Test Drive Meme #6

[inthenightmods]

TEST DRIVE MEME #6

Hello and welcome to the In the Night test drive meme for November! Thanks for your interest in our game! Reserves open on November 20, and applications open on November 22.

While you're here...

• Take a look at our rules and faq pages to familiarize yourself with the game.
  
• Note that we have a reserve cap of 20, and a (current) application cap of 7 apps this month for new players, as the game has a player cap of 60. An accurate count of current players will always be available on the taken page.
  
• TDM threads can become game canon if both players wish. If the situation isn't something that could happen in-game, you're free to chalk it up to some strange hallucination, a shared dream, or other mysterious circumstance.
  
• Note that this is not limited to new characters threading with characters already in-game. If current players wish to thread out the TDM prompts as canon events, they are welcome to do so. They are welcome to make posts in the main comms for TDM events as well. Please note, however, that actual plot clues or happenings will not occur in TDM prompts.
  
• If you plan to apply, please keep in mind that we do require at least one sample thread on the application to be from our TDM (though it doesn't need to be the current TDM).
  
• You're welcome to use the provided prompts or come up with something on your own, but we do ask that all threads take place in our game's setting.

Thank you again, and we hope you'll choose to join us!

log prompts

KEEP YOURSELF ALIVE

When the spirits decide to throw the residents of Beacon a feast, you have two options: partake or abstain. It doesn’t take long for the effects of the food to become apparent. Either you turned away from the temptation and watched your gluttonous comrades fall into a deep, comatose slumber…or you’re among the dreamers, and you awake to a Beacon of a time long forgotten. It's the same Beacon that was left upon falling asleep, but now, the sunlight is bright overhead and songbirds can be heard throughout the forest. The bonfire has been replaced by an ornate fountain, like a proper town square, and there's no lighthouse out on the peninsula.

While dreamers have the chance to explore, those stuck in the waking world find themselves swiftly overcome by a horde of violent green-eyed spirits that attack everything they can get their hands on: even if that includes an individual that’s left asleep and helpless. Regardless of your strength, this is your task now. Protect and defend the town if you want there to be anything left of it.

Although, unlike the official event, there will be no mod-run groups for dreaming and exploration, you’re free to write your character waking up in a sunny version of the known locations in Beacon and write your own psychological horror breakdowns of the dreamy world. Or, if you choose to write your character as a defender, feel free to make up your own green-eyed spirits to fight while looking over the comatose bodies of the dreamers.

This prompt is a mini version of the game's Enter Mr. Sandman event.

SHEER HEART ATTACK

You’ve never seen him before. A giggling little boy, cloaked in shadow, beckons you to follow through the forest. He travels quickly, always too fast to quite keep up with, and takes you through the trees with ease. If you choose to keep following, you're lead to an old, abandoned house, and once inside…find that the dining room has been all done up for a sort of dinner party. Various spirits clatter at the seats, pounding the table with forks and knives. They’re not the spirits you know. They’re not the chirping, scuttling friends that can be encountered around town.

No, these are long-clawed and jagged-toothed. They’re dirty and sunken-eyed, their masks streaked with red. The little boy collapses in a pile of wooden limbs at the foot of the table. Closer, now, the light of your lantern shows him for what he was: a puppet. The puppeteer makes itself known where it had hidden itself against the dark ceiling, eight long legs creeping into the once-unoccupied space of the doorway. As it blocks the way out, and the other spirits grow ever noisier, the looming figure of the Baubledook takes their rightful place at the far end of the table.

You have very little time to ask yourself: are you the guests of honor...or the main course?

network prompts

TOO MUCH LOVE WILL KILL YOU

Another week comes, marked by Robin's latest bulletin posting on the Network. But this one's a bit different: as a final note to sign off on the latest updates, she encourages everyone to give thanks in the spirit of the harvest season. Whether you want to thank someone directly or maybe say something more abstract, don't you think you'll feel better if you spread something positive? No? Not incentive enough? Well, this time, Robin appears to have accounted for the no-fun naysayers that try to skirt around her attempts at community building.

All readers will quickly discover that they're unable to navigate away from the bulletin until a thankful comment is left. There must be some kind of keyword function programmed in to only allow escape to those who have left thankful content. Better think of something, cynics and grumps. If nothing else, there's probably no way for the Network to tone police?

I WANT IT ALL

A friendly pumpkin sprite has appeared in the bottom corner of your tablet's dashboard! It's a loving and smiling companion, asking quite frequently to be attended to and, most importantly: fed. Curiously, the more that you feed the digital vegetable, the bigger it grows...until it's actively blocking out parts of your screen. You could stop feeding it, of course. It's not real or alive, so what's the harm? But as it grows hungrier and more insistent and you continue not to feed it, it cries and cries until it goes from sad to angry.

And then you notice it chomping at the edge of the screen, eating it away, bit by bit, blacking out the corners and working its way inward, making apps inaccessible and the network harder and harder to navigate. Maybe you should have given it what it wanted.

QUICKNAV
comms	|	network • logs • memes • ooc
pages	|	rules • faq • taken • mod contact • player contact • calendar • setting • exploration • item requests • full nav

Comments

carmilla karstein. carmilla webseries (warnings for blood, vampirism, sacrifices kinda???)

[vampirella]

BRING ME A DREAM.

