TDM - JANUARY 2021

[robbies]

TEST DRIVE MEME - JANUARY 2021

Good to the last gasp.
CW: gaslighting, potential mentions and depictions of trauma and other problematic material, body horror, dolls, violence

---

“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 outside of it carrying faintly, it all becomes very clear—

Something is horribly wrong.

---

JANUARY 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, the morning news is playing. The newscaster, a man in a gray suit and horn-rimmed glasses, keeps shuffling his paperwork on his desk as black and white footage of people in the midst of celebration — throwing streamers, wearing paper hats, toasting flutes of bubbly liquid — is interspersed between his droning report: ”New Year's Eve was in full swing last night as citizens from all over Santa Rosita came together to ring in 1961. A surge in ginger ale and sparkling cider beverage sales was reported by Honeybees as early as eight o'clock in the evening, a boon for the store…“

---

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. CLOWN AROUND. If December was a time for sweet treats and good food, January is the month where everyone is trying to unload their leftovers. Who better to enjoy them than you, the newest family on the block? Your neighbors have quite a bit of food to share: Throughout the month, they'll stop by to say hello, bringing a new sugary dish with them each time. As always, jello molds are a staple. One plate turns into three turns into five, and by the end of the first week of January, you're likely to end up with a collection of jiggling pink, green, and orange lumps taking up space in your fridge. From mountains of Whip 'n Chill to Broken Window Glass cake, you'd be forgiven in thinking that there's no end to it. And yet, there's the occasional exception. Someone comes by with a Bundt cake lathered in vanilla icing and topped with rainbow sprinkles. Were it not for the giant candy clown head topping it, it would almost look good enough to eat. "There's a rumor going around that you've been a bit under the weather, so I thought this would cheer you up!" they say, right before thrusting the technicolor nightmare into your hands, the clown's dead pink frosted eyes staring up at you. Your neighbor is quick to tell you to eat it while the icing is still fresh (you never know who might lick it off when you're not looking, eh kids?), but not that the clown itself is made out of styrofoam. That's something you'll just have to find out for yourself when you take it back inside and start chowing down!

B. SNOW DAY

What awakens you one cold Friday morning isn't the blare of your alarm clock or your family getting ready to start their day or even the chilly air that tickles your toes as they poke out from the bottom of your covers, but the sound of hooting and hollering outside your window. The sight that awaits you when you go to investigate is something out of a Norman Rockwell painting: The entire neighborhood is outside, playing and carrying on in the snow. While everyone was sleeping, Santa Rosita got four inches of snow, more than enough for the schools to close but not enough to stop everyone from enjoying it.

And enjoy it they are! Children build snowmen in their front yards while their fathers work on shoveling their driveways. Most, however, are busy erecting snow forts in their yards and the middle of the street, running back and forth as they collect ammunition for an ongoing snowball fight that takes up half of the neighborhood. Nobody is spared from their assault, not even the adults, and especially not the newly arrived ones who leave the house. Good luck getting the mail, mom and dad!

"Come on! There's plenty of snow!" one young boy yells at you over a snowdrift. "You can join my team!"

"Nuh-uh!" another boy shoots back. "You can join my team!"

And on and on it goes. Well, for the pacifists among you, making snow angels is always an option!

---

THROUGHOUT JANUARY.

CW: gaslighting, potential mentions and depictions of trauma, and other problematic material

