synodiporia_ooc | Test Drive #18

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test drive

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.

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"Doesn't matter where I'm from. And I am the stories of great heroes and their foes."

Though he doesn't elaborate if he's the hero or the foe.

"Stubborn! That's the word. No... Perhaps egomaniac. No. That was someone else."

He can't remember who.

"Didn't ask where you're from." Well that's straightforward.

Meanwhile, wedging the bed, basket and all, bit by bit through the door. He's being very careful, at least careful for him. "Stubborn is a nice word. Not sure about the other one."

Something cracks. The door frame? The bed? It's hard to tell with that much stuff in the way. The Doctor's certainly had far more intelligent conversation partners in the past, hasn't he? 'Egomaniac' would ... probably suit him, in another time and space, if he were in his other form. That one had destroyed many worlds and solar systems. This one.. not so much. "Do the foes ever win? I don't mean temporary battles. I mean long term victory."

Odd question.

Megalomaniac and Egomaniac are two different things. And you can be one without being the other... sometimes.

"Depends on who you consider the foe to be."

When the foe is the Doctor? Never. When it's those he fights? Always.

And he's just going to stand there, arms crossed and watch the goings on.

He'll be at this a while. A good hard shove WOULD get it through but also break it and then what was the point?

"Usually it's the ones who want to destroy things, terrorize people and so on. Large-scale meanness, not just pushing someone into the path of an oncoming stampede."

The Doctor smirks. "Funny you should say that. One of the species out there calls me 'the Oncoming ~~pout~~ Storm.'"

He pauses.

"That said, I'm usually the thing that monsters have nightmares about."

The oncoming pout, that's a far more interesting title.

"Storms are good things." Well he thinks so anyway, even if other people might think otherwise. So what if some things got broken? Overall it was beneficial. Rain happened, debris got washed away.

Maybe this species really liked this old guy.

But the rest.. he could sense nor smell nothing overtly unusual about this particular alien. "I'd assume you have to be good at it if you're as old as you seem." His sense of old is ... skewed though. "But nowhere has just one hero or just one foe. Do they ever win? If not against you, then others?"

He raises an eyebrow.

"Well, my storm isn't."

Destroys everything in his path. And the Daleks do everything but like the Doctor. Not telling his age is nothing new. Over 2500 years old, without counting the time lived on repeat in the confession dial. 4.5 billion years old now.

"I'm far, far older than I seem. That's true, there isn't just one hero or foe. And I'm not really a hero. The foes do win against others, which is why they need to call me in."

"If this species was in the foe list and not the general normal species that can think list then it is still a good storm, for everyone else." Broly raises one hand and gestures to his own hair. "Yours is gray. You lived long enough to get that way."

If a saiyan survived long enough to even turn gray? Then they HAD to be formidable and skilled.. and now wise and experienced to go along with it. It doesn't seem to even surprise Broly a little that this man might fall under the same category, because of course every single other species does things the way his does.

"So you fight the ones who are generally seen as foes, and are called when the other heros fail, then you would qualify on a ..."

He frowns. Now it's his turn to lose a word. "Broad ... generalization? Even if the fiddly bits are different. And if you're still alive then foes probably aren't succeeding long-term and on grand scales for long?" He's not really good at conveying what he wants with actual well thought out sentences, and it shows. But he's trying hard.

The bed is given another shove.

"You're assuming I wasn't born with grey hair."

He was - to an extent, born with grey hair, that is. The Doctor just lets Broly stumble for words for a bit.

"You're asking what I am? I already told you. But I'll rephrase it. There have been many attempts to conquer the Earth. Not one of them succeeded. Not a single one. They all lost and burned and ran. That's who I am."

It was pretty simple in the end. Unless you were an enemy and decided to call him the Great Destruction of the Universe.

"That said, most people just call me The Doctor."

"It's not just the hair. Unless your whole species looks elderly but I don't think so."

But there's a shake of the head when asked if he's asking who the Doctor is. He just wanted to know where to put the category, and if the enemy ever won. Nowhere, nowhere he'd ever heard of did the enemy win for long. "Just a category. Big categories."

It seemed the place this man was from was similar. Of course an enemy would see the one destroying them as terrible, but the net gain was generally good for everyone else. He was going to have to find a better way to put that into words so he can actually explain his intent. "Earth is your world?" .. Wait no, his father had mentioned an Earth. Was this an earthling?

"I heard a conqueror named Frieza was killed by an Earth person, did you kill him?"

The Doctor laughs at being called an 'Earth person.'

"I don't look human. Humans look Time Lord. And I'm from a place very far away from Earth. Who is Frieza?"

Because the Doctor is saying way more than he should. Especially if he wants to keep himself low-profile in this place.

Who is he kidding? If there's one thing he does, it's make an entrance.

"I wouldn't know the difference, I've never seen a human either." But he was going to! And if this guy looked like a human or humans looked like 'time lords', then it was basically exactly the same thing!

