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meme: test drive

[meme] test drive

September Test Drive is here!

Tag into this post with characters you're thinking of apping to the game (characters who are not currently in-game or currently reserved by someone else). It can be just a tag, a brief EP, whatever you want. You can be new to the game, or simply want to test out a fresh pup. Tag each other with these characters or those already in game, and have fun.

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There’s a quaint wooden wagon in Petros Park.

Nobody really knows who owns it or where it came from. It has a pitched roof and tiny windows and a ramp leading up through the door, and it’s attached by a hitch to a small hatchback car, which has driven a short way onto the grass of the park by one of the walking paths to allow the wagon to be nice and visible to anyone and everyone walking. It parked there early in the morning on Saturday, and it stays there until late in the evening Sunday.

The exterior of the wagon is painted in cheerful colors and decorated with hanging planters; there’s a table set under an awning that extends from the wagon’s side, on which a selection of books rests to draw the eye. A sign above the door reads Tiny Bookshop: Used and Rare Volumes in a carefully carved script. The interior of the wagon is a bit cramped, with shelves against the walls filled with rows upon rows of all manner of books; some even seem to be unpublished manuscripts, hand-bound with care. A counter with a register hides boxes of what is probably more books, and a cat lays on a shelf above one of the windows, tail flicking.

Its arrival Saturday morning seems to have prompted other booksellers to the same purpose. WIthin a few hours, tables with pop-up canopies are set up, each with stacks and boxes and stands of books of their own. Some are well-loved, dog-eared and crack-spined. Some are so new they creak when they’re opened. Many have names or messages scrawled in the front cover or title pages; some are even signed by the author. Perhaps a rare or coveted first edition is among these shelves?

When the tiny bookshop and the other tables begin to draw a crowd, food vendors arrive as well, ready to capitalize on the chance to sell wares of their own: hotdogs, burritos, kebabs, empanadas. There isn’t a specific theme except one: easily held one-handed. How else can you buy and read books, after all, if you’re eating with both hands?

Into the evening Saturday night, as the sun sets and after, lanterns are placed out to encourage the city’s nocturnal denizens to partake. Some canopies have built-in stringlights that invite a sense of whimsy to the space, lighting the tables beneath in a gentle, sometimes twinkling glow.

And by Sunday night, the wagon is packed back up and the hatchback trundles out of the park and away, leaving the tables and food vendors behind with the thinning crowd.

[ Bookfair gathering! Inspired by the video game Tiny Bookshop, bc I found it incredibly wholesome and cute. It’s timed for the entire weekend, with plenty of opportunity for nocturnal pups, too! Tag in, tag each other, tag around and have fun! Open for as long as it needs to be (aka forever!) ]

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(no subject)

September 7, 2025:

Jack Abbot arrives in Darrow. Robby is there to attempt to explain things

[ HERE | ongoing | profanity ]

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(no subject)

Jack had been in this city -- Darrow -- for approximately 36 hours. In that time, he’d gotten his information packet, found his apartment, and done a whole lot of walking around trying to understand what was where. Robby had done his best to explain the unexplainable, which was fortunately something that they both did regularly, and Jack had accepted that at least for now, this was where he was. His mind and his body were still on nights, which he wanted to maintain, if he could, but there were plenty of errands and little tasks that couldn’t be avoided when someone moved to a new town, involuntarily or not, and most of those had to happen during the day. He would need to find a doctor, a therapist, a prosthetist, and a PT, at a minimum. After all that was handled, he could find out if the hospital here was hiring. Robby had been confident they’d hire Jack, but if they didn’t need another ER attending, they wouldn’t be creating a position just for him, no matter how much Robby talked him up. He’d have to see if there was an urgent care or standalone ER somewhere. It didn’t seem large enough for that, but what did he know?

For now, though, he was adding a new task to his mental list. He'd gotten food for his apartment and bought some clothes so he could change out of the black scrubs he'd arrived wearing. Now he needed something that kept his coffee warm and could survive being dropped, but he didn’t want anything too fancy. He just needed a decent tumbler and some coffee to put in it, and he was looking through the options at a little coffee shop near his new apartment (which did not have an Ocean View, but it wasn’t far, either). He picked up a matte black one that came with three separate lid options and considered it. He wasn’t sure why he needed three separate lids for one tumbler. That just seemed overly complicated.

“Have you tried any of these?” he asked the person next to him. They were in the coffee shop, so they might have an idea or an opinion. Or, with his recent luck, they’d just be there to get a gift card and had never had coffee in their life.

[[First public post for Jack! Find him in any coffee shop you like wearing a solid-colored t-shirt and cargo pants. Open till this says otherwise.]]

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There’s a naked woman in the street.

Gwenny was leaving her martial arts class — she and Neil had agreed that it’s less to learn how to fight as to learn when to fight — and headed to her bus stop when she’d seen her. It’s hard to fucking miss, if she’s honest.

