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synodiporia_ooc2014-02-21 09:29 pm
powersthatbe) wrote in synodiporia_ooc2014-02-21 09:29 pm
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Test Drive #1
Welcome to the Synodiporia Test Drive Meme! Below the cut there are four new prompts, and here are the four original prompts, which you’re still welcome to use here. 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!
Prompt #5 takes a look at an event in the game’s recent handwaved backstory; #6 goes a little further back, exploring what it’s like for characters to wake up and think they’re someone else, #7 is a survival-horror exploradora continuation of Prompt #3 on the previous testdrive (by popular demand), and Prompt #8 shows what helping an idled character back into the game will look like!
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 info you’ll need for some of these prompts And if you’re looking for more information, the Directory is here and the Reserves page is here.
Prompts:
Prompt #5: The Belljar Riots
You can hear the crowd, maybe three streets over, like a stormfront breaking. Shouts, shattering glass, drumming footsteps, it all blends together into white noise. They’re coming for you, and you know it - and to make it worse, they don’t even know who ‘you’ are. Belljar Island has trapped all sorts of interdimensional wanderers, not just Fellow Travelers, but the people who lived in this world all along have had enough. They’re coming for all of you.
Behind you looms the Hotel California in all its faded grandeur, spiral stairs twining up to balconies that run the length of the building in all its weird Victorian folly. It’s where every unwanted visitor to Belljar gets room and board - you won’t be safe there, but it’s where all your things are, where all your friends are. You can face the mob, try to run, try to hide elsewhere in the neighborhood… but whatever you do, you’d better do it soon.
Prompt #6: Spark Infiltrators
The Spark is a chrome disk sixteen kilometers in diameter, floating like a leaf on the solar wind through the isolation of space, and home to all sixty-two million surviving members of the human race. Nine fusion reactors provide more power than you’ll ever need - more power than planet Earth ever had, if there really was an Earth - and nano-assemblers can snare the castoff plasma and shape it into anything you can dream of, if you’d like to bother with the material. Most people don’t. They spend their lives plugged into the Virtu, a computer network that thinks at the speed of light, responsive to its users’ every whim, shaping fairytales and whims that can, thanks to direct access to your nervous system, literally feel more real than reality. When Virtu bores them, they have the vats that grow their food build them tailored bodies they can project their consciousness into, experiencing reality as a custom-grown alien.
This is the life you were born to. All your needs are met. Only one thing matters: staving off boredom. Whether you’ve done that by shaping reality to your liking, or devoted it to scholarship or some other course, you live in a world of endless novelty where few things are strange.
Seeing a group of people whose Virtu ID-strings all begin with 63, however, most certainly qualifies. The ID-string is an 11-digit fingerprint… and there’s no need for those first digits to ever rise above 62.
Prompt #7: Outside the Morgue at Moebius
No-one has found any real clues to how you all woke up as scarred amnesiacs in the morgue. No-one knows why there’s a warning etched on the door, pleading with you to stay in. And no-one knows who’s sobbing quietly in the distance, or what it is that’s frightened or hurt them.
But not everyone is patient enough to wait for the answers. At almost the same time, someone blows the front door open in a rain of makeshift doorstops, while another impatient party bursts through the back wall, giving you an alternate route. A cool breeze floods into the room as the pressure equalizes, but already people are fighting the wind, picking one route or another and plunging out into the night. If there’s safety in numbers, it won’t be safe to stay waiting here for long.
As for what characters find outside? An arid, windy forest in the middle of the night; with gravel roads stretching off under the sharp-edged shadows of the trees. It's all but impossible to tell what direction the distant sobbing comes from. There's a thick scent of rotting vegetation on the air, dark and vivid... and it's a scent that seems to get into people's heads. For most, it does nothing but heighten adrenaline - fear is scarier, anger fiercer, paranoia keener. But for perhaps one out of every five people who smell it, it will lead suddenly, after a few minutes' time, to violent madness.
Prompt #8: A Dungeon Rescue
The paper-walled palace seems to stretch on endlessly in all directions, doors and screens folding back to reveal more doors and screens, floors covered in tatami mats and all but identical, save that sometimes they burst into song when stepped on.
It’s as disorienting as a house of mirrors. The doors open and shut on their own, and shadows flit behind them, distant lights bobbing crazily and sharply changing the angle and depth of the shade. Sometimes those shadows are nothing. Sometimes, they’re allies, separated by the fragile mobile labyrinth. And of course, sometimes they’re creatures with glittering teeth and cat-pupiled green eyes, attacking with a sound like a rush of wind and flitting away around the nearest corner after a single swipe.
