synodiporia_ooc | Test Drive #18

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 March 24th–April 1st. Our next Jaunt will be Olympus Upended: a classical myth and fantasy adventure, set in a Trojan War-era Greece full of gods, monsters, and titans. During the Jaunt, the Olympians and their chosen heroes must deal with the machinations of fate when their powers and domains begin to ebb and flow, faltering or in some cases transferring to others.

Prompt #47 features a liminal space where Travelers find themselves floating down the Tunnel of Love.
Prompt #48 features a liminal space with beds, balloons, and no ground to be seen.
Prompt #49 features a space walk set in the universe from the Escape From Junkworld jaunt. Having escaped the destruction of the prison planet Junkworld Gehenna, these refugees from the four major spacefaring races--crystalline Hecatites, psychic-but-prone-to-hallucination horned Diabolin; scaled Gorgons with their petrifying abilities and tentacled hair, and your bog-standard humans, newcomers to the stars--now finally have a moment where they can slow down.

#47

You find yourself in a boat in a long tunnel, light deliberately kept low. Oh, the sides and the ceiling glitter and sparkle and the dioramas you occasionally pass seem to glow with their own inner light, but unless you’re naturally adapted for low-light, it’s going to take your eyes a little while to adjust. Once they do--or perhaps even before they do--you’ll find that you’re not alone in the boat. There’s someone riding next to you. Maybe they’re a friend among the Travelers, maybe someone you’ve grown to love. Maybe they’re a perfect stranger. Maybe they’re even someone you hate. They’re still stuck in the boat with you.

Once your eyes have adjusted properly, you’ll see that the boat you’re both in is made of chocolate--white, dark, or milk--and carved in the shape of a swan. The ‘water’ it floats down is no such thing, but instead pink champagne. Those dioramas in the wall? They’re dramatizations of various moments of passion and romance in the love-lives of you and your fellow Travelers.

Just when it seems that you’ve been in the tunnel forever, it suddenly widens into a much larger room with a ceiling open to the sky, the underground waterway flowing through the center, constricted until there's barely water in the side, so that you can easily disembark from your swanboat during the minute it takes for the boat to glide through the room, which seems to be some sort of cafe. A ‘Group Date’ cafe, whatever that is, according to the sign. Instead of food on the menu board, there are instead lists of questions to ask your date. The floor is tiled with conversation hearts. The furniture, like the swan boats, is made of chocolate. Finally, the walls are made of valentine’s cards, addressed to initials and signed by Roman numerals, all in the same loopy pink cursive that makes up the questions menu.

#48

You find yourself in bed. In fact, each Traveler starts out in their own private bed, which is suspended from a floating hot air balloon (minus the gas burner) and both balloon and bed are decorated vaguely to the taste of the Traveler therein. It’s a lovely, comfortable bed, perfect for sleeping or just plain lazing around, and it allows a perfect view to all the other beds suspended in the sky--and the doors to created spaces as well, themselves suspended from balloons of their own.

There is no ground in this liminal space. Sky above, sky below, and the great crowd of balloons which are more or less level. Sometimes they drift close enough so that they bump together and you can easily move from one to the other, though of course they’ll soon drift away from each other.

Of course, this being liminal space, there’s no reason why you can’t walk through the thin air or even fly to the other balloons and doors, as long as you realize that’s an option. Just take care you don’t panic and forget you can, because once you forget you can fly the only thing you can do is fall. At least if you do fall into the endless sky, you’ll just have a few harrowing seconds to panic before you land right on your balloon bed again.

#49

It’s been a week since the Empress of Moths reached its destination. The planet below, with no official name, merely numerical designation referring to its star, is not exactly ideal. Its temperature is on the lower end of what humans will tolerate; its bedrock is not the best suited for Gorgon caves; there are few natural resources for the Diabolins to exploit; and its external geology isn’t quite to Hecatite tastes. It is, however, an M-type planet that will support intelligent life and has, in fact, supported a small smuggler’s base for quite some time.

Despite all these shortcomings, it’s much preferable to the radioactive slag heap the refugees formerly called home. Now that arrangements have been made with the local smugglers, most of the refugees have left the ship on outrider shuttles and it’s immediately noticeable how much less crowded the Empress is--even with a few of the local smugglers aboard after the negotiations.

But then, not everyone plans to stay planetside. There’s a sizable contingent who want to keep flying with the Empress, finding work among the stars to support their newfound home. It’s why she still hovers over the planet, instead of coming to an undignified landing on the surface. And before the Empress leaves, her new crew and any visitors currently aboard (smugglers and Investigating Travelers alike) have the opportunity to undertake a space walk together. It’s time to don one’s space suit and helmet, attach one’s air supply, and take a step outside into the beautiful, cold vacuum of the sea of stars.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"It's not their fault, I know. I don't mind doing these kinds of jobs. I'm just used to deciding which team I play for rather than being ordered which job to do."

The Doctor picks up on Allura's caution. So, he starts to be more general. Although, a part of him is glad that if it all goes pear-shaped, it won't be entirely his fault for once.

