test drive meme #2

[shadowyfigure]

TEST DRIVE MEME #2

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[Vishvendra Rai]

Hi, It's Me, Back Again

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:

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.

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.

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?

Drag You To The Bottom of the Lake

CW: POSSIBLE DROWNING, TENTACLES

Usually, one has to use their fob to buzz into the amenities on the first floor, but today you might notice that the doors are propped open and peppy pop music seems to be playing from down one of the hallways. Echoey and a little strange at first, at a distance, the music seems to beckon to you and you find yourself following the sound of it.

The closer you get, the more clear the music will be, less creepy and echoey, until it's nothing but bubblegum pop that might play on the radio in any world you might have come from. The lyrics are unfamiliar but they're easy to learn if you wanted to sing along! The happy, peppy energy is very familiar and the more you listen, the more you find yourself wanting to sing or hum along.

Eventually, the source of the music proves to be the swimming pool, the doors of which are propped open just like the doors leading up to it. Inside it is lit moderately brightly, the high ceiling sloped from about the center of the room with a glass roof that shows that it's raining outside. Inside, however, it's warm and smells slightly of chlorine and...candy? Upon further inspection, it appears there's a candy and ice cream bar set up at one side of the pool, where a little bit of room has been cleared, the lounge chairs pressed against the walls of the pool. The music appears to be coming from an old school boombox that's propped on one of the chairs and blasting at the highest volume possible, plugged into an outlet on the wall behind it. The doors to the change rooms are propped open invitingly, and the temperature is just warm and muggy enough that the pool? That looks like a great idea. Cool. Inviting. A drop of sweat winds its way down your forehead as you look at it.

The ice cream and candy bar is welcoming, with various flavours available from vanilla to chocolate to peanut butter swirl to...blood? That label must mean blood orange, right? Either way, there's plenty of ice cream to go around, and once you've scooped your portion into your bowl, you can top it with a wide variety of candies - gummy candy that turns deliciously hard and chewy with the cold ice cream, mini peanut butter cups, peppermint swirls, and a wide variety of other types. To top it all off, help yourself to caramel, chocolate, or strawberry syrup. Feel free to dance to the happy pop music in the cleared area while you eat and socialize with your fellow partygoers!

Once you're done with the ice cream, feel free to go into the change room of your choice (male, female, and non-gendered) and find a line of swimsuits and towels neatly folded in matching sets along the benches. Get changed, take a quick shower to rinse off, and go jump into the pool!

The pool itself is quite benign at the shallow end and through the middle, and as usual with pools, as you swim deeper the depth markers printed on the side of the pool go up and up. 5 feet. 7 feet. 9 feet. The final markers simply say "???" though, as you get to the last few feet of the pool, and if you are to look down you'll find that instead of the distant blue of the tile under chlorinated water, there's nothing but black. There's no way to see the bottom, and if you drop something lighted it'll simply sink until it's no longer visible in the dark. The more you look at it, the more it calls to you, as you stare into the abyss and it stares back.

Just when you find yourself tempted to swim down and see how far you can get before you can't hold your breath any longer, something emerges from the dark, a deep grey-purple tentacle with suckers on the inside. It wraps around your ankle, and you can feel the panic set in as it starts to drag you under...

Can you fight free of it? Will someone come to your rescue? Will anyone even notice?

Hope You Didn't See Me Unhinging My Jaw

CW: EMETOPHOBIA, ROT, MAGGOT-LIKE CREATURE

The stairwell and elevator in Penumbra Place have never been what anyone would call 'reliable' by any means. However, it seems that over the next few days after the pool party, they're fixated on the 8th floor. The elevator constantly stops at the 8th floor, doors opening as if to admit or expel an invisible party, lingering at the floor much longer than is necessary or normal. People using the stairwells will find that the numbers painted on the wall of the stairwell to indicate where the doors go are all '8' no matter how many floors up or down they go. There's obviously something on that floor that...requires your attention.