( one minute, she's doing the big damn hero thing, and... the next she's here. Carmilla really doubts it's heaven. for starters, she really barely believes in such a ridiculous concept of a happy place in the clouds only homophobes get to see, and secondly, even if such a place existed there's no chance in the slightest she'd end up there. she wasn't called a demon throughout most of the 1700s to end up in heaven. she's not sure what is happening — did she get sucked into the bright light of Lophiiformes and this is just her life now?

sitting on a plain white beach, sun beating down on her dark head, really isn't doing it for her. for starters, she's not dressed for the beach, big time. also, seeing as it's absolutely empty, she really is missing the whole "party" vibe. it could be worse, she could be inundated with the souls the sumerian god slug had consumed, right? since most of those were her exes, that would have been worse for sure. it beat being trapped in a coffin of blood, but only barely.

she's annoyed, most of all. she'd almost been looking forward to the nothingness of finally being dead, and now... she's here, by herself, all over again.

you'd think she'd be grateful to hear sluggish steps in the sand behind her, though the fact she snaps without turning around to say, ) I don't care who you are, beat it and find your own slice of afterlife! ( indicates she's not super feeling company either. )

LOVED UP.

are you serious? as if forcing people to play nice is going to get any genuine results.

okay, fine: i'm so grateful to be in this shithole instead of the shithole i was last. really trading up from one crappy situation to another, only this one is terribly lit.

TAMOGATCHI MADNESS

( she's had to resort to voice commands, since her pumpkin has definitely gotten big enough to cover a majority of her screen. she can barely read anything on it, and still keeps gleefully feeding the little monster. her voice is a quiet drawl when she finally bothers to talk: )

Think we can feed these little monsters enough that they'll eat the entire operating system? ( unbelievably, Carmilla sounds endeared to the little monstrosities. hopefully it's not an option to overfeed the poor things into destroying the entire network, because she might.... )

WILDCARD.

( none of these working? want to do another thing? i'm super game! feel free to pm me or hit me up at my plurk, meowed! )

dreaming

[lightlessflame]

[Agnes stops. She wasn't really looking for a conversation. This just happened to be where she was walking, only paying attention to her surroundings enough not to walk headlong into anything. She's not dressed so well for the beach, either: in a woolen coat and scarf, she may as well be in the middle of winter. Her hands remain in her pocket.]

Alright.

[But she doesn't move, not yet. She watches, her gaze deep and intense, like she's trying to figure out everything that underlies the snappy remark.]

[vampirella]

( she doesn't need vampiric hearing to know that despite agreeing, her company is still aggressively present and probably just staring at the back of her head right now. Carmilla's head drops back in a visible sign of her frustration, before she at least turns to eye the intruder before trying to shake her loose a second time. she ... she doesn't recognize her. that doesn't mean much, Mother got up to all sorts of sacrifices that she wasn't ever involved in. but it's still a little unexpected to meet a stranger in what she thought was an endless lone existence inside the eternal light of a slug god. )

You're not great at listening, ( Carmilla accuses, though her tone is at least mildly less incendiary than it was a second ago. not exactly because she feels bad, more that she's curious to not be the only one on the eternal beach. she pushes herself to her feet, and the only way the leather pants she's wearing are appropriate for the beach is the fact the sand doesn't stick to it, so that's about the only good thing she's got going right now. she heads closer to the redhead, expression skeptical. )

Or picking beach attire. Are you dead too? Tell me it was more exciting than freezing to death. ( what an incredibly callous question, whoops. )

cw: suicide mention

[lightlessflame]

I'm not great at respecting authority.

[And, for that matter, she doesn't know what kind of authority this other woman has. Very likely, the two of them have none at all, not really. They're dead, after all. Or so they've been told.]

This is what I was wearing when I hung myself.

[vampirella]

( that’s... fair. nothing about Carmilla has ever read “respectful of authority”, so she can almost blandly accept that. even when it’s her own demands being ignored. granted she is more used to flighty coeds that balk easily, so anyone with half a spine is a nice change of pace.

she’s certainly a cruel creature on occasion, but there’s a quiet flicker of remorse in her expression. it takes a lot to make Carmilla actually feel bad about her callousness, but apparently accidentally mocking suicide will do it. )

A cold death sounds terrible. ( she’s sincere, at least for a moment. she thinks back to her first death. she’d been cold. ) Hanging. Huh. ( that sounds pretty far out of the normal ritual, which is curious. is the god slug just slurping up any soul it can reach? or is something distinctly weirder going on? ) I didn’t dress much better for my demise, but in my defense I didn’t realize I had to hit the beach after.

[lightlessflame]

[Agnes smiles. It is a horribly morbid conversation...but she doesn't mind that at all. It's actually quite interesting.]

I've never been to the beach before.

[She hesitates, looking out at the water.]

I didn't imagine it being so dull.

[vampirella]

( horribly morbid might as well be her middle name. Carmilla does love to be as dour as possible, so she is perfectly at peace with such a depressing conversation.

she's not exactly a beach kinda girl, so far be it for her to play hype man to a body of water. still, even she has to admit, )

Usually it's more lively than this. Too many people, children screaming, sand getting everywhere. ( she's getting Anakin Skywalker-y here, whoops. ) The eternally empty and vacant vibe isn't doing it any favors. I don't suppose you saw anything more interesting on your way here.