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pluviooc2024-07-19 05:35 pm
pluviosamods) wrote in pluviooc2024-07-19 05:35 pm
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TEST DRIVE 03
TEST DRIVE
Hello, and welcome to the third Pluviosa Test Drive!
This Test Drive corresponds to Days 20-27 in the ship calendar, and will run until around the game's next major event. You can get a better idea what's going on in the most recent Game Update which covers Days 19-27, including the end of our previous event. Because some of the prompts in this test drive have differences based on whether they occur on Days 20-23 or 24 and on, you may wish to choose a firm date for your character's arrival and note it in your top level for other players.
Test Drive threads involving characters who are accepted are considered canon to the events of the game unless otherwise agreed by players/mods. Pluviosa does not do welcome mingle logs nor does it have any kind of in-character welcome information, making your test drive threads your character's arrival to the game setting. That said, mod-run interactions such as formal exploration and/or interactions with the Ship as an NPC are not available on the Test Drive.
It is advised that potential players familiarize themselves with the Premise page, the Rules/Session Zero page, and at least the first few paragraphs of the Setting page. As Pluviosa is a horror game, we especially encourage players to be aware of the content warnings that will be major themes of the game. If you have any further questions, you can ask them on the QUESTIONS header in the comments!
If you're test driving a character, you're welcome to join the game Discord and hang out and meet your fellow players!
Something jerks hard around your stomach, like a movement adruptly stopped. Something trickles through your hair, down the back of your neck - it's warm, and you get the feeling you know what it is.
But when you lift your neck to check, all there is is water. Somehow, counterintuitively, you feel a flash of disappointment. You feel someone's eyes on you...
As characters gain awareness of their surroundings, they will feel as though their head and neck are damp, as though they had just been in a light rain without any protection (even if they are, in fact, wearing a hat or hood). Unless they're particularly unlucky in the location where they wake up, though, the rain is in fact on the outside of the ship, and they are at most subject to humid air. Although the rainstorm in fact ends on Day 23, characters who arrive after that time will still be convinced that there is rain outside, complete with a hallucination of the sound of raindrops in the background, until they go to a window or an open-to-outside place (balconies, topside decks, etc) to check for themselves.
Rain aside, the feeling of being watched is stronger in the upper decks where characters arrive, which may send them seeking to go down instead of up. This might pose a problem in terms of actually making their way to the cleared, prepared-for-use parts of the ship... Especially with all that fresh rainwater breathing new life into the plants in the lower decks.
Note that prior to the rain ending, looking out the windows, glass balcony doors, or up into the domed roof of the passenger lounge will make it appear that the ship is underwater until late afternoon on Day 22. More information on this can be found on the So Below event posts. Additionally, the rainfall hitting the deck of the ship has a tendency to flood into the lower decks of the ship, particularly via the stairways and in rivulets down the hallways. It falls freely on the top deck and down into the open space in the center of the ship, though with less intensity than it does outside the ship's protective barrier.
And while going down decreased the feeling of eyes on you, it brings about other complications. Ghosts have been present on the ship for around a week now, and their time being visible is nearing its end as the ship comes above the old sea-level line on Day 22... At least as far as the longer-term passengers are concerned.
New arrivals, however, will continue to be able to see ghosts haunting the decks for the first 24 hours of their stay onboard the ship, regardless of the exact date of their arrival. These ghosts largely take the form of vacationers and researchers (as described here under the Haunting Feeling and Growing Shadows sections, respectively), and do not respond to attempts to interact with them any more than they did during the event. Less, even - once the ship is above the sea level line (evening of Day 23 and on), the ghosts perform their loops without registering any attempts to communicate with them. No matter what a character does, their attempts to interact with the spirits are for nothing - even standing in their path just gets you walked through as though you weren't there.
