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test drive — autumn

test drive — autumn
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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.

Since not all setting details have been made available yet, you are welcome to invent your own general locations for this test drive. There are no living souls in Mathias Township beyond the player characters. In fact, there are no signs of life at all... We hope you enjoy your visit.

( Recommended listening: ♫ )

— the fog —

It moves in quickly and without warning, not from the waterfront but the forest, cascading through every street in a thick wave of white. The fog is not a soft blanket enveloping the town, but a heavy weight pressing down, threatening to suffocate the sky is blotted out and you can see no further than your outstretched hand.

Those outside when it rolls in are left wandering blind, stumbling toward shelter as you're unable to even see your feet beneath you, let alone any obstacles in your path. Perhaps you call out for help, hoping for another voice to guide you toward shelter or simply another living soul. Or perhaps you were lucky enough to already be inside when the fog descended, quickly closing doors and windows to keep it from creeping in. Can you hear those voices crying out? You recognize some, but the others... Are they really there at all, or are you alone here and simply beginning to finally lose your mind?

And perhaps the most important question: Do you answer?

— portents —

You wake up with an ache in your head and a cloudiness to your thoughts, your body sprawled on the ground in a location you don't remember going to. As you sit up, the world spins and start to clutch your head — to realize there's something on your hand. A symbol, a word, a streak of wet paint or ink. You don't recognize it or have any memory of how it got there...

Or how the much larger depiction came to be on the wall or the floor around them. You can see it shining wet in the glow of whatever light source is nearest, but something instinctual urges you not to touch it. If you defy that urge, it burns, a searing pain that radiates from the matching mark on your hand.

Did you do this? Or was it done to you? The person approaching may have answers — or accusations.

— past deeds —

The Town Hall stands at the center of Mathias Township, a modest two-story building that would be welcoming if not for the faded sign, chipped paint, and deafening silence. 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 your attention is a large bulletin board on the main wall, once meant to hold flyers or announcements for the community.

What it holds now is decidedly different. Tacked onto the board is a torn scrap of paper with words scrawled almost illegibly in dark red ink.

why did this happen

Upon close examination, a keen eye will realize that the ink is actually blood, though whether it is human is unknown. And beside that scrap, a symbol has been drawn in dark black marker — it resembles a feather or a branch, but you've never seen anything like it before. It scares you even as you know it is perhaps the most important thing you have ever seen in your life.

On the floor below the bulletin board are more scraps of paper scattered amongst grime and dust, most blank but some with other strange symbols scrawled in a variety of inks, perhaps matching the pens and markers scattered near the baseboard. Some are small enough that they might have once been part of the same page, creating something larger. And to the far side, a pristine stack of crisp white copy paper and an unopened box of ballpoint pens.

What do you do?

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An attempt is made at lowering herself carefully onto the couch, but halfway she just gives up, letting gravity do the rest. The flop down jars the especially sore spot on her back, but it serves to put the rest of her injuries into perspective. She's not going to die from any of the bruises or scrapes, so she's still in much better shape than she'd been the day before. (Has it even been a full day? Hard to keep track of time when you're literally traveling through it.)

The lack of electricity is only barely noticed, the room still illuminated enough from the hazy daylight filtering through windows. When the sun goes down later, they might have a problem, but for now she can deal with existing in shadows. At least they still seem to be on Earth.

"I haven't seen anything," she confirms with a shake of her head, turning her hands palm up to show a few scrapes but nothing major. Then it occurs to her that her new companion is probably referring to the bandages. She'd kind of forgotten about them with everything else going on. "Oh, these aren't—"

Sighing, she unravels one of the bandages from her wrist, revealing unblemished skin.

Ellie sits on the couch a few feet away; she doesn't want to crowd Daisy, and she's also not about to be all up in someone's space when she doesn't know them. They're effectively stuck in this house together, because no way was Ellie just leaving someone out there in that freaky ass fog, but she can't help being on her guard.

She's definitely surprised when Daisy pulls the bandages off. She'd expected a lot worse under there, but...apparently she's fine?

"No offense, but you look like you had the shit beat out of you somewhere," Ellie says.

The distance between them isn't something Daisy takes notice of either way; her world isn't anywhere near as harsh as Ellie's, even if they do have to save the world every few months. She removes the other bandages wrapped around her arms, making a semi-neat stack of them on the arm of the couch.

