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TEST DRIVE MEME 002
⚰︎ ⍢ ⌲ ⍚ TEST DRIVE MEME:
Welcome to RUBILYKSKOYE — a dark, horror-smut game where player choices will drive a mod-run storyline about the world and its NPCs. This test drive meme provides a medley of prompts evoking the game's general tone.
THESE THREADS CAN BE GAME CANON if both players are accepted into the game and agree to it. However, if players who'd prefer to start fresh are welcome to reuse these prompts in their own personal logs upon acceptance into the communities. Note: the universal test drive arrival prompt will not be repeated on the coming event log, but players are welcome to reuse the prompt.
CONTENT WARNINGS for this game include: monsters, body horror, dub-con, non-con, religion, blood/violence, and marking/branding, loss of autonomy/self, and mental influences. This log additionally has warnings for: nudity, spiders, character death, and references to children in proximity to sexual situations.
If you have QUESTIONS about the test drive prompts, please ask HERE. Questions about the game itself or the general setting should be directed to the FAQ.
FAQ ✧ SETTING ✧ CALENDAR ✧ RESERVES ✧ APPLICATIONS
THESE THREADS CAN BE GAME CANON if both players are accepted into the game and agree to it. However, if players who'd prefer to start fresh are welcome to reuse these prompts in their own personal logs upon acceptance into the communities. Note: the universal test drive arrival prompt will not be repeated on the coming event log, but players are welcome to reuse the prompt.
CONTENT WARNINGS for this game include: monsters, body horror, dub-con, non-con, religion, blood/violence, and marking/branding, loss of autonomy/self, and mental influences. This log additionally has warnings for: nudity, spiders, character death, and references to children in proximity to sexual situations.
If you have QUESTIONS about the test drive prompts, please ask HERE. Questions about the game itself or the general setting should be directed to the FAQ.
IN THE WOODS SOMEWHERE
The chirping of partridges in the treetops rouses you. Light barely filters through the canopy, just enough to suggest daylight. By the time it reaches the forest floor, the light has taken on a sickly green. You lie amongst the frost-covered mosses and ferns, the frozen soil cold and just a little damp on your bare skin. Wherever you were before this moment, whatever you were doing or wearing, when you awaken in this forest, you find yourself naked and helpless as the day you were born. As you sit up and get your bearings, aside from a brief wave of disoriented nausea, you seem to be no worse for wear than you last remember.
You seem to be alone. The gnarled oaks and moss suggest no sign of civilization or sentient life. Just flickers of movement from curious squirrels or brave lizards emerging from a temporary retreat from the wintry weather. With your feet under you, and you'll find the wood is filled with berry bushes and nut trees, though much of the fruit has been picked clean. The freshwater stream that runs north-south, populated by both poisonous toads and delicious crawdads, is running actively again as the weather warms back up from the recent snowstorm.
As you explore, you may run into others with stories just like yours. Some may have already formed clumsy nudist groups, others may still be processing their confusion, with no memory of how they got here. Now is a good time to overcome any hang-ups you have about modesty; it's going to be a long hike, and the weather isn't quite amenable to your lack of.
Turn your back to the darker, shadowy parts of the forest and eventually the glow of manmade lights and the curve of a dirt road may come into view. At the edge of the wood, you'll find a town surrounded by a fifty-foot wall of beige stone. The only entrance is an iron gate positioned on the southern edge. When you arrive, the gate is already open, welcoming people inside.
This quaint, historic town of five-thousand has cobbled street and signs lit by gas lamp. Wooden shutters protect otherwise open-air windows on the buildings, which are all under three stories with gabled roofs. A number of businesses hug the main street — a clockmaker, a cobbler, a grocer — while residential homes sprawl outwards towards the wall. At the far end of the main street, visible about a mile to the north now that the trees and the enormous wall is out of the way, sits a castle with three towers.
