bumfuckidaho | TEST DRIVE MEME, MARCH 2019

TEST DRIVE MEME

There was an accident. The details are hazy and obscure, but it's still the first thing you remember. Maybe a car wreck — metal and broken glass everywhere, and the sirens and the screaming. Maybe your bike hit a rock and you careened uncontrollably off a mountain path. Maybe something less mundane, even impossible seems to have happened to you. You can't quite make out the details, not who was at fault or why. Try as you might, the chaos is all you can truly remember.

It's also the last thing you remember from before waking up.

When you open your eyes, the accident is gone. Instead, you're in a hospital bed, and the nursing staff greet you with cheerful smiles.

Don't worry, they tell you. You'll make a full recovery here. Where is here? Why, home in Wayward Pines, of course!

option one

(SLICE OF LIFE)
A HOPPING GOOD TIME

Easter may not be for another month, but this year the festivities kicked off early (possibly due to the unseasonably warm weather? temperatures have reached highs that could almost be mistaken for summer, especially by veteran residents). Yards are decorated with inflatable bunnies and chicks, and you'll find your eyeballs assaulted by pastels virtually everywhere you go.

(Linda's house boasts the most elaborate and yet perfectly tasteful of decorations. No one dares declare otherwise.)

Mid-April culminates in an Egg Hunt (for the kids!) that doubles as all-purpose revelry: a townwide gathering on the lush green expanse of the Play Field. Easter ham is provided in quantity; with sides to be provided by, well, you!

(Does "sides" mean alcohol? Probably. Does it mean "anything that isn't ham?" Hopefully!)

Wayward Pines’ moderate handful of children scatter about in the meantime, their attention span significantly shorter than an all-day event; by the time they've wandered off, most if not all of the brightly colored plastic eggs have been plucked from the field and loaded up into baskets, where their plunderers will later find little Crackerjack-style toys. Though... that doesn't seem to be the end of the eggs after all; the observant may note a few still winking from behind a tree or under the bleachers. More interestingly, they may further note these seem to be more the Fabergé variety, at least in size and ostentation.

Go on, investigate! It'll be fun! At least, for a certain type of person who enjoys a certain type of prize. The contents look like they might be from the estate sale of an elderly eccentric: old jewelry, an ornate spoon, etc (....wait, was that a pair of dentures? huh). Occasionally, a slightly less innocuous prize can be discovered - is that hand-sewn doll with real human hair a child’s toy, or something subtly occultic?

Oh well. Given the monsters outside the fence and the hallucinogenic mushrooms in town, that's probably not the weirdest thing you'll see this week.

option two

(HORROR)
LET'S SEE WHAT'S IN SPORE

The stowaway came through the fence unnoticed, clinging imperceptibly to the the clothes and shoes of an unsuspecting team of homecoming expeditioneers - at least, that’s what Ortech’s mycologists will conclude in their thorough investigation in the weeks to come. Here and now, there’s a new, colorful addition to the flora of the town. Seemingly overnight, clusters of mushrooms (vivid blue and shaped a little bit like brains) are sprouting in dark, wet places throughout the woods. They’re quite pretty and also large, reaching roughly a foot in height.

Perhaps you’re curious about this new addition and reached out to touch one by choice. Perhaps you’ve stumbled upon it entirely by accident. Perhaps you have no idea they’re even present until it’s too late.

The mushrooms release spores into the air, almost cloyingly sweet in scent, though it doesn’t seem like anything is wrong right away. No itchiness, no watering eyes, no trouble breathing. Colors may seem a little brighter, but that’s about it.

In roughly thirty minutes, that all changes.

For anywhere between an hour and a day, characters experience many or all of a host of symptoms including nausea, loss of appetite, dry mouth, uncoordinated movements, and intensified sensory experiences. But oh, that's not all. It can also come with visual disturbances (maybe even hallucinations), disordered thinking, paranoia, mild or dramatic mood changes, mixed senses ("seeing" sounds, "hearing" colors), detachment from reality, outright panic, and changes in the perception of time itself.

Don’t worry: It doesn’t seem to be fatal. Here's hoping you have someplace quiet and comfy to ride out the trip, because it’s probably gonna be a bad one.

option three

(ACTION-ADVENTURE)
A SAMPLE EXPEDITION

The crisp morning air finds you lingering at the base of a watchtower just inside the northwestern fence. You’ve signed up for an expedition - maybe your first, or maybe you’ve lost count - and here’s hoping you’re a morning person, because you’ve been told to rendezvous at this patch of fence at no later than 8 AM.

Your teammate in this expedition has yet to arrive. Maybe they’re a friend - someone you know from home, or a friend you’ve made here in Wayward Pines - and the two of you signed up together. Maybe you’re paired up with a stranger, another solo adventurer looking to make tracks outside of the safe zone without waiting for a solo expedition to show up on the roster. Maybe you’re a designated expedition chaperone, assigned to guide someone who doesn’t have clearance of their own. Maybe you don’t have clearance, and your teammate is the chaperone assigned to guide you. Either way, they have five more minutes before they’re late, so they should be showing up pretty soon!

Your destination can be any number of things depending on the make-up of your expedition duo. Two combatants might be fetching a rumored supply cache, or maybe they’re routing and destroying the home nest of a small band of abbies that have wandered a little too close to Wayward Pines for Ortech’s comfort. A team with a scientist may be on an expedition to catalogue or discover the local flora and fauna - or a more generalized academic might be in search of a private library documented to exist nearby. A techie or mechanic may be responsible for repairing and fetching a valuable vehicle (for example, a helicopter), or maybe they’re assigned to repair functionality to a nearby radio tower. Basically: Go ahead and wing it. Make shit up. The apocalypse is your oyster and we’d rather you go nuts with the details than worry about not getting things precisely right.

For the sake of this Test Drive, your expedition route can be whatever you’d like it to be, but this example route will be the same regardless of destination.

Your destination is about five miles from the safe zone within the fence. You depart through a well-concealed and well-guarded gate in the northwestern fence, where the map you’ve been given tells you to curve to the right up a path that leads to the top of the northern cliffs. From here, all of Wayward Pines is visible below you - but you definitely can’t afford to linger long if you plan to make it back by nightfall. The path back down is steeper, with a scattering of loose rocks that make footing tricky.

From there, you head due north through a river valley. Your map strongly suggests you detour through the trees, indicating aberration activity along the clearer riverbanks, but the forest is dense and will absolutely slow you down. The choice is yours either way.

Your destination is just past the end of the valley, but nothing in life is simple, and the river seems to be damming up behind a fresh new rockslide that blocks the mouth of the valley and your destination along with it. This is the final obstacle to clear before your destination - but you’re likely behind schedule, and it’s time to decide if you dare stay the night out here in the wild or try to hoof it back to the fence in the fading light.

(If you’re in the mood for some combat, you’re welcome to toss in an aberration attack if they choose to trek along the riverbanks... Or at the rockslide, a terribly convenient place for an unexpectedly well-designed ambush.)

option four
ON THE NETWORK

Though it's not as high-tech as you might be used to (or hell, maybe you're ren faire and it's centuries beyond anything you've seen), Wayward Pines does in fact have a network to accommodate its citizens.

Go ahead, post a network post! The network has text, audio, and video functionality via the smartphones provided to each character when they arrive.

MOD NOTES

Welcome to our pre-opening test drive here in The Pines! Just one important thing to note:

Upon arrival in Wayward Pines, characters find themselves struggling to remember entirely who they were or where they came from. Memories return progressively over the next two weeks. You're welcome to play with this mechanic in any of these prompts, but it's definitely not mandatory! For more details on this temporary memory loss, see our FAQ.