"You're a real flatterer, aren't you?" she comments in return, giving Ellie an amused sidelong glance before rubbing her hands over her face tiredly. "I'll be fine, I've been through worse."

She's not elaborating on what that worse is. Instead, she leans forward, resting elbows on her legs, and asks, "Do you remember how you got here?"

Ellie's mouth twists in that half-smile again and she looks down.

"Sorry. I meant it in the nicest way possible, if that's any consolation." She's used to just being blunt, though it sometimes gets her in trouble. Not everyone appreciates it, after all.

She looks down and rubs at her hands, nervously. They're dusty, but it's not actually a big deal. She just has restless energy. This place definitely has her on edge, and how could it not?

"I woke up here," she says. "But...I'm not really sure where here is. I couldn't find anyone around or anything. It's like there's barely any sign of life. And not even any bodies. No Infected. Just...me. And then the fog. I thought I was losing my shit, actually. Hearing voices. Then you showed up."

She looks up at Daisy again.

"How 'bout you?"

The nicest way of telling her she looks as bad as she feels. She could look and feel a whole lot worse though, so she acknowledges again how lucky she was that Sousa had been there to pull her out of that barn. If he hadn't... But it's better she doesn't think about that right now.

Watching those nervous gestures, Daisy wonders distantly how to help put the other woman at ease. It might not be possible given their present circumstances, but if there were something—

Ellie's words catch up with her slowly, piling onto each other as their similar experiences are confirmed. But then. What? Frowning in concerned confusion, she says, "Yeah, I woke up here and haven't seen anyone. But what do you mean, Infected?"

Ellie's movements still with Daisy's answer.

What do you mean, Infected?

She's a mixture of confused and wary when she looks back at Daisy's face. She's not even sure what she's looking for, but she doesn't see any immediate sign that the other woman is bullshitting her.

"Are you shitting me? That's not fucking funny," she says, but even as she says it, it's like the world is sideways.

They woke up here. They're alone. There's not even any sign of cordyceps, spores, none of it. No mangled bodies. No clickers in the woods waiting in ambush. It doesn't look like someone cleaned up this town. It looks like this town was never infected in the first place, which is...just totally impossible. Isn't it? Ellie is pretty sharp. These threads don't totally make sense, but she's starting to follow them.

"You really don't know?"

They are definitely on very different pages and it's almost more unsettling than the weird fog and creepy voices. Those she can deal with, they're on par with the rest of her crazy life, but... There's something in Ellie's response that sends a chill through Daisy's veins.

"I have no idea what you're talking about," she confirms quietly, trying to keep her expression and tone steady rather than between the panic and desperation churning beneath the surface. If she could get off this wild ride now, that would be great, thanks. "I admit I've been preoccupied the past year, but I'd have heard about some sort of massive infection."

Unless the other woman is from the future and it's even more fucked up than the one they'd helped avert. What, did they cause a zombie apocalypse by stopping the world cracking into a million pieces?

Ellie's frown only deepens. This is defintely fucking impossible. Either Daisy is the best liar in the world, or she really doesn't know. But how is that a thing? Is there really some corner of the world where the infection never happened? That might be likely, but Daisy doesn't have some weird accent. They're speaking the same language.

Anytime this nightmare wants to end would be fine with Ellie, thanks.

"It happened before I was born," she says. "The infection wiped out, like, almost everyone. There were militarised zones in cities. I guess there still are, but a lot of that collapsed, too. Now it's just...fuck, I don't know. Band together and hope you don't get Infected or run into cannibals or people who will kill you for fun or...whatever." She stands up, too stuffed with nervous energy to sit still. She's not angry, exactly.

"I don't know how you could have missed it. It's everywhere."

She's quiet for a minute before she turns back around to look at Daisy.

"I feel like I'm in a comic book or something," she says. "Waking up somewhere where someone doesn't remember the fucking end of the world. It's like...I don't know. A parallel universe. Crazy, huh?"

"Not really that crazy," Daisy answers quietly, thinking back to Deke going on about the multiverse theory. For once, she wishes she'd paid a bit more attention to his science babble, maybe then she'd have something more solid to offer the other woman. As it is... Sitting up a little straighter, she breathes through the pain in her back at the shift in position, then starts a conversation she never thought she'd ever need to have.

