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

[superieure]

'Mm, not my thing. I can put you in touch with a colleague. No judgement.' She stifles her own smile, thinking of Terry's irritated expression already.

'There's a theory they're using us as the batteries. With an increase in population, the waiting room increases in complexity. Care to test that?'

[sklent]

"Ah, it's a passing fancy."

Okay. Now Monet has Natasha's complete attention, which apparently means leaving the compartment and making her way to the roof in order to sit across from her.

"What do you have in mind?"

[superieure]

'Life is short. No harm in indulging a whim from time to time,' she replies, eyeing Natasha as she climbs. She doesn't surrender an inch of her personal space. Instead, she tilts her chin up, a challenge, and crosses a leg over the other. 'We can only test when the next waiting room shows,' she says, clearly annoyed by having to wait. 'If we open the doors at random or try anything funny,' she snaps her finger. The course of action was hardly smart, or efficient, which made it unadvisable. Never mind that she'd tried to hit a wall her first day.

[sklent]

Well then Monet will just have to deal with Natasha being very liberal with the idea of personal space, sorry to say. She sits as close as she can without touching.

"It stops, or it just resets?"

[superieure]

Monet doesn't flinch. She has no perfume and minimal makeup; she wasn't going to take that ridiculous stuff they had in the '30s. Bad for her skin. She's no less poised, however, still as a statue, only her eyes are sharp and never leave Natasha.

'It resets,' she says. 'My original theory was that the space is moving from dimension to dimension, as we are, but that doesn't explain these bodies. What do you think?'

[sklent]

"Depends on how much power it takes to move us. If it's a drain, then there's limited resources to keep us occupied and in one place." Not to mention how much it just might take to keep them entirely. "But that's just the working theory."

[superieure]

'Monet St. Croix,' she offers, by way of approving Natasha's train of thought. The appeal of escape was very high indeed, and it involved figuring out which of these places was the weakest in terms of keeping them here. Telepathically, she adds, Or M., if you prefer that codename nonsense.

She doesn't stretch out a hand to shake.

[sklent]

"Natasha Romanoff, but you already knew that." She's not put off by the lack of formalities or politeness. Sometimes they're just covers. "How many of these things have you been through already?"

[superieure]

'Enough,' she replies, because honestly they're all the same. She hates the idea of her memories being overwritten - at the mercy of something greater than herself - and like hell she's going to tell a stranger that, let alone the Black Widow. 'Some of the others have the ability to share memories, you can request a firsthand look.'

[sklent]

"Did they come here with them?" That's...an interesting ability if so. Then again, the world is an interesting place full of interesting people and this place includes more than just the world she knows in general.

[superieure]

'No.' Amateurs. Telepathy was a gift - her gift - and the care and training Emma Frost had taken when teaching her had impressed upon Monet how valuable, and how powerful, it was.

[sklent]

"Well. That's different." To say the absolute least. She's not sure how she feels about suddenly!mutants happening here; it feels as if enough rules are being bent out of shape as it is.