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September 2023 TDM
SEPTEMBER 2023 TDM
You wake up completely alone in an unfamiliar place. The forest around you is awash in the pleasant warmth of late summer. Any time-telling devices have stopped working and nothing looks familiar. But the visitors center has maps and information on the area, and with a bit of looking around you find the name of a nearby town: Ashbrook.
Welcome to Ashbrook's very first TDM. Take a look at our navigation page to get started, or skip right to the prompts below! TDM threads may be kept as game canon.
While Ashbrook is an invite-only game, you do not need an invite to play on the TDM.
Please direct any TDM-specific questions you may have here.
Welcome to Ashbrook's very first TDM. Take a look at our navigation page to get started, or skip right to the prompts below! TDM threads may be kept as game canon.
While Ashbrook is an invite-only game, you do not need an invite to play on the TDM.
Please direct any TDM-specific questions you may have here.
Of Monster and Men
What:
Lost in the woods with friends and 'friends'
When:
Throughout September
Warnings:
Stalking, paranoia, violence, being lost in the woods
With summer nearing its end and school already begun, it seems as if every teen's got a story to tell.
One of them that's pretty popular starts off like any other. Couple of kids go into the woods, one of them goes missing, and gets found later on — but they're not right, it's not them; the rest of the story goes as it goes and the group ends up dying or scared half to it by the week's end, tormented by the Goatman. The story has its variations depending on the person telling it. Sometimes there's a creature staring from the treeline; or unexplainable, not quite human voices calling from outside the campfire's light. No matter what the creature is hard to identify, and you can only really catch it by spotting oddities in the way it mimics its victims.
The stories aren't just stories, though. In any other town they might be, but in Ashbrook, they're warnings. You're cutting through the woods after class, or heading back to the car at the end of a camping trip, or maybe you're even a new arrival stumbling your way home. No matter what, there's an odd scent, sharp and metallic, that's following you around. It disappears when you think about it; maybe it's the mind playing its tricks after hearing the stories, or the stress of being somewhere unfamiliar?
But when you glance at your companion they're suddenly gone; look away and back and they're suddenly there again. It can happen a few times and it does. You try not to think about it, but it nags at the back of your mind — how well do you really know the person beside you? Are you sure they're safe? Are you sure they're really them? You decide to press on, sure you're imagining things.
Until you discover the eviscerated body of the person you've been traveling with.
You hear footsteps behind you.
TL;DR
- There's a Goatman that's said to roam the woods and slip unnoticed into groups, disguising itself as someone else. You won't ever catch it taking someone, just the mangled corpses it leaves behind.
- The Goatman has an acrid scent to it, metallic like blood in the back of your throat, but it doesn't linger enough to tell who it's coming from.
- The Goatman can take on the face of anyone at all. Identifying it is tricky, but possible — but it requires you the know the person it replaced well enough to spot the oddities.
- The Goatman will also play dead while disguised as a member of a group, in hopes of inspiring paranoia in its victims.
- Characters can experience visceral, gruesome deaths in this prompt, due either to the Goatman or to the paranoia of their traveling companions.
Ghost on the Shore
What:
An encounter on a foggy night
When:
Evenings in September
Warnings:
Drowning, compulsive behavior
As summer turns to autumn, fog from the rivers rolls steadily over the town in the early evenings, and only dissipates in the morning's rays. Visibility is low, but it's perfect if you want to go for a quiet evening stroll or pre-dawn jog. It's just you out there — you and one other person.
You don't know if they were there a second ago. And maybe it's just the cover of the fog making it hard to see but... they seem familiar. You feel drawn to follow the path they take. No matter how hard you try they don't slow or respond to yelling, and you never catch up. You eventually find yourself at the river's edge, one foot ahead of the other as you've seemingly started to tread the depths of it. You can't see the person you were following but you're certain they've gone into the water. You just need to follow them, and never mind how cold and swift the river runs.
But maybe that didn't happen. Maybe you thought you heard someone calling your name and snapped out of it. Your first instinct may be to get out of there and away from whatever had you hypnotized in the first place, but then you see it: someone else still chasing after a phantom.
If your first instinct isn't to help, as a decent person should, there's something like a soft voice as the wind caresses your ear, pleading for you not to let them near the water, not to let them sink... and you move, for whatever good enough reason your mind conjures, to help those who have yet to wake.
TL;DR
- Characters see a familiar face on foggy knights. They're driven to follow them, because who wouldn't want to see an old friend or even enemy?
- Unfortunately, characters will never reach that person. They can walk all they want, run or sprint, but the other will remain both unresponsive and just out of reach.
