repeter | OCTOBER TDM

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OCTOBER TDM

TEST DRIVE

OCTOBER TEST DRIVE
The city of Recollé...

When the crypt doors creak, and the tombstones quake, spooks come out for a singing wake. Happy haunts materialize and begin to vocalize...grim grinning ghosts come out to socialize...

Every year during the Halloween season, the city of Recollé comes to life with plenty of fall activities for everyone. There's something to do in every district if one were to take a look.

What will you do today?

I.
Family fun seems to be the theme today over in Tribunal Terrace. Several tables are set up and in a semi-circle near Recollé Square with stacks of pumpkins, carving tools, paint and anything else you may need to create your own jack o'lantern. Other stations are set up for face-painting and games to win mini-sized candy bars including a ring toss, bowling, and bobbing for apples. Be careful with the apples though. They like to wiggle and jiggle with their happy little faces staring up out of the water.

...so maybe apple-bobbing is for the brave at heart. Are you the artsy type to carve a beautiful pumpkin? Are you helping to run the games (or even cheating to get more candy)? It's time to relax and let your creativity flow.

II.
Pumpkin-carving not your speed? Never fear, horror is here. Over in Tisse there's plenty to do for those looking for a little more adventure. Several coffee shops have harvest specials made with pumpkin, maple, and pecan flavors. Over at Flix a monster movie marathon and costume contest are taking place (with a prize of two free passes for the best monster costumes.) But the highlight of this district is the annual haunted funhouse.

Anyone daring enough will find the usual spooks and scares in a haunted house, jump scares and fog machines galore. But...the house certainly didn't look so big from the outside. How did you possibly get shuffled straight to the center? No worries. This hall of mirrors will guide you out safely...if the walls closing in don't crush you first. It's a race against time as the halls narrow, and if you're one of the lucky ones you'll escape and exit through the main doors.

For those not quite so lucky, the walls will stop just inches from crushing you completely before the floor drops open and you find yourself on a slide, falling through the dark and tumbling into an underground room filled with plastic skeletons, rubber spiders and more. There must be a way out, right? Hopefully you aren't alone and you can navigate the lair with a friend or two.

III.

Meanwhile, the rest of the city's usual hustle and bustle continues. The shopping districts are busy, students wander the sidewalks after class, and that oddly-shaped ghost appears right in the middle of the crowd.

Wait, what? You could have sworn that ghost wasn't there before. Maybe you don't even believe in ghosts. You may blink a few times to clear your vision, but the faint outline of the ghost remains as a few more of them pop up around the city. They won't speak, but they will cause some trouble for anyone who gets too close whether it's by playing pranks on passerbys, stealing items and running away, sitting on a person and applying a gravitational force so they can't move or other crafty, sneaky tactics.

Are the ghosts messing with you? Or are you going to find a way to mess with the ghosts?

IV.
As the sun begins to set, a strange sort of fog rolls in. Several citizens of the city may not even think it's unusual and others seem to capitalize on the weather. The Churchhill Downs Stables are hosting their annual haunted hayrides through Recollé Woods as soon as the sun sets. There are plenty of carts and chocobos saddled up and ready to go.

Once passengers are seated the chocobos begin to trot forward into the woods as a pre-recorded ghost tour of the city takes place. The stories range from silly ones about two ghost children who like to play hide and seek in these woods to scarier ones about a jilted lover chasing her husband off a cliff at the edge of ocean. For the most part they're a bit cheesy and in good fun, but something about this haunted ride seems a bit...off. Peering into the fog you may see something strange that follows you, be it a monster or a shadow or an object. You may hear things whispering your name and you may see your greatest fear manifest right out of the fog and chase your cart through the woods. Even worse, it seems to follow you right out of the woods and back into the city. No matter where you run or where you hide, the fears from the fog will track you down and they change for every single person in the city.

Will you run or will you fight? You may wish to be careful since the creatures will fight back.

