TDM #003

[bequiet]

TEST DRIVE MEME
You wake, standing. A thick, muddy red dust coats your skin and clothes - it sticks to your tongue and blocks your vision. Inhale and it chokes you, exhale and your breath puffs out in front of your face in a transparent maroon cloud. It tastes of copper, tangy and harsh. Movement is difficult, every limb tingles and aches. Look to your left, your right. Evenly spaced in each direction stands another person indistinguishable in every way from the next. You're disoriented and lethargic, unable to grasp onto a single thought. A pinprick of light blooms ahead and grows steadily larger; a door has opened.

Hands grip your wrists, push at the small of your back and guide you out of the darkness into a room with four walls and a thin, sagging ceiling. The plaster is peeling, the air is musty, and the floor is slick. White plastic piping juts up from the center and curves into multiple spouts, clean water flowing in uneven streams. Those hands pull your clothes off and clear the dust from your body, redress you in handsewn jumpsuits.

A finger is pressed to your lips. Kind eyes meet your own and a single word is whispered - hush.

Led out of the room in a line, you’re taken down a short hallway and into another, much larger room. There’s a woman waiting for you there, a child hugging her leg, and a cloth bag in her hands. She reaches in and pulls out a device, passes one to each of you. Once finished, she begins to move both hands in graceful gestures, a language. One of the people who helped you lifts their device and the screen lights up, tracks the woman’s hands. Letters appear on the screen and you understand the device’s purpose. She tells you what she knows and it’s not much.

This world is haunted. Noise attracts them, so it is not allowed. Communication is through body language, soundless writing, and the device. She tells you that your feet must be light and your mouth never used. There is a community outside these doors, where you can survive together, but only if you agree to one thing: complete and total silence. You'll have time to talk it over. Acceptance allows you to journey outside. The ground is marked in pathways of sand, lining the paths to each building and everywhere in between. You notice that the locals hold their devices always, aloft and glance to it often. It will not vibrate or make a sound to signal a message.

Notices appear. Rules. Guidelines. Feet on the sand and never anywhere else. To open a door you brush your fingers along the hinges - oiled and you may enter. If not, take the brush from the can sitting nearby and coat the metal with the dark liquid. You're to settle into your new home.

Caught me unawares
Content Warnings: Confusion, disorientation
Themes: Survival, horror, it's like groundhog day

The ending of the floor has caught me unawares. This must be the reason why I’m falling down the stairs.

That night, when you fall asleep, you dream of your life before The Quiet Place. At first it's the happiest moments of your life played on repeat, over and over. Everything good and sweet and fun. The second night, it's much the same. You go to bed anticipating another restful and pleasant sleep. But on the third night it changes.

For everyone, it starts the same. There's a long hallway with a door at the end. You walk towards it with nowhere else to go. You twist the knob and when you step forward, the floor ends and you fall. Falling lasts for seconds, minutes, or hours and when you land, it's with a jolt and a cloud of red dust all around you. There's someone else next to you, stumbling, coughing and choking on that familiar dirt that coats your tongue and mouth. When your eyes meet, everything blurs and you're falling again - this time, when you land, it's inside that dream from the first night. Only you're not alone. They're with you. The only way out is to experience the dream together. And when you do wake up, for real, that same red dirt is on your hands.

Falling down the stairs
Content Warnings: Confusion, disorientation
Themes: Survival, horror, it's like groundhog day

The ending of the floor has caught me unawares. This must be the reason why I’m falling down the stairs.

That night, when you fall asleep, you dream of your life before The Quiet Place. At first it's the worst moments of your life played on repeat, over and over. Everything bad and sour and awful. The second night, it's much the same. You go to bed anticipating another restless and dreadful sleep. But on the third night it changes.

For everyone, it starts the same. There's a long hallway with a door at the end. You walk towards it with nowhere else to go. You twist the knob and when you step forward, the floor ends and you fall. Falling lasts for seconds, minutes, or hours and when you land, it's with a jolt and a cloud of red dust all around you. There's someone else next to you, stumbling, coughing and choking on that familiar dirt that coats your tongue and mouth. When your eyes meet, everything blurs and you're falling again - this time, when you land, it's inside that nightmare from the first night. Only you're not alone. They're with you. The only way out is to experience the nightmare together. And when you do wake up, for real, that same red dirt is on your hands.

OOC
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NAVIGATION

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Comments

[isherarmor]

[Oh gods, how to proceed... Well, for one she'll be as brief as she can. She has questions on her own and though she's far less rattled than her first trip down multiverse lane, she doesn't feel particularly safe out in the open. It's a shock (though a good one) to see her sister - so her thoughts are scattered and it's a little hard to pin down the details just now. She sets her mouth, blinks back he wetness rom her eyes and thinks.]

Not long after Joffrey died Aunt Lysa tried to throw me down from the Moon Door. Next I was face down in the snow in a place like this. Another world. Called Anatole. A "multi-verse"?

[Is that even right? she's having trouble remembering some things once removed from them.]

I lived years there. A long time.

[She omits being reunited with her parents, with Arya - it's too much to throw at this Arya, had possibly been tto much to throw at the other, she thinks, and it's not relevant just now.]

And then another place. Less like that more like this, but a hell. One of the seven, maybe. I don't know. A year, maybe more. Another after that, called Clock, for another year. But then I went home.


[Was Westeros even home? She doesn't know anymore. It had been - and then after Anatole it had ceased to be - especially when she thought she'd died, and that everyone she'd known and loved were dead, too. But then...]

