AUTUMN TEST DRIVE MEME

[rubimods]

⚰︎ ⍢ ⌲ ⍚ 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: spiders, animated skeletons, aphrodisiac effects, exhibitionism/voyeurism, bdsm, kink negotiation, knifeplay, potential dismemberment.

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 damp mosses and ferns, the balmy summer air warm and sticking 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 their hiding places. With your feet under you, 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 knee-deep and chilly. Here and there, dotting the autumnal forest, are strange, massive white trees extending into the sky, surrounded by a circle of dead soil. Their sides are smooth and cool to the touch – like bone, for those who know its texture – and they creak alarmingly, threateningly at the press of warm hands.

As you explore, you may encounter caches of clothing left in painted crates or placed in hollow tree trunks. They contain loose shirts and trousers, perhaps even a moth-eaten coat, along with a note that includes a bare-bones explanation for your arrival and a sketched map toward town. You may also 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 to find civilization.

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. Above the town, drifting like a low hanging cloud over the tops of the buildings, is a pavilion swathed in deep red cloth, and to the north, past the end of the main street, are several large blockades barring further exploration. Somewhat strangely, the whole town seems to be in a state of slight disrepair– workers bustle around, filling in a large hole in the town wall, a woman curses and fiddles with the crank mechanism of a well, and children splash through muddy potholes in the cobblestone, chasing a malnourished looking dog. Here, the bone trees have taken root as well, a few rising through buildings, branches extending through cracked roofs, others rooted in the middle of the street.

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. 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! Once inside, you may notice patchwork repairs have been made, some scorch marks still linger from a fire about a year back, and the place seems somewhat in disrepair

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. The town has recently been through some upheaval, and its people have suffered a great loss, newcomers are told. Everyone is doing their part now to restore it to its former glory.

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!

RECUMITA

The festival fills the streets with dancing locals and all the stuffs of a street market. Despite a stressful summer - the events of which the local seem reluctant to speak of - there's much cheer and reveling over the abundant harvest, and the harvest festival of Recūmita becomes a celebration of unity and community strength dedicated to their fellow townspeople for salvaging this year's crops, the Duchess' magic for protecting them from the horrors beyond the Void, and the Void-Touched who have become such an integral part of their community. Everyone is expected to participate, and everyone is expected to pitch in.

Over the weekend, all regular work is put on hold, except for the necessary festival preparations. The streets come alive with vibrant stalls and stands, offering a wide array of delectable treats and refreshing beverages. From barrels of beer and cups of kvas to mouthwatering roasted meats, delightful squash-based dishes like pumpkin latkes, honey-glazed brussel sprouts on skewers, hot borscht in both pork and vegetarian variations, and tantalizing mushrooms stuffed with leeks, cranberries, and bryndza cheese, there is an abundance of flavors to indulge in. But take care of what you put in your mouth. Rubeans traditionally spice their foods with aphrodisiacs, something that is so culturally normal to them that they don't feel the need to mention it.

The first day of the festival transforms the streets into a bustling night market, where the Rubeans organize an assortment of carnival-style games and communal activities.

- Test your strength and aim in knife throwing contests as willing (or confused, drunken) volunteers line up to serve as live targets, standing against a wall with an apple balanced atop their heads. Hopefully someone explained the rules to you beforehand - pierce the apple, and the target is yours to... pierce... in turn. Miss your shot in three attempts, and they get to have their way with you instead. Either way, it would be in awfully poor form to refuse...

- Challenge your pain tolerance in public displays where individuals whip or cut each other to determine who yields first, with the watching crowd cheering the participants on into a frenzy.

- Impromptu improvisational theater where hapless members of the audience are pulled in to act out bawdy jokes or monstrous tales... and are expected to fully act out their part, whether it means growling and biting the actor while playing 'angry bear' or giving him a good fingering in the role of 'lascivious rake.'