BONUS.
With only a few short weeks left until the end of October, Retrospec's Halloween Mode is in full swing and popping up on new users' devices. Retrospec users will find their application decked out in cheerful Halloween colors, and their userpics in a randomized (work safe) costume. However, there's always a trick to each treat and this time the seasonal mode can't be turned off for new users. Notifications chime with zombie groans, a rousing game of Candy Crush must be played and beaten before you can use your device again, and the new Trick or Treat function has a few upgrades. When a user enables this function, they will be met with the phrase "Trick or Treat?" Users who select "treat" will get one virtual candy! Yay! The catch though is that they will also find themselves in a costume representing that specific candy.

Should a user pick "trick", however, they will find all sorts of harmless but unpleasant things happening to them including but not limited to pranks, being splashed by vehicles driving through puddles of water, being unable to speak in anything but rhymes and other such things. None of these effects last over ten minutes, but the game will show up periodically over and over again and even giving you the option to play the game with others.

Welcome to the

recolle test drive meme! All characters will be begin in-game AU'd as Recollé residents. You may use any of the above prompts for ideas or make up your own depicting your Recollé AU! Prompts do not have to be set in the districts listed above. You can review our list of locations for what's available. Please note that TDM threads can be used as samples, can be kept as game canon, and can also be used for bonus points for future item regains. Share a few minor details of your AU, tag around, and have fun!

For current players, TDM threads will not count toward your Trick or Treat freebie! Additionally, please remember that TDM threads can only be used for bonus points, not regains.

Please note: you will need a reserve to apply, and current characters must have full AC posted at the time of their reservation.

Your October TDM directory is here, and your AU workshop is here! Our mod questions thread for this TDM is over here!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[Zack turns around to only get a little more disoriented by the flash of cluttered reflections. Some of them warp and change to make his head look bigger or his hips look wider. It sort of amuses him and he'd probably laugh more if he wasn't s o d o n e with being lost in here.

Placing his hands on his hips he shakes his head.]

Are you sure that's a good idea too? What if there's some dumb trap from above? Like falling fake blood?

[Ugh. It's more like a horror fun house than a haunted house.]

[ Minato's here to add to those reflections, making it difficult to tell up from down when there's two sets of everything surrounding them. Zack's concern is a valid one, though, which makes Minato lift his gaze from the floor to the ceiling as if something were to fall on his face, right on cue.

Nothing does, and he looks back down. Pulls the hood of his jacket over his head. Problem solved. ]

Better on your head than on your face. Wet floors would also be a safety hazard...

You're right about the safety hazard.

[Yeah and he'd prefer walking out of here not looking like an extra from that Carrie movie. He has no hood on his own jacket so all he can really do is hope for the best.

He shuffles and holds a hand out in front of him to touch the mirrors and keeps his head down as suggested.]

How'd you get roped in here? I think I'll take corn mazes over haunted houses after this place!

Thought it'd be fun.

[ HE WAS WRONG. But also somebody who had willingly walked through those front doors and got shuffled into the hall of mirrors. Corn mazes are their own brand of scary, because can you imagine something naturally growing that high in such short a time? Mirrors at least show your own face, and make it easier to spot things that might jump out at you, so Minato takes the tip and brushes the tips of his fingers against the reflective surface too. ]

Either way, mazes are the same. Do you know the right hand rule for mazes?

[He gives a bit of a sheepish laugh.] You and me both...!

[HE WAS ALSO WRONG. Here he thought that he'd join in on the Halloween festivities but he should have just stuck with the apple bobbing with the weird apples with faces. But at least with corn mazes if you get too wigged out you can just beeline in one direction through the stalks until you get out.

Zack glances up at one of the Minato reflections, obviously curious.] Huh? What's that? A trick?

[ It's true... Even playing the games properly, you get to keep the apple you successfully fished out, and in a corn maze too there might be leftover corn to grab and not starve to death like they will if they can't find their way out of the mirror maze. They could? theoretically? bulldoze through the mirrors and shatter glass everywhere until they reach the other side of the room, but but how many hundreds of years of bad luck would that be... Hopefully it won't come to that, but it's a backup plan Minato tucks away in the back of his mind. Plan A is to try this first, and succumb to desperation later. ]

Yeah. You start by touching the right wall, and turn right at every fork. Your hand never leaves the wall. [ Theoretically, this works, but not in all cases. ] But we'd have to go back and start from the beginning for it to work.

