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

[willyousee]

Ghostly in the twilight, Alcuin stands pensively before the next car, just close enough that he can see the heaped shapes, but not their features. He glances over as Joscelin approaches, giving him a grave nod of greeting.

[protect_and_serve]

Joscelin nods back, silently elegiac. He has always liked Alcuin, but Alcuin here unnerves him. Meeting him again was wrenching. Dealing with him, alive, watchful, sometimes peaking in his head... in its way, it's like being haunted, and he does poorly at hiding that, although he would like to, drowning the feeling in formality.

He finishes his prayers.

"I wonder sometimes if they can hear us," he says, terse, oblique.

[willyousee]

"If they can, perhaps they can draw comfort from it," Alcuin replies softly, twining a lock of hair around his fingers.

Joscelin hasn't truly been easy around him since he arrived, but Alcuin understands. How could he not? He isn't meant to be here. He tries not to get in Joscelin's way. There are more pressing matters than one mis-directed soul. For himself, he hadn't enough time to become used to this place, and the strangeness of it ground against his nerves. Joscelin - another true D'Angeline face and voice in this ever-changing sea of stranger folk - was a comfort. Even if he was inexplicably older, with years of pressures and experiences molding him which had been absent at their last meeting. There is a guilt and agitation that weighs on him - even more than that which had been on his face in the library - that's clear enough to those who know the signs. ​ "This isn't something you could have foreseen," he says gently.

[protect_and_serve]

"My foresight has always been lacking." The counter is dour and immediate, self-flagellating as Joscelin so often is without someone to stop him. He isn't self-aware enough to feel the balance between his need to be checked, to be measured and the dark, penitent almost-pleasure he takes in his own tension and error - in a way familiar to, yet utterly unlike, that of any Mandrake or Valerian adept's understanding of pain, shame, and guilt.

[willyousee]

"No more than any other mortal, Joscelin." Alcuin's gaze sharpens, even if his voice does not. "Somehow I doubt even Phèdre's Tsingano friend could have seen this." Joscelin has always been too hard on himself, and even if Phèdre saw it more frequently than he, one must needs be blind and deaf to miss it. He's not quite certain how to go about moderating this harsh habit, but someone must, as it is more than clear that Josclin won't, left to himself.

He steps forward, holding out an open palm, concern writ about his eyes. "Don't rush to shoulder the blame. It was never your fault."