Test Drive #18

[powersthatbe]

Welcome to the Synodiporia Test Drive Meme! Below the cuts there are two new prompts, and here are the prompts from previous test-drives, which you’re still welcome to use in this post. When you comment, be sure you specify what prompt you want to play with, and please put up your own threadstarter—it makes for a much more friendly environment that a forest of bare toplevels! OCs are especially welcome! Please take a quick look at our Directory & familiarize yourself with the concept and setting of the game before you jump in.

Our upcoming app round runs March 24th–April 1st. Our next Jaunt will be Olympus Upended: a classical myth and fantasy adventure, set in a Trojan War-era Greece full of gods, monsters, and titans. During the Jaunt, the Olympians and their chosen heroes must deal with the machinations of fate when their powers and domains begin to ebb and flow, faltering or in some cases transferring to others.

Prompt #47 features a liminal space where Travelers find themselves floating down the Tunnel of Love.
Prompt #48 features a liminal space with beds, balloons, and no ground to be seen.
Prompt #49 features a space walk set in the universe from the Escape From Junkworld jaunt. Having escaped the destruction of the prison planet Junkworld Gehenna, these refugees from the four major spacefaring races--crystalline Hecatites, psychic-but-prone-to-hallucination horned Diabolin; scaled Gorgons with their petrifying abilities and tentacled hair, and your bog-standard humans, newcomers to the stars--now finally have a moment where they can slow down.

#47

You find yourself in a boat in a long tunnel, light deliberately kept low. Oh, the sides and the ceiling glitter and sparkle and the dioramas you occasionally pass seem to glow with their own inner light, but unless you’re naturally adapted for low-light, it’s going to take your eyes a little while to adjust. Once they do--or perhaps even before they do--you’ll find that you’re not alone in the boat. There’s someone riding next to you. Maybe they’re a friend among the Travelers, maybe someone you’ve grown to love. Maybe they’re a perfect stranger. Maybe they’re even someone you hate. They’re still stuck in the boat with you.

Once your eyes have adjusted properly, you’ll see that the boat you’re both in is made of chocolate--white, dark, or milk--and carved in the shape of a swan. The ‘water’ it floats down is no such thing, but instead pink champagne. Those dioramas in the wall? They’re dramatizations of various moments of passion and romance in the love-lives of you and your fellow Travelers.

Just when it seems that you’ve been in the tunnel forever, it suddenly widens into a much larger room with a ceiling open to the sky, the underground waterway flowing through the center, constricted until there's barely water in the side, so that you can easily disembark from your swanboat during the minute it takes for the boat to glide through the room, which seems to be some sort of cafe. A ‘Group Date’ cafe, whatever that is, according to the sign. Instead of food on the menu board, there are instead lists of questions to ask your date. The floor is tiled with conversation hearts. The furniture, like the swan boats, is made of chocolate. Finally, the walls are made of valentine’s cards, addressed to initials and signed by Roman numerals, all in the same loopy pink cursive that makes up the questions menu.

#48

You find yourself in bed. In fact, each Traveler starts out in their own private bed, which is suspended from a floating hot air balloon (minus the gas burner) and both balloon and bed are decorated vaguely to the taste of the Traveler therein. It’s a lovely, comfortable bed, perfect for sleeping or just plain lazing around, and it allows a perfect view to all the other beds suspended in the sky--and the doors to created spaces as well, themselves suspended from balloons of their own.

There is no ground in this liminal space. Sky above, sky below, and the great crowd of balloons which are more or less level. Sometimes they drift close enough so that they bump together and you can easily move from one to the other, though of course they’ll soon drift away from each other.

Of course, this being liminal space, there’s no reason why you can’t walk through the thin air or even fly to the other balloons and doors, as long as you realize that’s an option. Just take care you don’t panic and forget you can, because once you forget you can fly the only thing you can do is fall. At least if you do fall into the endless sky, you’ll just have a few harrowing seconds to panic before you land right on your balloon bed again.