There’s no business like show business! And business is hopping at the Starlight Drive-In, which has been boasting about its all-new film premiering on January 2nd and playing all month long. The critics are raving, the townspeople are flocking, and plans to go to the drive-in seems to be all anyone can talk about. “Make sure you get there early to see the serials,” many of them suggest, eyes wide with excitement. “I couldn’t look away!” Whether you come with your family, your friends, or simply come on your own, the lot is packed, Robbies and normal townsfolk alike beaming as they hook the individual speakers onto their cars. Apropos of the cold weather, the concession stand has added seasonal items to their menu, serving up hot chocolate and kettle corn in addition to its usual soda and popcorn. Watching a movie against a backdrop of gently falling snow while you're sipping on steaming chocolate and melted marshmallows has a certain je nais se quoi to it that even you have to admit is appealing. At last, when it's finally dark enough to start, the projector clicks on from the booth in the back of the lot and the movie begins. A. COMING ATTRACTIONS. The movie, Curse of the Doll People, is a horror flick. A real chill-o-rama, starring actors you've never heard of playing a group of archeologists who unknowingly trigger a deadly curse that sets a group of murderous living dolls upon them. The poster pasted on the ticket booth promises it'll be the most fun you'll have screaming. Unfortunately, you have to sit through several minutes of previews first. The coming attractions aren't anything special — a bunch of westerns, a romance, even a beach musical. Far from being bored to tears like you might be, the people in the cars around you are glued to the screen, popping snacks into their mouths and whispering their commentary among themselves. The movie is the reason why everyone's here, sure, but you don't just get one flick out of going to the pictures! There's also the serials, little 5—10 minute long chapter plays that tell a story in pieces. Nothing can beat those, and when the first one starts, everyone sits in rapt attention as if it were the feature presentation itself. But as the scene opens up on a sight that is instantly familiar to you, and your own face stares back at you from the projection screen, it becomes clear that this is no ordinary film. You watch your memories play out in grainy black and white footage, aired for all the world to see. Or perhaps not — though you may not realize it, the movie playing out on the screen differs from person to person. No one sees the same thing. The person next to you might see one of their worst fears come to life, whether imagined or real, practical or fantastic. You might see one of the worst moments of your life — the death of a friend, your hated enemy bringing you to the brink of death, your absolute lowest point — exactly the way you remember it... save for the way your double on the screen occasionally turns to face the audience, staring directly at you with a knowing smirk and a wink. Or the way your loved ones will sometimes go off-script, gazing at you with pleading eyes as they beg you to help them. The people of Santa Rosita will see an exciting battle between two pirate ships, swashbuckling and cannon fire in place of the traumas you're witnessing. When the serial ends on a cliffhanger, much to the disappointment of everyone around you, it's almost a mercy. "Tune in next week for the thrilling second part!" Well, you will, won't you?

---

END OF THE MONTH.

CW: body horror, dolls, violence

Aside from the horror of the drive-in, January might seem to be passing calmly... until one night, something changes. In the middle of the night, once you fall asleep in your comfortable bed (or on your couch, or with your head lolling against the kitchen table), a nightmare comes to you. The shift from whatever dreams you were having to the cold, dark void you find yourself standing in happens gradually and quietly. So too does the image that plays out in your mind's eye: From out of the darkness, a featureless mannequin stands ramrod straight, facing you with its arms pressed rigidly to its sides. It has no face, no identifying marks, no features at all. It's a blank slate in every sense of the word... until it isn't. Slowly, the material of the lower half of its face begins to split as a searing pain tears through your own, as if invisible fingers are ripping your lips off inch by inch. The slit on the doll's face widens and deepens until, finally, mercifully, its new mouth opens as yours disappears, replaced by a flat, smooth barrier of skin. Like it was never there to begin with. The pain returns, this time in your arms and neck — right as the doll's own begin to jerk. Your joints are hardening, seizing up as the doll's arms go from minutely twitching to slowly flexing. While every nerve and bone from your fingertips all the way up to your shoulders grows heavy, the doll tilts its head and looks down at its hands, as if seeing them for the first time. By the time it takes its first step, you've taken your last: the pain has spread to your feet, ankles and toes hardening and locking into place. Every part of you is claimed this way; what isn't taken by force simply fades from your body and shifts into being onto the doll's, your skin replacing its cloth body, your clothing dressing it, your hair filling out its head. Your tongue goes numb as the licks its newfound lips, coarse cloth and batting surging up from your lungs and all the way to the back of your throat. By the time it's over, you can't move. You can no longer breathe. All you can do is stare at the perfect, eyeless double of yourself standing before you. As your eyes begin to burn, the last thing you see before everything goes black is the sly curve of a smile — your smile — before the face wearing it turns away and walks back into the darkness. Luckily, you wake up to a room full of sunshine and the distant sound of traffic as the neighborhood gets ready for another beautiful day. The morning air feels cold and dry on your skin. You're you. As much as you've always been. Right?

