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synodiporia_ooc2014-02-05 08:29 am
powersthatbe) wrote in synodiporia_ooc2014-02-05 08:29 am
Entry tags:
Test Drive #0.
Welcome to the Synodiporia Test Drive Meme! Below the cut there are four prompts to get you started: the first is if you’d like to test what intro-ing a new character is like, the second if you’d like to just chat and get CR with other prospective players just before the game’s starting event takes place, and the third and fourth for threaders looking for more active challenges to play in the game’s backstory - a bit of a look at what getting involved in this game’s plot would look like.
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 than a forest of bare toplevels!
Before you start, we’d like you to please take a quick look at the game’s Concept, its Rules, and the Liminal Space & Previous Universes pages, just to give you the background, so you know what you’re getting into. And if you’re looking for more information, the Directory is here and the Reserves page is here.
Have fun!
Prompt #1: Liminal Space: New Arrivals
It seems to you that you’ve just stepped through a door, and you can feel the faint breeze of it blowing behind you.
You’ve just stepped into a mansion as imagined by MC Escher. This is the grand foyer, and zigzagging staircases with gilt balustrades curl impossibly along the corners, leading to a ballroom on the right wall, a theater on the left, or a fire-lit banqueting hall on the ceiling, far more rustic than the rest of the mansion looks. The far wall is a scattered collection of doors and windows facing all directions and opening who-knows where. Outside the windows you can see a beach, a mist-shrouded forest, and a starry sky. One door has a sheaf of papers nailed to it. Another has blood trickling out from beneath the doorframe.
When you look behind you, however, there is no door there. Nor, in fact, is there a wall in the traditional sense. Instead, there’s a marble-tiled bath-house.
In all of these places, whatever direction they happen to be facing with respect to tradition gravity, are people in strange clothing. Most of them seem to be looking relatively bored or restless, and only a very few seem at all bothered by the notion that the laws of physics seem to be being held in abeyance - mostly, the people standing nearest to you.
Most disturbing of all, beside the quiet murmur of conversation in your ears, you can also hear voices casually exchanging small talk inside your head.
After a moment, there’s a lull in most of the audible conversations, and a large portion of the room turns and looks your way. Someone -one of the voices in your head - says
Look at that. A new pack of Fools just arrived.
Prompt #2: Liminal Space: Everyone Else
This time, liminal space has manifested as a mansion as imagined by MC Escher. This is the grand foyer, and zigzagging staircases with gilt balustrades curl impossibly along the corners, leading to a ballroom on the right wall, a theater on the left, or a fire-lit banqueting hall on the ceiling, far more rustic than the rest of the mansion looks. The far wall is a scattered collection of doors and windows facing all directions and opening who-knows where. Outside the windows you can see a beach, a mist-shrouded forest, and a starry sky. One door has a sheaf of papers nailed to it. Another has blood trickling out from beneath the doorframe. Behind you, there’s a marble-tiled bath-house.
It’s up to you to find a way to amuse yourself. You’ve been here thirty-six hours, longer than any of your previous Jaunts between worlds has taken, and since the food in the banquet hall vanishes the moment it’s out of your sight (even if it’s inside you), you’re starting to get hungry. When is the portal going to appear?
Prompt #3: Alternities: Locked Rooms In Moebius
You wake up in a new world, but by now you’re familiar with that. Only… something’s wrong. You didn’t step through any portal. You’re lying on a cold surface with something draped over you, and you can hear confused murmuring coming from your left and your right, maybe above and below you too, and you hurt.
You sit up, shrugging off the dingy once-white cloth draped over you. You’re in a morgue. All the alcoves are open, and in many of them, other Travelers are stirring and waking up. Some of them are wild-eyed. Some are blood-spattered. Every last one is criss-crossed with unfamiliar white lines of scarring.
On the slab in the center of a room is a clock. The hands indicate that it is 3:01. A collection of bloody-edged tools - knives and separators and saw and scalpels - sits beside it.