"There's nothing like that in my world," she explains with all due seriousness, carefully watching Ellie's reactions. "The world has tried to end a few times but never quite like that, and we've always stopped it. My team, and others... My name is Daisy Johnson, I'm an agent with SHIELD. We're an agency that handles things that others can't — things like people with superpowers and alien invasions."

It seems so surreal to be talking to someone who likely doesn't know that aliens actually exist. There's no one in the world who doesn't know that, not after the Battle of New York and everything that's happened since. That single day changed everything for everyone.

Ellie listens to Daisy talk about her world like that's a real thing and not some crap she read about sci-fi comics. She's read books and things now, too, and yeah, it comes up there too. But that's fiction, right? It's what people imagined before the world fucking ended and everyone started getting infected.

"That doesn't even sound real," she says, trying not to be accusatory. It's a lot to take in, though, this waking up in a sci-fi horror story thing. It must be a dream, but...it doesn't feel like a dream. Reality always feels shittier than dreams, even the bad ones, she thinks. She's used to the bad ones, though. This is too weird for her to have imagined it.

But that means it's really happening, and that's terrible, too.

"That stuff's all just stories," she says, but she's uncertain. "Man, I wish we had aliens instead of Infected." Almost everyone she loves has died because of the Infection. Well, some people have died other horrible ways. That's not the point. The point is, aliens and superheroes are just...stories to her.

"Wait, did you...could you go to space?" Trying to hang on to anything that seems plausible, she catches on the aliens thing.

The other woman is handling the information a whole lot better than Daisy would have before the Battle of New York. Even with her mountain of conspiracy theories, she'd never have just taken in something like this without a whole lot of demands for proof. It's just too out there and yet. Here they are.

Smiling slightly at the question, she nods. "Yeah, I just spent a year in space with my best friend looking for her husband. Which is... a really complicated story involving the end of the world and time travel." She pauses, considering, then sighs and adds almost distantly, "Kinda describes what we were dealing with right before I got here, too. Plus one psychopath cutting people up to steal their powers..."

It really does sound like something out of a comic book. Everything since the Battle has, but it's her life and her job and everything she holds dear, and whatever situation they're stuck in won't stop her from getting back to it.

Ellie mostly still thinks this is a nightmare. Maybe she hit her head. Maybe she's delirious somehow. But it still feels real.

She laughs, nervously, not at all amused but unable to figure out another outlet. "If I'd have been born before the infection, I'd have been an astronaut," she says. "I love thinking about. Going up there. Leaving the shit behind on earth where it belongs. But...there's no astronauts anymore. It's all you can do to survive."

She crosses her arms and looks back at Daisy. "You know everything you're saying sounds totally fucking crazy, right? Superpowers? Aliens? Like I said, sounds like a comic book and not real life. How could we have really woken up in another world?"

Maybe something fucked with Daisy's memory? Like whoever brought them here? Nah, that doesn't seem plausible either. Not even one thing that's happened today seems plausible, from waking up, to the creepy fog with voices, to Daisy's aliens talk.

"Sorry, I'm just having a really hard time with this."

Daisy wishes this were just a nightmare. And who knows, maybe it is. Maybe the Chronicoms are behind this, putting them in some weird version of a Framework-like system. But coming up with someone like Ellie who has such a completely different story... that just seems too original for the space robots. Even Enoch, with all his years spent observing humans, wouldn't have been able to come up with something like this.

Watching Ellie struggle to process all of this, she can't imagine living in a world where you couldn't have dreams. Everything the other woman has said brings to mind a world devoid of hope, practically devoid of life, and that... That's worse than any nightmare. Daisy would sacrifice her own life to keep a world like that from coming into existence, and she's come pretty damn close to it a few times.

And Ellie doesn't even know how much is out there. If only she could show her, give back a bit of that hope she'd never gotten to have.

"It's okay," Daisy murmurs, understanding just how hard this must be. She's quiet for a second before gently offering, "Do you want me to prove it, or would that be too much?"

Ellie really doesn't have any point of reference. Sure, she's seen some shit, but...nothing that would have ever made her believe comic books or old sci-fi films were at all connected to reality. Reality seems harsher to her than anything in a book, even the really grim ones. She hangs on to her survivor's guilt and pushes through it, but...she can't imagine real aliens or superpowers anymore. Maybe when she was younger, but not now.

