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penumbramemes2024-11-16 04:50 pm
penumbra: test drive meme #1
TEST DRIVE MEME #1
↪ Test Drive Meme plot and interactions can be considered game canon as long as both parties in the game are accepted and agree to keep it canon!
↪ There are currently 50 player spots available!
↪ Threads on the TDM can be summarized for Activity Check
[art credit]
The last thing you remember is either simple or very complicated - you were asleep, or unconscious, or perhaps...you died. Whatever the circumstances, you closed your eyes at home and dreamed of a storm, and when your eyes opened again you were staring at the ceiling of your new home, injured perhaps, but with wounds bound and safe enough. For now.
Upon waking and exploring your new surroundings - a relatively nice, furnished apartment - you will discover a BlackBerry style phone, your apartment key, mail key, and a sensor for "buzzing" into the building, as well as a list of rules to live by in your new home:
The apartment you now find yourself in looks well-kept, the fridge is full, the lights are on, and the whole place looks as if whoever lived in this apartment before you simply packed up and left, minutes ago.1. don't use the elevator between 1:11 and 3:33 am.
2. you will receive mail from 'the building manager' shoved under your door. read it once and then burn it immediately.
3. if someone claiming to live on the fourth floor tries to speak to you, ignore them.
4. never enter the basement, or any area of the building below ground level
5. if you see a shadowy figure in the hallway, run.
If you leave that apartment, you'll find yourself faced with a dim hallway that leads to a small lobby with an elevator door. You're going to have to explore this new place sometime! Why not now?
Eventually, everyone will make their way to the lobby, the heart of the building, with its empty concierge desk and mail room. Like most of the other common areas of the building, the Lobby is a little dimly lit in a way that could be cozy or creepy depending on your perspective, with patterned carpet that hides nasty scuffs, and sturdy paint and drywall that's not likely to get broken too easily. All of it hardy and meant for a space that's open to the public.
One other major feature of the lobby of Penumbra Place is a large corkboard stationed on the wall behind the concierge desk. And on this corkboard is a large map of the city, burnt around the edges, torn and replaced with transparent tape in places, and scribbled on with large swatches of colour here and there. There are some pertinent places marked with these colours - the Dry Waste, Wet Waste, and the Chasm, as well as where Penumbra itself is located. See a picture of the markings here.
Underneath the concierge's desk can be found a small stockpile of supplies that looks strangely out of place in the dim lobby. The majority of the items look like they were salvaged or scavenged from the Dry Wastes outside, dirty and rusty and generally like a tetanus hazard from hell. The items cover a broad spectrum - shovels and pickaxes, makeshift weapons including a bat with nails driven into it, a large plastic waterskin half-full of stagnant water, first aid kits from the pharmacy that have seen better days. There are also a rather large stack of something that can't be found elsewhere in the apartment building - MREs, or meals ready to eat. These rations are light and shelf-stable for years, each providing a full day's food for an average human, and excellent for packing to eat on camping trips or expeditions.
How will you divide these spoils? Eat the MREs, or save them for an exploration mission? And what about that map?
Most importantly - just who left these items out for you to find?
There's a treat waiting for anyone who happens to venture outside and explore the businesses that are installed in the main floor of the building - Skidooch's Pub has a welcome banner above the open doors!
Echoing off the nearby buildings, all of which are collapsed and in ruin, is the sound of cheerful music, beckoning you into the dim, somewhat timeless interior of Skidooch's. The sound of the music contrasts sharply with the grey rubble and dead silence of the rest of the world, leaving it sounding a little tinny, and are there whispered voices somewhere in that recording or are you just imagining things? Best not to dwell on it, perhaps. Better to get into the mood for a party, because that's what's going on in Skidooch's!
Anyone who enters the pub will find refreshments set up, a dance floor cleared, and a huge very-spiked punchbowl ready and waiting at the end of the bar. There are delicate crystal plates and cups for the refreshments and punch. The foods are generally...a little old-fashioned. Some of them look quite appetizing, like the huge platter of completely normal deviled eggs; others are a little less so, like the ambrosia jello cake and towering aspic that stands in a place of honour at the center of the spread. Surprisingly though, if you take a closer look and the aspic doesn't put you off your appetite, there are quite a few good foods there, including stuff you might recognize from home. The punch is, as mentioned, heavily spiked, but has a lovely light fruit punch flavour.