When you enter, the streets are full of people, but despite any efforts on your part to hide or make excuses, they don't seem offended by your nakedness. Even families with children don't gawk or look twice. Those determined to find proper clothing regardless will find that modern clothing stores aren't available — the closest this town has is a tailor's shop and a stand in the central marketplace selling scarves and blankets.
breaking and entering
If you intend to have your character break into someone's house or yard to steal some of their clean laundry, please review the info about game laws on the FAQ and give the mods a heads up HERE.
Fortunately, the people of the town are very generous! Anyone who ask the locals will be directed to the boarding house for both clothes and a place to stay. Accessible through an embellished iron garden gate and obscured by hanging plants, trees, and vines, beyond an overgrown yard in the residential sprawl of the town is a bright-red door, which opens to a spacious cottage of several stories. Parts of the house still bear the dust of disuse, gathered on various furnishings — bedding, sofas, curtains, wooden tables. However, it's already full of people! Anyone who's already appeared in the village just as you did today lives here. Once inside, you may notice patchwork repairs have been made, and some scorch marks still linger from a recent fire, and some furniture is still lying around in splinters.
Tonight, a few of the townspeople will help out with the new arrivals. They stock the kitchen and prepare a communal dinner of parsnips, pheasant, and squash. During dinner, they (and those outsiders who've already begun to settle) sit down at the enormous wooden dining room table and help orient the newcomers and answer their questions.
finding roommates
Don't spend too much time in the dining room going for seconds, though. You'll want to claim a bedroom quickly because each one only has two full-size beds, and there aren't enough spaces for everyone. The last people upstairs will need to double up to squeeze in. Roommates will not be mod-assigned; players should coordinate directly with one another to determine their living arrangements.
Get a good night's rest. By the light of day, locals will help get the new arrivals set up on the coal stove with breakfast. You may notice they're dressed in a way you would almost call normal — at least, in a manner befitting 19th century Eastern Europe. As you find your way around town to get your bearings, folks are eager to help you find a place to apply your skills so you can contribute to your new home.
writer's block?
If you're struggling to pick a way to engage the prompts, try: naked hiking, acquiring clothing or other inventory items, asking questions at dinner/orientation, or staking your claim on a bedroom!
OFFERINGS FOR ULANTI
The festival starts in the middle of the night, when the sun and the children are safely tucked into bed. The streets come alive with dancing locals, their faces painted red and purple and black and yellow. They all wear revealing clothing that, to your sensibilities, may seem sexually suggestive. Some individuals openly expose their breasts and nipples, while some others may incidentally reveal when they turn around to tend to their errands that their dress is backless — entirely! market stands and kind neighbors will gladly provide clothing befitting the occasion to anyone who asks.Notably, the locals' choice of clothes reveal a mark on their bodies. An astute person will notice that there are four varieties — and a very astute (
In addition to dancing and the lighting of any number of candles, you may stumble upon fighting rings inspired by Terry Silver's basement club, where the locals brawl until they're bloody and unable to move. Elsewhere, amongst the performance of a number of erotic dancers, you might come upon a face you recognize — naked and collared and caged, tongue pressed to the bars to taste anyone who'll stop and give them a little attention.
Temporary night market food stands offer various forms of alcoholic beverages and sweet and savory street food in suggestive shapes — sausages, popsicles, flowering cupcakes. many of them represent hedonistic indulgences and displays of wealth that the town usually does not seem to possess. This bounty, they attribute to the Duchess' patronage — and much of it is dosed with herbs and additives that enhance the sexual appetites and aggression in any who consume them.
Another kind of temporary stand has been erected — while new arrivals may at first mistake these for some kind of bathroom, it becomes apparent upon entry that they are partitioned stalls with gloryholes drilled between them. Some stalls are closed with an anonymous stranger waiting inside for someone to push a part of themselves through the hole to be lavished with mystery touches; others are fully unoccupied, should your character wish to lock themselves in and wait on the small wooden stool for a partner to offer themselves.
Anyone native to Rubilykskoye will take the time to answer questions about the festival of Ulanti, which functions as a way to purge their bad energy ("zadza") and sate their inner beasts ("duchozweirz"). They encourage characters to join the festivities — which range from staged sexual performances to sadism and masochism designed to feed the desire for violence. all appetites are welcome here, and there are only two rules: (1) stay away from the unmarked, which refers to the locals' prepubescent children; (2) hold nothing back.
writer's block?