A. DOPPELGANGER.

It's the kind of morning that makes you want to sing. Where the sky was once dull and grey, it's now a deep blue. Barring the usual hustle and bustle on the streets of Shadyside, the first sound that greets you when you wake up is the steady beat of water trickling outside your window as the snow begins to gently melt under the rays of the sun. You may even hear the chirp of a bird! January, in all its dreariness, is nearly at an end.

When you leave the room to go downstairs — or upstairs, if you slept in the living room — the house is quiet and flooded with sunlight. With how perfectly silent everything is, it's easy to mistake the calm for solitude and think you're alone.

This is not the case.

Waiting to greet you is a familiar figure. If you go downstairs, you'll see it sitting in your kitchen with its head bowed and its arms hanging limply at its sides; if upstairs, lying in your bed on its back. There's no mistaking who it is. Even at a distance, their hair, face, clothes and features all instantly recognizable, and you know who it is before you even fully register their presence:

You.

Motionless, your doppelganger looks more puppet than person. Its chest is still, not a single breath leaving its mouth. Its eyes are closed. They snap open when you get closer to it, wide enough to see the whites, as its head jerks up to look straight at you. In a staccato imitation of your voice, it chirps at you:

"Hi!"

"Good morning!"

"Hello!"

"Rise and shine!"

Your clone is a good imitation, but not a perfect one. Its movements are stiff and uncoordinated, like a marionette being commanded by unseen strings. Though its cheeks are rosy, its skin is pale and almost glossy with the texture of newly polished porcelain. None of these setbacks bother it in the very least. If left alone, it goes about the house mimicking your morning routine, though given how awkward just walking is for it, it's almost certain to do a very bad job. Still, it tries its hardest, following you all day around the neighborhood, trying to imitate your movements — all with a smile!

That is, until you become aggressive with it.

It doesn't take much to set your doppelganger off — a simple shove will do it. When that happens, its eyes will do the impossible and open even wider, its mouth yawning into a wail that pitches louder and louder. That's the point when it will lunge at you. Its hands will try to go for your throat, but not always. It's resourceful enough to improvise with whatever it has around it, whether that be a kitchen knife, a paperweight, or even a letter opener. Luckily for you, they're fragile. Just hitting them is enough to crack and chip away at their skin. With enough strength, their limbs can even come off. Unluckily, they don't stay down for long; even a severed appendage can be popped back into its proper ball-jointed place.

All the while, they never stop childishly whining and shrieking at you.

"Not nice!"

"Why are you so mean?!"

"Not nice, not nice, NOT NICE!"

The only way to shut them up for good is to keep pummeling them until they're nothing but a pile of doll parts. But be thorough — even a mouth that's nothing but a shard of porcelain can still talk.

---

OOC INFO

Hello, and welcome to We're Still Here's second 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 February 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. Additionally, starting today comments made to the TDM will now count towards Activity Check. Current players are permitted to use up to five comments from it for this month's Activity Check — half of the required amount to pass. The other five must be made within the game's communities.

If you would like to have January or other winter-themed 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.

A note about the drive-in theater: Players are in full control over what memories, phobias, or fears the serials before the movie will depict. You can also specify whether or not other characters will be able to see your character's serial. Be sure to label your threads with relevant content warnings if needed!

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Comments

Xiao Xingchen | Mo Dao Zu Shi

[binghua]

I. January 1st

[Waking up in a new place isn't necessarily new to Xingchen; after all, he's spent a portion of his life traveling the world, stopping in various towns and spending the night in countless inns or camping out under the stars, but for the last couple years, he's at least had one place to call home. Even if it wouldn't be classified as a proper house.

Waking up in a plush bed instead of a coffin is definitely a surprise, albeit a pleasant one.

But that's where the pleasantness ends. If this isn't the coffin home, then where is he and why does he have no recollection of how he's gotten here? Not to mention, his clothes don't even feel the same! Where are his robes and...and the cloth covering his eyes?

He gets out of the bed and starts to feel around for any answers, discovering more questions along the way. Where is his sword? This is just one room, though, so assuming he hasn't been locked in, Xingchen cautiously searches for the door and finds that it's...wide open. Okay, so that's probably good.

It's good until he reaches the staircase, unaware that it's a staircase at all. The first step lands where he expects, flat on the ground, but then the second meets...air. And then a delayed stop that throws him off balance. With a gasp, Xingchen throws out his arms, one of which hits the banister, which prompts him to latch onto it entirely, saving himself from bouncing down the stairs farther than the few he already has. This is going to leave some bruises.