However, there are also a few new ghosts who only appear to the new arrivals, and are invisible to characters who were on board the ship previously:
-> A young man in extremely worn clothing, nursing a bruised jaw wanders the upper parts of Fern deck. When he sees the newly arrived character, he says "Oh, not more of this shit," aloud before turning and booking it off in another direction. Characters who chase him will find that he is visible and audible for a decent amount of time, but that his knowledge of the twists and turns of the Ship exceeds theirs and that he is unhindered by any of the overgrown vines as though they weren't there. As such, characters will inevitably fall behind and lose track of him.
-> At night, a dark-skinned woman can be seen in the lounge, looking back and forth between a glowing tablet she's holding and the sky above. If she notices a newly arrived character in the dimmed-to-nearly-nothing, she tells them in a firm voice, "You're not night shift. Go back to bed, you need your rest," before going back to whatever she's doing with her tablet screen. She fades slowly out of sight afterwards.
-> An androgynous person with a nearly-shaved head and a small flower dangling from a green marking over their ear comes out of the communal showers near the cafeteria. They glance around and ask, "Hey, did you see where that new guy with the eyepatch went?" but head off down the hallway without waiting for an answer, scrubbing at their cropped hair with a towel wrapped around their head.
-> A young woman in an open bathrobe with bandages around her middle looks out the back of the ship from the cafeteria deck, sitting with her feet dangling over the edge over where the ship's protective bubble attaches. Her light brown hair is blowing into her face constantly by the cafeteria's slight wind tunnel effect, but she doesn't seem to care, supporting herself by leaning her arms onto the lower rung of the railing. If approached, she gives a tired smile and says, "It's alright. I'm just waiting for that nice angel to come back," and resumes her watch out the back, not responding to any further questions or interactions.
These ghosts do not seem to register the presence of those who have been on board the ship more than 24 hours, even if pointed out directly. New arrivals who attempt to interact with the ghosts will be able to see and hear them, but not touch them. Attempting to touch a ghost in a way that 'proves' that they're not physically there (eg walking through them) causes the ghost to disappear, and they will not reappear.
Of course, the upper floors of the ship are not exactly free of eyes. A rather sizeable fleet of motorized drones zips around the hallways, ranging in size from knee-height to large enough to contain a moderately sized couch. The former are often equipped with scrubbing devices along their undersides, and work hard at portions of the floor in the hallways; the largest are functionally dumpsters on wheels, and other drones with long unfolding arms prune and rip plants from the walls, floors, and even the ceilings to fill them. These top two levels of Fern - not the open deck but the two floors immediately below - are clearly undergoing renovations, and renovations start with getting the plants out of the way. A few are even doing electrical or plumbing work, once things have dried up enough after the rain that it's safe to do so.
Since these are also the primary floors on which new arrivals wake up, it's very difficult to not come across some form of cleaning bot soon after arrival. However, there seems to be something a little... off about the ship's cleaning crew if you're a new arrival. They don't seem to register new arrivals as passengers yet; as a result, new characters may find themselves sprayed down with hot soapy water or subject to a set of surprisingly strong mechanical arms trying to shove them into a dumpster. Even if you aren't actively being aggressed by cleaning bots, they don't provide the kinds of loud "warning: backing up" noises they do for other passengers, nor do they slow down to avoid running you down in the still-mostly-dark hallways. The drones either have very good night vision or have some other way of finding their way around, since the only thing that brings them to a halt is particularly bad patches of floor.
Ship drones will continue to treat new arrivals as part of the walls (at best) or particularly stubborn plants in need of pruning (at worst) until either a light is shined on them - but beware, because this will cause any plants in the area to experience a surge of growth - or another, more known passenger intervenes. Admittedly, at that point the drones will be positively apologetic, as much as robots not equipped with voices can be. Soaked characters will be given a complimentary warm-air drying (if they stick around long enough) and anyone thrown in the dumpsters will be appropriately rescued - but it's still not all that great of a first impression, is it?
