TEST DRIVE MEME #2

[vestigemods]

TEST DRIVE MEME #2

is the doctor in?

► THE SETTING

In this Test Drive Meme, characters find themselves in the husk of what was once a hospital.

The hospital has three floors + a basement. Unfortunately, characters only seem to be able to reach 03 + B1:


• 03 - This uppermost floor appears to be a regular modern hospital wing untouched by apocalyptic disaster, with various tidy patient rooms + an empty nurse's stand. at a glance, it's difficult to tell from this floor that the hospital is run-down at all... until you try to leave. Or... go anywhere at all, really. (Consult the relevant prompts below.)
  
• B1 - Primarily of interest is the morgue / autopsy room (powered + in functional condition), but this floor also contains locker rooms, a laundry room, a break room, and a handful of other rooms with locked doors and covered windows that Trace doesn't want to make shit up for just yet.
  
Floors 01 + 02 are inaccessible - the stairs crumble away to a multi-floor empty stairwell between the basement and top floor, and the elevator only seems to have buttons for 03 and B1.


Outside is a flat snowy wasteland as far as the eye can see, with blizzard-esque weather conditions awaiting anyone who steps outside (or has the misfortune of waking out there in the first place). This can be seen out every window the hospital has to offer, and will blow right inside if a window is opened. This can be accessed via emergency exit doors leading from B1. Those who try to re-enter the hospital through the front doors find it locked up tight.

The prompts below mostly focus on those who first wake up on the given floor, so feel free to wing it otherwise + ask any questions you may have on discord or in the provided top-level below!

FLOOR 3 ► LEAVING SO SOON? YOU HAVEN'T BEEN DISCHARGED

⬛ ENVIRONMENTAL + MILD PSYCHOLOGICAL HORRORS.

You wake in a clean white bed to the overly-hygienic scent of fake wildflowers and the morning sun filtering in through the windows. You're in a hospital room, a visiting chair at bedside, a television hanging on the adjacent wall. Perhaps you're in a private room and can wake at your own leisure. Perhaps your room is shared, and someone else is waking up in their own bed on the opposite side of the cloth divider.

You have no memory of how you arrived here, nor are you entirely sure where this is. A glance out the window is no help at all - the sun through the window is filtered not by curtains but by a thick torrent of snow, and from this height (at least two or three stories up) you can't even see the ground.

At the end of the bed, you might just find your file. At least, it seems like your file - it lists your name, one or more injuries you don't recall ever having (or perhaps injuries you suddenly have but don't recall ever receiving), and a brief but alarming summary of the cause of the injuries. That's the worst part, the summary. It's almost always something you don't want to hear - you're careful and the injury was borne of recklessness, you value your mother most of all and were stabbed by her hand, or any number of possibilities all written down in carefully clinical terms. If you've woken up alone in a shared room, you might also find a loved one's file attached to the adjacent bed, similarly concerning in content and with no loved one in sight to reassure you that the tale the document tells is a lie.

Outside of your room is a hall with many other such rooms, their occupants stirring now just as you are. A nurse's station sits nearby, thoroughly abandoned. Just beyond that is the doors to the elevator and the stairwell.

But leaving this place isn't quite so easy.

Calling the elevator earns a polite ding! before the elevator doors open to reveal an empty shaft, cables extending downward to indicate that the actual elevator lingers far below. The stairs aren't much better - you have six, maybe seven stairs attached to the stairwell landing before they seem to have crumbled away, and as you look over the edge, you find the stairwell even more empty and ominous than the elevator shaft.

Perhaps you can set to work on figuring out a way to climb down... Or maybe, with luck, someone who woke up in the basement might elevator their way up to your rescue.

⬛ ENVIRONMENTAL (PARANORMAL?) HORROR.

Or, rather than beating your head against the metaphorical wall that is finding a way down from the third floor, perhaps you decide to explore the hallways. Maybe you think there might be another way out! (Hospitals don't just have one stairwell right? That's a fire hazard.) Or maybe you just want to know what else exists on this floor, for the sake of scavenging or even for your own curiosity.

