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the_center_memes2020-11-20 04:00 pm
thecenter_mods) wrote in the_center_memes2020-11-20 04:00 pm
Entry tags:
December Test Drive Meme
Thanks for your interest in the Center! Not sure what the Center is? Check out our premise and FAQ.
One of the main goals of this game is to make it easy to jump into, so the prompts are relatively short and snappy. If you have questions about mechanics, ask on the Questions comment, or just wing it!
Reserves open December 1st, and apps open December 15th. We plan to open the game officially on January 3rd, 2021. This TDM can be used as game canon if you want it to, and you can assume that your character has been in the Center since the beginning of December.
Each month at the Center, the Experiences are built around a theme. This month's theme is:
One of the main goals of this game is to make it easy to jump into, so the prompts are relatively short and snappy. If you have questions about mechanics, ask on the Questions comment, or just wing it!
Reserves open December 1st, and apps open December 15th. We plan to open the game officially on January 3rd, 2021. This TDM can be used as game canon if you want it to, and you can assume that your character has been in the Center since the beginning of December.
Each month at the Center, the Experiences are built around a theme. This month's theme is:
getting to know you
Months at the Center are structured with one rest week and three weeks of Experiences. Experiences each take place for one week. They begin at midnight on Sunday morning and last until 11:59 the next Saturday night.
Gwen will announce the the Challenge at the beginning of the month, and will open each week with a short post describing the Experience. It will be vague, and only allude to the actual Experience to come.
The goal of this month’s Experience is to help you and your fellow Participants get to know one another. You’ll be spending a lot of time together.
Learn more on the Experiences page.
Content warnings for this TDM:
Experience 2: small spaces
Experience 3: references to spiders, general fears
Gwen will announce the the Challenge at the beginning of the month, and will open each week with a short post describing the Experience. It will be vague, and only allude to the actual Experience to come.
The goal of this month’s Experience is to help you and your fellow Participants get to know one another. You’ll be spending a lot of time together.
Learn more on the Experiences page.
Experience 2: small spaces
Experience 3: references to spiders, general fears
Everyone arrives at the Center in the same way. You arrive at midnight on Sunday morning of the first week of the month.
You wake up in a comfortable bed in a room you have never seen before.
You feel well-rested and refreshed. Everything around you is washed in soft shades of white. You’re wearing neutral linen clothing, and around your non-dominant wrist is a beautiful, rose gold bracelet. You’ll find it very comfortable, and fitted perfectly. As you sit up, the blank concrete wall opposite your bed flickers and turns into a screen, showing a bone-white, smiling face.
A soft, perfectly neutral voice fills the room as the face starts talking.
“Hello. My name is Gwen. Welcome to the Center. We are excited to accompany you on the most important journey you will ever take.
You are here because you are flawed. You are weak. You feel, in your bones, that you are not the best version of yourself.
But you could be.
Here at the Center, you will be pushed to be your best self. It will not be easy. It may be the hardest thing you have ever done, and what you get out of this journey will be equivalent to what you put in.
Everything you need will be provided for. You can find all other information in the book beside your bed.
Good luck. Please know that we will be with you every step of the way. You are never alone.”
Gwen smiles, and the screen disappears, leaving only concrete.
You wake up in a comfortable bed in a room you have never seen before.
You feel well-rested and refreshed. Everything around you is washed in soft shades of white. You’re wearing neutral linen clothing, and around your non-dominant wrist is a beautiful, rose gold bracelet. You’ll find it very comfortable, and fitted perfectly. As you sit up, the blank concrete wall opposite your bed flickers and turns into a screen, showing a bone-white, smiling face.
A soft, perfectly neutral voice fills the room as the face starts talking.
“Hello. My name is Gwen. Welcome to the Center. We are excited to accompany you on the most important journey you will ever take.
You are here because you are flawed. You are weak. You feel, in your bones, that you are not the best version of yourself.
But you could be.
Here at the Center, you will be pushed to be your best self. It will not be easy. It may be the hardest thing you have ever done, and what you get out of this journey will be equivalent to what you put in.
Everything you need will be provided for. You can find all other information in the book beside your bed.
Good luck. Please know that we will be with you every step of the way. You are never alone.”
Gwen smiles, and the screen disappears, leaving only concrete.
around the center
The Center has two wings of suites and bedrooms, a cafeteria, and a rec room. Your character has access to all of this. Bedrooms lock from the inside, but everything else is fair game. Read a self-help book, have a chat in the conversation pit, try a kale bowl or a kombucha, give meditating or yoga a try. There is plenty to occupy yourself with during rest week at the Center.
this month's kombucha selection
Seasonal Flavor: Cranberry
Effect: Emotion sharing. When you drink the kombucha, you will be able to feel the emotions of the people within five feet of you for the next hour after consumption.