Or perhaps it's not the ghost of a person or the drones of the ship that you first encounter. It could be something significantly less civilized.
Strange animals have begun to appear in the ship's jungle - but you'd be forgiven for not noticing them at first. At rest, anyone would dismiss them as strangely shaped bundles of plant matter, because that's exactly what they are. Tails formed out of plaited vines; pelts and feathers formed of interlocked leaves; legs grown out of twisted wood with roots formed into toes. And, occasionally, sharp claws made of bent nails, fangs made of shattered glass, and antlers of rusted pipe, and, always, eyes like black pits that could swallow you up if you stared into them too long.
The 'animals' occupying Fern deck, if they can be called such, are formed out of plant matter with scattered bits of debris from the ship itself. They are, by and large, animals appropriate to the environment of the temperate rainforest that consumes the deck - no elephants or giraffes here. Deer, foxes, the occasional big cat or even a bear, and any number of smaller creatures... Smaller being a relative term, because the animals aren't always to their proper scale relative to humans. A deer might be only knee-high (antlers included), while a squirrel may come up to your waist. On most decks, they're limited to the height of the ceilings above them (9 feet or so), but if you manage to encounter them either on the open upper deck (with its much less height-limited tree canopy) or at the bottom (where the gap in the ship's decks, down the center, leaves lots of space for clearance above the mud and standing water), they could easily be taller.
Most of them are quite skittish, and will bound off into the jungle from which they came and disappear as though they were never there. A handful, though, respond as though threatened - or hungry. And while it might be funny to be stalked through the underbush by a cougar the size of a house cat, it will be less funny if it manages to sink its very real rusty claws into you, and getting trampled by a wooden deer whose antlers scrape the rotten ceiling tiles won't be fun at all.
It is possible to fight the animals, though most will make an attempt to flee if they get the chance, especially if you bring light or fire to bear against them. A 'killed' animal collapses into a pile of plant matter (leaves, branches, vines, etc) with the occasional bit of metal or glass; these heaps don't maintain their form as the 'body' of an animal and don't seem to have been connected together in any way. If lit on fire or otherwise affected by supernatural abilities, the animals react to this as an animal would be expected to, but their bodies are affected in ways consistent with the plant matter they're made of. In addition, no attempts at animal communication will work on them. On the other side of the coin, if you attempt to flee from them, most won't bother to give chase.
This Test Drive corresponds to Days 20-27 in the ship calendar, and will run until around the game's next major event. You can get a better idea what's going on in the most recent Game Update which covers Days 19-27, including the end of our previous event. Because some of the prompts in this test drive have differences based on whether they occur on Days 20-23 or 24 and on, you may wish to choose a firm date for your character's arrival and note it in your top level for other players.
Test Drive threads involving characters who are accepted are considered canon to the events of the game unless otherwise agreed by players/mods. Pluviosa does not do welcome mingle logs nor does it have any kind of in-character welcome information, making your test drive threads your character's arrival to the game setting. That said, mod-run interactions such as formal exploration and/or interactions with the Ship as an NPC are not available on the Test Drive.
It is advised that potential players familiarize themselves with the Premise page, the Rules/Session Zero page, and at least the first few paragraphs of the Setting page. As Pluviosa is a horror game, we especially encourage players to be aware of the content warnings that will be major themes of the game. If you have any further questions, you can ask them on the QUESTIONS header in the comments!
If you're test driving a character, you're welcome to join the game Discord and hang out and meet your fellow players!
ARRIVAL - GAZE FROM THE CLOUDS
Something jerks hard around your stomach, like a movement adruptly stopped. Something trickles through your hair, down the back of your neck - it's warm, and you get the feeling you know what it is.
But when you lift your neck to check, all there is is water. Somehow, counterintuitively, you feel a flash of disappointment. You feel someone's eyes on you...
