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!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I. THE CASINO FLOOR
[ This makes no sense. That sense of calm from before has worn off and now Clarice is stuck with the confusion and, yeah, the anger. Never let it be said that she doesn't have a chip on her shoulder. She wants out and the sooner, the better.

The lack of shoes is creeping her out, too. She keeps worrying she's going to step on something gross or otherwise stub her toe. It's just all together awful here.

But pestering the concierge, the table managers, the other patrons, gets her nowhere. Sighing in frustration, she picks up a shot of whatever's being offered to her, the blue liquid looking like the more likely to get her a little drunk.

She tilts back her head and downs it in one go. She doesn't notice the creeping sadness immediately, but it'll make itself apparent. Especially after a conversation with her.

She turns towards the nearest person with a shrug. ] At least the drinks aren't bad.

II. MAKE YOURSELF AT HOME
[ After her breakdown on the casino floor, the last thing that Clarice wants to do is be around people. She heads to her hotel room and locks the door behind her.

It's... not bad, actually. Compared to the shitty ass apartment she shared with John and Zingo back home, compared to the sewers, it's luxury. But she doesn't want to stay there long.

She starts trying to open a portal almost immediately. At first, her powers sputter and flare, unwilling to cooperate. It's dangerous to try and use a portal when she can't see where she's going, when she doesn't know where she's going. But there's got to be something here, right?

She can look out the window and see elsewhere. So she tries to focus on elsewhere.

The vibrant purple portal begins to grow in size, a circle large enough for her to duck through. On the other side, she sees blue and green and white. Freedom?

She jumps through...

and lands straight in the pool with a gigantic splash.

Clarice comes up sputtering, gasping, and, of course, cursing. ]

IV. HEY! LISTEN!
[ Clarice is really unsure about this, but she's also scared and alone and wants to feel like she's not.

So she clears her throat, taps on the device, and sends out an audio message. ]

Hey, so... Anyone with special powers? That has tried to break out of this place? Probably shouldn't be saying this on an open channel, but what choice do I have, huh?

Just... want to see if anyone else is as frustrated as I am.

V. WILDCARD
(( Come at me. PM me or hit up

evilsalmon if you want to discuss something.

N.B. Clarice is a mutant. She has wavy purple hair, pointed ears and unnaturally green eyes. Additionally, there's a faint purple mark, like a line from her brow to her cheek bone. Her green mark matches, on the other side of her face. ))

Leanne was exploring and came upon this strange smelling body of water. She was at the edge of it, studying it and trying to figure out why would anyone do something so strange to water? It was so unnatural and she can't hear nature's voice in it.

That is until someone suddenly appears and splashes water all over her. She lets out a small cry and her wings poofed up to try and shake the water out of them.

She was blocked from her own duress when she hears the strange new comer letting out a slew of words she doesn't know.

"Ruuude! Did you not see me before you appeared?" She moves away from the edge of the pool in order to do an emergency preening session for her wings. A brief thought and in a softer tone of voice. "Are you okay?"

[[OOC; Hey there! Have someone who doesn't speak a lick of English but can understand it at least. At least most of it. Her words would probably sound Elvish from Tolkien would be the closest language to hers.]]

There's a disorienting moment when Clarice hears gibberish and hears English half a tick later, perfectly normal. The cadence tells her that whatever the woman is saying, it's the same as what's being said in her ear. She thinks so, anyway. That's a lot to think about when she's flailing in the deep end of the water.

Clarice tries to remember how to swim and doggie paddles to the edge of the pool.

"Fine," she grumps. It's only the last part of what's said that clicks with her.

She sputters out some water and wipes her hands over her face to make sure she's seeing things right.

"That's a hell of a mutation," she says, in mild awe at the wings.

Leanne watches with some concern for the beorc. Does she not know how to swim? Leanne was about to fly over to her when the other female doggie paddles towards her. Okay, so she doesn't need to go and help her.

She finally finishes preening her wings and tilts her head at the other's words. "Mew-tate-shun? What's a mew-tate-shun?" She fidgets a little with a lock of hair before reaches over with a freshly preened wing to try and help her dry herself. "Where did you came from? You don't look like normal Beorc."

"A what now?" There's a instant scowl in place for the angelic-looking mutant. Whatever she's just been called, Clarice doesn't think it's a good thing. But then again, she's used to being called negative names. She expects more from another mutant, but then again...

"A mutation. The X gene. You know... Your wings."

Leanne blinks at the sight of the scowl and tilts her head. What? She was using the respectful term! "A Beorc. Its... A respectful term...."

And then more weird words and she just gains a confused look on her brace. "X gene? Serenes never mentioned anything abiut a X gene." But then the mentioned of her wings and then she smiles brightly, giggling.

"They are pretty right?!? They look a lot like my mother's wings! Every member of my clan has wings. It is normal for a Laguz to have the trait that is common with their clans."

"Respectful?" She's not outright doubting you here, Leanne. But it's nothing she's ever heard before and she has a hard time believing that someone's going to come out the gate with respect. But, by the same token, clearly the angel is some kind of mutant. Maybe? So she would understand better than anyone what it's like to be different. Right?

"Wait, so... there's a whole clan of you? Hold on." She pauses to set her hands on the edge of the pool and drag herself out of the water, settling on the edge. Thankfully, there's sun.

"You're telling me you're not a mutant?"

you're right, not likely something to be discussed openly

but if you're willing to have a little chat at the bar we could at least have a few rounds for our troubles

Oh, invitations to drink from gruff man.

Tell me first if this is gonna be worth my while. Do you have any special abilities? Or anything to intrigue me?

what makes you think i'm a gruff man? from text alone i could be some marvelously adept waterfowl with a penchant for gin

I have a type and it doesn't include ducks.

But I like gin. Gin is good.

i'm not sure i'd qualify gin as good after some of the bottom shelf hangovers i've had. fun though, certainly

so i propose i grab us both a few rounds, you ask me as many questions as you wish before someone passes out and everyone wins

Good and fun are synonymous in my book. We don't think about the future and the hangovers while we're drinking.

Sounds like a plan to me.

i couldn't have said it any more eloquently. you'll make quite the poet before your time here is through i can guarantee that

i'll be the gruff man in a trench coat at the casino bar. you may have been right about more than just the gin

I'm easily flattered, dude. Try harder, later, when you know me.

[ She heads out for the bar, feeling at the very least like she's got something to distract her from her melancholy. For a girl who's been on her own a large portion of her life, she misses her friends already, like a hole in her chest.

She picks out the trench coat easy and heads over, sliding into the stool beside him. She's arranged her hair so that -- even though it's purple and wavy -- it hides her pointed ears. There's nothing to be done about the unnatural green of her eyes though. But she's already been talking about special powers, so there might as well be something special about her. ]

Nice coat. You look like a noir detective.

clarice "blink" fong | the gifted

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