If you're struggling to pick a way to engage the prompts, try entering the fighting rings, watching or joining a live sex performance, or eating some aphro food (deliberately or otherwise)!
the fathomless dark of pajak wood
At the outer edges of the forest, shadows grow long and the air grows thick. Though the sun never grows warm red-gold with sunset, the wood darkens. Birdsong is replaced by the click of mandibles and the skitter of many legs. Anyone who ventures out this way will soon find it difficult to see before them, even in the middle of the day — eventually, even the brightest magical light source or darkvision cannot stretch further than a few inches. In the void, the air feels heavy, as if it were not air at all but some more solid mass. Almost like liquid-smoke, it presses down upon you. Slowing your movements. Characters who push too far into the void may stop being able to move at all, and find themselves given over to insanity if they collapse, unable to draw themselves out. This is just one of many dangers.
Monsters thrive this far out. Huge, blood-red spiders the size of hunting dogs drop from the treetops. In addition to their venomous bite, which contains a fast-acting paralytic, these creatures are clever: they attempt to use their webbing to entangle any trespassers, binding limbs together or to trees. If you're unfortunate to become fully cocooned, you don't have long before this forest will be the last thing you see.
In addition to the spiders, you may come across the sharp-toothed furred yetis that emerged during the snowstorm, still looking for a meal. Each one hunts alone, a fifteen-foot-tall shambling creature that drips black ooze and super-chills the air around it until your skin feels tight and icy. If it gets the drop on you, you're likely to be its dinner. It has emerged from a long summer hibernation to enjoy the colder weather, and it's starving.
Those who seem lucky enough not to run afoul of the monsters here are in for a worse fate. The void can play tricks on your senses. As madness sets in and you lose all sense of direction, you may also lose control of your body — what is that steers your hands to turn against your friends? Why does it sound like your own voice whispering?
In the fog, you may also hear the voices of those familiar to you — people you know from the town, or people whom you know with almost perfect certainty aren't here. these figments may recreate unhappy memories or force trespassers to hallucinate their worst nightmares. Nothing is as it seems in the void, and when you swing at these figments, desperate to silence them, it might not be a figment at all, but a friend in the flesh trying to help you. By the time you see their true face, it could be too late to stop yourself.
writer's block?
If you're struggling to pick a way to engage the prompts, try fighting a monster, hallucinating your worst nightmares, and/or attacking a friend or stranger!
HIDING INSIDE EACH OF US
Uh oh spaghetti-os.
The marks worn by all residents of Rubilykskoye aren't just cool body art, as it turns out. The town is full of rumors, whispered in shadows and over candles of a starving creature hiding in the dark corners of your chest. Feed your inner beast, they say, before it finds a way to feed itself.
Alas, its emergence is inevitable — sooner or later, the horrible things that happen here pile up and make someone repulsed by the idea of human contact. Someone holds themselves back, bites their tongue, or simply does not believe the stories. Today, for one reason or another, that creature is coming out. Someone hasn't been keeping it sated.
Symptoms escalate over weeks, from monstrous irritability to full-blown body horror transformation, where people physically shed their human forms and evolve into the monsters this place made them. Once a person becomes something more (or less) than human there's only one way to go back — sate the beast.
The baker, Nile Yoren, is a likable, middle-aged woman who can fill any request — wheat, rye, even nut breads. She boasts that her sourdough starter belonged to her grandmother. Today, when you enter her shop — to help out or to get a muffin or a bag of rolls — something is off. Her smiling face isn't behind the counter.
Around the back wall, you hear the crackling of the oven. But when you call, she doesn't come out. You have to go back and look for her. What you find is not just the oven crackling, but nile herself — twisted into an incandescent monster of human flame, the flickers of dark orange light like a face howling in agony amidst the yellows and reds and whites. Before you can scramble away, the creature lunges at you. Defend yourself or flee, or her inner beast will be feeding itself on you.
