rubimemes | TEST DRIVE MEME 005

⚰︎ ⍢ ⌲ ⍚ 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 any 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: spiders, aphrodisiac and truth serum effects, public nudity, exhibitionism/voyeurism, bdsm, kink negotiation, social pressure, and animal sacrifice.

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

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 reemerging after a long winter. 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, will lead people towards the first signs of civilisation, the cabins of those who choose to live beyond Rubilyskoye's formidable walls.

In the forest, 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.

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.

SETTING: CRIME

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. It's already full of people who appeared in the village just as you did today.

finding roommates

Don't spend too much time asking questions in the common areas. 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. Maybe you'll get lucky and run into someone who has decided to move out? (Roommates will not be mod-assigned; players should coordinate directly with one another to determine their living arrangements; at this point, many characters have used activity rewards to move to accomodation outside the boarding house.)

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 a breakfast of thick grain porridge and caramelised bananas from the new peaks; these NPCs can also answer any questions about the situation. You may notice they're dressed in a way you would almost call normal — at least, in a manner befitting 19th century Eastern Europe. Gossip about new arrivals spreads quickly, and Rubeans who run businesses or train trades 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, being offered work, asking questions over breakfast, or staking your claim on a bedroom!

HEARTS FESTIVAL

New arrivals to Rubilykskoye will find themselves strongly encouraged to participate in the current zadza purging festival, and will be assigned either a collar in leather or iron based on their Niez or Wilk mark, or a wrist-strap or manacle that suits the attachment of a leash for those with a Diabel or Skala mark.

Characters are encouraged to embrace this temporary designation as a sign that they will be good citizens; those who object or ignore their designation may find the NPCs try to helpfully guide them, express displeasure at "Void-Touched" who won't assimilate, or in rare cases exert social pressure, coercion, violence or shunning to ensure compliance.

Throughout town various NPCs have set up tents and booths to host myriad performances, workshops, demonstrations, and food stands for their celebration. The foods were made using some of the new flora that have brought back from the peaks. Characters can get their hands on the following heart-themed foods from the second day of the festival onwards:

HEART-SHAPED COOKIES: eating these intensifies body heat, making characters a great cuddle buddy for the cold weather and likely to strip down, feeling overheated even in a snowdrift
BEEF HEART STEW WITH DUXELLES: eating these fills those who consume it with confidence, making them more solicitous and dominant
LIME-GLAZED GOAT HEART SATAY: eating these intensifies sensation, making characters more sensitive to both pain and pleasure
CINNAMON GLUWEIN: drinking a cup of this hot beverage will make characters especially honest

The nature of the booths set up for performances, workshops, and other goods focuses around the festival's dominance and submission themes. These persist throughout the day regardless of the hour or the audience, so very few people can be found consistently at their places of work during the day this week. In addition:

Skala and diabel NPCs may offer to share their partner(s) with the Void-touched, or ask to share theirs.
PIOTR, a farmer, brings tools over from the farm including bridles and saddles, which can be found at a booth near some hunters who've made anal plugs that end with real animal tails, as well as muzzles.
The cages from the Moot Hall have been moved into the streets, and people are allowed to move freely in and out of them. One of them has been covered in curtains to function as a glory hole booth.
Some niez and wilk NPCs line up near the main event stage and kneel to offer themselves as human furniture.

However, characters may also come across some carnival games operated by NPCs who are eager to help the Duchess find her heart! Some involve slaughtering livestock by removing their hearts—rest assured, these livestock were already on the menu, but their ritual sacrifice will now involve the cutting out of their hearts. Cut out an animal's heart yourself, or just attend the show! Many of the townspeople will get into it, painting their faces with animal blood or drinking from it.

writer's block?

If you're struggling to pick a way to engage the prompts, try reacting to being assigned a dominant or submissive role, scenes where your character is starting to feel the effects of the food, watching (or participating in) a performance, or joining in on a gory animal sacrifice. NPCs that are usually welcoming may strongly pressure even new arrivals to participate in their cultural festivities.

the fathomless dark

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.