[Zack is excited about the prospects of this little trick until Minato says that they'd need to start at the beginning for it to work.]

Well, that doesn't really help us, does it... [Frowning...]

Alright, let's buck up and do our best to get out of here then. Let's go this way.

[Might as well get started! Minato is free to follow him if he'd like but Zack starts to wander off in some random direction. Some eerie sound of a ghost wailing is heard off in the distance and a plastic spider drops from one of the ceilings...!]

[ Minato follows closely, trusting Zack's confidence that he knows where he's going— which is face first into a spider, apparently. It smacks Minato right in the forehead, and he reaches up to bat it away, thankful that he was staring down at Zack's feet instead of up so that he doesn't get a mouthful of spider, but before he can relax at the touch of hard plastic, he finds the web to be very thick, very strong, and very sticky. He pulls at it in trying to shake it off, is met with resistance on the other end of the thread, and then

here comes that dumb trap, a creeeaak announcing a waterfall of lukewarm water as the two of them are doused in fake(?) blood. ]

[NO- NOOOO- Zack yells in agony (not real agony, just grossed out, this is unfair, agony) as he tries to leap out of the way of the falling fake blood. There just isn't much space for him to leap to.]

Are you kidding me right now!?

[What a day to become a psychic to fortell this kind of trick happening. He should of just kept his big mouth shut.

Half drenched in fake paint-like red, Zack sighs loudly and tried to wipe at his face and eyes.]

Are you alright?! ...

[ That's a pretty subjective question. There's... not really a reaction from Minato, head bowed and dripping blood from his bangs as if still in the middle of processing what had happened. The liquid is thick and sticky, with a somewhat musty smell for how long the trap must have been waiting up there without anybody to trigger it before they came by, and he would very much like to go home and take a shower and never leave the house again. ]

...On the bright side, [ because there is one, in the middle of all the painfully obvious downsides he doesn't need to voice, ] it'll be easy to backtrack by following our footsteps, if we make a wrong turn.

[Zack frowns and growls out in frustration and even tries to attempt to shake his head like a dog to get some of the red out of his hair and eyes. Then he glances at Minato and somehow frowns more.]

Geeze... You got nerves of steal or something? You didn't even flinch.

[He's kind of impressed, really.]

Come on... Let's keep trucking. I'm making a beeline for that apple bobbing water bucket as soon as we're out of here.

[ A slow reaction time is really nothing to be proud of, so Minato just shakes the paint off his bangs and follows alongside Zack, as if walking next to somebody taller means Zack would catch the worst of whatever comes at their heads next time instead of himself. ]

People spit in the water.

[ jsyk

He's watched people bob around for apples before, wide open mouths trying very hard to bite at the fruit, faces covered in festive paint and who knows what else they've gotten into. It might be better than haunted house paint, but what about bathrooms... ]

[..............]

Excuse me?

[Why did Minato tell it like that, oh my god?]

People don't just plain spit into the water, why would anyone do that?

[Everyone is wholesome and plays games nicely!!]

[ Just saying it how it is, my dude. ]

Not on purpose. But if your mouth's open, saliva's going to get into the water... I guess it'd be too dilute to matter, though.

[ If that makes Zack feel any better, he can go ahead and dunk his face into a bucket of spit, it's all good. ]

[Now he doesn't want to shove his face into a bucket of spit, thanks.]

Guy, it's not like people are hocking loogies into it...!

[Ugh- This fake blood is starting to dry to his face and hair already...]

If they're frustrated enough.

[ You know. They're jittery little apples that dance out of your mouth even after you thought you had a good grip on them, and sometimes people spit when they're angry; he wouldn't discount the possibility.

But drying blood is at least easier to get off than wet blood, Minato idly rubbing a spot on the back of his hand where the paint(?) has dried to a thin layer and he can pick little flecks of it off with his fingernails. ]

You better not be one of those people. [Zack warns jokingly with a waggle of his finger. He now has half a mind to police the apple bobbing buckets for the rest of the night.]