(There are other monsters lurking in every townsperson — feel free to invent your own npc monsters and scenarios!)
The marks worn by all residents of Rubilykskoye aren't just cool body art, as it turns out. The town is full of rumors, whispered in shadows and over candles of a starving creature hiding in the dark corners of your chest. Feed your inner beast, they say, before it finds a way to feed itself.
Alas, its emergence is inevitable — sooner or later, the horrible things that happen here pile up and make someone repulsed by the idea of human contact. Someone holds themselves back, bites their tongue, or simply does not believe the stories. Today, for one reason or another, that creature is coming out. Someone hasn't been keeping it sated.
Symptoms escalate over weeks, from monstrous irritability to full-blown body horror transformation, where people physically shed their human forms and evolve into the monsters this place made them. Once a person becomes something more (or less) than human there's only one way to go back — sate the beast.
someone else transforms
The baker, Nile Yoren, is a likable, middle-aged woman who can fill any request — wheat, rye, even nut breads. She boasts that her sourdough starter belonged to her grandmother. Today, when you enter her shop — to help out or to get a muffin or a bag of rolls — something is off. Her smiling face isn't behind the counter. Around the back wall, you hear the crackling of the oven. But when you call, she doesn't come out. You have to go back and look for her. What you find is not just the oven crackling, but nile herself — twisted into an incandescent monster of human flame, the flickers of dark orange light like a face howling in agony amidst the yellows and reds and whites. Before you can scramble away, the creature lunges at you. Defend yourself or flee, or her inner beast will be feeding itself on you.
(There are other monsters lurking in every townsperson — feel free to invent your own npc monsters and scenarios!)
you waited too long
At first, as you hide yourself from your darker impulses, a subtle itch develops under your skin. An irritability that makes you snap at the person who bumps into you on the stairs because all those fleeting emotions that you've been repressing bubble to the surface. Every dark thought you've had about being here, all the fears of never getting home, of being surrounded by ticking time bombs, the anxiety of wondering who you might hurt or what relationships you might betray by doing what you have to do. The anger. Oh, the anger.
Maybe you shut yourself in your room or run into the woods to hide away, but there's only so much you can do to deny the itch that grows into hunger like a spark catching and growing to wildfire. Someone comes to check on you. That knock on the door or crunch of leaves in the wood that fills you with dread at what you might do and hope that you will be sated.
As claws and fangs and scales and spines and fur grow and your body transforms with a sickening crunch of bones and peeling of skin, so do your appetites. If you won't sate them, you'll lose yourself to your beastly impulses sooner or later, mauling friends and taking your fill. Is it better or worse if only your claws get inside of them?
Maybe you shut yourself in your room or run into the woods to hide away, but there's only so much you can do to deny the itch that grows into hunger like a spark catching and growing to wildfire. Someone comes to check on you. That knock on the door or crunch of leaves in the wood that fills you with dread at what you might do and hope that you will be sated.
As claws and fangs and scales and spines and fur grow and your body transforms with a sickening crunch of bones and peeling of skin, so do your appetites. If you won't sate them, you'll lose yourself to your beastly impulses sooner or later, mauling friends and taking your fill. Is it better or worse if only your claws get inside of them?
no subject
"It's not nonsense." She says that plainly, drawing herself up straighter. For once, she does know better. And while she won't explicitly lord it over Zoya, she's also not going to meekly avoid acknowledgment of it in her body language. "You have a mark, don't you? Or maybe you haven't seen it yet."
no subject
All she sports as a mark of anything are her dragon scales over her left wrist where her tiger bone used to be. Granted, Zoya hasn't particularly checked herself over. Even when she'd been naked in the woods, she'd spotted nothing out of the ordinary on her person. No mark on her face, chest, arms or legs.
There's no mark on Alina that she can see. Zoya wonders if she'd even tell her the location of hers if she was to ask.