FAQ: DEATH RULES

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.

FAQ: MONSTER CURSES & TIMELINES

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

Poor Merta Chesnokov, the usually stalwart older woman who mans the Apothecary, has been beset by unusual requests in addition to her regular demands, not to mention sweating blood. The festival, a rash of skala blood flu, and a little extra town chaos in January, has brought a high demand to her little shop. Now there's also a local fashion springing up for teas and herbal remedies sourced from the recently revealed tropical mountains.

After another failed tisane test drive, and the third customer asking for a new kind of aphrodisiac to add to their festival food, she was seen tossing down her work knife with uncharacteristic frustration, and taking an "early lunch" that she didn't return from that night. Though her children, friends and employees reach out to her, there's no sign of her until you stumble upon her in the woods.

Merta overboils with her suppressed fury as her body distorts and her flesh blackens and crusts. Her attempts to hold off her transformation have failed, and Merta turns into a Smoldering Skink, a large repillian creature whose thick scales hold back her magmatic insides. The noise she makes is an unhearthly hissing scream like a boiling kettle, and she attempts to vent her pent-up stress by wildly attacking everything in sight. Immediately, the surroundings catch aflame! There will be a small fire eating at the dead wood of a long winter if it's not put out, but your first priority might have to be fielding a stampeding lizard with massive teeth and burning hot scales...

(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?

RULES: CONTENT WARNINGS

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[ He knows these blue eyes. Has seen them before in countless women, some of them young like her. She's not too young, though, just enough to be her own person, with room left for him to make of her whatever the fuck he wants. Frank's not the one to go to for a healthy dynamic, as evidenced by the flood of memories from moments ago, and neither is she.

A smile with an amused exhale, he lets his gaze drop. He speaks as though they've known each other, like he's her father's best friend, seeing her in a new light when the sky's gone dark. Not quite paternal, not quite authoritative — just a question that can't ever have a correct answer, because that's the point. Anyone who thinks they've earned Frank's attention usually gets what they deserve. ]

What did you have.

[ How many drinks, Jem. How many delicacies. ]

[She tries to say: nothing, but what comes out is: ] Gluwein - [followed by an annoyed scrunch of her nose. She tries not to let it linger. The buzz in her system is nice, it's warm - she feels like a furnace, really, after the cookies and the satay. Her skin feels alive, like every cell is wide awake.

She sways closer into his space, wonders what his mouth tastes like, what his beard would feel like against her thighs, and feels her face go hot. She thinks, oh, she really should go. ] I can't stay, [is what she says, honestly. She can't stay; she doesn't want to stay. She amends: ] For very long, [softer, like this is a secret between them. Like this is something she is not supposed to share. ]

[ She moves in, Frank shifts just enough to give her room. Like she's the one who has to work for it, when he's the one who invited her in the first place. The hand on her chin moves around to the back of her neck, fingers splayed. Nothing too firm, neither dialed toward affection or control. It could be, though, and Jem has probably met enough men like Frank to know where it'd land. ]

I didn't ask if you could stay.

[She knows where he'd land, and she knows this game, too. She says: ] No, you didn't, [with a hand coming to rest on his chest, head tilting in coy interest. She likes his eyes - the intensity reminds her a little of Danny's. Empty, sharp. ] But it's true.

[and then she takes a step back, begins to step away, shedding coyness for battiness. She withdraws her hand, doesn't try to pry his own from her neck as she moves. ] So I suppose I'll see you around - ?

Up to you, [ He offers, letting her go without lingering on the touch. Maybe if he'd accepted any of the spiked food the hand that was on his chest would have left him with a sense of emptiness, a need to get it back. Being fully sober doesn't necessarily make things boring, but it also doesn't make her more interesting. ] I'll be here.