Standard Flavor: Ginger-Lemon
Effect: Boosts your energy and your powers by 20%. However, in addition to boosting your powers, it will also give you way too much energy. You won’t be able to sit still for at least four hours. The more you drink, the more energy you’ll have, although the power-boosting seems to be limited.
Standard Flavor: Green
Effect: Heals you by 20%. It also makes you very suggestible. You will go into a haze lasting at least four hours. During those four hours, you’ll be very open to suggestions from anybody, including Gwen, about things you should do or say.
Effect: Emotion sharing. When you drink the kombucha, you will be able to feel the emotions of the people within five feet of you for the next hour after consumption.
Standard Flavor: Ginger-Lemon
Effect: Boosts your energy and your powers by 20%. However, in addition to boosting your powers, it will also give you way too much energy. You won’t be able to sit still for at least four hours. The more you drink, the more energy you’ll have, although the power-boosting seems to be limited.
Standard Flavor: Green
Effect: Heals you by 20%. It also makes you very suggestible. You will go into a haze lasting at least four hours. During those four hours, you’ll be very open to suggestions from anybody, including Gwen, about things you should do or say.
At the beginning of the week, Gwen's post reads:
You must learn to be honest with yourself and others before you can take the first step.
Overnight, little plaques have appeared on every surface in the Center: all the tables in the cafeteria, all coffee tables in your suites, counters in the bathrooms, and on your nightstands.
Every time you pass one, it’s like you’re being drawn to your own reflection in a window. You’re compelled to slow down, stop and read what’s on them: ice breaker questions.
As soon as you lock eyes with the prompt, your Bracelet snaps as if heavily magnetized to the nearest surface, trapping you in place. So do the Bracelets of anyone who heard you read the prompt. Not near a surface? They Bracelets lock you together with another person who heard the question.
Answering the questions seems to be the only way to get free, so you’d better be ready to share some fun facts about yourself!
You must learn to be honest with yourself and others before you can take the first step.
Overnight, little plaques have appeared on every surface in the Center: all the tables in the cafeteria, all coffee tables in your suites, counters in the bathrooms, and on your nightstands.
Every time you pass one, it’s like you’re being drawn to your own reflection in a window. You’re compelled to slow down, stop and read what’s on them: ice breaker questions.
As soon as you lock eyes with the prompt, your Bracelet snaps as if heavily magnetized to the nearest surface, trapping you in place. So do the Bracelets of anyone who heard you read the prompt. Not near a surface? They Bracelets lock you together with another person who heard the question.
Answering the questions seems to be the only way to get free, so you’d better be ready to share some fun facts about yourself!
At the beginning of the week, Gwen's post reads:
You are not as singular, or as special, as you believe yourself to be.
You open a door, and instead of being where you were going, you’re in a small, white cement room with another character. The room is just big enough for the two of you to sit down cross-legged in. It’s a tight fit. Every five minutes you spend in this room, it gets smaller by a half a foot on each side.
On the wall, stamped into the cement is the phrase: Our similarities bring us to a common ground.
The only way to leave the room is to find something that you both have in common and bond over that. What counts as bonding? That’s up to you to decide! If you (or the Center) decides it’s not good enough, Gwen simply won’t let your characters out of the room.
Bonding can look like sharing stories about that thing, talking about why you like it or hate it, what it means to you, etc.
Once you have bonded, a door will open to one of the places that one of the characters was headed before. Yes, you have to go together. You’re friends now!
Throughout this week, this keeps happening to you, often when you enter or leave a room, including the bathroom.
You are not as singular, or as special, as you believe yourself to be.
You open a door, and instead of being where you were going, you’re in a small, white cement room with another character. The room is just big enough for the two of you to sit down cross-legged in. It’s a tight fit. Every five minutes you spend in this room, it gets smaller by a half a foot on each side.
On the wall, stamped into the cement is the phrase: Our similarities bring us to a common ground.
The only way to leave the room is to find something that you both have in common and bond over that. What counts as bonding? That’s up to you to decide! If you (or the Center) decides it’s not good enough, Gwen simply won’t let your characters out of the room.
Bonding can look like sharing stories about that thing, talking about why you like it or hate it, what it means to you, etc.
Once you have bonded, a door will open to one of the places that one of the characters was headed before. Yes, you have to go together. You’re friends now!
Throughout this week, this keeps happening to you, often when you enter or leave a room, including the bathroom.
At the beginning of the week, Gwen's post reads:
Facing your fears alone will destroy you.
Overnight, your greatest fear manifests in the Center. If you are afraid of ghosts, suddenly there are ghosts around your person 24/7. Afraid of dying? You’ll see yourself die—viscerally, in a very real way—every time you enter a room. Afraid of spiders? Spiders. Everywhere you go.
Fears will always try to drive characters away from crowds and other characters. They seem to want to get you alone where you're at your weakest.