As characters gain awareness of their surroundings, they will feel as though their head and neck are damp, as though they had just been in a light rain without any protection (even if they are, in fact, wearing a hat or hood). Unless they're particularly unlucky in the location where they wake up, though, the rain is in fact on the outside of the ship, and they are at most subject to humid air. Although the rainstorm in fact ends on Day 23, characters who arrive after that time will still be convinced that there is rain outside, complete with a hallucination of the sound of raindrops in the background, until they go to a window or an open-to-outside place (balconies, topside decks, etc) to check for themselves.
Rain aside, the feeling of being watched is stronger in the upper decks where characters arrive, which may send them seeking to go down instead of up. This might pose a problem in terms of actually making their way to the cleared, prepared-for-use parts of the ship... Especially with all that fresh rainwater breathing new life into the plants in the lower decks.
Note that prior to the rain ending, looking out the windows, glass balcony doors, or up into the domed roof of the passenger lounge will make it appear that the ship is underwater until late afternoon on Day 22. More information on this can be found on the So Below event posts. Additionally, the rainfall hitting the deck of the ship has a tendency to flood into the lower decks of the ship, particularly via the stairways and in rivulets down the hallways. It falls freely on the top deck and down into the open space in the center of the ship, though with less intensity than it does outside the ship's protective barrier.
SOMEBODY'S FOOTSTEPS
And while going down decreased the feeling of eyes on you, it brings about other complications. Ghosts have been present on the ship for around a week now, and their time being visible is nearing its end as the ship comes above the old sea-level line on Day 22... At least as far as the longer-term passengers are concerned.
New arrivals, however, will continue to be able to see ghosts haunting the decks for the first 24 hours of their stay onboard the ship, regardless of the exact date of their arrival. These ghosts largely take the form of vacationers and researchers (as described here under the Haunting Feeling and Growing Shadows sections, respectively), and do not respond to attempts to interact with them any more than they did during the event. Less, even - once the ship is above the sea level line (evening of Day 23 and on), the ghosts perform their loops without registering any attempts to communicate with them. No matter what a character does, their attempts to interact with the spirits are for nothing - even standing in their path just gets you walked through as though you weren't there.
However, there are also a few new ghosts who only appear to the new arrivals, and are invisible to characters who were on board the ship previously:
-> A young man in extremely worn clothing, nursing a bruised jaw wanders the upper parts of Fern deck. When he sees the newly arrived character, he says "Oh, not more of this shit," aloud before turning and booking it off in another direction. Characters who chase him will find that he is visible and audible for a decent amount of time, but that his knowledge of the twists and turns of the Ship exceeds theirs and that he is unhindered by any of the overgrown vines as though they weren't there. As such, characters will inevitably fall behind and lose track of him.
-> At night, a dark-skinned woman can be seen in the lounge, looking back and forth between a glowing tablet she's holding and the sky above. If she notices a newly arrived character in the dimmed-to-nearly-nothing, she tells them in a firm voice, "You're not night shift. Go back to bed, you need your rest," before going back to whatever she's doing with her tablet screen. She fades slowly out of sight afterwards.
-> An androgynous person with a nearly-shaved head and a small flower dangling from a green marking over their ear comes out of the communal showers near the cafeteria. They glance around and ask, "Hey, did you see where that new guy with the eyepatch went?" but head off down the hallway without waiting for an answer, scrubbing at their cropped hair with a towel wrapped around their head.
-> A young woman in an open bathrobe with bandages around her middle looks out the back of the ship from the cafeteria deck, sitting with her feet dangling over the edge over where the ship's protective bubble attaches. Her light brown hair is blowing into her face constantly by the cafeteria's slight wind tunnel effect, but she doesn't seem to care, supporting herself by leaning her arms onto the lower rung of the railing. If approached, she gives a tired smile and says, "It's alright. I'm just waiting for that nice angel to come back," and resumes her watch out the back, not responding to any further questions or interactions.