Her shoulder prickles hot beneath her suit, a psychosomatic reminder of the mark etched into her skin, pledging her allegiance to the god-alien that chose her. She's never had the absolute freedom he speaks of - even before the war had shattered her world and chosen the course of her life, she'd been a princess of Altea, and that meant duty came first, and whimsy a far and distant second - but she's grown used to having a bit more lattitude than this, and so she gives him a brief, sympathetic smile.

"We can still choose how we do it. And it won't last forever - only a few quintants more, and we're off for the next adventure." The last bit is pure fluff, knowing as she does that the next adventure will be more of the same, but as it's meant more for any idle ears than for his, that doesn't really matter.

"Yes, the how is what matters. Even when you're given many chances to change how you do it, you have to remain true to yourself."

He's talking from experience. One week lived on repeat for billions of years was a heck of an education. Both suits scanned the Doctor nodded at the results.

"Well, they don't have holes in them and the seals should work properly. After that? I'd say we're probably on our own."

"Yes," she agrees quietly, the last of her disapproval bleeding into solemnity. "You do. If you don't, you lose everything you were fighting for in the first place."

She glances away to finish checking the seals on her own suit, though she shoots him another sidelong glance that, this time, carries something more like amusement. "I'm sure someone will come after us if we get ourselves into trouble."

"I'm usually what gets sent in to stop trouble, so if that happens things are really desperate."

Which is true from his point of view. His friends would say it's the opposite. With that, he started to put the suit on. He still wasn't happy about it, but needs must.

She blinks at him for a moment, puzzled or dubious or just judging the distance between the claim and the protests about the available equipment.

"It seems like they usually are," she notes. "You don't have to go out there if you're worried about the equipment failure. I'm sure someone will be willing to report back." Or loan him their senses, courtesy of the telepathic network.

Yeah, that whole 'loaning thing' isn't good with a touch-telepath. He would fight it with every ounce of his being. It's his training. He raises an eyebrow at her last comment.

"I'd rather die out there than be trapped in here."

She lifts a hand to smother a smile, both at his reply and at the uneasy glance from one of the other tourists - they might have been tuning out most of the discussion, but the topic of death in space, even when raised flippantly, is one close to most spacers' hearts. "I wouldn't call us trapped, but I can't say I blame you, either. I promise I'll come get you if you demagnetize and fall off the side of the ship, if you'll do the same for me."

He's not used to strangers listening when he's being flippant. Because, well, he is more often than not. He makes an embarrassed look and nods at them. "Sorry."

He wasn't really, but sometimes it's best to smooth things over. He looks over at her and aims the sonic at her boots, then at his own.

"Shouldn't be a problem."

She eyes the buzzing, glowing thing with some skepticism, then glances back up at him, brow knitting slightly. "What was that?" A tracking tag, perhaps? The thought makes her uneasy on principle, but she can't deny the use of such a thing if that's the case.

He tucks his sonic back away. "Nothing so fancy, just reversed the polarity of our boots. They're magnetised now. We'll stay stuck to the hull of the ship now."

He offers a grin, because for once his phrase actually meant something.

Of course she tests it, lifting one foot to check the resistance as she pulls it away from the metal grating of the floor. She's too accustomed to space travel not to - there are a few whose word on matters of spacefaring safety she'd trust untested, but she can count those on one hand and not use all the fingers.

And of course the trick raises a whole host of questions she knows better than to ask here and now, and so she just says, "I know a young woman who'd be fascinated to meet you when this is all over."

He's not offended that she tests it. He simply nods as she does so. He does too, but less obviously.

"Well, that's everyone's reactions, until they realise they hate me."

"Hate is a strong word," she says, but quietly, like something that's less reassurance than it is experience.

"I'm only saying what others have said to me."

And at this point he calls that a normal reaction.

"People say a lot of things they regret in the heat of the moment," she says, eyeing him sidelong for a moment. Piped tinnily through the ship's comm system comes a warning that the airlock will be opening in one minute, and she absently twists her helmet in her hands, trying to accustom herself to the unfamiliar shape of the foreign equipment.

"Are the people saying this the trouble you get sent to stop, or the ones you're trying to help?"

"Who said anything about the heat of the moment?"

He offers a bit of a manic grin.

"Both, sometimes at the same time."

The grin returns. But he puts his helmet on because it's time.

"You don't seem like the type of person to stick around for long after the dust has cleared," she replies. That remark about death being preferable to confinement might be colouring her impressions, but she'll stand by them still.

She pulls her own helmet on, ducking her head slightly as she does to keep it from snagging painfully on her hair. She adjusts it slightly once it's in place, checking her movement and her peripheral vision, then triggers the seals. The murmur of conversation and thud of footsteps on metal falls away, replaced by the low rasp of her own breathing, and the faint buzz and click as the audio pickups switch on.

He does his own checks and waits until the audio kicks in before he replies.

"Really? What makes you say that?"

She's not wrong, but he's always curious how people see that in him. Because many do.

Test Drive #18

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