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synodiporia_ooc2014-03-29 03:05 pm
powersthatbe) wrote in synodiporia_ooc2014-03-29 03:05 pm
Entry tags:
Test Drive #2
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.
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.
no subject
[She supposes it's possible. In liminal space, anything is possible. But she still feels all these places come from somewhere else. They're not random. They just seem random on the surface.]
It's an interesting theory, from a Fool. [Another little challenge. Not that Lila is a veteran, but she's more of one than Natasha is.]
no subject
[ Calling her a Fool gets an eyebrow raise from Natasha. ] Is that what we're calling rookies these days? I prefer Natasha.
no subject
[There is music playing out the window. She tilts her head to listen to it, though she never quite looks away from the woman in here with her.]
That's what the veterans call us. And themselves, actually. Very self-deprecating. Natasha? [There is a touch of familiarity in the way she speaks the name. She is third generation, but her family knows its roots better than most.]
Lila. Zacharov. [Natasha won't know her family, but Lila still wields their name like a snake wields its fangs.]
no subject
Romanoff. [ She nods at Lila's name, eyes closing for a moment. ] Any relation to Matvei Zakharov? You seem a little too young and a little too pretty for that. Do you still speak the language?
no subject
Ivan. My father. And [the hint of a sneer] the lately departed Anton, although he never really made much of a mark.
[Because Lila didn't let him. The compliment she takes as her due; the question she answers with a pause and then rapid-fire, American-tinged Russian. She'd never be taken for a native, but she's not terrible, either.]
Enough to get by. Not enough to be as good as my grandfather.
no subject
She likes her already. ]
But you have such a charming accent. [ Natasha finally pulls her legs down, allowing Lila more room. ] And it's good to know who speaks the language. You never know when English is less than desireable in a fight.
no subject
English is tactically undesirable in a lot of situations. Do you think it makes a difference here, among the dead?
no subject
Tell me, Lila: what makes you dangerous?
no subject
[She repeats the word not because she's uncertain of its meaning or its place in the conversation, but because there are so many ways she's dangerous, it's hard to think of one to start with. She is strong, not physically but psychologically; she has weapons at her disposal. In one place, she has the weight of numbers behind her, and wherever she goes, she can bend men to her will.]
[She wants to say everything. In the end, what she says is:] My mind.
no subject
And have the Travelers been good about not being rabid dogs at each other's throats? [ That seemed to be the only rule, beyond the vast impression that 'escape' was highly unlikely, but Natasha knows people.
It's only a matter of time, really. ]
no subject
On the contrary. They've been slow to act. Static. Sluggish. It's unimpressive.
[Many things are unimpressive to her, but this most of all. These people are not willing to do what's needed to get work done. She is immensely frustrated by this.]
no subject
[ Foolish, foolish cattle. ]
What needs accomplishing?
no subject
[Lila is absolutely the kind of person who doesn't care for any to do list but her own, and is quite put upon by the fact that someone has deigned to put her priorities on the back-burner.]
Lately it was solving a murder. But I don't think they're all so straightforward.
no subject
[ All this power, the ability to pull people in from various worlds and various realities, and they worry about a murder? Natasha is slightly incredulous, which is to say she arches her brow just a little more. ]
How mundane.