[She leaves, and she doesn't come back. Not that night, not any of the following nights. She spends the entirety of the festival locked away, then almost dead, and then hiding away. By the time the twelfth rolls around, all Jem wants is a hot bath. She goes to the banya early on, decides she's going to sweat the stress out before she sinks into a basin and scrubs herself raw.

She sheds her clothes, grabs a towel, and then ties her hair atop her head. She enters the sauna with a desire to simply sweat and sweat and until pink, pruned out.

She glances at Frank on the way in, vague recognition at the front of her consciousness before she sits at the edge of a step and sinks back, sighing. She hasn't thought about the festival at all - most of it feels like a hangover dream. She remembers, she thinks, that he smelled smoky. Intense. His hand had felt warm. She glances at him, briefly, takes a proper, sober look at him through the steam, and thinks: right, he was handsome. Her mouth quirks, just a little. ] You survived the festival, then.

[ Sweat from working out and the steam-kissed shine on his skin are indistinguishable, but there's a hint of it in his expression, relaxed, almost meditating. Defined muscles exposed where people have shed most of their clothes, on his arms and down his middle; facial hair recently taken care of at the barber, where he met a nice young blonde. A fellow void-touched who handled Frank as though she'd met many men like him before, respectful, warm and ladylike.

A contrast to the brunette and the smirk he's seen many times before. He doesn't rush his response, allowing Jem — her body — his full attention. Posture straight, shoulders relaxed after he rakes fingers through his own hair, and shuts his eyes, ]

Is that relief or disappointment?

An observation. They were cutting hearts out, and you never know what someone's into.

[She can remember the gun, now. Vague images, a fucked up little imagination for everyone to see. He's arrogant, she thinks. Dangerous. He thinks he's powerful; he thinks he's important.

She sits back, doesn't bother to tighten the knot of her towel. Lets it go loose, lets it start to fall away. She tilts her head a little, eyes him again. Gives him a proper once over, a final consideration. ] You're not going to get a gun here. Not a real one. They might carve you a wooden one. Or blow you a glass one.

Hmm. The festival certainly made it easy to find out.

[ All the truth-spilling drinks, the food that gave people that final push when they might have otherwise held back. Frank didn't care much for the gory displays on stage; not because he's sensitive, but because it was a fucking mess.

And uninteresting, which was the greatest crime. When he opens his eyes, met with the sight of more bare skin, Frank makes an observation of his own, though that one stays silent. Then: ]

Couldn't get that one out of your mind?

I just think it's important to manage your expectations.

[Realistic desires and all that. She tips her head back, lets her eyes slip closed and exhales out a sigh. ]

I didn't catch your name.

Very important, I'd say, in a place that far exceeds anyone's expectations.

[ Unless you already had monsterfucking and ritualistic evisceration on a list before you woke up in the woods, Jem. ]

I didn't give it to you.

[Don’t read too much into it. ]

Seems a little rude of you, then.

[Eyes still closed, but her mouth quips into a smile. ]

Somehow I doubt that you give a shit about being polite.

[ Rude, but playing along. ]

Were you able to take care of things?

[ Purposely vague. ]

In a manner of speaking.

[The corners of her mouth twitch again; the briefest memory of a collar on her neck, of how Billy's felt under her fingertips before she let herself switch off, go docile. A bead of sweat runs down the bridge of her nose and collects at the tip. It drips to her mouth, her tongue catching it lightening fast.

Her eyelashes flutter, sidelong glancing at him when they open half way, heavy-lidded. ] Do I have to guess your name?

[ Having memories planted in his mind isn't completely new, just not with people who don't look like him. It's a show, as far as his ego is concerned, whether she realizes it or not. It's more interesting if she does. ]

You can, [ An exhale, lifting the towel next to him to dab his face, his chest. ] If that sounds like fun to you.

[ So condescending. The smile suggests otherwise. ]

TEST DRIVE MEME 005

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