- Hot oil massages are being offered in a large tent, where smooth chunks of volcanic rock have been brought in from the nearby coast and heated to radiate warmth, warding away the autumn chill. Relax in your own curtained room and let yourself enjoy a massage from an enthusiastic volunteer - or take your turn rubbing out tight knots and sore muscles among the Rubeans and Void Touched alike. Of course, these intimate activities often take an enthusiastic sexual bent, so for those trying to hide away in the tent, be careful about ducking into the wrong room.

- For those artistically inclined, a long bench is loaded up with massive sheafs of wheat-stalks, and Rubeans sitting around braiding and weaving them into intricate wreaths and crowns. Join the gossip circle to hear about Yudmila's affair with both of the blacksmith's daughters, Hugo's feud with his next door neighbor, and other small-town tales. When you're done weaving, you're expected to spill a bit of blood upon the wreath and dedicate it to the Duchess Zlatka.

Enthusiastic Rubeans, particularly those involved in integrating the Void-touched, take it upon themselves to enhance the festivities. They recruit local participants and willing Void-touched individuals to partake in impromptu stage performances and competitions, with no need for rehearsals. Come as you are and join the spectacle! Once the performance begins, the passion and excitement behind their efforts become truly evident, as all the performances call for explicitly sexual or violent acts to be performed together.

However, those who refuse to get in the community spirit of shared trust and pleasure may find themselves singled out by the Duchess' stewards for some personal, mandatory education on Rubean culture and traditions. They may be forcibly dosed with potent aphrodisiacs, put on display in the stocks or upon a stage until they plead for Her Grace's mercy... or have satisfied enough of the sexual or sadistic desires of any passer-bys.

Throughout all of this, the general attitude from the local townsfolk may occasionally come across as strangely admiring or overtly hostile. While many of the common people of Rubilykskoye hold mixed personal opinions toward the newcomers to their town, two extremist groups have emerged with opposing viewpoints: some think you are benevolent, beneficent beings with nascent powers sent to lead and guide them and solve their woes. These people, called Blackguards, will do their best to make sure your participation in the festival is one of joy and pleasure. But others, called the Zlatniki, believe that the outsiders coming into their land have corrupted their fellows and seduced their Goddess, and will do their best to twist their native traditions toward cruelty and vindictive sadism when it comes to the Void-touched.

writer's block?

If you're struggling to pick a way to engage the prompts, try your hand at knife throwing or serving as a knife-throwing target, get or offer a massage, watching or joining a live sex performance, or eating some aphro food (deliberately or otherwise)!

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.

In addition to the spiders, you may come across strange skeletal creatures out in the deep forests. An enormous gray bear wearing the horns of an elk, studded with sharp bony spikes protruding from its fur. A wolf-sized badger whose entire skull is visible beneath mossy green growths, sprouting human-like bony limbs from its spine that grab and claw at anything that comes near. Each one is distinct, an unholy hybrid mishmash of plants and animals and bone, but viciously aggressive toward any living creature that crosses its path.

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

Something's wrong here.

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

Rubilykskoye's performance troupe is thrown into a state of panic as Emrik, the male lead of their newest opera, has vanished without a trace! Sure, Emrik has a reputation for being broody, jealous and a little too fond of dramatic entrances and exits, but how is the show supposed to go on without him?

But in the scramble to find their leading man AND get set up for their next performance, a heavy beam nearly crashes down upon a stagehand's head, and the female lead narrowly escapes being snatched up by a shadowy figure that croons a tender melody to her shortly before flinging her into a mirror. Emrik has transformed, and his skeletal, bat-like figure now haunts the rafters of the theater, trying to seduce the prettiest members of the troupe with his haunting song while cutting ropes and raining deadly projectiles down upon them from above.