"So all of that's true then." A part of her had been hoping it was all some story to spook children into behaving. What's scarier than not knowing who's truly a monster? But any uncertainty she feels about it, she shoves behind steel. She'll ransack Juris' memories later. "We're finally the monsters in the stories."
no subject
The monsters may be unhinged and powerful, but the thing that the otkazat'sya feared was not grisha who were out of control of themselves, but grisha who were not in their control. And though the monsters were powerful, it was a grisha who had made the Fold, who had changed the landscape of Ravka seemingly forever.
From their perspective, this would look no different.
"But ... Yes. You'll transform, too, if you're not careful."
no subject
"Thanks for the heads up." And she is grateful for it, even if she's not the type to smile brightly or clap her on the shoulder for it.
She takes a moment to think of how she wants to ask what she wants to ask. Is she okay? Is Genya truly okay? But the presence of shadows in a small space prompts Zoya to be cautious. Even if the Darkling doesn't have the capability of moulding his shadows to become additional ears, she's come to distrust the dark corners thanks to him and his abominations. Nikolai's demon can be thanked for that.
"Has Genya started smothering you with her mothering yet?"
no subject
She can't help bristling. The Little Palace had been hard enough for Genya from what little Alina had understood of it. It can't have gotten easier with her faced scarred.
no subject
She doesn't apologise, either. They speak of the same thing. Only Zoya doubts Genya would see it as Zoya being uncaring.
"How long have you two been here together?"
no subject
You two.
Does that mean she thinks it's only the two of them? Or is it that she remains as jealous as ever about the attention that Aleksander had given Alina, and reticent to frame them as together in any context?
Alina flinches away from the thought, troubled by how jealous it sounds even in her own mind. How much her own paranoia feels like continuing to try to vie for the attention of that monster. And yet, it's exactly what she would have done. If she hadn't known better ...
And if she is pretending as if she didn't know better. She works her jaw a moment, glances aside, then looks back at Zoya with a huff.
"Two months." A beat. "General Kirigan, too."
no subject
If Alina has brown hair, Genya's either Tailored the white away in a bid to keep her safe or… The other option seems implausible. But how could it be when she spent weeks inside a stone and sand realm with three dead Saints? No one had been able to find her or Nikolai after they had entered the wasteland of what was once the Fold. How is this any different?
Still the General. Still hiding behind a title. 'The Darkling' would tell her a lot more about where either of them are in… whatever it is that Zoya's trying to piece together.
She really wished Nikolai was here to offer some quip so she could have a few extra moments to think.
"I'm not going to ask to stay with you two," she says. The last thing she wants is for Alina to believe that Zoya has expectations. Things feel strangely frazzled like she's channelled her lightning all wrong.
She's definitely not going to ask if she can stay with Morozova. The thought repulses her. She doesn't ask about him because he is nothing. It's her own petty way of giving him what he fears most—a forgotten legacy.
But she has to ask:
"Where is he staying?"
no subject
And that terrifies her.
"In the boarding house," she snaps out quickly, temper flaring. "With the rest of us, in a bed too small to have space for you."
But that's not entirely true, is it? As much as Alina wants to believe that only a protective instinct lies at the core of her comment, the fact that she thinks instantly of how wrong her statement is—Wanda is, after all, sharing that room with him, it's not as if he were too good for tucking in close—proves it's not so simple.
She deflects. Or, more accurately, projects it right onto Zoya instead. "You're unbelievable."
no subject
All that's left for her is confusion, and that's easier to lean into than any other emotion.
"I'm sorry?"
no subject
She wants to crawl out of her skin and let the earth swallow her.
cw: talk of smothering
The Alina she knows would say the same words, but the delivery would differ. Softer, more understanding. Perhaps even amused. She'd take to Zoya as though she was trying to calm a storm.
The idea of staying with Morozova makes her skin feel heavy like it's covered in sap again. Even if she were made to, she wouldn't last a day. She'd smother him in his sleep—a mercy he doesn't deserve—for the pain he has caused the young woman in front of her, Genya, Nikolai, Marie and Harshaw and the countless Grisha he has killed. For that bloody cat. For Liliyana. Even for herself.