As you venture into the hallways, you might begin to notice that they're all... very much the same. Lights dimmed as if for nighttime, room doors locked - and each time you turn a corner, you find yourself faced with more of the same hallway you just left. But as you venture deeper into this winding maze of identical hallways, you find that overhead the lights flicker more and more intensely, and each new hallway ahead besets you with an odd sort of vertigo, the far end of the hallway seeming to shift gently to and fro as if carried by an ocean's peaceful waves. The vertigo gets stronger the deeper you venture until it's nearly impossible to go on.

Lucky for you: Simply turning around to backtrack finds the hallway you awoke in just around the first corner you turn, regardless of how far you've traveled since. How fantastically merciful of the Technicians, considering what's going on three stories below your feet.

BASEMENT ► DOES IT HELP IF WE THOUGHT YOU WERE DEAD?

⬛ PSYCHOLOGICAL HORROR.

Here, you wake in the dark and the cold.

The dark is absolute, and unless your eyes are especially keen, you'll need to use your hands to get a bearing on your surroundings - and once you do, well. The news isn't great. You've awoken in what feels like a coffin-sized metal container, cold against the inexplicably bare skin of your back. If such a thing exists in your world, you might recognize that the container is chilled artificially.

Maybe you're trapped altogether, with no choice but to shout and bang on the walls and hope someone outside is close enough to hear. - but if you're especially lucky, a kick of your foot at the far end of your container will find it unlatched, sending the floor of your container sliding out into the open air of a dingy run-down morgue. You were trapped in cold storage, and here in the light you find that you've been dressed down to nothing but a flimsy backless hospital gown, a tag tied to your toe.

Upon closer inspection, the toe tag lists your name, where you're from, and... a cause of death? Since when were you dead? Or perhaps you already knew you were dead and the cause of death isn't quite what you recall. Either way, the contents of your toe tag are disconcerting at best, abjectly alarming at worst.

Your clothes and belongings can be found in the laundry room next door. Let's see if you can make it that far without showing a friend or stranger the entirety of your bare ass.

⬛ BODY + PSYCHOLOGICAL HORROR.

Or perhaps you don't wake in cold storage. Perhaps you wake on the autopsy table itself, one of three or four spaced evenly under the flickering fluorescents of the hospital morgue. A thin layer of paper covers your otherwise nude body, and beside the table, a tray of autopsy tools (some bloody, some supposedly clean) on a rusty cart within arm's reach.

An eight-inch-long rectangle has been cut from the front of your paper gown, and you're quick to see why: Some of you have a 6-inch-long, clumsily-stitched surgical slice down the center of your chest, almost as if an autopsy was attempted but quickly patched up before it could be finished. The rest of you aren't fortunate enough to have the stitches - your surgical slice is still open and bleeding mildly. Whether stitched or unstitched, the wound isn't any kind of life-threatening, having missed all vital organs and arteries... Not that it's terribly pleasant regardless.

If you (or a helpful friend or stranger) want to patch that shit up, there are plenty of supplies to bandage the area for now, or even a needle and surgical thread to stitch that up properly. Shame there's no anesthetic.

Once you've achieved enough relative chill to actually care about your prevailing near-nudity, your clothes and belongings can also be found in the laundry room next door. Maybe try not to bleed on them?

OUTSIDE ► WALKING IN A WINTER HORRORLAND

⬛ENVIRONMENTAL HORROR.

If you so happen to find a way outside - whether by way of the emergency exits hatches leading up from the basement or simply by flinging yourself out the third floor window and hoping you don't die in the fall - you're met with a frigid wasteland as far as the eye can see. Which... isn't very far, admittedly. Visibility is typically limited to 10 - 15 feet, though every once in a while the wind dies down enough that for a second or two you can see the flat snowy plane up to ~100 feet ahead.

This leg of the journey is... pretty straightforward. It's cold. It's windy. You almost definitely aren't dressed for the weather. Once you wander out into the snow, it's hard to find your way back to the hospital - and since the hospital's front doors are locked up tight, the only way back inside is through the emergency exits down into the basement (if you can find them, through the snow quickly piling up on the ground).

