villagememes | test drive

SPRING TEST DRIVE
Welcome to the test drive and thank you for your interest in The Village. This test drive is not game canon but will allow players the opportunity to experiment with game mechanics, the setting, and the flexibility of choice allowed by this game. The following prompts are examples of typical situations characters might face in the game. At least one thread from the TDM is required as part of the game's application process.

Prospective players are welcome to play with any of the established locations within Mathias.

( Recommended listening: ♫ )

GHOSTS OF THE LIVING
The fog moves in quickly and without warning, not from the waterfront but the forest, cascading through every street in a thick wave of white. It is not a soft blanket enveloping the town, but a heavy weight pressing down, threatening to suffocate as the sky is blotted out and no one can see more than ten feet in any direction.

Those who are outside when it rolls in are left wandering blind, hoping that a randomly chosen direction will lead them to shelter or another living soul. There are perhaps even those who were lucky enough to already be inside when the fog descended, quickly closing doors and windows to keep it from creeping in. Wherever they are, the residents of Mathias will soon notice that they are not the only ones in the fog.

Anyone out in the fog is left disoriented, possibly losing their sense of time and place, and it is only after prolonged exposure that they will begin to feel off. A sense of being ill will cling to them if they are in the fog for too long, including dizziness, lightheadedness, or nausea — the time it takes to manifest varies from person to person, as does the duration it will last after leaving the fog.

With all of these elements at play, the first strange apparitions encountered may be assumed to be figments of addled minds, tricks played by psyches struggling to cope with the strange reality they've found themselves in. But before long, there will be no denying that the Others in the fog are real. Appearing almost wraithlike and startlingly recognizable, these figures even feel a bit like ghosts to those who can sense such things, though everyone will feel that there is something wrong about them. Truly, there are many things wrong that residents will begin to notice as they encounter more and more of the spectres that do not acknowledge their presence in any way. They simply exist, silent and subtly terrifying like so many things in this town.

Like misty ghosts of those who have been in the town at one point or another, the Others appear as those who have died or disappeared and even those currently within the town. The likeness is truly uncanny, to the point of being completely terrifying, made even more so when they realize there is no way to communicate with the Others. They do not acknowledge anyone's presence nor anything said to them. At times, they may be only one in an area, or there may be a dozen existing in the same space. There is no limit to how many people can see them — if they are there, they are seen by all.

The Others do not enter buildings and cannot be contained in any way. They can appear at one moment and be gone in the next, or they can exist in one place for hours on end. Whether standing stationary or slowly wandering throughout the town, there is no discernible purpose to them. There is something absent and distant in the way they hold themselves, the way they walk, and their expressions, as if even they cannot grasp what is happening.

A BIT OF EXPLORATION
There are plenty of places in which to get one's bearings and hide from the fog.

There are businesses on the square, nestled around and extending out from the Town Hall. There is a schoolhouse nestled by the southern treeline, not from the rather expansive makeshift cemetery at the end of Jackson Boulevard that is courtesy of a few kind residents in town. To the far north of the square is a sprawling garden, now covered in snow, and a greenhouse that once supplied the botanical shop. And to the east and west, beyond the business square, is are residential districts.

The eastern district sprawls all the way to the beach, with some houses in perfect condition and others beginning to show significant signs of age. The western district, however, is nothing but decay. From the beginnings of rot to completely collapsed and little more than a pile of proverbial bones, none of these homes are anything resembling livable. Well, as far as one can tell, at least. For between the streets of Hill Lane and Stine Road there is a crack in the earth. A dozen feet across and fifty feet down, there is no way across.

TO SEE AND BE SEEN
Standing at the center of Mathias, the Town Hall is a modest two-story building that would be welcoming if not for the faded sign, chipped paint, and deafening silence within its empty halls. It's a typical government building, with a reception desk at the front and rows of identical offices within, the names half faded from each door. But what catches the attention is a large bulletin board on the main wall beside the reception desk, once meant to hold flyers or announcements for the community.

What it holds now is decidedly different. Covering the board are tacked-on scraps of paper covered in an assortment of handwriting styles — requests for supplies should anyone find them, pieces of information shared in the hopes of someone understanding the strange symbols and mathematical equations, notes about those missing or recently deceased. And painted directly across the center of the board, visible in the gaps between the pieces of paper, is a symbol in dark red. While peering at that obscured symbol, a strange breeze ruffles the papers, revealing a little more, just enough to—

An eye. A strange, ornate eye with three lobes, painted in still-wet red. And upon close examination, a keen eye will realize that the paint is actually blood, perhaps even human.

The longer someone stands there, the more it will feel like they are being watched, even studied, with great interest. It's a sensation that lingers and stays with them even when they exit the building.

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Klaus doesn't usually hang out at town hall, but it'd been the closest building when he had started feeling like he might pass out from traveling through the fog. He was slumped in a heap in a dark corner, trying to remember what it felt like when the world wasn't axis-tilted.

He might have even answered the woman calling out aimlessly into the space, except the nausea had gotten to him, too. It takes him a few more minutes before he thinks he can drag himself to his feet.