Should anyone be brave enough to actually venture into the 8th floor, they'll find it looks like a normal floor in the apartment building, albeit slightly...squishy. The floor squelches under shoes, covered in an inches-deep mysterious greenish-yellow liquid, the walls dip slightly under the touch of fingers, even the doors are slightly squishy when the knobs are grasped to open or close them. Surfaces are shiny and slightly slimy, glistening in light that's a little bit lower than the lights on other floors. There's a scent in the air like rotting food, spoiled milk, prickling at the back of your nostrils. Every touch stings a little, too, unless some kind of protection is being worn, like acid biting at the skin and eating through it. It eats through clothing too, with drips falling from the ceiling and landing on heads and faces and shoulders, dissolving fabric and hair and the skin underneath.

As you explore the floor, you'll come across apartment 808, where the door is slightly ajar. Moving inside, the scent of rot and digestion that permeates the entire floor gets stronger and stronger, like curdled milk and bile and vomit. The amount of liquid on the floor gets deeper and deeper until it's stinging and biting at your ankles and calves, the sharp but slow throbbing pain of being digested.

And then you see it, the giant thing attached to the apartment's living room wall. About 10 feet long, the thing is like a giant maggot, squirming and pulsing above a couch soaked with that burning acidic bile, seemingly feeding on the wall and the fluid. And anything that happens by, it seems, as the creature shifts and makes a high-pitched noise, reaching out some kind of appendage toward you. In some instinctive way, you recognize this creature as a parasite, and disgust builds up like bile in your own throat at the sight of it, a primitive emotion bordering on fear.

There's no choice but to kill it, is there? Except it doesn't die so easily, requiring ridiculous amounts of damage taken before it will die. Are you going to risk killing it and damaging the building in which you all live?

The World Is Burning

CW: FIRE, POSSIBILITY OF BEING BURNED

The smell of smoke greets you as you awaken, and as you go about your day, the scent doesn't go away. It's faintest on the main floor and the 11th floor, but gets stronger the closer to the center of the building you get. If you happen to be in the stairwell, it's easy to see that the smoke is billowing out from under the door of the 4th floor.

Anyone who investigates the floor will find it on fire, the flames licking at the skeletal remains of the walls, already burned out. And they will hear screams and cries of terror from inside the floor, as if there were people in those apartments! There are 25 apartments on the floor and people in almost all of them that need rescuing! Does it matter that this floor was uninhabitable just yesterday? No! You can hear them, screaming and crying and panicking. Someone is crying that their baby is stuck somewhere, someone is screaming that they're burning.

While some characters may be heroes who'd help no matter what, the others can be compelled by the fact that the only standing and habitable building anywhere nearby is on fire. It's worth the time to help out, in whatever way possible.

Anyone who tries to fight the fire will find that nothing they do will extinguish the flames, no amount of water or ice or anything else will staunch the flames that are burning the skeletal apartment walls. There's hardly anything left to burn, and yet it keeps going, flames licking at the exposed wood seemingly without really doing any further damage. But if a person tries to touch it? Well, that's another story altogether, because the flames definitely harm flesh.

The only way to stop the blaze before it consumes the whole apartment is to rescue the people on the floor. People that no one here has met before, people who seemingly didn't exist before the flames started. Could they be related to the phantoms you can usually see on this floor? Maybe. But either way, once all the people are cleared out of the floor, the fire magically dies down and slowly goes out.

We Go Boo

CW: GHOSTS, DARKNESS

The shadowy figure is old news by this point, and easy enough to avoid. It's simple, if you see it, simply run to the other end of the hall and leave the floor, or duck into one of the apartments. Easy enough, if still pretty scary.

Things start to change in the month of January, though, with new figures appearing. They are shrouded in darkness, enough that making out details of what they look like is difficult. Sometimes they come alone, sometimes in groups of two or three. They're distinguishable enough from each other by height and posture to tell that there are 6 of them, all different save for two that are identical, only obviously two because they often appear together.

While these six figures are much like the original shadowy figure, and don't do much of their own or take initiative to attack anyone, and are impervious to any attacks on them, they are intimidating, and their appearances are more frequent than the shadowy figure's appearances had been. Every night, on multiple floors, and sometimes even in the daytime, most often around sunset and sunrise, these figures appear and sweep down hallways, rattle the knobs of the apartments, and generally make themselves known.

