this version of himself was still good with a bat, nice to know. But outside of that the two of them seemed as different as night and day. The photos scattered around the walls and drawers depicted a well-groomed, clean-cut kid, who played out in the woods, helped out in his community, joined various clubs, had lots a friends, and was seemingly doing excellent in school according to the report card taped to the fridge. His black hair was a little longer than the norm but it was well kept and otherwise, he was the very picture of a perfect kid. Or at least a perfect human kid.
Whoever this human had been before he'd replaced him they were almost nothing alike.
The most disturbing thing he'd found by far though was still the homework that had been laid out on the desk in his room, half-finished and filled out in his own handwriting. He wasn't exactly sure why that was the thing that really got to him, maybe because it was the closest thing to solid proof that he and this human were really somehow the same. But it was disturbing enough for him to take it with him, clutching the crumpled paper as he wandered around the house, unsure of what exactly to do with it.
Maybe he would stick it in the blender...]
-Don't Be a Square- CW: mild emetophobia
[A week in and he'd already managed to make one very unfortunate decision, which considering his track record for bad decisions was actually doing pretty good for him.
He'd taken "his dad's" clippers and cut a sizable chunk of his hair off, bleached it, and attempted to color it with Kool-Aid packs found in the pantry. It was rough even by the standers of the 90's punks he'd admired back home, but it had felt like a good idea at the time. Some means of making this body a little bit more his own while separating himself from the boy in the photos.
But there was certainly an uptick in tight forced smiles, disapproving looks, women touching his hair and tutting, and men forcing a chuckle before good-naturedly but very pointedly asking "Did you get in a fight with the lawnmower, son?". It's enough that within that first few minutes of getting pulled into the Block Party he was ready to sneak his way back out again, until someone pushes a plate into his hands with that wiggly food with stuff in it, and his eyes light up.
Like a feral animal, he quickly makings off with it, ducking through the crowd, probably bumping into at least a few people along the way, before sliding into an empty seat at one of the tables. Giving it a few exploratory pokes, just to watch the catfood-esk meat chunks, olives, and egg jiggle for a bit, then digs into it with a chip. Shoveling it in his mouth he immediately looks disgusted, opening his mouth again and letting it plop back onto the plate.]
It's sweet. [Sounding utterly betrayed, he dramatically pushing it away enough to put his head down on the table. Just giving up.] Why is everything here terrible?
-All Tricks, No Treats-
[If you're out alone on Halloween night you might suddenly hear a growl coming from behind some of those pristinely cut hedges or up in a tree overhanging the pathway, or maybe what you thought was a slumped over Halloween prop at the edge of someone's drive suddenly stands after you pass and begins following you.
Halloween night has Ickis out stalking the streets in a cloak and ratty rabbit mask, and he's not into the treat part of the holiday. As far as he was concerned, Halloween existed for one reason; scares.]
-Always Respect the Dead-
[It was when he started hearing screams not caused by him that he started to worry.
The streets had suddenly seemed a lot more empty at this hour, as if the local kids had known something the rest of them hadn't and took shelter in their homes early, but he was refusing to give up on the night. Even if he was running low on people to scare he was still enjoying the dark, the bite of the chilly fall night air, and the lingering thrill of getting to revel in a few good scares. And he dreaded giving that up to slink back to the house, shuck off his costume and go back to pretending he was human.
But then the screaming started. At first, it was far enough down the block that he couldn't see where it was coming from exactly, only that after a few minutes a small group of fellow stranglers came picking their way through the dark from down that direction.
And there was something wrong with them. They didn't go up to any of the houses, instead, standing on the sidewalks or lawns, just staring for a few minutes before moving on to the next home.
As they drew closer he ducked behind a tree, cautiously watching as they finally found a house they did want to go up to. Taking off his mask to see better, he fumbles it when he hears gurgling voices behind him, dropping it with a yelp. Looking over his shoulder as they slosh out another burbling "Trick or Treat", he stumbles back just as they lurch forward, teeth bared, a blackened mix of water and mud dripping from their mouths.
Scrambling away with a shriek, he dashes across the street as the sound of glass shattering and more screams ring out through the neighborhood behind him. Bounding up on to closest doorstep available to him starts frantically banging on the door.
Hope you've got your jack-o-lanterns lite, because they're stalking across the street after him.]
All Tricks
Probably he should be escorting "his" children as they go around for their own pranking and/or candy-gathering... but did that for a while, and they're old enough to take care of themselves - not even in stripes anymore - so he's veered off to head back home. After all, somebody should be back at the house, offering candy to bribe other children away from trashing the yard, right?
He notices the presence partway through the walk, some hint of movement just far enough in the shadows he can't manage to track it. Growing up with his brother, he's used to spooky figures who show up and lurk behind you without warning. But he's distracted by the prickle of goosebumps and cold sweat on his skin, new sensations that add to his general unsettled state, and - even knowing better - he picks up the pace to get back home.]