rubimemes | TEST DRIVE MEME 005

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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

BOARDING HOUSE
cw: none

In terms of places Tony's been dropped into, this little town is one of the weirder ones. At first he'd assumed he'd ended up, somehow, in central Europe -- he'd struggled to his feet and looked for signs of his suit, an impact crater, anything that might have given him clues about how he'd landed in the middle of nowhere buck naked and freezing his ass off. But there had been nothing, not a scrap of metal. No suit. No F.R.I.D.A.Y in his ear. No arc reactor. Nothing.

It had been a long, cold walk through the forest, aiming for the town walls as soon as he spotted them. Then a mad dash into a yard to steal some poor sap's clothes because he wasn't going to turn up in the middle of town in his birthday suit, not in the age of instant uploads to social media and a degree of dignity to maintain. But in the end, that hadn't been a problem, since it turns out he's apparently also ended up 200 years in the past as well as completely off the proverbial map.

He's given some more clothes -- shirt and trousers and boots, a little too big for him and embroidered with unusual motifs -- and a room, though he doesn't exactly sleep that first night. Instead he stays up in the kitchen by the fire, trying to figure out how things could have possibly gone so wrong. In the morning he joins the crowd in helping himself to banana porridge and strong black tea, hunting down a place to sit with an expression of mild distaste.

"Thought I was done living in a college dorm," he comments, wry and tired, as he finds somewhere on a bench.

OUT IN TOWN
cw: none

There seems to be some kind of social upheaval going on in town, judging by the graffiti being cleaned off a few buildings, the broken and boarded up windows in a couple places, and the resentful looks shared around by a few tense knots of people. There's muttering about a Duchess and meetings and a void; Tony is only partially paying attention as he wanders through the small food market, picking up fruit and setting it down again in a distracted way, drawing a number of frowns and concerned looks from the stallholders that he barely notices.

The sound of hammer and anvil ringing together draws him down towards the row of blacksmiths and glassmakers with their noise and steam spilling out into the street, a sight he takes in with a feeling of mild shock, feeling like he's walked into some kind of dream, before he makes his way over to a place where he can watch the smith work.

His presence, however, doesn't go unnoticed. A young man in an outfit a little like a uniform starts over from the side of the building, scowling.

"Hey," he calls out, "Void-touched! Move on. We don't serve you here."

Tony glances over. Tilts his head a little in a way that suggests, among other things, that the young man might want to think about who he's talking to. "I'm sorry, what did you call me?"

He's not in the streets much now. So much of the town is closed off to them, unwelcome clear in the stares of people who could make things so much worse for so many if he lost his patience at the wrong moment - and his patience is stretched so very thin on the best of days that it's wiser to stay away. But he does have business occasionally. Reasons to find himself making his way through the bustle of a town he's been gradually distancing himself from, remembering in its far removed familiarity a walk around the block, a trip to the deli, warm sun on a bright New York day.

So when a voice cuts through that belongs neither here or there, not anymore, Stephen's world narrows, knife-edge sharp, expecting the onset of some new nightmare or for streets to fold in and swallow him up into a Void-induced life of his own making. But when he turns to look over his shoulder it's just Tony Stark. Alive, dressed local, taking issue with a local man. He's so close that the reality of him is almost undeniable, so close that he can just reach out and—

"Not now." It's a low command laced with bitter urgency (stress, it's stress) as he catches Stark by the elbow, firm, pulls him away to start into a walk down the street. His attention's fixed firmly ahead, jaw tight. Not yet daring to spare him another glance.

It's been a long time since someone tried to start something with Tony Stark outside of a Senate hearing or a gossip column and he's fully prepared to square up and show him what a middle-aged semi-retired superhero-slash-billionaire philanthropist can do, when a strong hand grips his arm and cuts him before he can get started.

"Not now? Not --" He glances around as he stumbles along, catches sight of the wizard who has appeared from, apparently, nowhere, from the impossible gap of five years and change. For a heartbeat of time Tony's back on Titan, betrayed and saved all at once, a warm alien wind stirring the ashes where his friends used to be. But the man beside him is solid and real, wearing the same sort of clothes as everyone else, a little more grey shot through his hair than Tony remembers, a little rougher around the edges, and were they always the same height? He hadn't noticed that before. Why hadn't he noticed that?

Questions crowd up in his mouth. Tony tries to work them loose.

"What the -- what are you doing here? Wait, is this a thing? Are we in a thing?" He stops in his tracks, reaching out to take hold of Stephen's arms, searching his face for answers. "Strange. We did it, we killed Thanos. Is this revenge? Did he do this somehow?"

There's nowhere to go, nothing to do— he wills himself still. Tries to look into Tony's face without the memory of injury burning an overlay, without the muscles in his cheek twitching out misery, without pulling away. God, to be anywhere else. To have a second to think. To have had a moment's warning.

We killed Thanos and Stephen has to choke off a horrid laugh, the downturned stretch of his mouth a savage, incredulous cut across his face. Possibilities spiral. Either this is a man who will live decades longer while the universe screams through the loss of trillions, or he just doesn't know any better yet.

The seconds draw out too long. There's no time.

"No, Thanos didn't—" Thanos isn't finished yet, but he doesn't finish here. "This isn't Thanos. This isn't anything." You shouldn't be here. But who among them should?

It's probably the most baffling answer he could have offered, besides maybe we've been kidnapped by Mickey Mouse or we're all slaves to the lizard king. Hands still wrapped around his biceps, Tony stares at him for a long moment before his face screws up with incredulous confusion.

"What? What do you mean this isn't anything? This is clearly something. Come on, did someone knock you on the head with your crystal ball --"

He becomes aware, belatedly, that they're in the middle of a street and more than a few passers-by have paused to observe their little conversation. Tony lets Stephen go, runs a hand over his face and through his hair instead. Tamps down a little on the desperate panic that keeps wanting to claw into the pit of his gut, and fixes Stephen with a sharp look instead.

"You. Need to explain. Right now."

The loss of warm living hands wrapped firm around his arms, the brief relief of Tony's eyes covered and no longer boring into Stephen's, jolts him free of his narrow focus. Their surrounds pour in. In the beat between one held gaze and the next, Stephen breathes out a heavy gust and the next second they're somewhere else. Not far. An alley a few streets over, not that Tony would know that yet. But it's empty for now, empty of everyone but them, and they arrive in it without a muscle moved, only the vague sensation of landing when they'd never lifted feet off the ground.

He figures Stark's used to touching down. He didn't bother with notice and he doesn't bother to apologise for the lack of it, busy keeping up with the pace of his own thoughts, chasing sense down frantic corridors.

"This is nothing to do with us. It's not Earth, it's not an invasion, it's not some new problem for you and your motley crew to fix. And I need you to tread with caution with these people before you do something we all regret."

Panic reforms as precise, potent anger. Cold, direct. Unearned, but the surest cover he can grab at for the maelstrom spiraling out in his head. Stealing some time to make sense of it, harness it, make it something tame.

Tony Stark | MCU | Skala

out in town

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Boarding House

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cw: internalized ableism

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out in town

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hittin the town

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boarding house.

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