Minako and the rest of the volunteers [including him btw] worked too hard on setting everything up just to have punks hocking loogies into it and ruining the fun.

[He laughs and then pats Minato hard on the shoulder.] Come on, let's go this way I got a good feeling about it.

[There's a door! Maybe it's an exit to sweet freedom?]

[ Minato lets out a soft grunt at getting hit on the shoulder, but it's successful in making him pick up the pace towards what's hopefully the exit. It opens out into the fairgrounds again, sweet freedom making him think back to how he'd stumbled through the haunted house as quickly as he could without really appreciating everything in there; the volunteers probably wouldn't be too happy to hear that either.

This is something he won't tell Minako, who he'd just met after being apart for over a decade and that's... yeah, not something he's going to admit to her. He's surprised to hear her name from Zack, though, sparing him a glace before looking around the grounds for the apple bobbing stands. ]

Minako worked hard on all this, huh...?

[ Says casually. Nonchalantly. As best he can without sounding too interested about Minako in particular. ]

Yeah, community volunteer coordinator. She bosses us all around.

[He says that with the most playful affection for the girl. They've only worked together a few times now but it's all been very pleasant experiences. She's a fun girl. And he doesn't notice at all that Minato and Minako look kinda similar.

Free from the confines of that blasted horror fun house Zack immediately goes to look for the buckets with the apples or at even better the hose they used to fill them up with ice water.]

Edited 2017-10-30 23:05 (UTC)

[ Bossy seems to match up with the decades old memory of how Minako was like when they were little, but he never really got to see much of that because he would used to go along with things at the slightest suggestion, trailing behind Zack now and, yeah, veering off towards the spit-free hoses when they come across the apple bobbing, even if it's decidedly ice cold water that—

Their make-shift shower is interrupted by one of the volunteers working at the stall, who runs up to them and gestures wildly at the two of them, top to bottom and all around. "What happened?!" she cries, hands out to keep them away. "The first aid station is down by the chocobo-drawn carts. Do you know where that is? Don't go wandering around covered in blood like that!" ]

[Welp, he was going to ask Minato if he knew her too (girl is popular as heck, he wouldn't be surprised) btut he's interrupted by some girl screaming bloody murder at them for looking like they just committed said bloody murder.

He pulls the hose back and slicks his hair back in one movement of his hand and turns to the girl.]

Hey- calm down! What happened? What happened was we were assaulted by whatever practical joke you'd like to call your fun house over there is. Got drenched with fake blood and now we look like something out of The Shining. Me and- ... [Oh he doesn't know this kid's name, so he pats his shoulder. Name?]

We'll clean up quick, won't we?

Yeah.

[ y e a h. No name is offered, Minato tensing up at the first touch on his shoulder, but he tries to convince the girl that they're perfectly fine by attempting a grin that looks more like a grimace but whatever. He stops trying after half a second and instead, leaves Zack's side to trek over to the faucet at the other end of the hose, and turns it on full blast, hopefully Zack's for a good grip on it. ]

[What is he, a robot...? Well- Good enough. He supposes.]

That's right, John! [That's his name now.

Hopefully the girl wanders off after that, he doesn't want to leave the festivities just yet since he still has some things to watch over as a volunteer and then there's clean up. So for now back to washing the blasted red crap out of his hair and shirt-- He yowls when the hose turns on full blast!]

Waaauughh!! Hey, take it easy!

[ He's a robot. One who doesn't even blink when Zack cries out, but does at least ease off a little on the water pressure, just a little, bit by bit by bit... perhaps in retaliation to being renamed John, who knows.

But a little less than full blast is all he gets before Minato stands up from the faucet and holds his arms out to either side of himself, giving him a little cant of the head that's supposed to mean "Hose me down," if he used his words instead of this bare minimal miming. ]

[He laugh and gets the picture. Honestly, it feels good getting all this crap off. So with a grin he aims and shoots.]

Alright! You asked for it!

[And he blasts John with the hose with no remorse. Enjoy that cold as hell water!]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

OCTOBER TDM

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