These ghosts do not seem to register the presence of those who have been on board the ship more than 24 hours, even if pointed out directly. New arrivals who attempt to interact with the ghosts will be able to see and hear them, but not touch them. Attempting to touch a ghost in a way that 'proves' that they're not physically there (eg walking through them) causes the ghost to disappear, and they will not reappear.
JUST ANOTHER WORKDAY
Of course, the upper floors of the ship are not exactly free of eyes. A rather sizeable fleet of motorized drones zips around the hallways, ranging in size from knee-height to large enough to contain a moderately sized couch. The former are often equipped with scrubbing devices along their undersides, and work hard at portions of the floor in the hallways; the largest are functionally dumpsters on wheels, and other drones with long unfolding arms prune and rip plants from the walls, floors, and even the ceilings to fill them. These top two levels of Fern - not the open deck but the two floors immediately below - are clearly undergoing renovations, and renovations start with getting the plants out of the way. A few are even doing electrical or plumbing work, once things have dried up enough after the rain that it's safe to do so.
Since these are also the primary floors on which new arrivals wake up, it's very difficult to not come across some form of cleaning bot soon after arrival. However, there seems to be something a little... off about the ship's cleaning crew if you're a new arrival. They don't seem to register new arrivals as passengers yet; as a result, new characters may find themselves sprayed down with hot soapy water or subject to a set of surprisingly strong mechanical arms trying to shove them into a dumpster. Even if you aren't actively being aggressed by cleaning bots, they don't provide the kinds of loud "warning: backing up" noises they do for other passengers, nor do they slow down to avoid running you down in the still-mostly-dark hallways. The drones either have very good night vision or have some other way of finding their way around, since the only thing that brings them to a halt is particularly bad patches of floor.
Ship drones will continue to treat new arrivals as part of the walls (at best) or particularly stubborn plants in need of pruning (at worst) until either a light is shined on them - but beware, because this will cause any plants in the area to experience a surge of growth - or another, more known passenger intervenes. Admittedly, at that point the drones will be positively apologetic, as much as robots not equipped with voices can be. Soaked characters will be given a complimentary warm-air drying (if they stick around long enough) and anyone thrown in the dumpsters will be appropriately rescued - but it's still not all that great of a first impression, is it?
IDEAL CAMOUFLAGE
Or perhaps it's not the ghost of a person or the drones of the ship that you first encounter. It could be something significantly less civilized.
Strange animals have begun to appear in the ship's jungle - but you'd be forgiven for not noticing them at first. At rest, anyone would dismiss them as strangely shaped bundles of plant matter, because that's exactly what they are. Tails formed out of plaited vines; pelts and feathers formed of interlocked leaves; legs grown out of twisted wood with roots formed into toes. And, occasionally, sharp claws made of bent nails, fangs made of shattered glass, and antlers of rusted pipe, and, always, eyes like black pits that could swallow you up if you stared into them too long.
The 'animals' occupying Fern deck, if they can be called such, are formed out of plant matter with scattered bits of debris from the ship itself. They are, by and large, animals appropriate to the environment of the temperate rainforest that consumes the deck - no elephants or giraffes here. Deer, foxes, the occasional big cat or even a bear, and any number of smaller creatures... Smaller being a relative term, because the animals aren't always to their proper scale relative to humans. A deer might be only knee-high (antlers included), while a squirrel may come up to your waist. On most decks, they're limited to the height of the ceilings above them (9 feet or so), but if you manage to encounter them either on the open upper deck (with its much less height-limited tree canopy) or at the bottom (where the gap in the ship's decks, down the center, leaves lots of space for clearance above the mud and standing water), they could easily be taller.
Most of them are quite skittish, and will bound off into the jungle from which they came and disappear as though they were never there. A handful, though, respond as though threatened - or hungry. And while it might be funny to be stalked through the underbush by a cougar the size of a house cat, it will be less funny if it manages to sink its very real rusty claws into you, and getting trampled by a wooden deer whose antlers scrape the rotten ceiling tiles won't be fun at all.