Your whiskers twitch and your ears flutter nervously - everyone has those traits here, as if you were all mice. You try not to think about the tails.
Somewhere, down one of these dim corridors, a lost friend is waiting for you. Once or twice, you’ve had shouted conversations that echoed and shivered down the halls, only to fade into the distance, whether you moved or not.
Ahead of you, the one visible hallway has gone impenetrably black, as if there’s a cloud of ink filling it. But it should be easy enough to sidestep whatever it is but opening a door or simply tearing open a wall.
Prompt #5 takes a look at an event in the game’s recent handwaved backstory; #6 goes a little further back, exploring what it’s like for characters to wake up and think they’re someone else, #7 is a survival-horror exploradora continuation of Prompt #3 on the previous testdrive (by popular demand), and Prompt #8 shows what helping an idled character back into the game will look like!
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 info you’ll need for some of these prompts And if you’re looking for more information, the Directory is here and the Reserves page is here.
Prompts:
Prompt #5: The Belljar Riots
You can hear the crowd, maybe three streets over, like a stormfront breaking. Shouts, shattering glass, drumming footsteps, it all blends together into white noise. They’re coming for you, and you know it - and to make it worse, they don’t even know who ‘you’ are. Belljar Island has trapped all sorts of interdimensional wanderers, not just Fellow Travelers, but the people who lived in this world all along have had enough. They’re coming for all of you.
Behind you looms the Hotel California in all its faded grandeur, spiral stairs twining up to balconies that run the length of the building in all its weird Victorian folly. It’s where every unwanted visitor to Belljar gets room and board - you won’t be safe there, but it’s where all your things are, where all your friends are. You can face the mob, try to run, try to hide elsewhere in the neighborhood… but whatever you do, you’d better do it soon.
Prompt #6: Spark Infiltrators
The Spark is a chrome disk sixteen kilometers in diameter, floating like a leaf on the solar wind through the isolation of space, and home to all sixty-two million surviving members of the human race. Nine fusion reactors provide more power than you’ll ever need - more power than planet Earth ever had, if there really was an Earth - and nano-assemblers can snare the castoff plasma and shape it into anything you can dream of, if you’d like to bother with the material. Most people don’t. They spend their lives plugged into the Virtu, a computer network that thinks at the speed of light, responsive to its users’ every whim, shaping fairytales and whims that can, thanks to direct access to your nervous system, literally feel more real than reality. When Virtu bores them, they have the vats that grow their food build them tailored bodies they can project their consciousness into, experiencing reality as a custom-grown alien.
This is the life you were born to. All your needs are met. Only one thing matters: staving off boredom. Whether you’ve done that by shaping reality to your liking, or devoted it to scholarship or some other course, you live in a world of endless novelty where few things are strange.
Seeing a group of people whose Virtu ID-strings all begin with 63, however, most certainly qualifies. The ID-string is an 11-digit fingerprint… and there’s no need for those first digits to ever rise above 62.
Prompt #7: Outside the Morgue at Moebius
No-one has found any real clues to how you all woke up as scarred amnesiacs in the morgue. No-one knows why there’s a warning etched on the door, pleading with you to stay in. And no-one knows who’s sobbing quietly in the distance, or what it is that’s frightened or hurt them.
But not everyone is patient enough to wait for the answers. At almost the same time, someone blows the front door open in a rain of makeshift doorstops, while another impatient party bursts through the back wall, giving you an alternate route. A cool breeze floods into the room as the pressure equalizes, but already people are fighting the wind, picking one route or another and plunging out into the night. If there’s safety in numbers, it won’t be safe to stay waiting here for long.
As for what characters find outside? An arid, windy forest in the middle of the night; with gravel roads stretching off under the sharp-edged shadows of the trees. It's all but impossible to tell what direction the distant sobbing comes from. There's a thick scent of rotting vegetation on the air, dark and vivid... and it's a scent that seems to get into people's heads. For most, it does nothing but heighten adrenaline - fear is scarier, anger fiercer, paranoia keener. But for perhaps one out of every five people who smell it, it will lead suddenly, after a few minutes' time, to violent madness.
Prompt #8: A Dungeon Rescue
The paper-walled palace seems to stretch on endlessly in all directions, doors and screens folding back to reveal more doors and screens, floors covered in tatami mats and all but identical, save that sometimes they burst into song when stepped on.
