polymeme | Autumn TDM

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! test drive meme

Autumn TDM

✖ Test Drive Meme

Ⅰ. ARRIVAL
You can read all about your character's arrival in the game lore.
The island looks very much like a cute little seaside town from New England, the sort overrun with tourists in the summer. But it’s not summer anymore, is it? No. Even on warm days the air holds a secret knife-edge of chill. Autumn is here.

The gently rolling hills beyond the little town are alive with reds and oranges and yellows, a riot of fall colours just begging to be used as the backdrop for a Hallmark movie. The town itself is likewise picture-perfect, with a bandstand in the middle of the park at the center of town where sometimes bake sales are held during the day and local concerts in the evenings. Mr. Terwilliger from nearby Terror Lake is even going to put on a one-man performance of the entire score of the H.M.S. Pinafore! Is there a church painted white with a red roof? You bet your ass there is. There’s little restaurants and corner shops that will keep you happily fed, and all sorts of little tourist shops that will keep you up to your neck in shitty keychains and postcards.

Notes:
1. Please remember to mark threads appropriately with Content Warnings when necessary.

2. These prompts are a jumping off point - how they affect your character and their development is up to you.

3. These residents of the island are normal humans. Killing them is possible and will affect the colour grading of your Scrywatch depending on the situation.

4. Any food is safe to eat, and is consumable by non-human entities.

5. Have fun!

Ⅱ. PSL 4EVAH
The Coffee Shop AU is an alternate universe fanfiction trope; in most cases, one of two characters is the barista, and the other is or becomes their favorite customer.

Love it? Hate it? Too bad, you’re living it.

That’s right - succumb to the siren call of pumpkin spice and walk through the doors of C’Ya Latte and you’ll find yourself either in line like a normal customer, or suddenly and inexplicably behind the counter. Hope you know how to work that milk steamer.

Regardless of what role you suddenly find yourself in, you won’t be able to leave the coffee shop until a full shift has been completed. Not unless one of you notices that the tip jar on the counter is suspiciously radiant. Thanks for the tip! reads the sign in bubbly letters that actually sparkle, and yes, it’s a clue: if one of you offers up some heartfelt advice to the other, the coffee shop doors will unlock themselves.

Notes:
1. A full shift is eight hours, regardless of what time you may have wandered into the shop. Both customer and barista are trapped for the duration.

2. Yes, the barista gets free drinks.

Ⅲ. PUMPKIN PATCH KIDS
CW: Monsters, blood
If you wander just outside of town, you’ll find a road that is lined on either side with trees displaying their autumn colours. There’s a sign reading “this way to the PUMPKIN PATCH!” with a little arrow pointing down the road, and should you take a stroll you’ll find yourself at a quaint little farm. There’s a big red barn, some goats and chickens you can go and gawk at, an apple orchard, and of course the advertised pumpkin patch.

There is a little stand set up by the entrance to the farmyard, and as you pass by the kid manning it will hand you a cellphone.

“It’s for the scavenger hunt,” she explains with a smile, also handing you a list. “You and a partner have to take a picture of each of the things, and then you come back here and you get a photo prize!”

The list reads:

- one of you holding a pumpkin! :)

- you holding hands while one of you goes down a road/path!

- feet with autumn leaves!

- apple cider or hot chocolate (you can find these at our concession!)

- something you think is truly beautiful!

If this is a little too twee for your tastes, you can of course choose instead to wander the fields of pumpkins and apples. There will be children running around right up until the sun begins to set - one little tyke in orange footie pajamas seems intent on chasing after you as you walk, ducking out of sight whenever you turn to try and see him clearly. He appears to be wearing some sort of mask, which is a little weird.

As the sun bleeds out in the western sky, the shadows of the orchard grow long and longer. If you choose to wander out that way you’ll find that the neat rows of apple trees have begun to twist and turn, creating a maze that spirals inward. Sunlight fades from bruise yellow to purple, and in the twilight you find yourself at the center of the orchard.

There is a mound of earth here. If you walk around it, you will find it’s not just any pile of dirt: it’s a barrow. There is an old, nearly collapsed entrance there just barely showing above the ground. In front of this there is a stone into which the following is carved:

“Accept this sacrifice.”