It is possible to fight the animals, though most will make an attempt to flee if they get the chance, especially if you bring light or fire to bear against them. A 'killed' animal collapses into a pile of plant matter (leaves, branches, vines, etc) with the occasional bit of metal or glass; these heaps don't maintain their form as the 'body' of an animal and don't seem to have been connected together in any way. If lit on fire or otherwise affected by supernatural abilities, the animals react to this as an animal would be expected to, but their bodies are affected in ways consistent with the plant matter they're made of. In addition, no attempts at animal communication will work on them. On the other side of the coin, if you attempt to flee from them, most won't bother to give chase.
Aurelia you can't just ask people if they're real
As she muses on that, the two of them round a corner and walk through another corridor, should Chirity look around he’ll see layers of dust and drying black ooze coating the walls and floor. With a small amount of ash floating through the air. As they pass an intersection, the sight of plants filling it contrasts strongly with the empty corridor they stalk through. As though whoever walked through it last had killed everything in its way while ignoring everything that wasn’t.
Which is of course, exactly what she’d done.
“I suppose it would be most efficient to ask if your master had ever told you the nature of your soul, should you possess one. Though you are possessed of a strong aura, I am unsure if you are a living being or a sentient construct… the line between the two is my primary area of study. Anything your master told you about your construction would be of great interest to me”
its ok chirithy doesn't know if they're real, either
"Um, sure!" Chirithy plays along. This does not entirely describe Mint as he knows her, but Master Aurelia is right about one thing if nothing else - the chances are it's a different Mint are less likely for sure. Especially given how Chirithy found his way here. It can't hurt to meet! Besides, it's been so long since he's seen his Mint... who knows how much she could have changed - grown up!
"Th- Thanks for the ride, by the way," Chirithy mumbles, bashfully. This is a weird form of Magic, but it's working. "My legs are kind of small!" And teleporting has been going, uh. Ways. Not in their favor. Anyway! It's important to be polite!
"Um - well - my heart and my wielder's are tied to each other," Chirithy says, fumbling a little. 'Soul' is not a word he hears often. "But my Master didn't tell me anything other than that. As long as Mint is around, then I'm around. And as long as Mint walks in light, I'll be blessed with light. And if Mint falls to darkness... then I, too..."
Chirithy trails off. It thinks of the Nightmare Chirithy that belonged to Mint, as well. It doesn't know what to do. But it shudders.
"I don't know. I just know that my Master created me, and I was Mint's, and... I existed to guide them. Anything else... I fear only the Master knows."
You have triggered Evil Wizard thoughts
“You’re creator must have been a genius to impart so much personality to a being locked to another, especially when so far away from Her. I wonder if you were to fall to darkness how that would affect Mint.” She seems to be pondering how to bring this on for a moment. Before she waves the thought away with an idle motion as they reach the elevators and she hits a button without taking her eyes on Chirithy. “We must return you to her presence as soon as possible then. Fascinating…”
no subject
"Erm, I guess not!" Chirithy agrees. "I mean, that's what I've been saying - I'm a Chirithy, after all." They have no idea what a poppet is.
If they were to fall to darkness... "It doesn't work like that," they protest, suddenly serious. They know, because Mint's nightmare Chirithy existed, and what happened to that guy didn't affect Mint at all - did it? Did that Chirithy sucking away all of Mint's darkness for itself save her? Well, either way, that Chirithy went off the deep end, fully embracing the darkness, and Mint was fine.
"What happens to us doesn't matter, to Mint," Chirithy explains. "It's only one way. If Mint falls, I fall, but if I fall, Mint will be fine. Even if I died..."
They shudder. "Not that I want to die, before I see her again! I want to see her again, more than anything."
Wrapping up I think
The elevator dings, and Aurelia ushers them into it. Lost in thought.