While nobody can face their fears alone, if you try to fight off their fear with the help of someone else, it works. If you team up with another Participant to face your fear, it will disappear and stay gone for the rest of the week. For example, if your fear is spiders, and you and another Participant face the spiders and squish them all, the spiders will be gone. If you're afraid of dying, if you accept the inevitability of your death with another Participant, you won't have to watch your final moments again.
Notes about this Experience:
Facing your fears alone will destroy you.
Overnight, your greatest fear manifests in the Center. If you are afraid of ghosts, suddenly there are ghosts around your person 24/7. Afraid of dying? You’ll see yourself die—viscerally, in a very real way—every time you enter a room. Afraid of spiders? Spiders. Everywhere you go.
Fears will always try to drive characters away from crowds and other characters. They seem to want to get you alone where you're at your weakest.
While nobody can face their fears alone, if you try to fight off their fear with the help of someone else, it works. If you team up with another Participant to face your fear, it will disappear and stay gone for the rest of the week. For example, if your fear is spiders, and you and another Participant face the spiders and squish them all, the spiders will be gone. If you're afraid of dying, if you accept the inevitability of your death with another Participant, you won't have to watch your final moments again.
Notes about this Experience:
- If your fear is a specific person, that person will appear and they can talk to your character, but they are limited to a script of a few sentences, like a pre-programed doll that can only say a handful of phrases.
- Fears won't try to kill anyone—after all, you can't face your fears if you're dead—they will attempt to harm characters and can leave physical woulds and certainly mental scars.
- You can see and interact with each other’s manifested fears. However, only a team containing the person whose fear it is can defeat a fear.
navigation »
common ground
[ Trapped in this tiny room with Ken is a girl, frowning as she runs her own fingers along the cracks. This whole experience has been terrible for Marinette so far. She doesn't have Tikki, she doesn't know where she is, and she is one-hundred percent sure something awful is happening in Paris at this very moment but there's nothing she can do about it.
Which is just horrible.
But! She has to put on a brave face for this kid. Nothing good is going to come from frightening a kid, and there's no way Marinette's going to let them stay trapped in here anyway. ] Forcing people to do things for you is a terrible way to get what you want.
...but maybe we should try it anyway? I don't really want to be stuck in here forever.
no subject
He can't do anything about his overall predicament, however, until he solves his short-term one, so although he has to steel himself, he nods. ]
Got it. Escaping comes first.
[ Except. ]
But....what should we talk about?
[ The walls shudder. ]
no subject
[ She's really throwing the proverbial pasta at the wallh here! There must be something they have in common in all of that, right? ]
no subject
My name is Ichijouji Ken and I'm from Tamachi in Tokyo, Japan. I like - hot springs and soccer. And
[ food, he needs a food, um
....well, he doesn't know if it's a "like" but he has a lot of it with a friend ] ramen.
[ Argh. ]
Does none of that...match?
no subject
[ And she can't leave Paris for that long. Look what happened the last time she and Chat Noir were both gone.
No, focus, Marinette! There has to be something. She glances up doubtfully at the smaller walls, pouting. ] Oh! I like ramen, too.
[ She waits a beat.
Then frowns. ] What's that if not common ground? Is ramen not enough?
no subject
[ he likes ramen more for the memories associated with it but he still likes it...
but the walls are still here.
Is it Ken's fault for not having a food he likes for every possible reason? ]
no subject
[ This! This is something they're on the same page about, it seems. Marinette is very good at talking when she wants to be, so she's just going to keep going and hope it's enough. ] I think food is one of the best ways to bring people together. Is that what you love? About ramen? Besides the delicious noodles.
no subject
[ He has to admit it, doesn't he? Ken's embarrassed, but if it gets them out of here....
He'll try to speak more quickly than he usually does when he's finding a topic difficult. In the interests of lack of squish. As he needs to take a step forward. ]
My best friend - wants to make ramen. For a living. So I eat it with him - a lot.
[ He never used to eat after school with friends before. Ken can't help a little smile. ] It's nice....
no subject
She smiles now, soft and sweet. ] That's really sweet. Like research for his future career! What do you want want to do for a living? I'd love to be a famous fashion designer—
[ And dress Adrien in all her clothes, he'd look so beautiful—no, nope! No. Can't get distracted thinking about his gorgeous green eyes or his perfect smile.
Oh, god. Marinette giggles, nervous and flushing all of a sudden. ] Um, but, I have a long way to go!
no subject
I'm still thinking. But law enforcement. Maybe.
[ Oh no he has uh. He's running out of things to say about himself. Most of what Ken knows about himself is either highly complex, psychological, and private, or else a bunch of trauma.
...But that's not all there is to him! What else, what else, uh...Something precious to him....
His partner's face swims in his mind's eye. ]
I like - bugs!