There is one door out, up half a flight of stairs in one corner, and no windows. The door has been barred, and all around the edges doorstops have been jammed in - wedge-toed shoes, folded sheafs of paper, a length of rubber hosing - anything that will fit in the narrow gap between door and frame, used to create a seal.
Scratched into the paint on the door are the words In the name of Blessed Elua, listen to me this time and stay inside. Don’t go out there. Just wait. Please. -JV
Somewhere out there in the distance, close enough to be audible but far enough away to be quiet, barely audible over the hum of the fluorescent lights, there’s a loud, ragged scream, and then the distant voice begins to sob unevenly.
Prompt #4: Alternities: Extravehicular On The Spark
You’re standing on the curved, chrome-bright hull of a space station that stretches to the horizon in all directions - not a smooth horizon but a busy one, with shapes like distant cityscapes, mountain-ranges of conical turrets glowing faintly with violet light, and a faint if inaudible hum travelling upward through your feet, varying in strength and direction at the passage of distant traffic, scalloped domes sliding over the surface or small treaded runners like motor-trikes zipping by at much greater speeds. A white plastic belt around your waist puffs cool fog every few seconds, a black metal rod in your hand smells of ozone and seems glued to your palm, and your boots are heavy, steel-soled, and have a blinking generator at the heel - but otherwise, save for a pair of goggles tucked into one pocket, you’re wearing street clothes, just what you’d expect yourself to be wearing. Your hair moves around you in a cloud, and your stomach turns uneasily. Even though you seem to have both air and heat there is no gravity. You might as well be hanging from the underside of this craft, not standing on it.
Looking up - or down - anyway, away from the ship - you see a massive planet filling a quarter of the sky, covered in jade-banded rings of cloud that swirl and churn anxiously. Between you and the luminescent green world is suspended a miniscule shape, round, red, like a rough-edged droplet of blood. It and the planet above it appear to be slowly expanding as you watch.
You’re not alone. A group of other people, similarly equipped, stands around you, looking as confused as you feel. A startled expression crosses all their faces at the same moment as an excited, fast-talking voice enters your mind.
-- hacked the telepathic network and scrambled your heads! Bet the champs never thought that was possible! What does that tell you about -- never mind, it can wait. We’re live now, but only for a moment. We need to avoid any *further* psychic interference, so we’re going dark. Repeat, the network is going dark. They won’t be able to get into your heads again. The clock’s at seventy-two minutes at my mark, Fellow Travelers. Aaaand… Mark. Okay. Seventy-two minutes to bring down those engines, or we’re out of the World Series and you can all see how you like floating home! Let’s crash this sucker, kids! See you all on Sangre.
The voice vanishes. You have no idea who it was, and no memory of what it was talking about.
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 than a forest of bare toplevels!
Before you start, we’d like you to please take a quick look at the game’s Concept, its Rules, and the Liminal Space & Previous Universes pages, just to give you the background, so you know what you’re getting into. And if you’re looking for more information, the Directory is here and the Reserves page is here.
Have fun!
Prompt #1: Liminal Space: New Arrivals
It seems to you that you’ve just stepped through a door, and you can feel the faint breeze of it blowing behind you.
You’ve just stepped into a mansion as imagined by MC Escher. This is the grand foyer, and zigzagging staircases with gilt balustrades curl impossibly along the corners, leading to a ballroom on the right wall, a theater on the left, or a fire-lit banqueting hall on the ceiling, far more rustic than the rest of the mansion looks. The far wall is a scattered collection of doors and windows facing all directions and opening who-knows where. Outside the windows you can see a beach, a mist-shrouded forest, and a starry sky. One door has a sheaf of papers nailed to it. Another has blood trickling out from beneath the doorframe.
When you look behind you, however, there is no door there. Nor, in fact, is there a wall in the traditional sense. Instead, there’s a marble-tiled bath-house.
In all of these places, whatever direction they happen to be facing with respect to tradition gravity, are people in strange clothing. Most of them seem to be looking relatively bored or restless, and only a very few seem at all bothered by the notion that the laws of physics seem to be being held in abeyance - mostly, the people standing nearest to you.
