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

[todoroki_shoto]

"Yeah. Quirks are genetic, they're passed down through family lines. My mother's Quirk is ice and her hair is white. My father's is fire and his hair is red. This is how the combination manifested for me. My siblings each inherited them in different ways."

He keeps up the constant flow of new ice, creating a new path to walk on every few seconds as the existing one dissolves.

"But if you want to be able to refine your Quirk and make it stronger, it takes long, hard training. ...I trained with my dad until I was old enough to go to a hero academy."

[little_pest]

"Huh. That's weird." Nayuta thinks about what she knows about bloodlines. "Do people try to create specific Quirks through breeding? Like how we bred dogs into herders, terriers, and hunters? Did you know a bloodhound's sense of smell is forty times stronger than a human's?" She gasps as an idea occurs to her. "Do only humans get Quirks, or can animals too? Could someone get a Quirk where they can smell like a bloodhound?"

Nayuta doesn't really seem bothered as the smell of the hallway becomes increasingly nauseating. Dog facts must just be that engaging.

[todoroki_shoto]

Shoto immediately wishes he had not explained anything. Who knew she was going to jump straight to that? He grits his teeth.

But it's not her fault. She's just a kid, she had no way of knowing.

So he just answers the questions in order, all at once.

"Yes. Yes. Animals can too, but it's extremely rare. The principal at my school is a rodent who was born with the Quirk of above-human intelligence. Yes, heteromorphic Quirks that grant animal traits are common."

He wrinkles his nose as the smell gets progressively worse, and during a pause in refreshing the ice, he uses his right hand to pull the collar of his jacket up over his nose. It doesn't really help.

[little_pest]

Nayuta notices Shoto's answers becoming briefer, but she interprets it as discomfort with their situation. The smell may not bother her as much but it's becoming noticeable to make even her wrinkle her nose. And the fluids are getting deeper--does that make things any harder for Shoto's Quirk?

"Um, I think we're getting close, but it's probably gonna be... pretty bad. Like, gross bad. Are you up for this? Maybe you can burn away the smell?" Nayuta doesn't know enough about digestive fumes to realize that could potentially be really dangerous. Of course, she also doesn't know much about a trained hero's perseverance.

[todoroki_shoto]

She's not wrong - the situation is also making Shoto less likely to engage in conversation. Fortunately, the fluids' depth doesn't have much impact on the ice, which is only making contact with the surface anyway and doesn't sink even when it starts breaking apart from the acid.

He shakes his head. "The fire could set this whole hallway aflame. But..."

He reaches down and refreshes the ice again, but this time there's a whole lot more of it. In seconds, the hallway goes from squishy, moist, and too warm to nothing but a tunnel of thick, layered ice. The ambient temperature plummets, but:

"Odors are weaker in the cold. How far down do we need to go?"

[little_pest]

"Oh," she says, not having considered the flammability issue. It makes sense, though; Denji had told her you could light your farts on fire, even if she'd never been quite curious enough to dare him to do it. "I guess a hero with a fire Quirk needs to learn that kind of stuff."

The sudden transformation of the hallway takes Nayuta's breath away--literally, the abrupt cold makes her cough and shiver. She's dressed kind of warmly, but she seems more impacted by the cold than she'd been by the heat and smell.

"Whoah, could you freeze the whole hallway like this, all the way down...? Uh, but don't, though. I think the door's just around this corner."

She points at the turn, then looks back to Shoto. "Um... I don't know what it looks like, exactly, but if I can get a clear shot at it I might be able to, like... tame it." Maybe she should have had this conversation before they were on the threshold of encountering a monster. "I mean, I definitely can. It's just a stupid parasite."

But some things in this world haven't been so easy to control...

[todoroki_shoto]

"Yes. Doing any less would put me and everyone around me in danger. The same is true of most Quirks that interact with the environment."

Shoto glances over in concern when he hears her cough and feels her shiver. "Oh - not used to the cold? Sorry. Here." The hand she's holding starts to glow faintly like embers as it heats up, enough to radiate some warmth without being hot enough to hurt.

