funnyhearts | INAUGURAL TEST DRIVE MEME

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INAUGURAL TEST DRIVE MEME

TEST DRIVE MEME: WELCOME TO HAPPY HEARTS

You wake up in a padded box. It rocks, gently, as though suspended in mid-air. You begin to stir, confusion or distress pushing you to try to sit up — and then the air begins to smell sweet, and you fall back asleep.

You wake up in a padded box. For a moment, you are beatifically calm. You don't know how you got here, or why, but that isn't really all that important. You don't need to know where you are. You're just... here. And here is a wonderful place to be.

But there is a niggling suspicion growing in the back of your mind. A suspicion that here is not somewhere you wanted to be. That it is not where you're supposed to be. You remember... chasing a white rabbit (or was it a person)? A mirror? Bright light, and green ivy crawling over your skin... Before you can worry too much, the box jolts, and then settles, and after a long moment the walls fall from around you to reveal —

A hotel lobby?

"Welcome to the Happy Hearts Hotel and Casino," says an attendant behind a desk. "We're so pleased you could join us for our grand opening gala. We have your room keys and Empathies here, please make an orderly line and we'll hand them out once we've confirmed identities. After that, feel free to explore the hotel! We highly recommend starting with the casino. Everyone's a winner here in Happy Hearts!"

Is this normal? It doesn't feel normal. And hey — you could swear you had shoes before!

I. THE CASINO FLOOR

As you pass through the entrance to the casino floor, an attendant passes you a small bag of chips. The casino is loud and bright and filled with games of every kind — you want to play poker? They've got a table for that. Sabacc? There's a table for that, too. Slots, pachinko, and bingo are also available. The attendant in the lobby wasn't lying, either — everyone who plays wins. Everyone, every time.

Servers wander the floor with trays of shotglasses full of multi-coloured liquids, offering them to every oyster "Compliments of Her Royal Highness." If you're expecting alcohol, though, you'll be surprised — these drinks are teas made of the distilled emotions of every oyster in the hotel. Each colour tea corresponds to a different emotion, and as soon as you take a sip, you feel overcome with that emotion.

JOY — the distilled essence of happiness, this tea makes even the most rough and tumble of oysters giddy with happiness — for a moment. The effect fades into a sense of general contentment after a few seconds, and that itself fades away slowly over the course of twenty minutes.
ANGER — this tea, anger in liquid form, can make the most even-tempered of oysters ready to absolutely blow a gasket. For twenty minutes, anyone who drinks this tea will find themselves much more easily annoyed, frustrated, and all around irritable and snappy.
SADNESS — distilled sadness is a potent tea, capable of turning a stoic, stalwart oyster into a blubbering mess in moments. Events that may have previously only been a minor disappointment become the end of the world, every repressed unhappiness comes to the fore, and for twenty minutes, any oyster who drank a sadness tea can hardly keep themselves together.

II. MAKE YOURSELF AT HOME

If gambling isn't to your interest, there are many other areas of the hotel to explore! For the moment, only The Pool Of Tears and the Pig & Pepper buffet are available for oysters to peruse, but the staff will assure anyone who asks that the other facilities will be open by the next day. Unfortunately, that means no one can buy any swimsuits from This Elegant Thimble, but the staff aren't going to kick anyone out of the pool for jumping in in their clothes! The Pig & Pepper serves lunch foods from across all different cultures, offering something for everyone, and some things you've never even heard of.

Maybe you just want to be alone — well, that's what you have your room key for! Oysters room on the second and third floors of the hotel, one to a room. You were assured your room would be exactly what you'd always wished for — and for some, that's right! It's exactly as you would have decorated it yourself. But for others, their rooms are totally wrong. A grizzled cowboy can't have a pink room! Hotel staff are firm, though: every room is exactly as its owner wants it to be. Search your feelings, oyster. You know it to be true.

III. YOU'VE BEEN NAUGHTY

Curiosity is not, on its own, a trait the staff want to discourage. Oysters are free to search for ways out of the hotel, but they won't find anything — there are no doors anywhere in the lobby or the casino, the windows are impenetrable, the walls don't crumble no matter how hard anyone hits them. The elevator between floors has no service hatch, and there are no stairs to take. The hotel is, at least so far as anyone can tell, a completely closed system.

Now, in light of this, Happy Hearts knows some oysters can be a little... reactionary. Especially when cornered, especially the ones with powers or abilities beyond the average human. With this in mind, any oyster found to be destructive or combative won't be punished. Not yet. They will, however, be quickly incapacitated by hotel staff, drugged to incoherence, and brought discretely to a hidden back room. No one notices these oysters disappearing, nor the doors they must have been dragged through.

In this room, troublesome oysters sit, paralyzed, across from a woman in red. She smiles, and offers candy from a bowl on her desk, and laughs to herself when she remembers the oysters can't take one.