Someone please help your new, and very blind, dad navigate this nightmare dwelling.]


II. Snow Day

[The joyful cries of children slowly pull Xingchen from his slumber, but as it sinks in, he can't help but smile. He likes children and any time they can enjoy the life around them, he considers things to be good. He's unsure why they're still home when they should have left for their studies by now - unless he's massively overslept, though it doesn't feel like it - so he dresses, slips on some sunglasses to cover his empty eyes, and heads downstairs. Successfully, this time.

He's just closed the front door behind him when something hits him in the arm. Surprised, he turns toward where he's been attacked, only to be accosted by those childrens' voices. He smiles, but shakes his head in answer to their pleas.]

I'm afraid I wouldn't be a very good teammate.

[You know, what with being blind, and all.]


III. Doppelganger

[Well. That dream sure was awful. But that's all it was, right? A dream? Surely. Xingchen has woken in a cold sweat before, having dreamt of his own traumatic events, but nothing quite like this. Never has he seen himself be transferred to something else.

So when he heads downstairs to try to make some semblance of a normal day, he thinks nothing of it. It's only when he's made some tea for himself and set it down on the kitchen table that his his hand brushes over someone sitting in the chair he's about to claim. It must be a member of his "family" here.]

Oh, I'm sorry. I didn't realize you were there.

[It's then the "person" gets up, pushing the chair back with a scrape and says, "Good morning!". And that voice is so alarmingly familiar and yet altogether foreign that Xingchen gasps and takes a step back, suddenly feeling horribly uncomfortable.]

Who...What are you?

[To which this entity replies with a tinny laugh, soft and mockingly gentle like Xingchen's own, "I'm a person, of course! Don't be so silly!"

He wishes he were being silly.]


IV. Wildcard!

[Want to do something else with Xingchen? Bump into him (or be bumped into by him) when you're both out running errands? Hit me up! You all know how this goes.]

ii

[weifinder]

( Wei Wuxian enjoys kids most days, even if these ruffians have as much respect for their elders as seems to be convenient at any given moment. It's somewhat nostalgic, ignoring everything unfamiliar about the situation, and how odd it continues to be finding all these boys with short cut hair, and only the girls sporting anything longer.

Snowball fights are a fun sort of mischief he doesn't mind engaging in, partly to observe the people in the neighbourhood. Enough of them are "native," such as it is; but he's looking for discrepancies, odd notes to their activities. There's an odd sort of tenaciousness to the beliefs of these people, and their resistance to certain lines of conversation, versus how readily they embrace the repetitive inanities.

What he doesn't expect is to hear a voice that takes a long moment to register as familiar; most of his experience in talking with Xiao Xingchen was either almost two decades old, or through the eyes of a young woman who'd lived her life pretending to be blind, next to his own blindness. It's those memories he'd witnessed with Empathy that have him dusting off cold hands and jogging over, ducking a snowball lobbed at him and wagging a finger at the giggling children responsible, his smile bright with nothing much reaching his eyes. None of it is their fault, but he's distracted, and he's calling out to the man in the clothing of this place, with the odd frames on his face, and the long hair so few seem to favour with a: )

Shishu?

( He's a dead man with a shattered soul: is it even possible? Also reasonable enough a call followed up by what's more practically familiar: )

Daozhang.

( Is this another strange hallucination in this place. Xiao Xingchen, please advise? (It doesn't occur to Wei Wuxian there's... no way... he's ever met Xiao Xingchen before. Or that calling out shishu can be all but meaningless, in its own ways.) )

[binghua]

[The children, at least, don't argue with Xingchen so he stands there in front of his door, wiping the snow he imagines is there off of his clothing. He's still smiling, the sounds of the snowball fight next door - across the street? it must be a neighborhood effort and that's delightful - echoing around. Once he's satisfied with his own efforts, he steps down into the walkway, only to sink into a good amount of snow. It immediately starts to melt into his slippers and, really, he should have expected this. So back up onto the steps he goes, shaking his feet in the process.

Until someone calls out using terms no one else here has used. The first one can't apply to him, he's sure, but the second is all too familiar. Xingchen turns toward the voice, not recognizing it.]