"Sure. I've frozen much bigger areas than this."

He pauses when they reach the corner. "Useful. But if you haven't seen it, how do you know it's here?"

[little_pest]

Nayuta guesses that's a downside of having powers based on physical logic rather than nightmarish thematics: you can't trust your powers to just work without practice or collateral damage. It's also a downside of human compassion. Though human compassion benefits Nayuta personally in the form of a hand-hold of warmth. "Thanks," she says with the sort of off-handed gratitude common to kids.

Nayuta glances around the hallway as she considers the scale of Shoto's powers. No wonder he didn't think nuclear weapons were cool, if any random person in his world might have the power to destroy, say, a whole apartment complex. Having the control not to do that is definitely cooler.

Which brings Nayuta to her current conundrum: she's been relatively careless in talking about her powers, knowingly. It was just a matter of time before someone figured her out, given that she was one of maybe a dozen people in Penumbra Place... and if it was really a problem, she could erase someone's memory. She's rather not do that with Shoto, and there's definitely no time to do it well, which would be important for a number of reasons, not least of which being that he could burn her to a crisp with a thought.

He probably wouldn't--on purpose, anyway--but humans get dangerous when they realize you're a devil.

"I have a devil contract," she says after some thought. "I can sense and control pests."

She doesn't offer more for now--maybe he'll buy the half-truth, or at least realize this isn't a great time to dig further.

[todoroki_shoto]

Fortunately, Quirks that could easily destroy whole apartment complexes are relatively rare, and even rarer are people who could do it without extensive training. Still, people like Tomura Shiguraki - or All for One, for that matter - do exist.

Also fortunately - for Nayuta, at least - Shoto already suspects there's something devilish about her, and has done since the day they met. So his entire reaction to this half-revelation is a thoughtful nod.

"Later, you'll have to tell me exactly how it works, so we can strategize for next time. For now, just show me where this one is and let me know what you need from me."

[little_pest]

It's nice when things are easy. Of course, Nayuta will have to decide how much to explain--or whether to erase Shoto's memory--later, but that's later. She peeks around the corner and makes a face.

"I'm guessing it's in that room with the dissolved door, with the... stuff leaking out. This thing's grosser than I expected. Lucky me that you showed up." She looks back to Shoto and continues, "I need to be able to aim at its head, or... something head-like, I guess." She holds up one finger and thumb, cocked like a gun and aimed at the ceiling. "I need you to keep me safe, hero."

She tosses in a wink to seal in the cuteness.

[todoroki_shoto]

Shoto nods entirely seriously with no acknowledgment whatsoever of the cuteness. "Right. Stay close."

Once she's close enough, the platform of ice they're standing on sprouts a blast shield at its front that's tall enough to conceal Nayuta completely, but not tall enough to hinder Shoto's line of sight.

"Get ready. I'm taking us in." And a moment later, he does, standing still but moving them forward as if the platform was a little trolley on a track that's continually creating itself in front while dissolving into the acid in back. They pick up speed such that by the time they hit what's left of that door, it crumbles to bits on impact with the ice shield.

[little_pest]

"Whoah, cool," says Nayuta, marveling at the shielded ice-trolley. As humans go, Shoto's pretty useful, even if the changing temperatures are a bit uncomfortable and the trolley's speed is a bit overwhelming. Both things are probably fine, she assumes, because Shoto wouldn't do something stupidly reckless with a kid, right? That's not how a hero would do things.

Once they slam through the corroded door, Nayuta tries to get her bearings quickly, but it seems like the creature heard them coming. Slimy tentacles snag Nayuta and lift her up and off the ice-trolley. "Hey!" Nayuta shouts, angry to avoid letting herself be afraid, "Leggo! Shoto! I can't--get--"

She can't get a good look at the huge maggot-creature, let alone a clear shot with her chain. And who knows how long she'll survive if things continue this way?