You're new, she says, kindly, so it's understandable that you're having trouble adjusting to the hotel. We promise to do all we can to make your stay here as fulfilling as possible, so you have nothing to worry about. Your experience is our top priority.

She plucks a candy disk from her bowl, and unwraps it slowly.

But you must know: if you endanger our other guests again like you have today, there will be punishments. We pride ourselves on the emotional experience we offer our oysters, and we can't let anything get in the way of that. For everyone's safety and happiness, you understand.

She pops the candy in her mouth, sucks for a moment, and smiles broadly.

That's all.

The oyster is brought, still paralyzed and incoherent, back to the hotel. No one notices them return. The paths taken through the hotel to bring them to the woman in red fade from their mind as soon as they arrive back on the hotel floor. They're left in the lobby to sit and think until the paralysis wears off.

And then they can go back to having fun in the casino!

IV. HEY! LISTEN!

At the end of the day, every oyster's Empathy device buzzes, pings, and lights up — there's a message waiting for them!

A woman with red hair and a teal dress, sat on a throne with her hands held delicately in her lap and her legs crossed daintily at the ankle, looks into the camera, smiling.

"Hello, my dear oysters! We're so pleased you could join us. I am Victoria Hart, the humble Queen of this realm, and I wanted to personally welcome you to the Happy Hearts hotel, and thank you for your gifts. We will not squander them, dears, as we will not allow your stay with us to be anything less than perfect. If you need anything at all, I'm sure hotel staff will be happy to provide, and I will be keeping an eye on all of you, to ensure your experience remains a positive one.

Welcome, darlings. This is the beginning of something wonderful."

The message saves to each oyster's Empathy, and an app pops up on the screen: the community bulletin board. The queen doesn't respond to any messages sent to her, but the other oysters might. It's worth a shot, right?

Welcome to the first TDM of Happy Hearts, a new panfandom roleplaying game here on DW! If you have any questions, please direct them to the first comment on this page. Happy playing, oysters!

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[ sorry, she got sidetracked. she'll read the rest of your message in a minute, jos. ]

is this a family reunion of people i'm definitely not related to?

[Her heart is pounding VERY LOUDLY in her ears right now because that's her mom. Her mom is here. THANK GOD HER MOM IS HERE but given that Josie's name is very clearly on this message she doesn't know why her mom isn't acting like her mom. There's a few false starts and stops as she tries to figure out how to respond, before she decides to just swallow and go with it.

This seems like a science fiction movie. If her mom isn't her mom, or is from before she's her mom, if Josie tells her that she's her mom will the world collapse in some kind of paradox? Will she be erased from existence??????

(She needs to stop staying up late watching movies with MG.)

Breathe, Josie. Just breathe. It's just a message.]

Maybe? I don't know, I was just looking for familiar faces. I'm from Mystic Falls.

[Two of those four names were founding families, this could totally work.]

[ well, that checks out. caroline doesn't know where this place is, but the name saltzman definitely belongs to the small town with big mysteries. as do all the other names on the mystery girl's list.

which is weird, because caroline feels like she'd know if alaric saltzman had any younger siblings or cousins floating around town. they'd have come up at some point, considering his (admittedly questionable) step-parentage of her best friend. but mystic falls had more mysteries than answers, and so did this place, so caroline's pretty sure she's going to have to reply to get more information. ]

well, i know forbes (obviously)
we're not usually listed first in a list that includes the salvatores

[ the social committee chair for mystic falls is struggling to remember the name marshall. if she remembered the werewolf she'd thought tyler was cheating on her with, she clearly didn't commit the name to memory. ]

Well, you were pretty important to us. My sister's named after your mom, actually.

[Not a lie!!! But possibly getting herself into more hot water, and she realizes that the minute she sends it. And she kind of just open mouth stares at the device for a moment before putting it away from her while she breathes.

It's fine. That totally makes sense. Just wait and see what she says don't try to cover don't try to make this worse don't make it worse...

... Pauses, snatches it back:]

Alaric Saltzman is my dad.

[Yes, because that will make it better.]

[ oh, josie. that does not make it better. in fact, it makes caroline's head spin, the rising fear of "what the hell is happening and what alternate universe did i fall into" making her a little sick. ]

i'm sorry, what???
alaric saltzman is a history teacher [ among other things ] and definitely not a dad
and if anybody's going to be naming their kids after my mom, it's going to be me

[ yes, caroline. that's right. you're so close, you're almost there. ]

[Josie would be laughing bitterly if she weren't so in over her head, or, you know, SIXTEEN AND PANICKING. She takes a deep breath, trying to figure out how to explain that.]

He was a history teacher and not a dad. And then he became a dad and the headmaster of the Salvatore School in Mystic Falls after he became the father to two witch kids in 2014.

[The school actually came a bit further after that but ... general point remains the same.]

I'm from 2030.

