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synodiporia_ooc2014-02-21 09:29 pm
powersthatbe) wrote in synodiporia_ooc2014-02-21 09:29 pm
Entry tags:
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.
no subject
The old wound in his leg burned, but he managed his lopsided gait as fast as he could.
"What I wouldn't give for a speakeasy with an entry into the sewers," he muttered.
no subject
As they move inside, and the door is shut behind them, The interior lighting reveals a very familiar face. Tim Drake, at roughly twenty years old.
"The coffeeshop's got a secured basement. Even if they burn the building down, you'll be as safe downstairs as you would be in... a bomb shelter. There are half a dozen other guests already. Can you manage the stairs?"
Brisk, clipped, with a glint in his eye and not stopping moving for a moment, Tim didn't pause until he'd opened the triple-locked door on the stairwell, turning back to take a closer look at his guest and... frown.
There was something about that face.
no subject
"I'm not dead yet," he said grumpily, as he reached out to the grip the railing. "Are you going back out?"
Tim -- Jason, whoever he was -- has Bruce staring at him for a long moment, uncertain. "Aren't you-- more accustomed to working with a team? Or at least, a partner?"
A Bat?
no subject
"I don't do that anymore."
no subject
Bruce blinks it away, aware that he's curled one hand around his cane so tightly it's making noise in protest; the other comes up to grip his chest. He's sure the pain is psychosomatic. Either way, they don't have time for this.
He continued down, giving in to old tricks-- scanning his environment, marking all obvious - and not obvious - entry and exit points, trying to catalog anything worth noting. Even in his eighties, Bruce is, and always will be, Batman.
no subject
"... Bruce?"
no subject
"Took you long enough," he said simply. "Should've been faster than that, Robin."
And, in true Bruce fashion, passes judgment and demands better in the same breath.
no subject
There's no real rancor in his voice, just the dry acknowledgement that this isn't really new territory for them.
no subject
His death grip on his own chest eased, he's calmer-- easing into old roles again-- even with the cane, he walks like Bruce did; more glide than stride, and even bent with age, he still looms. The lines between his personas blurred so badly over the years, the mask of Bruce Wayne crumbling as it became less and less important, it's obvious that he's still Batman in his own mind, and that will likely never change.
no subject
Tim lead him to what appears, at a casual glance, to be the cofeeshop's walk-in freezer, but which opens to reveal a second staircase.
The stairs lead sideways as well as down - not into the basement of the coffee shop, but the underside of the warehouse next door. Numerous cameras and alarm systems stud the staircase, but little in the way of more substantial security except for a pair of industrial freezer doors - heavy metal, airtight. The warehouse has been partitioned into office-like spaces, and frontmost space has a rounded desk, practically humming with the number of server blades, parallel processors, and cooling fans at work inside it, overlooking sixteen flatscreen monitors on the wall.
Two things are immediately obvious about it. One: it's a team space. The other offices aren't occupied at present, but they have been. Two: the operating budget of the whole place barely breaks six figures. This place was built on bootstraps and shoestrings, whatever was available. Tim settled into the desk (in a chair that was obviously designed for someone taller) and turned his attention to the monitors, scrolling quickly through dozens of camera-feed images of the mob.
Normally, he would be comfortable here, in his element, but now he was self-conscious, awaiting whatever judgment was rendered, and realizing... in the game or out of it, no matter how long it had been... he still cared.
no subject
But he moves through the space easily, taking it in; the hum of computers - the Bat Cave's chill always made cooling easy, it was keeping the humidity down that was difficult. This was no gift from God, no natural space offered up as if in blessing of his mission by providence: no, these are soldiers in enemy territory, working with what they're given.
He's proud; it's not in what he says, but what in he doesn't say, doesn't do. There's no scowls, no frowns, no glances that says you should have done better or do you expect me to accept this as your best. No. They've worked hard with the resources with they had at hand, that much is obvious.
He's a good soldier, this Robin, this... 'Redwing'. (The name, Bruce thinks, needs a lot of work.)
His hand curled on the back of the chair, and he said, "Debrief, then, Redwing." No praise; not overt, anyway. Tone will be enough to convey that this is good, and now they have work to get to.