Test Drive #14

[powersthatbe]

Welcome to the Synodiporia Test Drive Meme! Below the cuts there are two new prompts, and here are the prompts from previous test-drives, which you’re still welcome to use in this post. 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! OCs are especially welcome! Please take a quick look at our Directory & familiarize yourself with the concept and setting of the game before you jump in.

Our upcoming app round runs April 24th-30th. Our next Jaunt, Neapolitan Beach Vacation, is a Roman-era romp with drama, comedy, and romance, a light-hearted chance for Travelers to catch their breath between metaplot-heavy, more serious events. Our next Walkabout (a more player-driven alternative event, for those not interested in the Jaunt) will be a survival/exploration event set on a ruined island Travelers visited in the distant past... Both Jaunt & Walkabout will begin May 7th & run for approximately four weeks.

Prompt #39 is set in a synaesthetic Liminal Space where sounds become shapes and motion becomes music.

Prompt #40 is set in the Marches of Purgatory Jaunt, a contested kingdom in the afterworld where Angels, Demons, and Sithen (immortal conscientious objectors) barter over sins, virtues, and lost souls.


Prompt #39

The floors in Liminal Space are paths made of keyboards and fretboards, or stepping-stones across prismatic pools made of drums and cymbals, and they make noise accordingly. The walls, colored liquid glass, vibrate with sound, creating patterns of jagged, angry exclamations (it was a rough Jaunt), smooth soothing waves of pastels, or, at particularly apt descriptions, dislodging bubbled sculptures of the pictures discussion paints. It’s almost impossible, no matter how hard one tries, to create something discordant - and equally impossible to create silence or bland color.


Prompt #40

The Vanity Fair is a day’s flight away from Melasurei and the burning river it bridges. In a field of gently-waving asphodel flowers, underneath an impressionistic sky with swirling stars and half a hundred waxing and waning moons, a galactic spiral of colored tents is centered around a gradient-shifting bonfire in which smoke-images flicker, curl, and disperse. Within the tents, hooded souls, undead immortals, and various celestial beings sell their services, Sins & Virtues, scraps of disconnected memory and personality, and other ephemera. There are fruit that can only been grown in tilled fields irrigated with tears, blessed or cursed objects, the indentured dead themselves, and then, of course, the bonfire itself, fueled by wood from Hell, grown on regrets, mistakes, and impure thoughts. Vendor or customer, everyone here wants something, and everything here is something someone wants.

Comments

[failgoyle]

"...I didn't do it." The response to being within earshot of that disapproving tongue-clicking is automatic, even if Jules for the moment looks like a really undersized demonic inhabitant of this place. Thanks, Mask, for breaking down and leaving him relatively naked in his normal Lurkglider state! A freaky purple gargoyle with undersized wings is just the sort of thing this place needs.

[haveabiscuit]

"I should hope not." Said in a tone that suggests that it would be most unpleasant if he had done it. Though she could believe he was part of all of this. He has a certain look, after all.

[failgoyle]

"And I'm not planning anything, honest," he finds himself adding as he wrings his tail a little nervously. He just doesn't need an old lady breathing down his neck, okay?

[haveabiscuit]

"That's a relief." There's something about him that just compels that teacher voice from her. He reminds her of someone, but she's not quite sure who yet.

"It seems there's enough going on here as it is." They're not here to stop this. But this is wrong.

[failgoyle]

"Yeah, yeah, there's a lot of it going on, alright." He seems a little agitated as he looks out at the chaos. "But there's a guy down there that's going on and on about selling virtues and vices, and it's kinda trippy. I don't trust it."

[haveabiscuit]

"As well you shouldn't. That sort of business is always dangerous." She wasn't entirely clear on what selling sins and virtues entailed. But she was quite certain about the dangerous aspect.

[failgoyle]

Well, at least someone here is agreeing with him on things being dangerous, even if it's in a sort of authoritative teacher kind of way that makes him squirm. "And here I thought goblin markets were bad..."

[haveabiscuit]

Now that's a word she hasn't heard much since she got swept up in all the traveling business. Most people seem to come from worlds that don't have anything of the sort. "You have experience with goblins?"

[failgoyle]

"Oh, yeah." Jules makes a face. "The hobgoblins love me, the others would always drag me to the market because we'd get a better deal." He shudders. "Not that that's still a good deal. More like less awful...and then there was that time that one tribe of 'em tried to adopt me and Haru ended up having to distract them with that elephant foot..." Ah, memories. Vaguely nonsensical memories.

[haveabiscuit]

"Goblins aren't famed for easily giving up what they think is theirs." Though latching on to a person is certainly a new one. It must be those universe differences that meant most people weren't even familiar with goblins. "They make excellent bankers."

[failgoyle]

"No, they're not, but..." Jules looks as befuddled as a purple gargoyle-thing can. "Why would you even want to try to trust hob math?" He is reasonably certain that way lies somehow accidentally exchanging all of your money for a single turnip that is, in fact, cursed.

[haveabiscuit]

"Goblins have excellent heads for figures. They're frightfully clever in general." Some wizards have a low opinion of them, but Minerva is not among them. They're clever and hopefully after everything that has happened, society at large will start to see them differently. "Any illusions otherwise come from quite another source."

[failgoyle]

"They don't make any sense to anyone other than themselves, and they're really quick to get violent," Jules complains. "I mean, they think I'm one of them and like me about as well as they like anyone, but they still get kind of crazy! Then you get into their contracts and the failsafes and the drawbacks, and noooooo. No way am I letting them manage my finances."