The lady is standing there, utterly still. Her skin is a pale, grayish color. Her hair is in sopping black hanks. Her tits sag flat against her ribs and her belly is soft between the wings her of hips. There’s a streak of blood running up from her navel, up her breast bone, up her throat.

Gwenny swallows hard.

( cut for horror-typical graphic depiction of a dead body )

Nobody else can see her.

That isn’t really a surprise so much as it is a disappointment. Every time Gwenny remembers she can see them and most other people can’t, she’s reminded of how lonely it can be, and how lonely it must be, for the ghosts.

Gwenny tugs her phone out and taps out a text — ghost shit, hang on — and then puts it away again. When she looks back up, though, the ghost is gone.

“Shit,” she mumbles.

“Hhhhhhh…”

Gwenny yelps and spins, flailing away when the ghost hisses so close to her ear. She tries to compose herself — nobody else can see her, so everyone just saw a tween shriek at nothing — and frowns.

“You can’t just scare me like that,” she scolds. The ghost’s eyes flick over her face, and Gwenny almost thinks she can feel how wet they are.

“Hhhhh,” the ghost tries again.

Oh, fuck. She wants to talk, but can’t. She doesn’t have any fucking lips.

Three minutes later, Gwenny’s playing a really bad game of charades with a faceless naked lady in the middle of the street.

“No, egg, I got it,” she says, brow pulled low in focus. The ghost’s hands are cupped between them, but when she says that, they drop again. “I just don’t know what about eggs. You gotta give me more than that.”

[ Gwenny is trying to communicate with a truly horrifying-looking ghost, potentially about something incredibly mundane. If you can see ghosts, you’ll probably catch pretty quick that she means no harm and is just restless and worried about something. If you can’t see ghosts… well, then you’ll definitely see a twelve year old talking to the open air with exasperation and growing impatience XD timed to the afternoon! Feel free to say Gwenny texted your pup or that you stumbled across the scene yourself. Open until this reads otherwise! ]

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It was sort of an accident.

Last week, Mira had been scrolling through suddengram flicks, those short little videos that look like instagram reels but for some reason just aren't, and she'd seen a video that'd annoyed her so much she'd had to try to correct it.

Someone had commented on another video, a video Mira hadn't bothered watching, asking how to tell if someone liked them. The poster of the video answered them in another one — the one Mira had seen, the comment just a bubble in the video's overlay — and had given the worst advice Mira had ever seen. ‘Get your friends to find out’? ‘Stage an encounter to make them jealous’? What the hell kind of juvenile, schoolyard advice was that? She hadn't even meant to start recording, but the next thing she knew, she was giving the video a whole dressing-down.

“Just ask them,” she'd continued, pacing through the park with her earbud mic hanging down by her chin. “Life isn't a movie, and acting like it is will just make everything worse.” She'd said more — it'd ended up being a nearly three-minute-long video, even after trimming down some of the dead-air where she’d tried to get her thoughts in order — and then after she'd hit ‘post’, she'd sort of put it from her mind.

And then it had blown. Up.

The next morning, she'd checked her phone and had seen that her suddengram had hundreds of notifications. Her video had what felt like a billion comments under it, whole chains of people agreeing or disagreeing with her, with each other, with themselves, and Mira had sort of lost herself in reading through them all.

Most of them were basic. ‘Yas queen!’ and stuff like that. Some of them argued with her or defended the original video.

One of them had stood out to her a lot.

lol wish I had someone like you giving me advice when I was a teen

She knows what that’s like. God does she know what that’s like.

And it's probably kind of dumb, but here she is, sitting outside and scratching in a composition notebook like she’s trying to be Zoey writing lyrics.

Except she's spitballing channel names, instead.

~~Dear Diary~~
~~Real Talk~~
Reel Talk - bring insta back?
AMA ???
ugh this is so dumb

The last one isn't a title, but a comment she scribbles down as she rolls her eyes. This is so dumb, she thinks. Why would she ever think she’d be the right person for this?

That one comment comes back to her, though. wish I had someone like you giving me advice when I was a teen. Mira considers that for a few moments, then drags her pen through the letters in a sharp side-to-side. Whether or not this is dumb, her words touched one person. One is enough. One is more than none.

Ask Mira, she writes, and then sighs and tilts her head.

“I dunno, maybe simple is just what it needs,” she says, mostly to herself but loudly enough that anyone walking by would hear her.

[ overhear Mira talking to herself at any outdoors seating area of your choice — cafe, park, beach, wherever! — at any time of your choice! She’s often blunt and a little abrasive with strangers, but don’t let that stop you from nosing in on her business XD feel free to have observed her recording herself last week in the park, feel free to have seen her video and recognize her, or just notice that she’s a tall, pink-haired bad bitch talking to herself in public XD up to you! Open to all until this reads otherwise ]