#49

It’s been a week since the Empress of Moths reached its destination. The planet below, with no official name, merely numerical designation referring to its star, is not exactly ideal. Its temperature is on the lower end of what humans will tolerate; its bedrock is not the best suited for Gorgon caves; there are few natural resources for the Diabolins to exploit; and its external geology isn’t quite to Hecatite tastes. It is, however, an M-type planet that will support intelligent life and has, in fact, supported a small smuggler’s base for quite some time.

Despite all these shortcomings, it’s much preferable to the radioactive slag heap the refugees formerly called home. Now that arrangements have been made with the local smugglers, most of the refugees have left the ship on outrider shuttles and it’s immediately noticeable how much less crowded the Empress is--even with a few of the local smugglers aboard after the negotiations.

But then, not everyone plans to stay planetside. There’s a sizable contingent who want to keep flying with the Empress, finding work among the stars to support their newfound home. It’s why she still hovers over the planet, instead of coming to an undignified landing on the surface. And before the Empress leaves, her new crew and any visitors currently aboard (smugglers and Investigating Travelers alike) have the opportunity to undertake a space walk together. It’s time to don one’s space suit and helmet, attach one’s air supply, and take a step outside into the beautiful, cold vacuum of the sea of stars.

Comments

[pearlyspirit]

47

This is probably not the kind of place one should put a ten year old child with anyone, but Lovers clearly doesn't care. And while Pearl is a bit confused at quite a bit of it, she is looking over the pictograms on the wall and the couples who are clearly actual couples in other boats.

"It's so ~romantic~!"

49

The tiniest Hecatite of them all is a little bit nervous about this whole thing, looking out at the others anxiously and down at her own space suit. Pearl really like space, for the little time she's been in it, but she knows basically nothing about it and--

"I--is it safe?"

49

[thornsofmalkav]

"As long as you follow the proper precautions," Charoite promises her, bending down to put herself level with the young Hecatite. "Do you want me to check you over so you've got everything on correctly?"

[pearlyspirit]

Pearl smiles shyly, but nods. "Yes please," she says politely, putting the remainder of the space suit on before standing very still so Charoite could check.

[thornsofmalkav]

Suit sealed, check. Helmet on, check. Air supply attacked, check. Tether to haul her back to the ship, check.

Check, check, check, check, check.

"You're good, Pearly," Charoite says, grinning at her. "Want me to come out with you, so you'll have company?"

[pearlyspirit]

"Yes please!" As exciting as it might be, and even though she double checked, Pearl isn't quite sure about going into space by herself.

...And it's good to hold on to someone else's hand when you step out, right?

[thornsofmalkav]

"Great! Let me put my suit on, okay? And then you can check me over."

It takes a little while for Charoite to put on her suit, but soon enough she's got her helmet on and everything. She crouches so that Pearl can get a better look at everything.

[pearlyspirit]

Pearl takes the check very seriously, looking over Charoite's entire suit before nodding in determined approval. "It looks all right to me!" Hopefully she didn't miss anything...

47

[runs]

"You mean gross."

There is only one place where being all lovey-dovey and making out are appropriate, in her opinion, and that is when it distracts the people in question so she can sneak past them.

[pearlyspirit]

"No, I don't! Love is very important!" Pearl is very insistent on this. "I-- I'm going to look for a picture of Mr. Nick and Mystic Maya! And if there isn't one I'll draw one for them!"

[runs]

"You can love people without kissing them. And most people who kiss each other don't do it because they're in love but because one or both of them get paid for it." Her view of this might be just slightly skewed by the people that she does and doesn't run into due to her job.

"And it's gross."

[pearlyspirit]

Kitty please don't teach Pearl about prostitution..... "That's not true at all!!! Most people kiss each other because of love, not money!" She believes this deep in her soul. "I mean, it's true that you don't have to kiss the people you love but it's different... it's a different kind of love!"