Edited 2019-01-31 17:20 (UTC)

oh my god you're from the future

[ that, at least, is pretty easy to get. she's sort of missing the connect-the-dots piece of how alaric saltzman's kids are named after her mom. ]

but how do you know about my mom?
she wasn't exactly friends with the teachers

[ elizabeth forbes knew alaric saltzman, but it's not as if they were particularly close. she isn't even close with him. hell, elena's kind of half-and-half these days. ]

[There's a few false starts and stops as she tries to make that part make sense without lying to her mom beyond lies of omission and, well, this is the best she got:]

She was really close with my mom.

[She pauses for a moment, before trying to figure out how much she's going to have to talk around this.]

Her name was Josette Parker. It doesn't sound like you've met her yet.

[ this is too much for one blonde woman to handle alone. ]

do i know you in the future?
i feel like i should have a clue about this if you're telling me there's a school named after the salvatores in the future

One Salvatore. Stefan Salvatore.

[And she takes a breath because this is where it's gonna get weird and hard but okay. She can do this.]

But yeah. You run the school with my dad. Mostly on the administrative side though. You handle like, recruiting and stuff. You did a lot for me and Lizzie after my mom died.

[Again! Not lies!]

[ oh. that name certainly does the trick, doesn't it? because, before waking up in this place, caroline's just left the room where stefan tricked her into switching her humanity back on, the room where a jo laughlin — not parker, she doesn't recognize the full name, it would take a little more careful consideration to connect those dots — once walked in to see how she was.

a pang in her chest at what now feels like an eternity of separation. she was going to... well, do a lot of things. thank him, mostly. and now to find out there's a school named after him where she works with alaric saltzman and his kids in the future? well, it's just a lot. it's weird, and it's a lot. ]

i'm definitely not qualified to be a teacher at a school that needs a headmaster

wait
is it like vampire hogwarts or something?

[ okay, that bit is pretty cool. she's a little sad to think of kids having to grow up already having turned (that was terrifying enough for her as a teenager) but the boarding school life had always seemed like a fun fantasy when she was younger. ]

Not just vampires. Any kind of supernatural kid is welcome there. They teach us how to handle our abilities in a controlled setting so that there's less of a chance of us ... going crazy on the world, I guess.

[It's a good thing that they did in Stefan's memory, and for Josie it's home. She's never really been anywhere else.]

well, that's got stefan written all over it.

[ guidance? reassurance? protection while baby witches and vampires and werewolves figured their shit out? yeah, that sounds like stefan alright. she's not surprised to hear that he'd go on to found something like that. (she'll be surprised to hear he didn't found it at all.) ]

what does he do?

[ here it comes. ]

[ .... Oh.

There's another long pause on the other end because this is going to suck, and she'd been trying to spare her mom any pain because she's gone through a lot. Both of their parents seem to be trapped in this endless dance of loves who are never quite able to make it to fruition, and she wishes things could be different, for both of them.

But she can't lie about this.]

He doesn't. He died saving Mystic Falls. The school was named in honor of him. He didn't start it.

[ nope.

nope.

caroline forbes just straight up bails out of the conversation, slapping the clamshell of her device closed like a flip phone in the nineties. she's not ready to talk about stefan salvatore dying to save their ridiculously over-stressed town, not right now. not right after... all that she remembers of home.

but she can't ignore this, either. not when this girl is apparently the only connection between home and whatever this place is.

so some however many minutes later — maybe ten, maybe thirty, who knows in a casino with no windows and no clocks — she replies. ]

he would be really happy with that.

[ she needs to say more, but there's a thickness in her throat she can't swallow down, and she feels like she might be suffocating in it. ]

is there anything else i need to know?
i don't really want to be surprised anymore

[Yeah. There's a lot she needs to know, and part of her just wants to give Caroline a break so she doesn't have to deal with all of this, but she thinks of Lizzie and ... better not let it rest.

There's another pause as she tries to figure out how to phrase this before:]

Can we do this in person?

[She really wants to see her, as it's been months at home, so even if it's not her real mom, it's close enough.]

meet me by the pool
it's quieter there

[ without the benefit of complimentary bathing suits, it seems most people have steered clear. at least for caroline, her sundress leaves her legs clear to dip into the cool water, and so that's where josie will find her, legs kicking softly back and forth against the far end of the pool.

maybe it says something that the vampire isn't trying to run away from it all. but there's also nowhere to run, so. what's she going to do, anyway? ]

[Josie is also fond of the skirts, so she does the same, sweeping her short Salvatore School plaid skirt under her as she dips her feet in the water.]

Hi. I'm Josie.

[She resisted the urge to hug her, and is again grateful that Lizzie isn't here. That would have given the game away too soon. She's also struck with how young her mother is. Caroline doesn't age, not really, but as she shifts from college student to young professional, she learns how to change her hair and the way she dresses. This is a Caroline who was never a mother.

And this is a bombshell she shouldn't have to drop and yet, she will.]

So ... this is going to be a long story.

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INAUGURAL TEST DRIVE MEME

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throws a dart at a canon point...

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