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

[bearhole]

Real? [ What the what? ] Why would you think I wasn't real? Whoever's been going around telling you that I'm not real, you should... Just... Don't listen to them.

[ She knows she's real. She just... Doesn't know if this weird hospital place is real. It's too clean, for one thing. And sure, Emil's here, but where's everyone else? ]

[enflame]

❰ his mouth opens to argue, but it's too much to ask of him right now. truthfully, he'd think he was a weird idiot too to ask something like that. but it wouldn't be the first time some faux-person appeared to someone as a vision, but he digresses. nothing he could tell her would make her understand in only a few minutes.

sighing, emil puts his knife back into his bag with a small shake of his head. ❱

Then what are you doing right now?

[bearhole]

[ Isn't it obvious? From the pile of ripped and knotted bedsheets she has lying at her feet? ]

Trying to make a rope so I can get off this floor! Stairs are gone, in case you hadn't noticed. I don't want to be trapped up here, do you?

[ Who knows what could get into this place at night. ]

i absolutely didn't half-read a very important sentence in your top level, no sir

[enflame]

❰ after a blink, the pieces fall together. her sudden appearance just so utterly dazed him. he leans over, looking down into the dark depths of the shaft. it unsettles his stomach, but if that's how they get out...emil shrugs, but stoney-faced. ❱

No. We need to leave as soon as we can. ❰ trust him, he knows more than well to be wary of this place, if it is the same place.

emil gingerly picks up a set of sheets, pulling handfuls in different directions and actually surprised by how flimsy they are. they doesn't bare well for their ability to hold onto it, even knotted, but ah well. it's far from emil's mind.

instead, he gives sigrun a studying look, still feeling wary about her close existence. ❱ Did they give you any of your weapons?

shh, it's fiiine

[bearhole]

[ No, it doesn't bode well for the sheets' ability to hold them. If she thought she had time, Sigrun would try maybe to braid the strips to make one thicker, stronger rope. But given what Emil said, it doesn't sound like they should dawdle.

But wait. There's something else about what Emil said... ]

"They?" They who? [ Why does it suddenly sound like Emil knows something she doesn't?

She rounds on him, pausing in her rope making to cross her arms. ]

Okay, report time. Where are we, and how did we get here? Where are the others?

[enflame]

❰ the sudden interrogation isn't one emil expected, and being stared at so suddenly causes him to falter. it's true he loves to talk, but in this case...where to even begin. his shoulders slump, flimsy cloth billowing at the ground as his arms hang. ❱

I don't know how you got here. You haven't been anywhere for a long time...Iceland, or wherever I guess.

❰ the best place to start, he guesses, is their most current location. or, what he can assume about it. ❱ This city is run by "technicians." ❰ air quotes included. ❱ It's not The Silent World, it's just some dumpy place in the woods and people...things want to hurt you.

❰ in frustration at having to explain this, repeating his still stinging reality back to himself, emil squats down to keep ripping at the sheets. ❱ There's. There's a pamphlet, you'll find one when we're out of here. But Lalli's here. Tuuri. Reynir is probably somewhere.

❰ keeping up with that guy is not his job. ❱

[bearhole]

[ Some of it makes sense. Actually, no. Not a whole lot of it makes any sense at all, really. She wonders if Emil is pulling her leg, but he isn't really the type to do that. ]

What do you mean I haven't been anywhere? I've been in Onni's camp with everybody else.

[ "Things" in the woods that want to hurt her aren't new at all. "Technicians" running the whole thing... Okay, that is new. ]

You're not making any sense.

[enflame]

It doesn't really make sense.

❰ asgard had a set of rules and features you eventually understood and got acclimated to. this...place? will eventually settle into him in the same way -- no, not entirely. but emil will adjust. how he got pulled from his homeworld to asgard, or from asgard to wherever they may be now? it's all completely illogical to him. ❱

I'm sure you've been hanging out with -- well, Onni is news to me. But you've been in some familiar country, doing whatever, but I've been gone over a year. Almost two. Everyone else has shown up here and there...even Onni! You never came around.

Well, until now. ❰ and she happened to pull the short straw and leap directly into the worst place. congrats! ❱

[bearhole]

[ Well, he's right about one thing. It doesn't really make sense. ]

You've been gone. For two years. Even though I just saw you this morning.

[ Just repeating that, to make sure she's hearing it right. She doesn't understand how that is possible, but... If things don't make sense, then they don't make sense. It's not her job to understand things. It's her job to look out for her squad, and get things done. So, she goes back to binding the sheets together into a rope. ]

Whatever. Regardless of who's been where for how long, we're here now, and we have to get out of this place. So, stop being so confusing and come help me.