December Test Drive Meme

[thecenter_mods]

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:

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

arrival | Experience 1: Icebreakers | Experience 2: Common Ground | Experience 3: Fears

arrival

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.

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.

experience 1: break the ice

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!

experience 2: just big enough for the two of us

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.

experience 3: are you afraid?

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:

• 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 »

Comments

[worthallthis]

"No, I'm not." The Asset is neither pissing himself nor looking at it, so Bailey's clearly wrong on both accounts. "It's maintenance. The Asset requires maintenance for mission functionality." But it's terrifying. He'd walk up to it if a handler ordered him to, but-- but there's no handlers here. Gwen is the closest thing, and she's... he doesn't know what she is. But she hasn't ordered him to the Chair, so he's not fucking going.

[itsybitsybastard]

Someone being so literal was less fun, but it didn't change the depth of Glamour whether the soldier lied or not.

"Mission functionality." He stands directly in front of the chair, hands slack by his sides as he gives the Asset an extremely sardonic look. "You're pure raring to go hide in a corner somewhere over a damn fucking chair. Whatever this thing is, don't be lying to me about it when this place is making our damn worst fears strut around."

He reaches his hands behind him, and rests them delicately on the arms of the chair, forearms resting in the shackles as he reclines lazily into it: the casual grace he has while doing so is both regal, and somehow animalistic. Very apex predator. "At least yours is stationary."

[worthallthis]

The movement gets him to at least look at Bailey's feet and registers what he's--

--no, no. There is no one and nothing he would want to experience that. Not his worst enemy, if he had one-- not his handler. He lunges forward to try and grab Bailey out of the chair in a panic before the heavy metal clamps come down on his arms. "No, don't, don't--"

Because the clamps will come down, the machine starting to hum as it charges up.

[itsybitsybastard]

The Asset rushing at Bailey has him slamming further into the chair, actually kicking the floor and pushing away from the other man on some misplaced reflex to scramble, run--

--so he's still in the chair when the clamps slam down, and he looks down in shock. Not fear, not yet, but the humming is immediately concerning, and he starts bracing automatically, instinctively.

He has to focus-- Glamour sizzles as it burns through him, makes his body hair stand on end, and somehow he just looks more at ease and commanding despite his circumstances. "Look at me and listen. There's a key around my neck on a red ribbon, it'll unlock the shackles. You need to get it before this bastard goes off."

[worthallthis]

"They aren't shackles, they're clamps, there are no keyholes!" he cries. He tugs briefly at one, but they're made to hold him when he's thrashing in terror and bucking with electricity, there's no way. And he knows this.

The halo starts to turn, the pieces swiveling down, clearly with their final position supposed to be around Bailey's face.

No one ever had to protect that from the Asset. He's always held down at gunpoint at this juncture. He can see several structural weaknesses he can exploit to tear those pieces apart. But-- he quails, panting and shaking himself, because it's the fucking Chair. It made him.

[itsybitsybastard]

Bailey is tugging at the clamps too - he's skinny, sure, but he's not that skinny, and there's very little leftover wiggle room to shove himself down and away from the headpiece as it lowers towards him. "Well then find something else!"

Even the Glamour can't hide how terrified he sounds, gritting his teeth as he tries in vain to sink into the chair, trying to jerk his head out. "Come on, ya fecking gowl!"

[worthallthis]

The pieces finish rotating and start to come together, Bailey's head between them, and there's one spark of electricity along one of the face plates. It'll send more volts through the jerk's brain than he can handle, probably, and even if he could-- the "jerk" would be gone. It would just be a blank, twitching asset. He can't let that happen. He can't. No one else. Never again.

The metal hand grabs one of the mechanical arms, the flesh one the other, and he yanks them apart, braced with one foot on the seat's bracing. They come away with a metallic shriek and a fizzle of power, and with far less effort than he'd anticipated for such a hated, powerful thing. He actually staggers back, the pieces of his own creation (destruction) in each hand.

Baily is still clamped in, though.