(CODE)

Accessibility: teacodes

Comments

[freakymagoo]

[That has him stopping in his tracks and turning around, one eyebrow raised as his unwavering sort-of-glare traverses again from toes to swimshorts to scar to face.]

The fuck are you wearing then?

[messenger]

A... bathing suit?

[ is he not? he glances nervously down at himself, suddenly feeling far more exposed.

he wouldn't have needed to wear this, if he still had his powers. if he were still a proper angel.

castiel curls his toes against the edge of the pool and scratches the scar on his chest. ]

My other clothes were too hot.

[freakymagoo]

So, what, you're just going to wear that and walk around the building? [Bucky shouldn't judge. There are people in far, far worse attires gallivanting around in New York City. But that wasn't the case in the New York City he remembers from before the war, and, you know, he just said horror movie apartment. Is it really wise to be running around wearing just that? Clothes won't protect against anything but. Not having much of any isn't exactly going to help either.]

[messenger]

No.

[ it's cold outside the pool room. the pool room is really the only room that happens to be this warm, and he thinks being too cold is probably worse than being too hot.

not that he would know.

he squints at bucky, before looking away, back down into the pool. ]

Aren't you warm?

[freakymagoo]

I'm fine. [Which, to be fair, is the same thing he would have said even if he was bleeding out of six holes with a shard of broken bone sticking out of his thigh. Yes it's uncomfortably warm in here and the pool seems like a good idea but he wasn't planning on staying anyway - no way in hell was he touching any of the food in case everything's rotten like last time - and he would rather look good with his clothes on and quietly sweat it out, take a shower when he gets back to his apartment than take any of his clothes off.]

I wouldn't do it, if you can't swim. [Bucky doesn't particularly want to have to jump in and save this guy if shit goes sideways.]

[messenger]

... No.

[ he says, while still staring deep into the blackness of the seemingly fathomless deep end.

he's in the deep end, all right. he doesn't know where he is, local or timeline or universe. it should be so easy to know. so easy to see. but he can't see anything. he can't feel anything. half the world has disappeared, and he's stumbling blind.

but the senses he does have, he must learn to listen to. ]

It felt like I was being... beckoned.

[ even if they're not always in his best interests.

hos voice draws out, slow, to punctuate his next statement. ]

I... think there's something in the water.

[freakymagoo]

[Bucky can't help but roll his eyes, but he does backtrack and go back towards where the other man is standing, peering into the swimming pool. He keeps a safe distance from the edge in case this is some stupid prank.

Something dry and witty is about to leave his lips when he catches himself and stops just short of saying anything.]

...yeah. [He can't see anything swimming or sinking in the water, per se. But it looks very inviting. Almost alluring. His head tilts like gravity is pulling on one side, but somehow his legs manage to stay still - just barely.]

It's probably. Bad idea. [It's not paranoia if the apartment is trying to kill you.]

[messenger]

[ oh, good. it's not just him.

he thought, maybe, because of what he is, that it was something only interested in him, or, worse, all in his head.

he knows just how unreliable human senses can be. ]

Yes.

[ he takes a single step back.

it seems to take him some effort. worry passes across his face — a flash of fear. ]

I think we should go.

[freakymagoo]

Mm. [He seems to agree, in theory at least, but he's as still as a gargoyle and glares with a tense jaw and tight shoulders, hovering somewhere between rolling for intimidation and contemplating stupid, reckless self-destruction.]

Put your clothes on. [If he leaves, this guy comes with. But they don't deal with the threat. And he's not even sure what the nature of the threat is, but. It seems irresponsible to just. Leave it like this for the next person to find.]

[messenger]

[ he knows the right thing to do would be to deal with whatever this is. if it's as dangerous as it feels, it's going to hurt people. but he has absolutely nothing — not even a knife to cut himself with to draw a sigil out in blood. what could he possibly do? dean would know, he's certain. but he's alone here.

he stumbles another step backward. the spell momentarily broken, he rushes toward the locker rooms to change back into his clothes.

he'll meet bucky outside once he's done. ]

[freakymagoo]

[As far as resilience goes, Bucky is simultaneously impenetrable as he is vulnerable. A part of him wants to take the plunge, and not necessary solely for heroic reasons. But a part of him is vaguely aware that this is possibly another one of the many tricks in this place's repertoire. Just like the rotten food. Just like the garden and the ruins of the apartment. It's a similar part of him that sort of understands he needs to resist the urge.