- Eventually, the phantom will attempt to lead their victim into the river, where they will likely drown if not rescued.
- Characters can be snapped out of this trance by a whisper on the wind they can't quite identify. Those that are will be compelled to seek out and help anyone still in a trance. Just don't wait too long, or you'll find the other party willingly taking a dive six feet under.
Toil and Trouble
What:
It's time to learn magic!
When:
Weekends in September
Warnings:
None
A more welcoming rumor is about the Witch of the Woods. The teens describe her as a stern but beautiful woman who's willing to teach anyone who comes seeks her out. Bring her a suitable offering and knock three times on her door in the middle of the night, and she'll answer to teach you what she knows of the supernatural and magic.
... Thankfully, no one has to find out how wrong that is right now. There are flyers, decorated childishly with bat and cauldron stickers, inviting the reader to the "Witch's Retreat". These flyers seem to appear when a Visitor glances away for a second to pick something up, or gently drift down right into their hands. Even the most skeptical, scoff-likely of Visitors will find their interest piqued in the days before it, mind drifting back to the promise of help in their unusual situation.
The retreat itself is headed by a middle-aged woman, who's narrowed gaze inspects the people who've come before she grumbles something under her breath and waves her hand.
"Look in the tree holes for your books and pick a partner to pair with — they aren't the kinds of things you'd want to test on your own. First rule: Always have a third hand. Second: Don't do it in public if you can help it. Final: Don't even try skipping ahead, because they won't answer you."
Whatever that means. It's time to learn magic.
The Witch — if pressed, she'll begrudgingly allow the students to address her as 'Ms. Spinner' — will force characters together with a surprisingly powerful shove of her hand if she passes and you aren't already paired with someone too, so don't think you can get out of this little exercise by going solo! You can't. As far as the promised spirituality goes... listen to the voice within, find your inner peace, and the rest'll come naturally. The Witch isn't too pressed for you whelps to understand off the bat, though she won't leave you out on a limb either.
TL;DR
- The characters — Visitors, as they're referred — are able to learn basic level magic with the help of the Witch.
- Pair up and practice. This is essential to the process, and the Witch will force unpaired individuals to partner up.
- Anything higher level magic won't come to the character; it may feel like there's a kind of blockage, even to those who're used to magic themselves.
- The Witch isn't open to questions about the town in particular (are you here to gossip or learn?) and won't answer anything about it, so stay on task if you want answers to your questions.
A Day In The Life
New Visitors may wake up in the woods, but that's not where they're going to be spending all of their time. They have homes, jobs, work, entire lives they need to attend to. They'd better get to it!
A Visitor will be instinctively drawn towards both their home and job; they will always know how to navigate the former, and may find the tasks they perform at the latter suspiciously easy. Outside of that, their life will be incredibly normal for the first few days. No one will acknowledge the strangeness in the woods, and a Visitor's insistence that they're not from around here will be treated like a joke.
And then suddenly it's weird again. They wake up one day and realize they have a different job, perhaps even a different home. They will lose any instinctive understanding they may have had of their old job and gain similar understanding of their new job. Visitors will retain all of their memories of their previous job, but if they bring it up to the townsfolk none of them will have any idea what they're talking about.
TL;DR
A Visitor will be instinctively drawn towards both their home and job; they will always know how to navigate the former, and may find the tasks they perform at the latter suspiciously easy. Outside of that, their life will be incredibly normal for the first few days. No one will acknowledge the strangeness in the woods, and a Visitor's insistence that they're not from around here will be treated like a joke.
And then suddenly it's weird again. They wake up one day and realize they have a different job, perhaps even a different home. They will lose any instinctive understanding they may have had of their old job and gain similar understanding of their new job. Visitors will retain all of their memories of their previous job, but if they bring it up to the townsfolk none of them will have any idea what they're talking about.
TL;DR
- This prompt is meant to allow players an opportunity to experiment with the role mechanic, without forcing them to retcon their threads if they receive a markedly different role after applying.
- Retconning is, of course, still an option - but if you want to give your character another bit of existential confusion, this is the prompt for you.
OOC Notes
If your character dies... While characters may die during the TDM, these deaths do not count towards a character's death count. If a character dies, they will vanish the instant they lose consciousness. The dead character will reappear safely back at the nearest visitors center, and both they and any witnesses will have only a hazy recollection of the event.
If a character TDMs but doesn't app... You have the option of having your character remember these characters. ICly, characters that TDM but do not apply will simply vanish without a trace under mysterious circumstances.
If you have any questions, please direct them here. Enjoy your new life.