Once you're inside Skidooch's, the music seems to lose that weirdly-echoing tinny sound and more just like lyricless jazz music, easy to dance to and also easy to talk through. The chairs and tables are comfortable, and the dance floor is beckoning. The longer you stay inside the pub, the more you forget your troubles, feeling them slowly ease away, ebbing and flowing until they become nothing, and you're suffused with a haze of nostalgic joy, whether you've been drinking or not. Why not sit down a while and get to know your new fellow tenants?
Just don't leave the party too soon, because if you come back, all you'll find beyond those open doors at Skidooch's Pub are discordant, repetitive old music, a spread of familiar food and drink that looks rotten, crawling with maggots and flies, and a complete lack of the people you just left there. The further you creep into the pub, the darker it gets, and you walk much further than you should to reach the full depth of the pub as it was before. Eventually, you'll find yourself in pitch darkness, with only that music playing.
Dare you continue walking?
Anyone who looks out of a window facing the "inside" of the U-shape of the building will see a gorgeous courtyard garden with winding paths to wander, trees and wildflowers, and gardening patches that are ripe for the taking. The only entrance to this area is a gate in the tall wall that protects the garden from the public on the opposite side of the bottom of the U-shape of the building, featuring the security of a small pad for you to use your individual sensor to "buzz" into the gardens. The words "Back Paths" are scribbled onto this gate in red spray paint.
It's understandable that you'd want to explore the gardens, when everything else in this world seems to be, for the moment, dry and in ruins, devoid of any life save the people in Penumbra Place. All that ruin and decay can get wearing on the psyche, if you're not used to it.
Upon entering the back paths, you'll find yourself at the start of that beautiful winding path. The gardens themselves are mostly grass and idyllic wildflowers, dotted with evergreen and deciduous trees, with wide grassy patches perfect for tossing a baseball with little Timmy, and the occasional garden plot. The weather in the back paths is always balmy, like a warm spring day just after the rain, the scent of loam and petrichor perpetually lingering in the air. It's a beautiful walk!
But...shouldn't that walk have been over a while ago? Haven't we walked much further than the visible length of the path as seen from the building? The path seems to go on and on, twisting and winding through the trees and grass, and have you seen that picnic bench before or is it just identical to the last one you saw?
Whether it's for an hour or 6 hours, you wander the back paths looking for the exit, until you finally, finally come to it. That gate, spray-painted in red on this side with the words "No Return." Stepping outside the gate, you find yourself back in the post-apocalyptic backyard of Penumbra Place. Walking around the building, you're captivated by how quiet it is, with no birds or animals making noises, no traffic, no signs of life. No lights in the windows of Penumbra Place. In fact, Penumbra Place has collapsed, with no sign of the building you left behind to come into the back paths.
The only place to go is back into the back paths. Any further exploring reveals only the empty ruin of the place. And once you're back in the gardens...how long will it be until you find the real exit?
The dawning of the second day of your new existence in Penumbra Place greets you with a song. A song that's stuck in your head, that is. It's a cheerful tune, melodic, a definite earworm, but one you've never heard before. It repeats over and over again, at first easy enough to ignore, but as the day goes on it gets louder and louder, drowning out the background noise of thoughts in your brain, eventually drowning out the ability for conscious, logical thought. It dominates your brainwaves, repeating over and over again, the music cheerful but the lyrics that you somehow know much more sinister:
The only thing scary is the void in my brain
Everything is burning, I am lonely every day
I'm just a tiny cell and my body is made of clay
The only thing scary is the chasm in my brain
Will you sing along?
As the night falls, the song abruptly comes to a halt, for everyone who can hear it at the same time. And then there are monsters.
In fact, to anyone who sang the song aloud there are suddenly monsters in the building, tall and with charred-black skin, looking as if they'd been burned and wearing crowns of moss, their mouths open wide and leering, full of sharp teeth, the long, crooked fingers tipped with claws that drip blood.