Maybe they can cordon off the pool area. Or something. Tapr it up like a crime scene from the outside. Move some heavy furniture. At least that'll deter people from coming in, even if they're not dealing with-- whatever this is directly.

He swallows and wavers; for a moment it seems like he might take the plunge. But the sound of the other guy opening and closing doors getting changed snaps him out of it and he grunts, frustration settling in the furrow of his eyebrows as he peels away from the edge of the pool and heads back out towards where it's cooler.]

[messenger]

[ castiel joins bucky with a rushed gait that makes him feel diminished. at least it might become somewhat more obvious why he changed when bucky sees him again. he's wearing a two piece suit and long beige coat, like he's about to step out to take the bus to some white collar job. of course, there are no buses and no jobs. not here. and soon enough the same will be true for the place he came from.

at least outside the pool area it's not quite so warm. when they're in the hall, castiel stops and turns back.

with his powers, he would have simply welded the doors shut. now he doesn't know what to do — he just keeps thinking of solutions that no longer apply. ]

[freakymagoo]

[With that kind of outfit he can surely afford a taxi. Bucky's stare might have lingered a touch too long but it's mostly just to reconcile the image he had in his mind of the man in the swimsuit against the man in the two piece suit and he doesn't do a double take.

It somehow feels easier to breathe once the pool is behind them, out of sight though not quite out of mind. There's no one else in the vicinity, so. They have some time to consider their next course of action.]

We need to block the entrance at least. Or come back with a gun.

[messenger]

[ joke's on you, bucky. his wallet is empty (save for jimmy novak's driver's license).

on moving away from the pool and toward the exit, castiel almost breaks into a run. he can feel the urge building within himself, the burst of panic. but by the time they reach the double doors it's faded, and as he turns back the tug is only gentle, now, like waves sucking up sand at the beach. ]

I don't have a gun.

[ and his angel blade wasn't on his person when he arrived here.

he moves to begin pushing the doors closed. ]

[freakymagoo]

[Well. To be honest he's not sure what shooting at the pool (into the pool?) is going to accomplish either. Apart from wasting some ammo and some small sense of satisfaction. There wasn't actually anything in the water that he could see.]

Wait. Let me go back in. [Maybe it'll be like that weird party where the spread of food looked normal the first time around and turned into a pile of fermenting, maggot-writhing sludge when he re-entered the building.

It stands to reason that maybe he'll be able to see whatever is lurking in the pool the second time around. Although he's still not sure how to deal with whatever he finds. It's not exactly ideal to throw a deck chair or whatever and hope for the best.

This is why he's not the man with the plan. He'll just. Figure it out if he can't resolve anything with his fists.]

[messenger]

What?

[ the whiplash from locking into "plan a" then immediately discarding it is difficult for him to keep up with, but he doesn't try to stop the other man. instead, he'll follow him back in when he goes.

he has no idea what his logic is, but who is he to argue? he doesn't know what's going on here either. ]

[freakymagoo]

It might've changed. [Does he sound crazy yet? Bucky storms back to the edge of the pool and peers back in like someone who opens a fridge door a second time 10 minutes later expecting to suddenly find something they feel like eating that's drastically different from 10 minutes before.

Of course, he's looking into the shallow end this time so. Nothing seems to have changed looking down the length of the pool.

Except for the uncomfortable warmth and the pull to go in.]

Does it-- look different to you? Somehow? [Bucky can't trust his senses even on a good day. Never hurts to confirm.]

[messenger]

[ what? he thinks to the list of rules he was given, and briefly wonders if this man is a spirit himself. it's possible, isn't it? he can't trust his own senses, not since he blasted the last of the grace out of himself banishing those angels from the warehouse in van nuys.

but as he stands at his side, at the end of the pool, nothing seems to have been altered in any way. air thick with chlorine wafts up from the pool.

it makes him feel a little dizzy. ]

No.