As you read the words, you feel the ground shiver beneath your feet as the barrow splits open and a creature pulls itself from the stinking womb of the earth.

It is ten feet tall with an emaciated body and a grotesquely oversized head. The skull looks pulpy, and the face is a grinning nightmare of teeth and milky white eyes. Its fingers are nearly as long as its forearms, tipped with claws that cut through flesh as easy as butter.

Looks like it’s time for you to run.

But you cannot seem to find a way out of the maze… even if you can fly. You just seem to wind up back at the center no matter what you do. And the creature is always there, moving toward you as soon as you stumble back to its grave.

Accept this sacrifice.

What could that mean? Has someone given something up for you? Now would be a great time to acknowledge it. Have you given something up for someone else, and resented it secretly all these years? Maybe time to get it off of your chest.

Or maybe you’re much more literal. Maybe you carry a sharp object everywhere you go and don’t mind spilling a little blood… yours or your companions.

Whatever you do, you better do it fast or the creature will sink its talons into you and pull you back into its final resting place.

Notes:
1. If characters complete the photo scavenger hunt, they will each receive a photograph of an important memory.

2. The only way out of the maze is to either cop to a sacrifice - the character’s or another’s - or spill some blood in front of the creature.

3. You can try to fight the creature, but it is extremely difficult to kill. It also has a tendency towards not staying dead, and might pop up again later during your visit on the island when you least expect it.

4. No, you don’t get to keep the cellphone.

Ⅳ. CRAFT FAIR
There is of course a town hall in a town this quaint, and it of course is host to a craft fair! It is, after all, right before the holidays! What holidays? Well. All of them! Look, just come get your uncle some salmon rub and your mother-in-law a candle or something.

The hall has tables end to end, and there’s plenty to buy: jams and jellies, honeys, tea blends, and even locally roasted coffee. There’s jewelry and scarves and knockoff UGGS, knitted toys and home decor that reminds you to live, laugh, and love.

There’s also a row of tables near the back of the hall where you can actually sit down and do some crafts yourself!

There’s a few stations. A lot of locals seem to be making some sort of masks out of straw and twigs and burlap - there doesn’t seem to be any room for you there, though.

More accessible and less unusual are stations to make friendship bracelets at. There’s bright coloured thread and easy to follow instructions! It’ll be fun! No, really - as you work, you’ll start to feel quite relaxed and pleasant. Whoever you’re working next to will also seem super easy to talk to. Who knows? By the end you might have a new friend to give your bracelet to.

Notes:
1. You can purchase things from the fair, but if you can’t fit it in your bag it will not come with you off-island.

2. Eavesdropping on the locals making masks, you’ll hear them talk about ‘the holidays’ a lot, but that’s the extent of it.

Greetings, prospective Travelers! Welcome to the Autumn 2021 POLYMYTHOS test drive meme and thank you for your interest in our game! Our next application round will run from August 27 - September 3, 2021. For the Autumn season, we invite you to use this TDM to explore but one of many, many islands within the Endless Isles; use it as an opportunity to introduce and familiarize yourself with the game, form connections with other characters, and just have some fun. (Perhaps while also getting some solid samples together for your application!)

Use the prompts provided below as-is or feel free to write your own set within the environment detailed in each. You're even welcome to access the network via your character's ScryWatch. While there will be some inevitable changes, TDMs may count as game canon and some islands may be revisited in the future. Be mindful of your surroundings -- you never know how you and your fellow Travelers might affect this place in the long run.

Killer idea: pumpkin spice playlists!!

Network · Logs · OOC · Memes · Plurk

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Palamedes listened to the Ferryman carefully when he arrived, a little more startled by the gently moving boat underneath him upon first awareness, having just been in the exact opposite of the open sea. But he too suspected that was more creature than creature's master, and he is used to finding out truths without those who may never share them. Not that his wandering has in fact been helpful at all. There don't seem to be answers. There is nothing he can feel in this place but he is not one to give up with a mystery in front of him. Not ever.