Instead, she tugs her shoulders back to anchor herself in a very violent storm that threatens to overtake her. She can't respond as she wants to—with a laugh—because the response will only force the chasm that exists for Alina even wider between them.
Instead, she settles on:
"Who are you to tell me what I can and cannot do?"
It's biting enough, although it lacks the sharp crackle of lightning that often accompanies Zoya's anger.
no subject
And, a smaller voice says, a mapmaker. An orphan. A stick from Keramzin who has delusions of grandeur, and no chance.
It's this smaller voice that stops her from snapping any of this aloud. That keeps her growing self-aggrandizement inside, where it belongs. Instead, she sneers, "Do you really plan to embarrass yourself by throwing yourself at him?"
no subject
Instead, she deepens her frown. She'll gladly take yet another hit to her reputation, although she much prefers the scandalous rumours of being Nikolai's lover. That at least served a greater purpose, protecting another element of the throne. She supposes this protects Alina from something Zoya's still trying to uncover for herself.
"Why do you care if I embarrass myself? The embarrassment is mine, not yours."
no subject
But even as she thinks these unkind things, she can't bring herself to completely forsake her to it.
"Consider it friendly advice. Don't worry. It won't happen again."
no subject
Alina, what?
Zoya's enjoyed the friendship that they've been able to nurture over the last three years. She will always see Alina as one of them, even if the sun never bursts from her palms again. Even in the instance that it does. Zoya doesn't wish to hide away from her disappointment, but even she knows that sometimes situations are bigger than her.
Even if she was to grip her by the shoulders, Alina's in no place to believe her. Zoya could tell her the sky is made of feathers—and it to be true, with clouds replaced by an assortment of them—and Alina will still deny it because she's the one who said it.
So, instead, she sighs and chooses to ignore the bite at the end of her words. Sometimes a dragon needs to bide its time. How long did Juris wait for her?
"Thank you," she says sincerely, knowing that will no doubt piss Alina off despite it not being her intention. This is why she leaves the diplomacy to Nikolai. He bursts sunshine when she's always been a storm cloud. "And since we're going to be in the same small space… I'd hope your dislike of me doesn't stop you from coming to me if you need anything. This isn't a time to be blinded by pride."
They're on the same team—always have been, even when one of them has been a page or two behind—but Zoya's convinced they're not in the same book anymore. At least for now.
no subject
No matter how sincere she sounds in thanking Alina for what doesn't deserve thanks at all.
"Are you speaking from experience?"
no subject
She opts for the truth. Denying as much is an insult to both of them, but especially herself. Her pride had caused this problem, and Zoya had sucked it up and followed Alina even when it trapped her inside of a dusty religious cult and saw her exhausted in horrible terrain. She followed her to the ends of the earth to discover that what they needed to destroy the Fold had been leading them all along.
She'd do it again because if her aunt taught her anything, it was that pride was the reason why someone had so little.
Zoya doesn't look away from her, even if her expression isn't as soft or open as she'd like it to be. "Whether you believe that is up to you."
(cw: series-typical slutshaming)
And yet when she searches for something to say to make up the difference, Alina just says, "You'll be fine, here. All it takes to keep the monster at bay is to find someone to tumble."
It would have been better, she thinks, to point out that everyone is in the same boat, and Zoya is plenty attractive, and she has no hangups holding her back from that kind of thing. But no. Alina doesn't mean it that way. She twists the knife for no other reason than it is in her hand and Zoya's venom when Alina had first arrived at the Little Palace has not left her.
no subject
She hasn't thought about that ridiculous crush in a long time and doesn't overthink it now. Oretsev was simply a passing fancy, a tall, handsome boy who had briefly made her feel good. But Zoya had been aware then as she is now that Malyen Oretsev was never meant for her.
Instead, she regards Alina with a soft arch of her brow. "If you want to say something to me, you can say it rather than speak around it."
no subject
She's not quite generous enough to set all that aside.
"I'm going back to the festival." She looks over her shoulder. "Good luck settling in. I hope it goes as well for you as it did for me, in Os Alta."