I thought I'd died by Lysa's hand, but I hadn't. I was hiding in near plain sight as Petyr Baelish's bastard daughter, Alayne, my hair stained dark with dye. Next thing I knew I was back in Clock. It was like a blink of an eye to the people who missed me, but I was gone a long time in the Vale. A long time as Alayne. Now I had all these memories, and I wasn't Sansa Stark anymore but Alayne Stone. I felt older, but I had not spent all those years in any other place, not in that ...version of time (?), so I was younger again, stuffed full of half buried memories from three worlds that suddenly had never happened. Until all my wounds came back and the memories became clear, and then I didn't know what to think. Or who to be. I was very wary and very confused, and I asked someone to find me dye there only it didn't rinse out, I had to wait or it to grow. And then this place.

[She holds up a piece of it with her maimed hand, inspecting it and letting it fall.]

I sound mad, but I swear I am not.

[list_maker]

[Arya reads Sansa's tale. There's a clear look of skepticism as she reads on. It's hard to track it all. And doesn't make very much sense when she knows she's only just seen Sansa before she'd arrived here. Surely she would have said if she'd spent a great deal of time in other worlds? Perhaps it had been too hard to speak on? But no, that didn't feel right either.

But some of what she's says sounds familiar. Things that did happen to Sansa in Westeros. She did travel with Little Finger, did stay in the Eyrie, but she didn't think it was for so long. No, she'd been married off to Ramsey Bolton. And then there's her hand. Arya's staring at it openly.

This is doesn't make any sense at all. But she can tell Sansa is speaking truth. This isn't some fanciful lie. Still-- how?] Do those who're mad actually know they are? [They didn't usually, did they?] I don't think you're mad. I just don't really understand it.

[Part of her wonders. Is this Sansa even really her sister? If she didn't experience the same things. Was there an Arya out there, experiencing another set of events like her own but similarly askew?]

[isherarmor]

[She knows how it likely sounds - (Arya's expression confirms it) and that's not nearly all of it - but there's little choice, and she has no time or patience for hiding things again, not from family. And certainly not here.]

I'd wager half of them do, at least. I don't understand the why of it, but I can say that I've met people more than once, sometimes in the same world, sometimes in the next, and they don't always come from the same time. :-?

I've met Jon three times. The very last time he was older. And when I saw Tyrion, to me he was still my husband, yet he had no memory of it. It hadn't happened to him yet. Or perhaps it might not have at all. That doesn't make it any clearer, does it?

[She sees that open stare, no longer self conscious, but aware of how out of place her injuries might seem.]

I gave up a piece of myself in exchange for Lady's life in Anatole. The scar above it is a brand, from the hell where we were marked for our supposed sins.

What was the last thing you remember?

[She could answer that, and she well might if asked. Yes and yes.]

[list_maker]

It's all as clear as mud. But I'll have to take you for your word. For now. I can't deny what it is that I'm seeing.

...how old are you now? [Are they nearly the same age now? How odd.]

[A piece of herself for Lady? But Lady is dead. But the dead can arrive here, she knows. Why not this other place she'd been too?] Could you give up a piece of yourself to bring back anyone? [She'd have brought back Father, Mother, Rickon, and Robb too... yes, she'd have cut off all of her limbs to do that.]

We were HOME, Sansa. You, Bran, me. Jon was on his way back... with Daenerys Targaryen. [The look on her face made it clear how dubious she felt about that situation. Targaryen's for as much as Arya idolized the dragon riders, they were not to be trusted. Especially for the Starks. ]

[isherarmor]

[She blinks, stunned by several things - by the idea they'd been together again, that they'd found Jon and he was somehow away from the Wall and wait. He had died there, he'd told her so when he'd returned to Clock, when they'd met in the crypts. It doesn't make sense unless it's a different way that the events had played out. Unless he'd returned to he Wall after his time at Winterfell? That doesn't sound right, either. Had Daenerys betrayed him? She'd met the girl three lifetimes ago and found her ultimately trustworthy and kind, and had been in her debt as Dany had saved her father's leg. And Rickon, what about Rickon? She'd not seen him in Anatole either - but he'd been a baby, then.]

Home? The three of us back in Winterfell?? But not Rickon? Are the Boltons and the Freys gone from it, then?

No, not anyone. There would have been nothing left of me my first week there if that had been so. Lady showed up all on her own after I prayed for her. But we'd gone somewhere dangerous and she was badly injured. I gave it up then.

I was nineteen, but now I'm ...I lost at least two years. I don't really know. I don't know if it even matters.

But Daenerys. Daenerys Targaryen is coming back with Jon? For what reason?

[WHAT EVEN. It's her turn to look utterly confused.]

[list_maker]

[She blinks at the question of Rickon. Arya's become so accustomed to loss that learning that he died hadn't surprised her. She cared, deeply, but she hadn't cried. She only wished she'd been there to see Ramsey die.] The Boltons are dead. And the Freys.

Rickon...[She does pause because she knows this will hurt her sister and she doesn't want to do that.] he's at Winterfell, buried next to father. Ramsey Bolton killed him.

[Arya listens to the rest. Lady back from the dead. Sansa's lost years. It's a lot but she's starting to move past disbelief and into acceptance.]

She came from Essos, landed at Dragonstone with an army of Dothraki and Unsullied. And now she's coming back with Jon to help fight the dead. [There's a gleam in Arya's eyes then.] With her dragons. [Arya doesn't know that one of the dragons is dead, killed by the Night King. that's information that's be kept from ravens lest Cersei or those close to her find out the Targaryan's loss.]

[isherarmor]

continued here.