Wish you were here one of the postcards says inside the window and he is somewhat irritated that 'here' is far more elusive than it should be. Palamedes accepts he might have to start asking direct questions of people soon, which means he has to put on his friendly face. He is not unfriendly, but he is certainly not in a great mood at the moment. He was doing something very important before coming here, and the aftermath of those swirling emotions still linger.

He knows Camilla's voice well, he would know it from miles away, he would know it trapped under the ocean. And in recognizing that, something in him relaxes. Palamedes turns just in time for her almost to be on top of him, so he didn't have to put up any self-defense at all, opening his arms as if expecting her to throw herself at him even if she's never done it before. He steps into it and then they're in a very rare and unusual embrace. He oofs since he's frail and she's compact, but still.

"On a scale of one to a hundred, how easily is this hug going to turn into you punching me?" Palamedes hugs her tight but he assumes, since he has no idea what time discrepancies are possible, that she may know what he intended. Or what he did. And she would hate it.

Camilla hates what he did with every fiber of her being. And it's that ancient aching grief-and-relief which propels her into Palamedes' arms like she's seeing a walking talking miracle, now burying her face in his scrawny chest, her arms going around him. Not since they were children had she sought comfort like this, but she has to fist her hands in the fabric of his robes, has to draw him close, hang on like she's drowning in the waters off Canaan House. The embrace draws out, lasting longer than it ever would've normally. At his question, she laughs a low chuckle and swipes at her face as she finally pulls back a step.

"Yes, but because I need to be sure you're real." And she punches him in the shoulder. And then pinches herself in the crook of her elbow. Doing little tests, insofar as it's even possible to scientifically prove or disprove that you're experiencing a mass hallucination or complete breakdown of reality.

(It occurs to her, just a little too late, that Harrow had tried to do much the same thing, in throwing her construct at Camilla. Maybe she shouldn't be so smug the next time she sees the other girl, if she ever sees her again.)

And then, for good measure, she seizes one of his hands and investigates the long, delicate scholar's fingers, as if searching for the seam, the split in the illusion which will prove it all wrong.

"You're not bones anymore," she says. A beat. She doesn't ask the question, because they know each other well enough that he can practically hear it in that unspoken pause anyway: Are you real?

It is why he never told her what he planned on doing. Palamedes knew she would never have let him and it had to be done. He never thought he would have to face her fury over it, obviously, or the depth of pain and sadness that she's expressing now in her own way. By pulling him close and touching him in a variety of ways that he can tell she's doing as both reassurance and as a test. He lets her do whatever she wants, partly because he doesn't want to give her the wrong idea, and because Palamedes has never been against affection when affection is called for. He is more loving of a person in general.

He leaves his hand in her possession but wiggles his fingers at her since she's looking at them so closely. Palamedes knew that he died, he did it on purpose, but hearing her say it makes it clear he pulled it off. His part of it, at least.

"Skin and bones, maybe, but alive." Like all necromancers Palamedes is skinny as can be, but she already knows that. He is only trying to tease her gently, their long-established pattern since childhood not gone even past death. His power is still in him too, not burned out, not flowing through the dying parts of another person.

"Did it work?" That is the key part. If it worked, if they managed to kill the thing hiding in Dulcinea's form, he will consider it a success. Cruel or not to the cavalier left behind, it had to happen, before everyone there died. "And my revenant?" Naturally, Palamedes had a backup plan. An imperfect one, his soul living on through his skeleton, but there were only bad options toward the end there. It might have been impossible, but he took the chance anyway.

The backup plan with the revenant was always only ever supposed to be the ace up their sleeve, break glass in case of emergency, an absolute last resort play — because the Sixth was the Sixth, and they were prepared for everything. Still, academically preparing for Palamedes' possible death was such a far cry from viscerally experiencing it. Undergoing it. Assembling his bones and painstakingly gluing them back together. Going through those long, lonely months without him.

The expression on Camilla's face is usually so impassive, but there's a flicker of pain that ghosts across it, a twist at the corner of her mouth, as emotive as a sob if it had been anyone else. She's still hanging onto his hand (marveling at the warm skin and flesh: not just the cold assemblage of proximal, middle, and distal phalanges). If she was co-dependent and obsessively watchful before, well, congratulations, Pal: your new shadow is not going anywhere.