For an unfortunate few, this might be where you wake up. You return to consciousness here, confused and likely already shivering before you even properly register where you are. Here's hoping you find one of those emergency exits (whether on your own or through sheer luck as someone opens one in front of you), because otherwise you're doomed for hypothermia in a few hours at best.

MOD NOTES + CONTINUITY

• This TDM takes place in a shared dream for all participants, so as not to interrupt in-game continuity. Characters already in-game may experience this dream at literally any time between now and the next TDM, and new characters who TDM here will have this dream as their vivid introductory experience much like the first batch of characters had The Loop. Players of current Vestige characters, feel free to fudge when your characters experience this nightmare and/or when something inspires them to remember it.
  
• Please leave the top-leveling for new characters - this isn't the last time we'll see this hospital, and veterans can take a crack at it at a later date. (And, in fact, much of the hospital has been sectioned off via ambiguous dream mechanics in order to make sure there's lots of fun fresh shit to do when the game at large gets ahold of it.)
  
• The elevator does work - it just can't be called specifically from the third floor to keep in line with the feeling of being somewhat trapped. If someone brings it up from the basement, they can rescue people from the third floor at leisure. If you want your character to escape via elevator to the basement, feel free to assume that someone has brought the elevator up to the third floor and left it unattended.
  
• Unless otherwise specified, characters arrive with all powers intact and carrying all items that they had with them on their canonpoint.
  
• I recommend checking out our FAQ before you TDM for any further game info, even though this isn't set in the Containment Zone proper.
  
• Feel free to hop into our Discord server if you aren't there already!
  

Comments

jemima | original character / world of darkness

[witting]

BASEMENT | AUTOPSY

( jem isn't, exactly, bleeding.

don't worry; it isn't better. the synthetic skin covering her torso has been sliced open, and there is blue liquid (disorientingly, the only part of her still the same colour as the hologram she knows herself to be) seeping from the...wound? the wound. she has a wound. and a body, hands which reach trembling to press into the open gouge,

it feels

(it feels)

as if her new innards are laid out correctly according to the abandoned plans for what such a body might have been, the incision narrowly missed doing permanent damage to connection C8-17 that she isn't sure she would know how to repair.

her face feels—strange. wet. her fingers are still searching by feel the design that she knows dr gallo had chosen not to move forward with,

she is looking for the place where it stops, the plans were incomplete, she must be incomplete,

the wet is in her hair. she hasn't sat up. she says, )

I am experiencing discomfort,

( so loudly into the silence that it makes her flinch. )

Please, Dr Gallo? Dr Gallo, please, I don't like it.

( since dreams are awful, please feel free to rerun this scenario with as many characters as you like. hmu at lilpantsunicorn#8828 if u wanna hash anything out ✌🏻 )

[goingtobefun]

[Oh, how interesting. He, himself, had been in a similar position before. Though he'd had his entire head wrenched off. This seems like someone had been trying to explore android technology and had gotten bored and left halfway through.]

Don't worry, [he says, his voice the epitome of calm as he carefully folds her skin back into place, pressing a little to make the edges of it meet.] I'm sure you're going to be fine.

My name is David.

[witting]

( beneath his fingers, the blue liquid—isn't, entirely. it moves like mercury, not lingering on his skin but seeping back into jemima's own at the encouragement of his pushing; some of it seems to...dry, to flake into shimmering dust that clings.

not blood at all but dormant nanites, slowing the process of self-repair. )

Jemima, ( she says, automatic, polite, and: ) Where is Dr Gallo?

[goingtobefun]

[Ah, how interesting. The way the blood -- for lack of a better word -- moves and shifts. How it turns to dust. David leans a little closer to try and inspect it, keeping his hands in place.]

I'm afraid I don't know who Doctor Gallo is. I was exploring this place when I came upon you in this state. Do you remember how you got here?