"Prove it?" she finally asks. "How? I kinda doubt we're gonna hop in a spaceship from this place."

Even with Daisy's own rough childhood, she can't begin to imagine what Ellie has been through in her life. A plague wiping out most of humanity. Cannibals. People committing murder for the fun of it. Even the hellscape of a world ruled by Hydra doesn't compare to that.

So she takes it slow, letting this be a choice. It's the only protection she can offer right now, and everything in her wants to protect this poor girl from whatever is waiting out in that fog. "I'm an Inhuman, basically someone who's part alien with superpowers. I can show you what I can do."

Ellie just stares again for a moment, letting Daisy's words sink in. Then, because this is so fucking absurd, she laughs. This can't be real, right? This is just...some joke. Even if she bought some of the other stuff - and jury's still out - this sounds extra nuts.

"Bullshit," she says.

This part. This part, she's done before. It's familiar, though usually it was accompanied by assuring someone she wasn't some kind of monster, a weapon needing to be locked away and controlled. Or she was explaining that same thing to someone else, helping them cope with their transition. It's been a long time since she met a new Inhuman...

Glancing around the room, she finds a target easily. A glass vase on an end table in the corner, far away enough away to be safe. She lifts her right hand, palm facing toward it, and focuses. It takes more effort than it normally would, her powers still so horribly weak, but after just a few seconds the vase begins to shake, rattling on the table—

And then it shatters, glass scattering across the table and onto the carpet below, the assortment of dried flowers dropping onto the table because she'd only targeted the vibrations of the glass. Lowering her hand again, she looks at Ellie expectantly.

Ellie watches the whole display, arms crossed, sceptical. Really, who can blame her? This has been a trying day and a totally impossible conversation. Daisy holds out her hand, and Ellie has to stop herself from rolling her eyes. Come on, like something's really going to happen?

But then, something does happen. The vase shatters into pieces. Ellie actually jumps at the sound, both because she's a little jumpy just in general, given everything, and because she hadn't been expecting it.

"Holy shit!" she says, staring wide-eyed at the glass shards that were once a vase.

"Can you do that again?" she asks, looking back to Daisy, scepticism replaced by something like excitement, anticipation.

The way Ellie jumps makes her feel a little guilty, though Daisy knows that a warning wouldn't have done much good if the other woman didn't believe her in the first place. But there it is now, a very obvious display that she wasn't just spinning some bullshit story from crazytown, and it's a relief when instead of horror, the display is answered with something much more positive.

"Sure," she agrees with an amused smile. "But let's go for something less destructive. Can you see if you can find a glass and some water? I know some of the other houses I checked still had working taps."

"Water? Uh, yeah. Yeah, give me a sec." She disappears into the kitchen. There are dishes, plates, glasses. There aren't any knives, which is extra weird, but she'll think about that later on. For now, she just grabs a glass out of a cabinet.

She holds it under the tap and moves the handle to turn the water on. There's nothing for a moment. She thinks at first that maybe the water isn't working. But then it decides to do its thing, and water trickles into the glass. She fills it about halfway and brings it back, offering it to Daisy.

"What are you gonna do with it?"

She's grateful that there's no insistence that she get the glass herself. As tough as she tries to be, sitting feels really good and she's not too sure she'd make it very far with any real stability right now.

"I made the glass of the vase vibrate," she explains, accepting the water glass and then leaning forward to set it in front of her on the dusty coffee table. "I'm just gonna do it again."

The process is the same as before: hand outstretched, careful focusing on only vibrating the glass... A soft tone fills the room, a clear note of music in the eerie silence. It's both beautiful and sad, though her companion won't have any reason to pick up on the latter.

"This is fucking nuts," Ellie said, knowing she's said something similar already but struggling for words. What else is there to say? This is like nothing she's ever seen and she has absolutely no explanation how that thing with the vase was even possible.

She tenses at the first sound of the tone, because it's also fucking nuts, unexpected and strange and...kind of pretty? She's a musician, but she doesn't catch the sadness because it's just a glass of water and this is way too much even for her.

"I thought I'd seen some weird shit, but today might actually take the cake," she says, looking at Daisy with both awe and disbelief. "You're really some kind of alien?"

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test drive — autumn

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