Most disturbing of all, beside the quiet murmur of conversation in your ears, you can also hear voices casually exchanging small talk inside your head.
After a moment, there’s a lull in most of the audible conversations, and a large portion of the room turns and looks your way. Someone -one of the voices in your head - says
Look at that. A new pack of Fools just arrived.
Prompt #2: Liminal Space: Everyone Else
This time, liminal space has manifested as a mansion as imagined by MC Escher. This is the grand foyer, and zigzagging staircases with gilt balustrades curl impossibly along the corners, leading to a ballroom on the right wall, a theater on the left, or a fire-lit banqueting hall on the ceiling, far more rustic than the rest of the mansion looks. The far wall is a scattered collection of doors and windows facing all directions and opening who-knows where. Outside the windows you can see a beach, a mist-shrouded forest, and a starry sky. One door has a sheaf of papers nailed to it. Another has blood trickling out from beneath the doorframe. Behind you, there’s a marble-tiled bath-house.
It’s up to you to find a way to amuse yourself. You’ve been here thirty-six hours, longer than any of your previous Jaunts between worlds has taken, and since the food in the banquet hall vanishes the moment it’s out of your sight (even if it’s inside you), you’re starting to get hungry. When is the portal going to appear?
Prompt #3: Alternities: Locked Rooms In Moebius
You wake up in a new world, but by now you’re familiar with that. Only… something’s wrong. You didn’t step through any portal. You’re lying on a cold surface with something draped over you, and you can hear confused murmuring coming from your left and your right, maybe above and below you too, and you hurt.
You sit up, shrugging off the dingy once-white cloth draped over you. You’re in a morgue. All the alcoves are open, and in many of them, other Travelers are stirring and waking up. Some of them are wild-eyed. Some are blood-spattered. Every last one is criss-crossed with unfamiliar white lines of scarring.
On the slab in the center of a room is a clock. The hands indicate that it is 3:01. A collection of bloody-edged tools - knives and separators and saw and scalpels - sits beside it.
There is one door out, up half a flight of stairs in one corner, and no windows. The door has been barred, and all around the edges doorstops have been jammed in - wedge-toed shoes, folded sheafs of paper, a length of rubber hosing - anything that will fit in the narrow gap between door and frame, used to create a seal.
Scratched into the paint on the door are the words In the name of Blessed Elua, listen to me this time and stay inside. Don’t go out there. Just wait. Please. -JV
Somewhere out there in the distance, close enough to be audible but far enough away to be quiet, barely audible over the hum of the fluorescent lights, there’s a loud, ragged scream, and then the distant voice begins to sob unevenly.
Prompt #4: Alternities: Extravehicular On The Spark
You’re standing on the curved, chrome-bright hull of a space station that stretches to the horizon in all directions - not a smooth horizon but a busy one, with shapes like distant cityscapes, mountain-ranges of conical turrets glowing faintly with violet light, and a faint if inaudible hum travelling upward through your feet, varying in strength and direction at the passage of distant traffic, scalloped domes sliding over the surface or small treaded runners like motor-trikes zipping by at much greater speeds. A white plastic belt around your waist puffs cool fog every few seconds, a black metal rod in your hand smells of ozone and seems glued to your palm, and your boots are heavy, steel-soled, and have a blinking generator at the heel - but otherwise, save for a pair of goggles tucked into one pocket, you’re wearing street clothes, just what you’d expect yourself to be wearing. Your hair moves around you in a cloud, and your stomach turns uneasily. Even though you seem to have both air and heat there is no gravity. You might as well be hanging from the underside of this craft, not standing on it.
Looking up - or down - anyway, away from the ship - you see a massive planet filling a quarter of the sky, covered in jade-banded rings of cloud that swirl and churn anxiously. Between you and the luminescent green world is suspended a miniscule shape, round, red, like a rough-edged droplet of blood. It and the planet above it appear to be slowly expanding as you watch.
You’re not alone. A group of other people, similarly equipped, stands around you, looking as confused as you feel. A startled expression crosses all their faces at the same moment as an excited, fast-talking voice enters your mind.