[ is his once and final verdict. his fingers dig into the knot of his tie and begin to pull it loose. it's too hot. it's uncomfortably hot, and he hates it. ]

[freakymagoo]

[Bucky grunts. Glares at the pool for a few more seconds, as if he could conjure whatever it is he thinks is lurking down there if he scowls hard enough. But when nothing comes, his set jaw loosens just a fraction, and he breathes an audible sigh out through his nose.]

Fine. Let's go. [He makes sure the mormon-looking guy in the trenchcoat is in front of him and getting out of the pool area first before he follows closely behind.]

You planning on wearing that everywhere? [He's-- overdressed, to say the least.]

[messenger]

[ castiel is still trying to tug his tie free free when bucky finally gives up on the pool. (on closer inspection, one might realize that it'd been knotted rather awkwardly.)

he's glad for the interruption, and the chaperone. the urge to undress and get into the pool only continues to grow every time he stands at the edge of the water.

castiel blinks at the question. ]

... Yes?

[ when they stop by the doors, he tries to fix the knot of his tie before almost immediately giving up. ]

[freakymagoo]

Okay. [Far be it from the guy who's been lugging a 55 pound titanium prosthetic around, albeit not necessarily consciously or willingly, for most of his years of existence before he found someone considerate enough to design something more comfortable, to preach anything about form or function.]

What're you doing. [If he sounds irritated it's probably nothing to take personally. This is Bucky's happy face. He reaches over and swats those fiddling hands away to help untie the tie and redo it up properly, under and over from right to left.

It doesn't look like it's his first time wearing a suit so it just seems ridiculous that he somehow managed to work a deadknot into his tie.]

[messenger]

Uh—

[ castiel doesn't answer. he was going to. it's obvious. his mouth is open and everything. but then bucky's hands are rearranging his knotted tie into a better semblance of its namesake and castiel's jaw clicks shut. the question was rhetorical. clearly. castiel feels no need to interject, in that moment. instead, he pays careful attention to the peculiar sensation of his chest tightening with a feeling that he can't quite yet identify, gut knotted almost as badly as his tie.

dean did this for him once.

is dean dead?

is everyone dead?

a terrible thought occurs to him: one that he immediately dismisses. he cannot, and categorically refuses to be, a lone survivor.

when bucky is done, castiel stares. his gaze seems fixed somewhere about his collarbone, but it's obvious enough he isn't seeing anything. ]

[freakymagoo]

[Great. Unfortunately he's very familiar with that look. That's just great. Hopefully they last for more than 2 minutes here.

Bucky changes gears to deal with their immediate problem first. He gives the door to the pool a tug, half-expecting it to be immobile. When it groans and creaks with relative ease, he huffs a mildly irritated sigh and closes the door, gaze darting upwards and down to the floor looking for locks.

One of the side tables by the elevator should do, or a larger rubbish bin, or anything to deter the lazier folks among them from entering.

He'll... come back and pick this guy up if he's still checked out. He doesn't look like he'll do anything stupid just standing there anyway.]

[messenger]

[ the other man leaves and castiel doesn't seem to notice when it happens. when he looks up again, the doors have been shut, and he's gone. castiel blinks.

the doors are open again.

he blinks.

they're still open.

but they were shut. when he looked up again. weren't they? the back of his neck prickles with the impression of a thousand tiny creatures marching along his spine. sharp pinpricks of pain, just faint enough they could be ignored by someone with a sturdier mind.

castiel blinks again. he walks inside.

was it just his imagination? is that what it feels like, to have an imagination? what about the pool? was that just his imagination, too? ]

[freakymagoo]

[Clearly, no one can be trusted to be left alone without adult supervision. Not even for five minutes. It takes Bucky some time to look for the furniture he needs to barricade the door.

He wasn't expecting the guy in the trenchcoat to open the door and let himself back in. Did something happen while he was gone? He wasn't even gone that long.

Setting the table down outside, Bucky takes a peek through the ajar door, checking initially for any signs of unnatural activity before he slips in quietly, cautious and guarded like he's stepping through a minefield.]