Or at least that's what those who sang see their fellow tenants as. Anyone who sang the song aloud will see their fellow tenants who didn't sing as monsters trying to chase and kill them, while seeing those who did sing as they really are. Team up with your fellow singers to slay the monsters! Or, well, if you didn't sing? Time to run from whoever did!
If your character sang the song aloud, please reply in this comment thread, as whether or not they sang will be very, very important during the game's first event.
no subject
In trying to understand the situation they're in, exploring everywhere that seems potentially different from anywhere else seems as good a plan as any. Next to checking out everywhere they're told not to go at least, of which checking out the basement and the fourth floor are high on Allen's list. But after checking the status of his worn duffel and deciding, finally, to pack one of those "meals ready-to-eat" in it as dubious as he is about it and any food at this point, he shoulders it and proceeds towards the gate. Giving the side of the duffel an absent little pat as he does so, an affectionate and instinctive little gesture like one might give to a loyal dog by their side.
Let's go, then.
Walking with purpose and straight, long strides he rounds the corner and -- nearly bumps straight into the other. But he catches himself just barely, startled quickly out of his thoughts by Shouto's presence.
"O-oh." His appearance -- it's hard to forget. Allen recognizes seeing the neatly spliced white and red hair from across the lobby earlier, as even his own snow white hair and pale grey eyes in someone so young are so unusual in his own world as to draw stares and suspicion from most people.
Or, more precisely, they stare because of the disfigurements of his left side. The hair just adds to it.
Though for the same reason he doesn't stare at Shouto even if his appearance is unusual enough by the standards of Allen's world to draw notice, as that's never something he's liked to be on the receiving end of.
"Sorry, I didn't see you there."
no subject
But the guy seems normal enough and doesn't act like he knows him or anything, so Shoto tries to put that oddity aside for now.
"Ah-- It's fine. If you're planning to head into that garden, be careful. The last place I walked into that looked way too alive to be part of this ruined city turned out to be a trap."
no subject
But Allen presumes the slightly wide-eyed look to be because of his sudden appearance and nearly ramming into him, so he just smiles a little sheepishly and waves a hand in a lightly offhand manner.
"Eh? I see... Thank you." His words are appreciative, but his tone is steady and undeterred. And he smiles again, this time with a lift of his chin and bright-eyed sort of quiet assurance. "But I'm sort of counting on that."
He reshoulders his duffel with a gloved hand, and for as much as he's been pushing his uneasiness down most of the day and pretending things were fine when they very much weren't, he really does seem genuinely calm about the prospect of walking face-first into danger. An easy sort of quiet confidence that only comes from experience -- and experiencing the worst things possible over and over again.
"Anywhere that's going to be the root of what's going on... it's going to look out of place and probably be trapped after all, right?"
no subject
He's about to ask what this guy's Quirk can do, but he remembers the vast discrepancies between the world he knows and the one Nayuta came from, so he amends the question.
"Do you have a way to defend yourself if we run into trouble?"
no subject
There's a faint hesitation at the suggestion that they go together, even if Allen actually looks a little pleasantly surprised, but he also catches himself. In his world, after all... there are only a small handful of them in the entire world with powers that let them have any chance against supernatural forces—and it's a genocide. It would be irresponsible to bring a normal human along for any reason other than to make sure they stay protected, and when globally there are less than 20 of you with powers... you don't presume others are equipped to deal with the strange paranormal forces that are obviously at play here.
But everyone he's spoken to at any length with so far has been supernatural in some way or another, without being anything he's encountered before. It's actually very strange, and seems important. So he pauses, considering Shouto again, why he might be asking, and gives a small nod.
And even if he is a normal human, it's better to stay in groups. For their sake."I'm not unfamiliar with how to handle myself in situations like this." Said with gentle and cryptic assurance as he adjusts the strap of his duffel and turns to face him. But that brings up a good point:
"What did you mean, the last place you were in like this?"
no subject
"Then let's go." He buzzes the gate open, sparing only a glance for the warning written on it before walking through ahead of the other guy.
"There's a bar on the ground floor of the apartment building with music playing inside. It's some kind of welcoming party, but it doesn't want people to leave. I was in there for a lot longer than I should have been."