If a character TDMs but doesn't app... You have the option of having your character remember these characters. ICly, characters that TDM but do not apply will simply vanish without a trace under mysterious circumstances.
If you have any questions, please direct them here. Enjoy your new life.
Ginko | Mushishi
ii. who you gonna call
iii. all around me are (un)familiar faces
(un)familiar faces ((also OMG YOU DID PUT IN GINKO YESSSSS, I hope this is okay!))
Part of her was terrified of running into said people while she was out and about, but she'd so far been lucky. And there were only so many places to go in an unfamiliar town when avoiding home.
Which is how she came to be in the cozy tea shop, overhearing an interaction that immediately piqued her curiousity. Wasn't from here, but the shopkeeper seemed to know him? That meant he was like her, right? Maybe?
Before she had time to talk herself out of it, she was quickly pushing her way forward, setting down enough money for his drink, one for herself, and some sort of bread snack
thank goodness the money system here was familiar, and her job seemed to pay well enough, forcing a smile and a laugh.]Ah, sorry ma'am! We heard a story from another town but the jokes don't seem to really translate, huh?
[She gently elbowed the tall man in the side, hoping her look said 'play along' well enough.]
works for me!!
...That's right. Sorry for the confusion.
[The explanation does seem to satisfy the shopkeeper to some extent, though as she turns to make the drinks, she grumbles very loudly that Ginko's too old to be playing childish pranks and if he's having a mid-life crisis or something he should do it elsewhere.
Once they have everything (and something called a 'receipt'), Ginko settles down with his tea at a nearby table and offers her a smile.]
Thank you.
no subject
It's still a near thing though, with how annoyed the person making their drinks seems, and Althea notes that reaction down for later. She's glad when they're both seated, and she sets her food down in front of her so that she can get situated with her drink. His thanks gets a big smile in response.]
Of course! [Then, quieter just in case the shopkeeper was listening in, she continued.] I'm just glad that worked. Who would have thought a town that seems like a magnet for weirdness would be so... vehemently against something weird happening to the inhabitants?
goats!
There's no guarantee that he can't overhear anything we say out loud. I think it's more likely that the only reason to defeat this would be to have people who know each other well enough to understand each other without words -- which might be harder, under the circumstances.
[ Given that Dazai has been recognized by people who he's never met in his life, and has been treated like he's an entirely different person... well. He hardly thinks he'll manage to figure out if anyone is imitating anyone else when he's busy trying to imitate this strange approximation of himself as seen through the eyes of strangers. ]
no subject
[Mysterious creatures leading to disappearances, or even situations where someone seemed to come back "wrong" are not unknown to Ginko. But such creatures are never omnipresent. There's ways to avoid them, ways to work around the danger.]
Sometimes familiarity can be all the more dangerous. People never want to believe their friends or loved ones are not what they seem, or that they have come to harm. Often, they'll have faith until it's too late.
[Even so. It doesn't hurt to be extra cautious, and so instead of heading on into the woods, he turns to double back a couple paces toward the Visitor's Center before looking expectantly back toward Dazai to follow.]
...But perhaps an agreed-upon gesture might be better. The visitor's center isn't far, and we could settle on one away from unwelcome eyes.
ii.
he thinks he sees ryouma in the fog ahead of him and isn't sure if he's desperate for something familiar among all the strangeness or if he just wants to kill him (as usual). izō is immediately sure he wants nothing to do with that sort of thinking, though, so he tugs his scarf up around his face more snugly and pushes on.
izō doesn't notice the water he's walking in or how it's soaking into his clothes. it's not until someone physically grabs him that he snaps out of it.
unfortunately, izō was raised in the streets and all that good stuff, which is all to say: nothing personal, helpful buddy, but izō's reflex is to swing. all things considered, it could be worse. at least he's unarmed.
also, despite all of the above, izō is swinging very blindly because he's not just going to admit something might've startled him!! he's not scared or anything (he totally is)!! ]
no subject
Settle down, [he insists, voice quiet but tone firm like steel, even as blood trickles from his lip.] You'll get swept up in the current if you go any further.
no subject
besides the grip on his arm, izō realises he's cold and soaked in knee-deep water and can already feel the tug of the current where they're standing. he looks around because none of this seems to be where he'd thought he was.
briefly, the whole strange reality of this place sinks in for a moment — mostly that people act like they've known him for years, and now ghostly figures that might want to drown him? — it's too weird. ]
Let go'a me! Do I look like an idiot?!
[ maybe don't answer that... ]
I ain't goin' nowhere!
[ he can't stand the thought that he might've shown weakness, so he employs his usual deflection tactic. ]