[witting]

( she woke up here,

but jemima has never woken anywhere. has never been asleep. she frowns, mostly at the ceiling instead of david directly— )

I have no records of that at this time.

voicetesting and we get to pretend i have more than 1 icon

[heartens]

( it's the voice that wakes him. jars him awake, echoing oddly around him in a way that has him jolting upright in place, only to collide roughly with a horribly low ceiling. hands find that ceiling, feeling along it in an insistent way, as if it might just be confused and not realize that it's not supposed to be so low. he feels stupid for it a moment later when the fog in his head clears up a little.

which is when he realizes what woke him up. a voice, and only now does quentin process what it said - she's uncomfortable. no, she's experiencing discomfort, that's... different, more disconcerting somehow. he hears her again now, pleading, and hands curl to fists to bang on the sides of the enclosure, flinching slightly at the overloud echo of it but nonetheless calling, ) Hey - I'm coming, okay? Hang on - ( he just has to figure out how to get out of -

what was supposed to be an attempt to feel for the other end of the enclosure with his foot turns out to be enough to push it open just slightly, and quentin squints against the sudden light, shoving fingers through the crack to leverage himself out a little farther so that he can scramble to sit up properly and get a look at the situation.

and wouldn't you know it, he sure was stuck in a corpse fridge. quentin's brow knits, teeth working his bottom lip as he nods a little nod - definitely not a confused-panic nod, clearly not, waking up in a corpse fridge is totally normal - before it clicks again that someone needed help. and so he fumbles out the rest of the way and stands on unsteady legs, eyes at once seeking out the figure lying on the table. he's fully halfway there before it registers that there's a gaping wound straight down her torso.

cue quentin turning a loop back the way he came, eyes closing, letting out a bracing 'here goes nothing' exhale so that he can be Helpful And Not Alarmed when he closes the rest of the distance to stand at bedside. )

I'm here to help, ( is the first thing he says, in case the sudden presence of a disheveled stranger codes 'alarming' rather than 'heroic', and he meets her eyes with what he hopes is reassurance for a moment before glancing down to properly look at the wound and stopping short at the sight of it. his brow knits a second time since he woke up, head tilting slightly as he processes what he's seeing: a thin layer of skin(?) over what definitely isn't flesh, all oozing a very un-blood-like blue.

this isn't-... he. how is he supposed to - ) Everything's going to be fine, ( he says, slow and semi-assured, but he's a terrible liar in crisis and there's clearly a caveat on the way: ) If I... ( a glance at the tools at tableside to double-check that yes, this is within the realm of possibility. ) If I can stitch it together, it should heal - I think.

( his eyes lift to hers again, hands mindlessly fumbling to close the flaps of his gown behind him. ) Can I-... I'm not going to unless you say it's okay. ( that sounds so ridiculous at a time like this, but if she's conscious enough to call for help, he doesn't feel right just digging right in with a needle and thread. )

it's ok half my icons are music video

[witting]

( literally every part of this is alarming, including the prospect of being stitched together. including the prospect of healing, as if that's something that she needs to do. at absolute most, she's prepared to accept that as a metaphor, as shorthand for something complex that doesn't immediately require explanation, not as—as a thing that happens to her, in any real sense.

she doesn't immediately give him her okay. she stares up at him with an expression that seems uncomfortably divorced from everything happening below her chin, which is still...unpleasant. up close, it's more apparent that the blue colour comes from a glow about whatever it is she's oozing instead of blood, and though she's more night-light than flood-lamp it's enough to shadow her face oddly, doll-like and unhappy. )

That doesn't make any sense, ( she informs him, a thread of frustration in it that in her girlish voice sounds almost petulant. ) Please proceed.

( in the absence of any better ideas. )

[bombshelled]

[ If she can't call the elevator up to the third floor, then Lana will just have to pry the doors open herself and jump down. Thank fucking god for her superpowers which make slowing her descent a breeze. Jemima will hear the sound of explosions, growing closer and closer. Soon enough, Lana lands on the top of the elevator and jumps down through a hatch and out onto the basement floor. ]

Uh, hello? [ She limps, slightly, her body still healing from the injuries she sustained before walking up here. She hears a voice and decides to follow it. ]

Holy fucking shit!

[ That sure is a person lying on a table, all cut up from an autopsy, but definitely still alive. ]

Are you okay? Is there anything... Is your blood blue?

[witting]

( nothing about the sound of explosions at decreasing distance makes this experience in any way less frightening or confusing; explosions she has no explanation for (less, even, than all the things already happening she can't explain) mean that if she were somehow insufficiently on edge before, that is no longer the case.

it probably wasn't the case a minute ago, either, but here we are.

she assumes are you okay is rhetorical, and therefore answers the only question she has an answer to with logic she is clinging to, )

I don't have blood.

