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

floor 3;

[enchangement]

[ River has been lying on the bed she woke up in for at least five minutes now; she has no idea where she is or how she got here, and she can only hear other people in pieces and bits through her grief.

She doesn't know where she is, or how she got here. That she can move freely is a blessing, but she can't remember the last time she was on a planet where snow was an issue. Or that had a hospital like this one. She checks under the mattress, under the pillow, for a weapon, but there's nothing.

Just a chart with her name on it she doesn't read, and another with her brother's which she definitely doesn't read.

Luusi's yelling brings River into the present, so to speak, and she comes padding out of an unsearched room (or maybe she was hiding beneath the bed when Luusi checked, hard to say) to see what's going on. ]

She doesn't know where that would be, and there's no one else here to ask. It winds like a clock in on itself, tighter and tighter until there's no telling the first from the last.

[grief]

❰ the presence of someone else suddenly appearing doesn't shock her -- maybe it should at least startle her, seeing as she just cleared the floor (her assumption) and didn't see a single person. to be scared or concerned just aren't currently things luusi is interested in.

if anything, perhaps another person might be helpful in locating something reasonable to nosh on, but the hopeful thought is thrown out the window.

instead, luusi looks at the girl like she'd just spoken norwegian, bemused but also totally lost. ❱

You want to run that one by me again, love?

[enchangement]

Mmm. [ River purses her lips and shakes her head. ] It won't help the matter of comprehension, the magic of restating what's been said already.

[ She notices that the other girl is very...certain of what she is. Not fluid and scared, like water in the dark, but very solid, like rock that has existed with the elements and continues to be a rock.

It's admirable. River is so much not that way. ]

Don't know where the food is.

[grief]

❰ luusi's other eyebrow raises at this riddle!girl. she hasn't decided whether she finds it annoying or somehow endearing...perhaps after a conversation or two, she'll finally decide.

in the meantime, she is irritated that no one seems to know where any kind of snack is. ❱

Are you kidding me? Am I just gonna starve here? ❰ at the very least, she's got something in her purse...just give her a moment. in the meantime, ❱ You don't have a sweet on you, no? I'm gonna be dead in 10 minutes otherwise.

[enchangement]

There have been no sounds of life otherwise. No doctors or nurses or beeping machines. No Simon, [ she says quietly, which is weird. His name had been on the chart opposite of hers, but she's glad she didn't read it.

It would have just stressed her out more, she's sure of it.

Either way, she's twisting her fingers into one another in front of her waist. She shakes her head at Luusi's question - there's no sweets on her either way - but brightens. ] Something in her clothes, maybe, a bar or ration?