But she's also never bullshitted him as long as either of them have lived, so she says: "Not by yourself. She came back. I had to fight her, along with the Ninth and Tridentarius— the necromantic one. Both she and Nonagesimus became Lyctors. It took all of it to put her down."

A quick rattling-off the gruesome facts, despite the fact that they're standing on a pleasant cobblestoned street outside a souvenir shop on a pleasant autumnal day. She still hasn't let go of his hand; which isn't all that different from back home with the bones, now that we think of it.

"But they succeeded. Building on what you did to her. And your revenant was bound."

A beat.

"Guess you can say 'I told you so' now."

If Sixth didn't have a backup plan, did they even belong in the Sixth House? No. He does rationally understand that putting this plan into action and talking it through did not make it easy to accomplish. There was always a very huge chance it was impossible or could fail. They prepared for that too, but Palamedes was rarely wrong when he estimated what could be done. He also suspected that killing the Lyctor would be out of his realm of power, but he was going to do it anyway.

He knows every inch of her face, better than his own, he's looked at her more than he's looked at mirrors. Palamedes knows that she's suffering deeply, although to anyone else they would catch the whiff of emotion but nothing too obvious. To him she might as well be sobbing hysterically in his arms. He feels guilty then; she has always been strong, unwaveringly so. Palamedes expected a lot of her. He knew he was incapable of sacrificing her, the idea of losing her impossible, but he did it to her. She had to live without him instead.

He keeps their hands together too and squeezes hers, silently begging for forgiveness, even as he reacted to her explanation. "Harrow and Ianthe ascended." Palamedes takes that in and then he nods. "Yes, if anyone would have, it would be them." Ianthe because she only cares for power and Harrow because she always had something to prove. They were the only two who were competition for him in the first place too, so it's hardly a surprise. He smiles faintly. "I was rooting for Ninth." The absolute truth. He helped Harrow and Gideon intentionally.

His smile goes from faint to wry and he raises his eyebrows at her. "About which part?"

Edited 2021-09-01 03:14 (UTC)

"The 'I'm going to tie my soul to pieces of my body' part. I knew you could do it," her faith in him was a firm thing, unshaken, "but the official confirmation's nice."

A hypothesis needed testing before it could become a theory, but this one was untestable and unverifiable, until you actually died. Entirely uncharted territory, and a wholly radical application of the River and spirit magic. The Archivists would've had a fit if they knew. Either from the risks involved or the fact that they hadn't thought of it first and couldn't write a paper on it like Palamedes theoretically could; either/or.

Camilla flexes her fingers inside Palamedes' grip — savouring the touch, as she has savoured so few touches in her life — and then finally, grudgingly, removes her hand. She's too fidgety and restless to stay in the same position for long. But she can't stop looking at him, either: her dark eyes drinking him in as if she's afraid to look away.

How are you here is probably a useless road of inquiry, since she can't even answer it for herself. So she suspects the next most sensible question is: "Did you meet a thing in robes too? Called the Ferryman?"

"Well, I am the greatest necromancer of my generation." There is no Harrow here to disagree with him so he is going to state it as fact. He may not be a Lyctor but his knowledge base is vast. The Archivists would flip out if they knew. He was very certain it would work, but there were always possibilities that she couldn't get his bones together or the soul would have not connected the way it was supposed to. "I told you so."

He knows the lengths she probably had to go to in order to put him together again may have been complicated. All on the chance he was right. But she was Camilla Hect. She is the only one who could have done it, determined and focused and the smartest person he knows outside of himself. Sorry to everyone else, intelligence is gauged differently in Sixth House.

Palamedes lets her draw her hand away, although they still stay close physically. He nods at the question. "Mmm, yes. An interesting construct. I couldn't tell for certain what it was, but it is not like us." He could spend more time studying the Ferryman later if at all possible. He has always been good at breaking beings down into studied pieces. "I don't intend to take what it says at face value. We'll have to find this Ancient."