[runs]

"...Maybe rich people." After all people who kiss others for money usually are poor or at least at the lower end of the social spectrum. "And it's a better kind of love. Because you don't have to do gross things and you can't get pregnant from it."

[pearlyspirit]

"I'm pretty sure Mr. Nick isn't rich..." He certainly complains about money enough. "No, they're just different! Both are wonderful, and very special!"

[otomechapilot]

Sara takes a look at how old the kid is, decides against full power to sarcasm, and just says "I guess it's inspired some couples."

As an afterthought, she adds "The chocolate is good here, though. Way better than the stuff we had at base."

[pearlyspirit]

"Mm. We didn't eat much chocolate back at the village, but sometimes Mystic Maya would give me some when we left..." The Kurain Village's choice of sweets was more along the lines of 'jawdroppingly large strawberry cakes.'

[otomechapilot]

"That's nice of her," she says and means it. "What does being a Mystic mean? I'm not from around here." It occurs to her that this definitely is not a village. "Or from there, huh."

[pearlyspirit]

"Mystic Maya is going to be the next head of the village," Pearl says, and then realizing that no one here knows about the Kurain Technique, elaborates, "Um, the girls in our family are spirit mediums! And Mystic Maya is the best."

[otomechapilot]

Spirit medium. It's something Sara has to suss out from context, and her face does some visible gear-turning before she figures it out. "They can talk to spirits? Like dreams or like ghosts or what? That's..."

Really cool, her face says. "Really helpful," she says.

[pearlyspirit]

Pearl beams in delight. "Yeah! We channel the spirits into our bodies, so they can talk to people again. It can be kind of dangerous sometimes though..."

She trails off, expression growing sad for a moment as she remembers the most recent examples of this before gaining a determined expression on her face. "But I'm gonna grow up and be a great summoner, just like Mystic Maya! I'm going to do my very best!"

47

[awitchdidit]

"I have to say, it's exactly the sort of thing I'd expect from her," Beatrice says, sarcasm tempered by the sight of a kid being so excited.

"You must be new here. I see our hosts continue to find people from a variety of walks of life, judging from that uniform of yours," she observes.

[pearlyspirit]

Pearl smiles, nodding. "Um... I was here for one of the- the Jaunts? But then I guess I kind of went somewhere else for a little bit..." Not that she'd really had much of a chance to get her bearings before then, but she at least has enough context not to be completely panicking.

"This is the uniform for the Kurain Channeling Technique!" she explains, pleased to be talking about that, "I'm still not the best at it, but I'm going to work hard to get better! I like your dress, though..." It looks like something from one of those shows Mystic Maya likes.

[awitchdidit]

"That does seem to happen. People who come in in fits and starts instead of all at once...," she says, but more interestingly, "Channeling Technique? As in the channeling of otherworldly beings?"

She smiles nearly genuinely at that. "How very interesting! As for my dress...you could say it's the uniform of a Witch."

[pearlyspirit]

"Otherworldly...?" Hm. Pearl's not quite sure if that's right. "Um, I guess kind of. We channel the spirits of the dead into our bodies so they can be in the world again for a little while." She's very chipper about this for a nine year old, but then again Beatrice is probably used to that.

Her answer gets wide, curious eyes out of Pearl though. "A-- a witch?"

[awitchdidit]

"Aha...how very interesting," she says. "I've been called upon in the past because someone wished to speak with a departed loved one, but that's a particular spell that never occurred to me..."

She draws herself up a bit, after considering that, eagerly receiving Pearl's attention. "That's right. Beatrice, the Golden and Endless Witch, at your service, at least for the duration of this boat ride."

Which for all she knows could be a week or two. Thanks Arcana.

[pearlyspirit]

Pearl is now suitably distracted by the presence of a witch. "I've never met a real witch before..." A magician, yes, but not a witch. "But, um... witches are bad in a lot of stories... You're not bad, are you?" She can punch you if you are!!