INAUGURAL TEST DRIVE MEME

[happyheartsstaff]

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!

Comments

[polydeukes]

Josie tends to be the more conscious of personal space of the two twins, and generally the more appropriate. Lizzie's brain to mouth filter would have likely alienated Derek before things had even began, while Josie just wanted to help, and could keep most of her inside thoughts inside.

She shifts to lean against the back wall as the elevator began to ascend. "I know that some of the teas affect your emotions. Someone else I met also had a theory that they might be using some kind of drug to keep people with abilities from being able to use them."

So while she doesn't doubt that Derek is strong, it's obvious they were prepared for them. They managed to kidnap all of these people all at once, but were careful enough to leave even the smallest hint of magic just casually lying around.

"If they did a lot of research into us before they took us, they could have been prepared. Had something tooled to impact you specifically."

[duelo]

"Abilities?" he asks, an attempt to sound more curious than concerned. The idea that they could subdue the wolf inside hadn't even occurred to him until just then and it somehow manages to make Derek feel even more vulnerable and uncomfortable than he already had.

His brow creases. Anything he can think of that would've been able to do what they'd done should've made him sicker or left him in more pain. Which means, he realizes, that they've figured out another way that he doesn't know and, therefore, can't proactively avoid.

Knuckles go white as he grips the bar that runs around the perimeter of the inside of the elevator car and he lets go quickly when he feels the metal sink inward a little as his fingers start to dent it a little under his unwittingly strong hold on it.

And then his thoughts shift abruptly and he looks back at her. How does she know? Why did that possibility occur to her and not to him? Does this girl know something he doesn't and is he walking into a trap by letting her "help" him right now?

"What makes you think they did research and it wasn't completely random?" he asks. That isn't suspicion so much as sheer curiosity. He'd been more comfortable, oddly enough, when he'd thought it had been random bad luck.

[polydeukes]

"Like ... superhuman stuff? Superpowers? I don't know."

But something she says there isn't the right thing. While the suspicion isn't outright, there's something about the way he's weighing her words that makes her think that maybe she should be a little more open about some stuff, versus continuing to be vague.

"Well ... the same suppressants or means of subduing someone aren't going to work on everyone." She weighs her options for a moment, before deciding to get a little more specific. "Like my world has humans, but it also has witches and vampires and werewolves, and the stuff that works on a vampire won't work on a werewolf and the stuff people assumes to work on them aren't going to one hundred percent work on them either. If they're going to kidnap this many people and keep them this carefully contained, then ... they'd have to know what they were doing. Have wolfsbane for the wolves and vervain for the vampires, all that."

She realizes in that moment that that's probably why Hope isn't here. With her accelerated healing, she probably heals too fast for any of the traditional supernatural sedatives to work efficiently. Maybe she's quietly destroying them as they speak and she'll get to go home soon.

Or maybe she's finally manage to make herself more of a special snowflake than Hope Mikaelson. Another thing she's managed to achieve that Lizzie always wanted and Josie never did. Great.

[duelo]

Derek's eyebrows lift at that. She doesn't sound ruffled at all about the idea of supernatural creatures and he can't decide whether that's a good thing or a bad thing. It could honestly be either. She could be fine with it because she's a good guy and she runs with wolves or she could be a hunter who hasn't seen the error of her ways, in which case, being honest with her could be especially dangerous.

"Or something completely different that isn't from anyone's world at all," he suggests, which might be unintentionally revealing too much, since it slips out when he's thinking to himself that wolfsbane can fuck a wolf up, but not like this stuff had messed with him. It's a different sort of disorientation.

He shakes his head a little and blinks slowly again as if pushing away the dregs of whatever they did to him. "This is my floor," he says when the doors open. "I'm pretty sure, anyway," he adds, just in case he's wrong. He's feeling better, but he's still not back at 100 percent.

"Do you know anybody like that?" he asks without a segue and, realizing belatedly that there's no context for that question, he backtracks a little. "With superpowers, I mean."

[polydeukes]

Josie nods, stepping forward to hold the door, intending to follow him until he's safe in his room, just to be on the safe side. Especially since he's still asking her questions, so it would probably be kind of rude and shady just to disappear.