-- hacked the telepathic network and scrambled your heads! Bet the champs never thought that was possible! What does that tell you about -- never mind, it can wait. We’re live now, but only for a moment. We need to avoid any *further* psychic interference, so we’re going dark. Repeat, the network is going dark. They won’t be able to get into your heads again. The clock’s at seventy-two minutes at my mark, Fellow Travelers. Aaaand… Mark. Okay. Seventy-two minutes to bring down those engines, or we’re out of the World Series and you can all see how you like floating home! Let’s crash this sucker, kids! See you all on Sangre.
The voice vanishes. You have no idea who it was, and no memory of what it was talking about.
#3
The second thing she does is stop reaching for the scalpel. The third thing involves rustling around for gloves, pulling them on, and then going for the scalpel again. You never know, with old blood, and it's better to be safe.
Armed with something sharp, she begins to roam the room, pacing from one wall to another with narrowed eyes. No immediately evident exits, but the second someone comes in here she'll find a way.
have a six inch tall NOT fairy
The voice is a high, clear tenor, dry with cynical weariness. She can't see, immediately, who it's coming from - it sounds like it's near the clock, low to the ground. Tialys has his back against the side of the slab, just around the curve of it. She's pulled his arms off three times so far, and he each time he approaches someone else first for another week of Sundays, but he keeps turning back and asking her again, in different ways. He's not sure why. Maybe she reminds him of Lyra. Maybe she reminds him of Hell. It's something to work toward.
happy shrieking!!
With narrowed eyes she finds him quickly enough, and smiles. Sort of.
"Where to?" This is notably not a yes.
no subject
He tips his head back to gaze up at her, gives a miniscule shrug. He doesn't say he's lost his wings. He doesn't say anything about the right moment to run. He doesn't say he's tired of getting stepped on.
"Mostly I just want to be farther away from this floor. It's kind of disgusting."
no subject
That said, she gets it. Mortuary floors are not nice places to be at the best of times. This is not the best of times.
She bends down and reaches out her hand to him without giving permission or denying it. Without, in fact, saying anything. She just watches, to see what he'll do.
no subject
"I'm not a baby bunny, I don't need coddling."
There's a brittle pettiness to it, like dead twigs. Offended without any real anger, objecting out of bloody fastidious habit.
"Your shoulder would be fine."
no subject
"Baby bunnies," she says, "are disgusting. So that works out nicely for both of us. Get up on my shoulder before I decide to put you in a jar or something."
All these nice jars sitting around just asking to be filled with annoying little men.
no subject
He jumps, a split-second precision leap like a spring-legged insect, lands in a crouch on her left shoulder, tiny hands fisted in the fabric of her shirt. In another second, he has himself turned around and settled.
no subject
On the other hand, he's precariously close to her neck. She is going to need to look out for that.
Once he's settled, she goes back to her pacing. This time she heads to the writing on the doors again, running her gloved hands over the grooves of the letters as if they'll show some meaning that's been previously hidden.
no subject
"I think they were serious." Lightly, like the flick of a knife. He knows they were serious. But truth is useless when trust is worthless. Besides, desperate barricades never helped. There's something out there they have to - find, do, kill. It would be nice if it was kill. He's working on a map of the facility in his head, in his scars.
(no subject)
#3 /imposes own powercap merrily lalala
Enough that the first thing he'd done would also have been reach for a weapon, but Lila gets there first. This might give other people less pause, but - as a for instance - of the young women her age with whom he's been acquainted, one can be anyone she wants, and the other spits acid.
So. It's not until she has a pretty wide berth that he swings his legs down (white splinters of pain shooting off like sparks; literally nothing has ever been more predictable than the fact that he ignores them) and crooks his fingers, sending a heavier tool than the one Lila'd chosen (one of the knives) slithering across the room, where he wipes it off on the sheet.
...actually, unless anyone stops him he grabs another one of the scalpels, too. For emergencies. Thus armed:
"Anything?"
