Test Drive #2

[powersthatbe]

Welcome to the Synodiporia Test Drive Meme! Below the cut there are twofour new prompts, here and here are the prompts from previous testdrives, 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 #9 gives a look at what it's like for everyone to be stuck in Liminal Space, & Prompt #10 is a chance to try your hand at being an infiltrator in our upcoming Noir plot.

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, & Noir Plot 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 Application page is here.

Prompts:



Prompt #9: Liminal Space

Today, if it's a day, Liminal Space has shifted again. It's twilight, and a moldering New Orleans graveyard, full of ornate gothic sepulchers, stretches in every direction, gray stone and wrought iron barriers sectioning it into smaller plots. Some of these mausoleums have been opened, and their insides don't match their outsides. Inside are well-appointed train compartments, dinner cars and sleeper cars and such, richly appointed and well lit, as if they come straight from the Orient Express. Out the windows, you can see the landspace whizzing by, although it's not the same landscape from one window to the next. You can feel the vibration of the train, the acceleration - but step out of the car and you're in a graveyard again, and inside the cars you can hear crickets and nightbirds singing and smell the rich aroma of flowering trees.

Also in the graveyard are a few scattered train-cars, but nobody's going into those - inside they're all dank spaces packed with decomposing bodies. There are small animals here and there outside - rabbits, birds, that kind of thing -- all of them dead, but none of them letting it keep them from their nightly routines. The crickets and nightjars are making train noises. Bemused travelers are finding comfortable spaces wherever they can.




Prompt #10: The Midnight Rose

It's half past nine and the joint is jumping. The shutters on the front window are down, the front door is locked, but there's a big mook with a shrewd look in his eye letting anybody with a black enameled rose pin on their lapel in through the delivery entrance, and the back room they're shown into doesn't look anything like a candy store. There's a small, dark bar in one corner, and in another corner six guys with strings and brass are making like they're the Duke Ellington orchestra. The floors are tiled parquet and a few couples are dancing, but most of the action's at the smoke-shrouded card tables where a dozen little private meetings are happening, gents and dames in pinstripes and fancy hats or beaded dresses and heels, but rarely both. There are card games and conversations going on, and who can say what's more high stakes? Tonight, this is the place to be, Bensonhurst outfit or Gravesend mob or anybody else who can pay the cover charge.

Comments

[pathofwisdom]

"Tyrael." Malthael said, moving over to examine another set of corpses. Their souls did not longer, so there was nothing for him to learn that way. He had no interest in lingering longer than necessary. What was more interesting than anything else was the general lack of malevolence in the movement of the undead. They did not attack, or guard a spot, or wait for the command of a necromancer. They went on as though they were alive.

"Not yet." He spent a moment examining the corpses; their advanced state of decay did not affect him as it did his mortal brother.

"It is... odd."

[eldruin]

Although the magic woven into the very fabric of this bizarre reality (or illusion of reality, whatever the case may be) was unlike anything he had ever encountered, Tyrael's eyebrows still shot up at the answer even if it had been one he'd more or less expected. Angels, for all their age and knowledge, were not omnificent – even Wisdom would not always hold the answers (even if this one had currently embraced Death and would likely have a better understanding of the magics at work here).

"Very," he remarked. "Everything is strange here."

Almost as if to punctuate the sentence, a harsh whistle echoed throughout the graveyard as a cricket rubbed its wings together a short distance from where Tyrael stood. Had it not been for the persistent whistles and nigh deafening horns echoing throughout the evening air, the angel might have jumped out of his skin. As it were, he grimaced at the noise and hid his flinch by crossing and uncrossing his arms over his chest, the creak of his armor barely audible over the cacophony of the birds and insects.

"Have you looked inside the coffins yet?"

[pathofwisdom]

"Undeath for the sake of it. Not as a tool to fight for or against demons," Malthael paused only minutely to turn his hooded head in his brother's direction, "Or by accident."

It was as though death and life had collided in this place and now existed as a twisted mockery that was neither. Tyrael was more animated than usual (even with Malthael's recent frame of reference for Tyrael as a mortal), but his reactions were a side note in the study of something much more relevant.

"There are no bodies in them." Which wasn't directly an answer, and he had, in fact, not looked to see what was in them.

[eldruin]

"Perhaps..."

Tyrael didn't quite balk at the word 'accident', but it was obvious it troubled him – his lips drawn together in a thin line and brow furrowed. The dead rising in Tristram once again might have been an unforeseen consequence of his decision to leave behind the High Heavens, but, unforeseen or no, that did not absolve him of responsibility for it. Regardless, he was far from convinced that the reanimation of the local wildlife and the displacement of the corpses that remained inert (for now) had come about merely for the sake of it.

There had to be some purpose to it. Something or someone was causing the dead to rise and to behave thus.