"Yeah. A bunch actually." There's a pause as she weighs the pros and cons. "Myself included, technically."

Another pause.

"I'm a witch. But I'm the weird kind of witch where I can't use magic unless I channel it from something else so right now I'm basically useless." Which is not a feeling she likes.

rl has been crazy so sorry for the delayed response!

[duelo]

The glance he gives the girl is sharp and surprised when she includes herself in the mix. She offers the information almost casually, in his opinion — though, to be fair, mentioning it at all would seem casual to someone like Derek Hale — and it takes him off guard.

"And you're not afraid of telling people that?" he asks, unable to shake that shock from his face or voice when he asks it. The weight of the words, I'm a werewolf are so heavy that Derek has never said them lightly to someone he doesn't also know for a fact to be supernatural as well. That means she's either careless, knows he's a supernatural, or doesn't care because the culture around it where she comes from is completely different than things are in Beacon Hills.

He stops in the hall suddenly and looks at the door to his left. "That one," he adds almost off-handedly. He doesn't smell anyone else's scent hiding behind it. That means it must be his, he thinks. He'll know for sure when he tries to get in, of course, but it's a pretty decent indicator.

no worries, life happens

[polydeukes]

"You're not the first person I've told."

She says it as though it's more excuse than explanation, but honestly it's deeper than that. It's habit, a kind of honesty that she's accustomed to giving because she's used to being in places that are safe.

"I mean, yeah, it's scary but ... I go to a school that's full of people like me. Werewolves and witches and vampires. I'm so used to being open about what I am, to people knowing already, it's hard to not be sometimes." It's harder to walk it back then it is to spit it out.

She stops in front of his room and crosses her arms in front of her chest. "And we're not going to get out of here if we don't work together, right? It'll probably help to know what we can do. Good or bad, right now we're all we've got until we can get some kind of message out."

it's gonna get worse soon while I relocate for a job, apologies ahead

[duelo]

Derek's brow creases at that. He's not sure why that would be an answer, but then she goes on and he supposes he can understand that. He can't relate to it, but he can understand it. He finds himself feeling a little pang of jealousy when he thinks about that. It doesn't seem fair that he spent his formative years hiding the part of himself with which he most identified. Josie gets to just be herself.

"But you're telling me that not only are you a witch but that you don't even have your abilities to protect you from an adverse reaction to telling me that. What if I was a hunter?" he asks, realizing only after the words leave his mouth that it could be giving away his position as not-exactly-human, himself.

He sort of hates that she has a point that's really hard to contradict and he pats around his pockets both to look for his key and also to give himself an excuse to look distracted in the hopes that the aforementioned realization won't show in his expression.

good luck with your move! but as long as you want to tag it back, i will tag you back

[polydeukes]

"Maybe you are."

She gets that she just potentially exposed herself in a big way. Her dad would be super pissed, but her dad isn't here and she's going to have to find some way to stand on her own too feet. Derek is bigger and stronger than she is, and she's trained, it's true, but is she trained enough?

She takes a breath as she leans against the door frame, watching him because the way he phrased that doesn't make her think hunter. He sounds more concerned for her than he does menacing.

"And there's a difference between useless and defenseless."

Thank you! I'm having fun with this, so I'll keep tagging :)

[duelo]

"Is it big enough a difference to keep you alive?" he asks reflexively before finally finding the key and unlocking his door. The door opens into a room that doesn't look very lived in at all and that just tells Derek even more that he's in the right place because he has a feeling most people would have actually tried to make a home out of it if they'd been around long enough. Derek doesn't even know what home feels like anymore; he wouldn't know where to begin.

He frowns. "If they have the ability to subdue anybody, regardless of their abilities, then how is working together going to help anything? We'd just be running into walls; abilities aren't going to help, in that case."

Derek moves into the room and gestures that she can follow if she wants.

aww good i am too!

[polydeukes]

"I hope so."

Or at least enough to help her get away. And as a last resort she does have Hope's enchanted pendant, hanging around her neck, but she doesn't want to channel that magic until she absolutely has to.

