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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
"You gave her your word." Not that it means anything when you can arbitrarily decide to pluck someone out of the hell they've made their home in and then spontaneously decide that you've reached the end of the line. And you can abandon your mental basket case of a burden like a hot potato that you insisted on raising from said hell in and make those damaged goods someone else's problem while you build that white picket fence and plant some roses in the backyard. And not especially since Steve clearly took all the stupid with him through time and space to wind up here, of all places. 'The tech malfunctioned'. Really?
"You could have been happy." Try explaining to Bucky why the words sound so venomous, why he's the one angry right now. Why he even thinks he gets a say in how and where Steve goes. He's not sure he'd understand it himself. He just knows that he feels it, raw and twisting in the pit of his stomach.
"You could've--" The tightness swells in his chest, forces his shoulders to rise, and Bucky doesn't know how to use his words, to finish his accusation. He tears his gaze away and huffs an audible sigh between his lips, eyebrows furrowed deep, clenching his teeth.
"Forget it," he hears himself say quietly, raising his open hand expectantly for Steve to pass the broken tech over. "I'll take a look when I-- figure out what happened to the building. Maybe it can be fixed and you can go wherever you need to go."
Because he might be a smart boy in any other circumstance but waiting for Bucky to figure out Steve came back for him? One will be waiting a very long time.
no subject
Bucky is so angry. Steve feels like he's maybe beginning to get a dim handle on just why - and jeez, could you be any more definite about that, Rogers? - and it's about Bucky having no control over his life, he thinks. At least, that might be part of it.
Steve didn't expect this to go smoothly, but he's beginning to see just how big a pit he's tripped into.
"I did," he says. "And I was with her, not long before the end. I'm not going to say that didn't destroy me, but being back with Peggy isn't my life any more. I have also... given my word to others."
Steve raises his eyebrows, tosses the stupid machine on the ground, and grinds his heel into it.
"Tell me about this missing building of yours?"
no subject
If people are not supposed to make big life decisions while dealing with PTSD, Bucky won't need to be making any decisions at all. Which, actually, he might prefer over the alternative. He has... ambivalent feelings about commandeering his own life. Yes, he knows that that's the goal he should be working towards, but. Sometimes he feels like he's perpetually just one bad day from driving it into the ground.
Bucky should also probably be angry (separately angry? Even more angry?) about Steve potentially completely wrecking their only way out of here, but. He wouldn't put much hope on or take his chances on a device that, on a pretty high off-chance, might actually be faulty. He didn't come here that way, so. It stands to reason he can find an alternative exit, either back the way he came or just. Angry-punching a hole in the fabric of this reality at this point.
"There was an apartment block there less than an hour ago," he says with a small, flippant gesture of his metal forearm, back towards the ruins. Clearly, it's no longer there. And there's few easy or rational explanations for what happened. Even if it was scheduled to be demolished - it was never cordoned off and somehow he missed the memo that it was going to happen and he didn't hear any noise of the explosion and everything collapsing - there should be bigger pieces of it left, and some sign of construction work. There could have been people still inside and there was definitely an entire armada of cats that wouldn't have been easy to evacuate in such a short span of time. But there's no traces of any bodies and the whole thing between waking up in the room with the ridiculous rules and Schrodinger's apartment complex and Steve is just-- making him feel like he's going insane. Or, at least, more insane than usual.
no subject
Steve's big on grand gestures, and means them, but he doesn't always think them through.
His head whips around anyway, even though he knows that he won't suddenly see the block and be able to say hey, Bucky, I think your eyes need checking. "...huh. Has anything else disappeared?"
no subject
"There were dozens of cats in the building. The type with no fur. A few people too." They're clearly all gone. And no bones or clothes or traces of anyone having lived there. So, yes, Bucky finds it safer to assume that maybe there was nothing there and he'd just imagined the whole thing, but that's more a reflection of his uncertainty in the nature of his reality than needing to get his eyes checked.
"Did you see anyone on your way here?" He could very well be talking to his imaginary friend here, but hey, at least they're talking about the apartment and not about Peggy or getting blipped or the long history between them or wherever they fall on the spectrum between selfishness and selflessness. Would anyone really ever be in the mood to deal with all that?