( like the mere suggestion is absurd. )

[bombshelled]

[ Oh...kay... In hindsight the questions she asked were kind of stupid. She's obviously not okay, and that's obviously not blood.

Think, Lana! What do you do now? First things first, help close this girl's wounds. ]

Uhhh... Is there any duct tape anywhere? I don't know what the fuck to do, I'm not a fucking surgeon, what the fuck!?

let's get this mentor in murder slash mother/daughter show on the road

[brickbat]

[ north would very much like to say androids don't dream, thank you very fucking much, and yet, she has like six months of evidence to say periodically she's just going to encounter these places where the rules are made up and the points don't matter and thus: the vague, unsettling awareness that she is dreaming. of fucking vestige, still.

so. her mood, as she navigates the glorious of this place, could be described, lightly, as cranky; she investigates and thoroughly overturns the laundry room, lockers, a vast and pointless expanse of human shit she doesn't need, until she hears a voice, light and plaintive, seemingly right at the very edges of what her ears might pick up, and as such, naturally, the autopsy room is just right around the next ragdamned corner.

what pulls her right out of everything else ratting her synthetic bones is the blood, which--well, of course she thinks is thirium and not uhhhhh diamond emma frost nanites. dreams behaving in the weird ways they do, it seems to take entire minutes to walk all the way over to the table, during which time she has the bizarre notion stitches should work? that should be nonsense, what she should be looking for is a soldering iron, and yet.

well.

naturally she skips the pleasantries even as she's threading the needle, feeling with, again, bizarre certainty the correct length. ]

This is probably going to hurt, and I'm sorry about that, but I'll fix it as quickly as I can. [ that's all the more warning there is, kind of like giving a shot on the one of one two three. ] Do you know who did this to you?

[witting]

( this dream is beginning to—blur. the faces are different but the discomfort is the same; she wakes, over and over and over again, uncertain if she isn't moving because she can't or because she doesn't know how to or because it doesn't occur to her that she could. she has been lying there for several minutes a year too long just a moment when north's voice cuts through the white noise, and jemima focuses on her. on the question. on the needle,

again. )

A thief, ( she asserts, with some confidence. ) The blue-prints for this body are proprietary intellectual property that has not had any form of release and therefore should not exist.

I have been put into stolen property against my will and I would like to go back to my server.

( she expresses this in the tone of someone who is submitting a complaint into a box; who does not expect it to be actioned but wishes to have it on record, all the same. there will be a note that says jemima does not like this. it will not make her feel better. )

[brickbat]

[ that is, not mince words, absolutely not what she thought she was about to hear, so much that it takes a second of looking up, stopping mid-stitch, to run the response over in her mind a second time and really parse what this young woman means. some of cyberlife's androids exist for their intellectual capacity, sure, but all that means is that their consciousness might get transferred should their body be broken beyond repair, and north wasn't one of those. the idea that an android should call a server home, as if when she exists in pure consciousness she actually exists as something other than technological potentiality, is therefore doubly foreign,

it would have pissed her off, once. or at least made her wary enough to withdraw from the entire situation: not all androids could be trusted, not when some still belonged to them. now it just tugs at whatever simulates sympathetic nerves in androids, that pull around the heart that twists up under the auspice of any overwhelming emotion. their people don't all start out ready to slough off their programming and embrace even the idea of wanting to be someone, but she believes every one of them can get there.

just. maybe not during what amounts to minor surgery sans anesthesia, although north wonders if she actually can feel pain? deviants do, and she certainly sounds like she's not having a good time, although all of that could be accounted for by the simple confusion that is whatever the hell is going on.

she makes an effort to gentle her voice past its inclination to efficiency and the uh, general undercurrent of rage that could break out anytime. though if the technicians are responsible for the more corporeal aspect if what she is currently stitching up, rather than just bringing her here, she's going to zoom right back to 11 immediately! ]

Okay. We can talk about that when you're patched up. I'm North. What's your n--

[ oh, uh. actually ]

Do you have a name?