Tyrael's eyes lingered upon a bird perched atop one of the strange metal constructs – its body in a grotesque state of decay, feathers and flesh melted away in places to reveal delicate bones held together with muscle and sinew. The bird, a sparrow of some sort he thought, seemed entirely unfazed by its appearance as it peened a wing devoid of most its feathers. Intermittently, it emitted a thunderous roar that couldn't possibly have been natural.

There were, of course, spirits that occasionally lingered on after death, humans whose souls refused to acknowledge their death and clung to some sort of semi-existence, but even that wasn't quite comparable to this.

"I have never seen anything like it."

He didn't specify whether that was in regard to the behavior of the undead creatures, the seemingly haphazard placement of the corpses outside of their crypts, or the peculiar metal contraptions that littered the graveyard.

His eyes fell from bird to rest upon the construct it sat upon. It seemed almost like a wagon or cart – the parallel wheels, plush seats within, and glass windows of a few of them suggested some manner of transport - albeit the ones he'd seen in the past had been crafted from wood not metal as these were. Additionally, that these carts of sorts were filled with the rotting bodies that Tyrael believed to have been taken from the various opened tombs and coffins in the graveyard was most peculiar. Was this how the deceased were transported in this place?

It seemed unlikely.

"No. The bodies are out here," he agreed. With a suppressed gag, the angel moved closer to the traincar, rising up upon the balls of his feet to peer inside the windows. Corpses occupied every chair within it, all of them in various stages of decomposition – some fresh, some ancient and withered. "But there is something strange about them. I looked inside one of them. It was larger than it should have been and the ground surrounding it was vibrating."

He hadn't investigated beyond that – the odd portal (or so he assumed) tied to the crypts hadn't been his concern. Not yet, at least. Malthael, on the other hand, was. Tyrael didn't trust the angel to not pick back up where he'd left off in Westmarch.

[pathofwisdom]

It was less than kind to remind Tyrael of the undead that his fall from Heaven had raised, but they were not to the point of being kind to one another. There was no room for it when they were on the edge of being enemies once more. He turned to follow his brother, gliding along above the ground. Tyrael would find no insight, no thought that had not occurred to Malthael. Despite his claim to the title, he was not well suited to the Aspect of Wisdom, and Malthael knew more of death than Tyrael.

"There is nothing more to be learned from these corpses." So perhaps the mausoleums next. Malthael's curiosity was raised by Tyrael's description of their interior. The outside seemed normal enough, though the monuments mortals built to house their dead were not a subject he had given much attention.

Malthael left Tyrael to check on one, examining it carefully before he pushed the door open.

[eldruin]

Tyrael lingered beside the car for several long moments after Malthael had swept past him. He did not question the statement that the angel had unearthed what he could from the bodies present, but to leave them as they were seemed in poor taste (even if they, thankfully, were not left in great piles or stacks as had been case in Westmarch or in areas where the Evils had wandered). Besides, what if the ones left in these strange metal containers were to rise? They could prove to be a threat to the scant few living beings Tyrael had seen flitting through the graveyard.

Eventually, however, he did draw himself away from the macabre display to follow after Malthael. Although the bodies looked as they had been obviously displaced from the opened crypts, there was little that Tyrael could do for them aside from burn them (something he wasn't particularly keen on doing at the moment even if that could possibly insure that they would not rise again). For now, until the mysteries of this strange graveyard had been unravelled and the currently animated dead returned to the ground, the bodies left out of their proper graves would have to wait.

When Tyrael did catch up with the former archangel of Wisdom it was just in time to witness him vanish into the confines of one of the opened mausoleums. Surprisingly, it did not appear that the angel had stepped through a portal - there was no ripple or distortion to the air, merely his disappearance from Tyrael's line of sight.

A few ground-eating strides brought Tyrael to the entrance of the crypt where, once again, he felt the earth tremble beneath his feet, rumbling in a rhythmic pattern as if something heavy was hurtling by. And, without so much as a backward glance towards the rest of the graveyard, he stepped through the entryway and into the crypt that was not a crypt.

Almost immediately, the change in lighting and scenery within the confines of the burial chamber set Tyrael back. It was far brighter in here than it had been in the deepening dusk of the graveyard and the architecture was something altogether alien. Stranger still, were the great glass panes lining either wall to his left and right - an oddly vibrating landscape that flew past as though he were riding in some sort of carriage. This, combined with the sudden perfume in the air (something far better than rotting corpses) and the movement of the ground beneath him, had his mortal senses reeling.

With a hand pressed against one wall to ensure his continued balance, Tyrael looked to his once-brother before glancing back over one shoulder, "There is no portal."

Was this an illusion then? El'druin could cut away at seals and other demonic magics, but this... illusion was questionable - it didn't seem inherently malevolent, simply perplexing. How and why was it tied to the bodies outside? To what end was this made?