Yes? Can I help you?

[He's hoping this young man will call him Daozhang again. It's comforting after being in this strange place.]

[weifinder]

( A pause in mind, if not in step. Given his own memories tend to be brought into question often enough by those around him, he can't say this doesn't make sense. He's responded to a titling of sorts, and the man is, or was, blind by the time he died. Wei Wuxian lets thoughts flow like a whirlpool at the back of his mind. )

Daozhang, ( he repeats, since martial uncle or not, they were still once of an age, and the closeness of martial bonds was not anything he was leaning into with a lack of apparent familiarity: they'd only met the once, and who knows how long ago that was? Or if this place doesn't play off it. Xiao Xingchen is dead, shattered in soul, outside of any cycle of rebirth. He's here, breathing, alive.

It's enough of a discrepancy already. )

I'm called Wei Ying, courtesy name Wuxian. You don't happen to be Shuanghua Sword Xiao Xingchen?

( After all, his eyes could easily fool him here. It's not like he's anything but significantly mortal, and faith in senses is something he had to pick and choose even when not less than half a cultivation wreck. )

[binghua]

[The reappearance of the title is soothing, in a way, but it only lasts a moment.

Wei Wuxian.

Xingchen's smile slowly falls away. Never in his entire life would he have thought he'd be able to meet the feared and monstrous Yiling Laozu. The man has been dead for some time now, living on only in the tales mothers tell their children to scare them into behaving, or the so-called protective portraits sold in the streets. Xingchen remembers seeing them when he could see, and now he can still bring them to mind. A horrible face, grimacing, barely framed by untamed locks of hair.

This man's voice doesn't match the portrait.

Of course, Xingchen tells himself that stories of that nature often get blown out of proportion, but how much when it comes to someone who did such heinous acts? Is he not a monster among men?

And yet, he's spoken so...kindly to Xingchen and he can't sense any ill-intent. The man seems to know him, which makes Xingchen frown in confusion and a little bit of unease. But they're both standing out in the cold and the snow and Xingchen's feet are going to freeze off if he stands out here for too long. Besides, it doesn't feel right to have this conversation outside, with children having their fun and anyone else able to hear. Then again, should he really humor Wei Wuxian for a conversation at all?

He exhales.]

I am he.

[He doesn't move for a second, still deliberating, but then decides to take a risk.]

Would you like to come inside?

[weifinder]

( He's not oblivious to people or reactions, outside of ways people might feel toward him which aren't the easily tracked frustration, jealousy, fear, or greed. A fading smile is another concern, but also a weighed truth: at no time when his mother's shidi was last alive did Wei Wuxian's name, or assigned title, carry any good meaning. With what his goals had been, with what Song Lan's goals had been, he's surprised at any sort of pleasantness to follow.

Yet he's... not sure what to make of this anyway. When in the last sixteen... less than sixteen years was this living part of the past from? How was he from any part of it in the first place?

Wei Wuxian breathes in, makes himself smile, and matches this hellishly strange landscape all the better for it, for all Xiao Xingchen cannot see it. )

If you're extending the invitation, I'll accept, ( he says, eyes dropping down to note what he should have earlier: bare feet. ) either way you should head back in, none of us have the reserves to deal with the weather.

( They were all reduced to muscle memory and mortal baselines here. There is a part of him that aches in realising, again, that Xiao Xingchen is a good person. His fate had been cruel, as had that of those tied with him, a series of missteps Wei Wuxian hadn't been blind to seeing Lan Zhan's eyes understanding too much of in watching Song Lan's back, after all the pieces fell down.

Casualties of another kind of interpersonal war. To a fan who had not really known Wei Wuxian, past the same single meeting, and he doesn't let himself think hard on that.

He steps forward, stops again. )

You really don't remember me.

( Or perhaps deciding it couldn't have been him, couldn't have been Cangse Sanren's son who did such things. Who's to say? He can only decide if he's willing to ask, and know that he's not terribly willing to do so at all. )

wildcard

[fanoperator]

It's the hair that draws Huaisang more than anything. He hasn't seen anyone with hair in a civilized style since he arrived here.

Heading to the stranger's side in the grocery store, Huaisang clears his throat softly as he approaches to let the blindfolded man know of his presence. "Do you need any help with your shopping?"