"You must be new," he drags a hand through his hair and leans up against the wall near the bulletin board like it might be the only thing supporting him at this moment.

Edited 2021-05-01 00:00 (UTC)

It's not that she's gotten used to the silence. It's not. The lack of sound is so foreign for someone like Caitlin who's grown up in a major city all her life. Even in those rare moments where she might have retreated into nature (never alone of course, camping and such things were always proposed by Ronnie), there was sound. It's just that the eerie quiet is nearly as oppressive as the fog outside, like it may suffocate and choke out any noise that dares disturb it.

So when the man speaks? She jumps. Her hand snaps closed, smearing the blood over her palm like she's subconsciously trying to hide it. She isn't, though, that's ridiculous. Her gaze shifts to him, quickly looking him over as if assessing him. He takes up a spot by the board, and she takes a couple of steps away from it, maintaining a little distance.

"Is it that obvious?" She pauses, looking herself over: wet sand still stuck in her hair, her wet pajamas. "Okay, yeah, it's probably obvious."

"Sorry," he holds a hand up in a surrendering gesture. "didn't mean to scare you." Not that he can blame her. Everything about this place was a little disturbing, unsettling, pick an adjective.

He smiles slightly. "Little bit. You got that doe-eyed newbie look aboutcha. We've all been there." He doesn't miss the way she backs away from him and he can't help but wonder what about him seems threatening. Then again, maybe nothing has to be. She's a woman, alone in a building with a man she hadn't realized was there-- and isn't that alone enough for any woman to be uncomfortable in these days and times?

"I'm Klaus," he offers easily. "It's not always like this here," Sometimes it was worse, but he'll leave that part out for the time being. "The fog just likes to roll in and fuck with us sometimes."

Doe-eyed newbie look. At least it isn't just her looking like that. Though she has to wonder what this place is that it appears to be a patented look which signals a new arrival. How many people have been through this? Where are all of them? Where's the actual town to this town? The questions just keep churning in her head.

He doesn't move to encroach on the space she's created, and he's shown her he's unarmed. Being empty-handed isn't exactly unarmed, that's something she knows better than most people. No one would assume she could be dangerous just by looking at her. But that tune could and would quickly change if they made a move to threaten her. He isn't being threatening. Her shoulders relax and her jaw unclenches.

"I'm Caitlin," she says, automatically reaching out for a handshake. She stops halfway there, though, and draws back. She opens her hand to show him the blood. Wouldn't want to get this on you, she hopes the gesture conveys. "Where is 'here'?"

He relents when she makes the pacifying gesture with her blood-smeared hand and nods. He's fine with not going in for the handshake, in this case.

"Mathias township," he answers in a voice that sounds...tired? weary? "Probably somewhere in the New England region, if we had a guess, but nobody knows for sure." They should really make a flyer or something with all the basic questions one might need to know on arriving here. Stick 'em all around here, the Gull, the boarding house, and all the. other public spaces. He'll file that way and talk to someone about it later. Probably Malcolm.

"Mathias Township," she echoes as she looks around for something to wipe her hand on. Her clothes are out of the question, and she can't very well do it on the bulletin board. There's just more blood there, and these messages are important to the people who wrote them. She settles on one of the blank pieces of paper, though it still leaves her skin stained a red-going-brown. Good enough for now.

"New England would explain the cold." There's something bitter in her words. The cold. The cold she isn't supposed to feel and has been trying to not think about. Thinking about that gets her thinking about the silence, and that's another can of worms she isn't ready to unpack at this exact moment.

"How can no one know for sure? There has to be a-a radio station or tv news or newspaper that tells us where we are. If not any of those, then the internet for sure." Don't mind her as she stubbornly tries to cling to the idea of normalcy.

"Not a fan of cold, I take it?" He asked, an amused note in his own voice. "I'm used to it, I lived up north all my life." Don't ask him where, Caitlin. The source material never says.

He shakes his head at her suggestions. "Nope... no records in here indicate anything that specific," he gestures vaguely to the building. "There's tax records and inspection reports, but dates and names, counties, towns, anything specifically identifying is always smudged out. TVs only play VHS, I don't even think I've seen a radio."

"I can usually weather it better than this," she answers, bitterness creeping into her voice. He couldn't know that she seems to be missing a whole part of herself, that she's spent two years immune to the cold. This isn't a loss of tolerance; this is a loss, full stop.

Her eyes go wide as he describes the lack of information. This is... this is insane. What is this place, some secret ARGUS base? Or something controlled by a different government entity? Nothing civilian could be that heavily redacted, have that much of its essential identity wiped off the map. Her expression shifts from bewildered to confused to incredulous. "You're joking, right? You're pulling my leg here."

"It'll be all right. We can get you some clothes, there's a store, or sometimes you get better stuff out of the houses." He says it so casually, like it's a normal thing. Funny, what you can get used to.

He huffs a soft, amused sound. "I wish I was. This place is insane, and the lacking amounts of geographical info is only the tip of the iceberg."

test drive — spring

to see and be seen

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