It’s as disorienting as a house of mirrors. The doors open and shut on their own, and shadows flit behind them, distant lights bobbing crazily and sharply changing the angle and depth of the shade. Sometimes those shadows are nothing. Sometimes, they’re allies, separated by the fragile mobile labyrinth. And of course, sometimes they’re creatures with glittering teeth and cat-pupiled green eyes, attacking with a sound like a rush of wind and flitting away around the nearest corner after a single swipe.
Your whiskers twitch and your ears flutter nervously - everyone has those traits here, as if you were all mice. You try not to think about the tails.
Somewhere, down one of these dim corridors, a lost friend is waiting for you. Once or twice, you’ve had shouted conversations that echoed and shivered down the halls, only to fade into the distance, whether you moved or not.
Ahead of you, the one visible hallway has gone impenetrably black, as if there’s a cloud of ink filling it. But it should be easy enough to sidestep whatever it is but opening a door or simply tearing open a wall.
Prompt #5
"They're getting close!" he shouts, doing little more than stating the obvious and drawing even more attention to himself.
no subject
Lookout or bait—ah, same difference, yeah?
Maybe Eren was supposed to go alone for this, maybe not, but in the end Souji couldn't seem to dig his heels in enough to keep up his ah, going out with that, are you? might as well just commit seppuku and save them the trouble once they find you apathy towards someone going out there by themselves. Whether or not he thinks this is suicidal isn't clear, but what has been since he arrived a few minutes behind the other is that if they're going to do this, they're going to do it ( observe, alert, fight, damage property, all of the above, and so on ) be successful at it. There's no point dwelling on other things, if push comes to shove, anyway. With how long they've been stuck working together, it would be a shame to quit cooperating now and increase chances of failure.
Besides, what else would he be doing if not out here? Formulating plans really isn't his cup of tea and being a weapon is the only thing he's ever been good at; which means, he can leave all that strategy and supply collecting to Hijikata and other people who know what they're doing in that sort of thing.
"Someone really pushed their buttons, this time." Wonder who that was. . . .Oh well.
no subject
He makes an exasperated noise deep in his throat.
"I don't want to hurt them. But if I try to scare them away, I'm just as likely to kill them. And I don't... know what else I can do."
He's only transformed into a Titan a few times since becoming a Traveler, and nearly every occasion has been an unmitigated disaster. Still, turning into a rampaging giant might be enough to send the mob running... he looks at Souji, uncertainly. Where do they draw the line? How far do they go? Having human enemies, enemies that might respond to reason, is deeply unnerving to him. He'd rather run away... but there are still people here to protect.
no subject
He doesn't move to advance or get into any type of fighting position just yet, lifting his blade to tap lightly against his shoulder as he brings it back up to rest there, glancing at the younger man. Ah, that look tells him enough. He can't say the others would be particularly happy for one reckless person to be getting encouraged by another, but the reckless have to stick together, too, don't they? Who else can handle them and properly save their asses if their rescuer isn't reckless enough to try to do it, themselves? With a laugh, Souji gives a small shrug. "Well, I think you should hurry and get to it, if you want to try. You're their only hope for a chance to walk away alive from us now." He says it somewhat playfully, but he's sure the other knows well by now that he is completely and absolutely serious. Unlike the other, he has no problem gutting someone who wants to make themselves a threat, whether they can be reasoned with or not. To him, people are monsters. The fact they can reason and still create wars and violence between each other is proof enough of that for him. Then again, he's never been particularly interested in the moral aspects of what he's decided to do with his life. As long as the people he cares about are safe and happy, that's all that will ever matter. "I'll do my best to see that you don't get too out of hand."
Not that he's seen anyone any of the few times that Eren's shifted really manage to accomplish that, even his friends who supposedly deal with those things that he turns into all the time. But, hey, Souji's not human, either. And desperate times call for desperate measures.
A mob of crazy citizens coming to rip them apart?
It's one of those times.
no subject
Armin's hand settled, firmly but uneasily, on the hilt of one of his blades. Fighting other humans - it was almost unthinkable! Yet here they were, almost to the point of drawing steel. If it came to that Armin knew he'd be little help to Eren - but he wouldn't be much help carrying supplies inside either, and he'd refused to leave Eren out here alone.
He tried not to think about how nobody else had been willing to volunteer.
no subject