[itsybitsybastard]

He flinches away from the first spark, a slight bark escaping automatically from the sharp pain, and his claws scrape along the armrests as he pulls himself in tight, bracing for the pain--

That-- doesn't come. Because two hands enter the sides of his vision and suddenly the entire headpiece is ripped off and Bailey swears loud at the sudden noise - and more than a bit at the raw electricity, with nowhere else to go, grounding on him for a few seconds - before the hum of power stops thrumming through the chair, and it goes silent.

It stays that way for a few seconds, Bailey still trapped and now frozen with confusion and indecision.

And then the chair vanishes from beneath him, sending him crashing to the floor.

[worthallthis]

For a long moment, the Asset stares at his now-empty hands, flexing the fingers and shaking. Then the thump of Bailey hitting the floor registers, and he looks up. "You." His expression rapidly grows from blank to thunderous. "You. You idiot. You. You absolute fucking numbskull. Your cocksure, dumbshit showing away almost got you fucking erased! And I thought I had brain damage! Jesus Christ!"

By the end of that he's yelling in an exasperated but shaky kind of way. Stress and fear and relief all coming out in anger. He has to pause for breath, so Bailey can try to interject, but if he doesn't, the rant will continue, trust me.

[itsybitsybastard]

His clothes pad the fall but Bailey still hits the ground hard, and smacks the back of his head briefly on the cold floor. He just lies there for a moment, letting the other man's anger wash over him - it's raw, and fresh, and with it being directed so furiously at him it's easy to concentrate and harvest some to replenish his dwindled supply.

When the man takes a breathe, Bailey lifts his hand and waves it idly. "Are you fair finished?" His Irish accent, so thick in his panic a moment ago, has receded back to barely noticeable, though now intensely bitter, as he pushes himself back to his feet - he's about the same height as the Asset. "I fucked up, you're after saving my ass, congratulations. Personal Space is a bloody hero now. Fucking deadly."

[worthallthis]

"I am not a hero. I am a thing," the Asset hisses back at him. "And I did save your ass. You come out of that Chair and you don't know who you are. What you are. You're-- you're gone and they put something else inside and they--" He puts his head into his hands with a shuddery breath. "Just believe somebody, next time. That there's a reason to be afraid."

[itsybitsybastard]

His stare is indifferent, bordering annoyed; but the more the man talks, the more Bailey's gaze turns baleful. Like he's looking to pick a fight.

"Oh and you're just so special for that, sure. Big man here can't handle a bit of dissociation being put on him."

[worthallthis]

He stares at Bailey-- in his general direction-- through his fingers. Confused. Annoyed. Still shaking from the mental effort of destroying the Chair. "What are you trying to get here, pal," he says more than asks, voice hoarse. Does he want to get hit? Because the Asset can oblige him if he really wants. But he wasn't going to let him get erased, either.

[itsybitsybastard]

Truthfully, Bailey's not fully sure. A reaction, maybe, so he can abuse the man and cover up the hot embarrassment from needing to be helped because he was stupid and showing off. Easier to make the man storm off than thank him.

"Doesn't seem you've a lot to give, does it? No matter what I'm after," he snipes back with an unpleasant smile. "You've faced your fear, go get knackered or something. Looks like you could use it."

[worthallthis]

"There's no alcohol here," he points out after a beat of baffled silence, but the ridiculous suggestion seems to be enough to let him pull his hands away. "But you're right. I don't have much to give. Unless all you want is hit."

He's good at that.

[itsybitsybastard]

Ugh, the man didn't take the bait. Whatever.

"What, it's not worth checking out anyway? You never know where you'll find a tidy pint. Long as we don't run into anyone else's bullshit, we'll be fine." And he's heading back towards the door then; whether the Asset follows him doesn't seem like something he's concerned with.

[worthallthis]

He considers for a long moment, but in the end, he turns to go back the way he came. The idea of trying to be social-- trying to deal with that man more-- sounds so exhausting. He's already feeling wobbly after the Chair, and he'd rather not risk lashing out and hurting someone.

So back to his room he goes, to shut the door and bury himself under blankets unhappily until he either falls asleep or feels less bruised inside.