... Which means humans and time lords look like tailless saiyans. "A planetary conqueror. He'd arrive with his armies, and raze a planet and resell it. If it was populated then too bad for them; sometimes he'd just destroy the planet. If it was you then you'd know his name. It must have been a different hero sort." He sounds thoughtful. Some OTHER human slash timelord who was at Earth at the time. "Is 'time lord' just a title or can you do time things?"

Sure, just keep telling yourself that, Broly. What kind of name is that, anyway?

"Time Lord isn't a title. It's my species."

Why do all the pudding-brained primitives find him? It gets old. Fast.

"I can do time things... Well, not here, not exactly, anyway."

And yet for all that the Doctor finds it tiring to deal with primitives, he has yet to actually even try to leave, and Broly certainly wasn't keeping him prisoner. What kind of name was 'Doctor', anyway?

"Too bad for you I suppose. It would have been convenient." Not for him, but in general. Time control wasn't one of the things he had much interest in acquiring personally.

"Convenient? Time is too weird to keep track of in this place. It's fine."

Because, well, that's how he rolls.

"So, what's your name?"

"For now." Nothing is ever missed so badly as when it's needed and not on hand, but in this specific place with floating bed balloons perhaps it wasn't as needed. Until one of those foes arrive. Time control in any measure would be a good way to keep ahead and alive.

Maybe one was sleeping in such a bed right now. "I am Broly. No titles." There is a great groaning crack from the bed and it pops through the doorway. The blankets at least are lingering, but what of the rest? "If you hear of a universe where adversaries win instead of heroes, please let me know. I would be grateful."

Sensing Time and controlling it are rather two different things. He'd need his TARDIS to control it. And he won't be entering her anytime soon.

Okay, wait. Broly. Which sounds terribly close to Brolly. And the Doctor can't stop his laughter for a moment or two. But he sobers when he hears the request.

"Wait. You want a place where the foes win? Why?"

He might not be a genius, but he knows when someone's having a laugh at his expense. There's little outward sign of it save the blue gems on the rather lot amount of jewelry he's wearing suddenly faintly lit from within as they do their job preventing inevitable disaster.

It's hard to get more than mildly annoyed when wearing devices that actively prevent it.

"Because all there is, is history and myth and legend in world after world that says the adversary does not win, and doesn't usually even survive the conflict. Their victories are short, their deaths painful and meaningless, their names scorned if they're remembered at all." There's a shrug from the doorway; the blankets are still there, though the pillows are gone. The wicker basket that had made up the bed frame is .. fading.

"I am not a hero, Doctor. I am what the heros fight."

The Doctor raises an eyebrow again.

"Well if all your fights go the way of that bed, no wonder you want to find a world where you win."

The Doctor is dying of laughter inside, he manages to just look amused. Last time he upset a badie by commenting on his lack of... No. He shakes his head. That will only make him think of her.

"They do. For the people who fight me, and their world and sometimes their solar system. I have never yet lost, but history and story tell me that will change eventually. I'd rather avoid it."

He doesn't ... seem like a fighter, in spite of being obviously physically fit. There's none of the hostility and aggressiveness that should come with someone claiming to be able to do that sort of thing.

"Ah well, you're asking the wrong person."

And the Doctor now thinks he's an idiot, because a very close eye will be kept on him.

"I'm the thing monsters have nightmares about."

He offers that grin that Nardole doesn't like. Mostly because it's pretty intimidating, as smiles go. And a bit manic.

It's not easy to intimidate someone who's never faced defeat, had no idea what it was like to be brought down by someone else. The smile is returned, brief and thin and humorless. He'd understand eventually, when defeat did happen, he'd know what a smile like that means, but what was there to fear when he was unstoppable?

"I think I'm asking the right person. You've said you're the one heros call when they fail, and you've stopped others from ruining 'Earth'. You said you stopped them, burned them, made them run. You didn't say you killed them."

Broly's not very smart but apparently he's not as stupid as he seems either. "That means the pattern ends. Being burned and chased might be worth that."

Nope. Idiot.

"Well, you've missed more than the boat at this point. I didn't think I needed to say I killed them."

He didn't, though. He was far worse. He convinced others to do the killing for him.

A shrug. If the Doctor was too shortsighted to do something with that information, Broly was not going to continue spending time on it. Perhaps grey hair and age wasn't as much of a marker for time lords as it was for saiyans. Maybe it was just a marker for arrogance.

"You're still not saying it. There is a scent of bluff to you, Doctor. I don't think you have the power to stop me. Maybe nobody does, and I'll be the first to break the pattern. Heh."

Not likely, there were always bigger fish, but this man wasn't one of them. The blankets were still there, and the mattress seemed to be as well. That was enough for a bed as far as he's concerned! "Goodbye, Doctor." It's time to drag all that somewhere comfortable and put to test whether or not the Doctor was a thing of nightmares!

"Me? I have no need to bluff."

He's too damned old to care. At least he's so old he acts like he doesn't care on a regular basis But bluffing? No. He's done all the things he's been accused of. And a great deal more besides.

"Goodbye Broly."

He waves the other guy off.

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Test Drive #18

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