(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

Comments

[hedoniste]

“Supposedly, the way I understand how it’s been explained,”

it’s careful, the way she distances herself from being bound to this is what I believe, this is the way that it is; here is what she has heard, here is what she knows is said,

“but it’s — more a side effect of being here. All the people who were born here have them, too. And that explains a great deal if you keep it in forefront of your mind, I find.” What becomes of a culture where death is temporary and desperation drives every softer touch? So far: it’s pretty fucked. Her conversational tone is not quite quiet, but certainly pitched for privacy; when Abby turns her hand up to show the anchor-shard, Gwenaëlle regards it with curiosity and —

uses it as an excuse. They’re having a little conversation, them two. She’s getting to know someone new. No one needs to worry about it, and clearly, by the way she holds Abby’s hand between hers for a better look at the anchor-shard, it would be rude to interrupt.

“Yours is Wilk,” she adds. “Ma petit roux, Sweeney, he’s that, too. Mine is Diabel. Wilk is more, mm, animalière.”

Instead of allowing Abby’s hand to drop, she gathers her elbow again, close. “The Duchess takes strength from it when we — appease the curses. ‘Sate our zadza’. She holds back the void with it, she says.”

[armd]

Someone else might have found the sudden touch annoying or inappropriate, and Abby knows that if she had arrived Rubilykskoye as she arrived, four years ago, in Thedas, she would have pulled her hands away immediately; like this, she doesn't. She doesn't even consider doing that. She watches Gwenaëlle peer at the marks on her palms one after the other. It's hard not to think of the last time they touched like this: Gwenaëlle taking her hands, holding onto them, thumb smoothing her skin, while she cried over Clarisse.

"Wilk," she echoes, and allows Gwenaëlle to tuck her hand into the crook of her elbow, the whole thing as natural as breath. "And the void is that thing on the forest-edge." The line where, once crossed, everything warps and goes wrong.

... Funnily, some of the elements seem similar.

"So all I have to do is keep giving my blood?" She doesn't enjoy the thought of it, but if that's all the Duchess needs to keep everybody safe it's a relatively small sacrifice. Donations were vital to first aid efforts back in America too. The WLF expected the cooperation of able bodies wherever and whenever needed; she gave blood then and it was for the same cause. Keeping people safe.

[hedoniste]

“No,” elongates further than that two letter word seems like it should be able to do, ever so frenchly, as Gwenaëlle clearly worries at exactly how to clarify. That, she has to think, would be a much fucking easier way of doing things— she would be prepared to bleed, if bleeding was all it took.

(She has been, naked in the woods, slitting deer throats and her own skin, but she is not under the impression that the rituals she’s crafted for Sweeney would please Zlatka even a little.)

“That, there,” with a nod back towards where they had been making wreaths, “that’s just… festival play. Like lighting candles for la Toussaint. You fuck it out or you fight about it, for the curses. More, um…”

A half-hearted little shrug: “Puissamment. Avec vigeur. Vigorously, ouais? If I cut my hand a little, nothing. If I stab you in the shoulder, maybe. If we beat the shit out of each other, yes.” And then: “For the record, I would not like you to beat the shit out of me, thank you.”

Look at her. She’s fragile. It’d be embarrassing even to do.

[armd]

"Classic," Abby mutters, looking too; already more wreaths have been applied to the pile at the center of the ring of weavers. If she squints she can just make out the presence of dark red on all of them, blurred at a distance. "Guess that would have been too easy." She's only twenty-six but she understands this much about whatever world she's in. So far it's the only consistency across all three of them.

She is at least, blithely glad that Gwenaëlle chooses fighting for her example, here. Turning back, she almost grins. "I'm not going to beat the shit out of you." And not just because it would be fairly one-sided.

And here, she suddenly realises that Gwenaëlle has no idea who I'm is, even though Abby knows a lot about her in comparison, and her stomach swoops — like she's missed a step going down the stairs. So she adds, "... I'm Abby," and only feels a little awkward about it.