Hi, Lila. It's
a feral catMagn...look, for right now it's just Erik.eheheheheh
Man, foreign (ish; does it matter here? not American), armed (with a scalpel, thank you terrifically for stealing her idea), unbothered by pleasantries (this gains him one point), also unbothered by the situation, at least on the surface.
Again: she narrows her eyes. Trust no one.
"Nothing useful. Just this - don't-leave-or-cryptic-warning graffiti bullshit."
no subject
"Or what," he murmurs, mostly to himself, that being the general direction of rhetorical questions. The hand not holding anything sharp makes a rough outline of the seal on the door, which tells him - irritatingly - nothing, other than that it's haphazardly composed, and he could see that.
The scream and subsequent crying bring him up short, although it does not appear to make him any more inclined to like, get the door open; his body language actually now reads more warily than it did before, and he wasn't exactly relaxed then.
no subject
She doesn't move forward again until the crying ebbs somewhat. Then she presses both covered palms and one ear to the door, listening like it's going to give away some secret. She pulls away angry a moment later, fighting an intense urge to kick something.
"It could just be a recording," she mutters, not really believing it herself. She just wants so desperately to use the door as doors were intended to be used and walk the hell out.
no subject
But that's certainly interesting. And familiar, the same way she picked up the scalpel. (The anger's familiar too, his just lives less close to the skin nowadays. He can afford that.)
"Or a very good actor." He considers her for a second, eyes speculative, then inclines his head toward the scalpel in her hand. "Resourceful. But short-range."
no subject
She glances Erik's way at the Helpful Weapons Critique, relaxing fractionally just because talking about weapons is familiar. She shoots him a dry smirk.
"Oh, what? You have a bayonet handy?"
no subject
that will be vagued at until the sequelas of yet undiscovered by the US government, prior to this adventure....anyway. "Not today." This is at least 70% joke, although he's somewhat immediately pressed to consider how convenient a bayonet would actually be--never mind. "Could you--"
Yeah, that gesture means 'point the scalpel at him.' Let's see how this goes.
no subject
If not, well. That's why she's got the damn scalpel.
Eyes narrowed, she looks at him through the thin fog of her light lashes and points the scalpel at him. Her muscles bunch, ready to leap at the first sign of trouble.
Nobody gets the jump on her.
no subject
Remy doesn't hunt for a weapon, although he watches the others in the room arming themselves with a cynical approval. Instead, he twists his wrist just so and lets a deck of cards drop into his hands, shuffling and bridging them as casually as if it was mere habit, an absent-minded behavioral tic.
His attention foes almost right away to the girl with the gloves. It's something he notices, girls who are careful about their hands, and the way she looks around the room like a cat in a cage, he sees all too well. He hops off the mortuary slab as if the scars didn't bother him, and walks towards her, maintaining a respectful distance as he gets near - the kind of distance where if everything goes worse, he's still just out of reach.
"What do you see, cherie?"
no subject
She sees walls, is what she sees: four walls with one door out and they're not supposed to leave. She sees bars. She sees a cage.
The more she tries to dodge the inevitability of this truth, the more sweat prickles on her forehead and at the back of her neck, the thicker the lump in her throat grows. But her mouth stays a coolly disapproving line, her eyes bored, lidded.
"A box full of scared idiots," she responds absently, and then, fingers tightening around the scalpel: "Cherie?"
no subject
"What do we need to make us smarter, do you think? More patience... or more initiative?"
no subject
"Initiative." In tones that make it sound like this should be obvious. To her, it is. They've been sitting. They must be moving.
She will always take movement over stagnation.
no subject
no subject
In this moment, the brightness threatens to blind her - more metaphorically than literally, at least for now, so she backs up feet and then yards, narrow-eyed and watching him work.
no subject
Remy smiles, turning up the collar of his coat.
"Never let it be said I don't get the door for the ladies. You first, chere Remy be right behind you."
((and I'm going to save the actual exploration of what's out there for the next test-drive, when it will be up as one of the prompts, but I'd love to keep threading with you!! If you'd like, we could have another thread going under one of the other prompts here in the meantime?))