She hesitates at the doorway, since he did just point out that he was a hunter and could be luring her in to kill her, but eventually she comes to the conclusion that if he was, he probably would have forced her in there - or likely he would have attacked her already - so she decides to take the risk. It would be rich for her to talk about trust and not trust him now.

"Is it really any better to work on our own? Maybe the abilities won't help, but maybe it will help think outside the literal box."

[duelo]

That response doesn't sound like certainty when taken at face value and Derek finds himself worrying a little for her. She was nice enough to help him find his way when he was still completely out of it, so maybe there's an obligation to protect her by suggesting that maybe she should be careful about who she tells.

Derek, to his credit, tries not to notice the way that she hesitates before letting herself in, because he doesn't want her to think that she's being watched as she's making her decision whether or not to trust him enough to enter. He makes his way further inside and sinks onto the bed, scrubbing his face with both hands and frowning.

The truth is that she has a good point, but Derek's never been great at thinking outside the box. He's so terrible about it, in fact, that he's gotten people killed failing to do so. He can't help thinking he's probably the last person in the world that she — or anyone — should be wanting to work with on this or probably anything else.

"I've found that it's usually better for other people if they don't work with me, but you're right, generally speaking," he concedes. "You can leave the door open if that makes you feel better," he adds to let her know that he's aware of the fact that it might not be the most comfortable situation he's invited her into, all things considered, especially with the trajectory of the conversation so far.

[polydeukes]

The open door is a good offer and she does leave it open before making her way in further, eyes scanning the rest of the room as she takes it all in. "Reminds me of someone I know."

She shouldn't keep lingering on Hope, but there's something about his seriousness that reminds Josie of her - it's hard not to leave an impression when you're constantly focused on how terrible the world is. Not that Hope hasn't earned it.

"But I think that if she can learn how to be a team player so can you. Believe me, we were pretty sure there was no hope for her for a while."

[duelo]

Derek lets his hands fall back to his lap and he lifts his eyebrows with interest when she says that his sentiment reminds her of someone she knows. He feels bad for that person, whoever he or she is because it's a horrible feeling knowing that spending time with him tends to only ever get others tangled up in danger. It makes for a pretty lonely existence, spending all of his time alone to protect the people around him. It's hard for Derek to imagine someone else living as he does.

"It's not about me not knowing how or not wanting to be a team player," he replies with a smile that doesn't match the look in his eyes, the latter of which is more saddened and resigned. "When someone needs me, I step up. I fight the good fight with the rest of them, back home."

Clearing his throat, Derek puts his hands on the mattress on either side of himself and leans back a little. His eyes flash an icy glowing blue for a split second. "What are you thinking? If I'm going to jump into this, you need a plan. I'm not really an idea man, but I can be the brawn if you can be a brain."

[polydeukes]

She thinks she sees his eyes flash, but it happens so fast she thinks it might be a trick of the light. It doesn't help that werewolves don't have blue eyes where she's from - it's all gold.

"Clarice and I theorized that if they're bringing us in and bringing food in and all that kind of stuff, there has to be some kind of entrance. We went poking around in the kitchens and stuff, but we haven't found anything yet. Right now we don't really need brawn so much as extra eyes."

Once they have a guaranteed exit, they can make the next plan to get past it.

[duelo]

"There's definitely a way out if there's a way and there's a way in if we're here," Derek agrees, nodding. The problem is that it isn't going to be that simple. If it were, he's certain that most people would've found their way back home by now. If Derek is honest, up until today, he'd sort of been thinking that staying in this place really might not actually be so bad. It isn't like he's got anything to go home to, after all.

Now he's not so sure.

"It won't be that easy," he replies, shaking his head. "There's no way it'll be that easy. It'll be somewhere that we don't have ready access to," he adds thoughtfully. If they're meant to be kept, in some cases against their will, the entrance and exit won't be somewhere that they can come and go as they please. At least, not if the people who run this place are smart, they won't.

[polydeukes]

"I don't think you're wrong there." Because he does have a point - if they're trying to keep them contained, then they'll want to hide all the possible exits. "But they can't hide them all forever. Maybe we should be paying more attention to whoever's running this place and how they come and go."