[hedoniste]

A strange mirror: the readiness of that easy answer is so unexpectedly warm that for a moment, Gwenaëlle is both charmed and completely baffled by it. It’s the sort of lost that isn’t unpleasant, but it does leave her momentarily at a loss, like there’s —

there’s so clearly something that she’s missing, here. And it doesn’t seem bad, exactly, just…

Missing.

“Abby,” she repeats, and nearly introduces herself, except that Abby had — sort of — recognised her already. ‘Gwenaëlle’, even mispronounced, is a funny name for an American to simply pluck out of the ether. She’s sure she’d remember it if they’d met before (she squeezes Abby’s arm, involuntarily; she’d definitely remember that), and she’s so obviously new, newer than she is herself…

“You can call me Gwen, if you like. I work at the White Hart Lodge, which is the hunting lodge not run by cunts — I’m the steward there.” She hasn’t actually been showing up to work, lately, but that’s neither here nor there. She hasn’t quit, either, and the point stands: “Everything’s barter, and they act like it makes more sense than it does, but mostly people are generous if you’re useful.”

[armd]

Abby snort-laughs instantly at this suggestion and is, thankfully, probably able to play it off as having laughed at the word cunts. "Okay." Yeah, she's — not going to call Gwenaëlle Gwen. The suggestion feels like a test, given in front of the tiny and Thedas-accurate Gwenaëlle standing on her shoulder, hands on her hips. "S'fine with me. We had barter where I came from and that wasn't much of a system either."

And she's decided abruptly that where she came from will be America, only America — to Gwenaëlle, anyway. Not that she thinks that, in the telling of Thedas or Riftwatch, that there could be some weird slip-up and confession, but because she thinks she'd rather keep them as separate things. This Gwenaëlle deserves the chance to be a little different to her without getting rebuked.

Even though it hurts.

Anyway. To the squeeze on her arm and Gwenaëlle guiding her expertly along the cobblestone she says, "Guess I'm being useful to you.

"How long have you been here?"

[hedoniste]

Guess I’m being useful to you makes her smile, which disguises — to some degree, though probably less than she thinks with someone who is and is not a stranger to her — the disquiet that lingers in saying, aloud, “A few months.”

It’s only a month or so from her birthday, which had been a matter of some contention before she’d come here. Months out, at the time, and among the arguments she and her father were having about her trip to the states; surely, she would come home for that? Or, if she preferred not the back and forth, surely she would wait until after?

And then why leave before Christmas— and before she knew it, why leave at all? Now, of course, she supposes she may never see New Orleans, nevermind anywhere else.

“My friend and I — Lestat de Lioncourt — have a cottage on the river. There are—”

There’s really no good way to say it.

“There are a lot of empty houses,” she says, finally. “Ours needs work. I think maybe it was empty longer, I don’t know.”

[armd]

"I know him," Abby says vaguely, in a way that isn't intended for any further question or comment. "What do you mean empty? Empty why?"

Because a lot of people die around here is the obvious answer to that, probably, only that isn't something she considers disturbing. It would be a lot stranger, to Abby, if she found herself in a place where nobody could die at all. Really it's the way that Gwenaëlle answered, as if there's a secret reason for it, something she's overlooked. Something she should have known before she woke up naked in the forests outskirting the town.

[hedoniste]

“Empty because a lot of people died, I think,” is — yeah, where that was always going to go. But: “It’s still strange for the locals. They don’t — the Duchess brings people back. To life. So, they don’t … it’s rare and by choice. For death to mean a house is empty. Except it was a lot of people, so there’s, um, real estate. Available.”

There’s really no way to say that that doesn’t feel deeply strange to acknowledge— both the strangeness of death here and the idea of free real estate.

It had been sort of a relief to find a place that feels as if it’s been empty longer; that it might be, probably, further removed from those recent events she’d not been here for, herself.

“It’s not pleasant,” after a beat. “Resurrection. It doesn’t change — to die is still terrible. Just, temporary.”