TEST DRIVE #24

[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 than 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 21-28. Our next Jaunt will be Digital Frontier: Legacy Mode, a return visit to the Grid, where investigation of the secrets held by a new computer system will be investigated. The jaunt will be accompanied by the walkabout Northern Lights, where a ski resort in Finland is subject to some unusual happenings during the longest night of the year.

Prompt #62 is a Liminal Space that offers a chance to get clean, if you can work with its quirks.
Prompt #63 gives players a taste of the exploration setup used on the Grid previously.

#62

Liminal Space is a laundromat - the rows of washers and dryers stretch into the distance, occasionally punctuated by the doors to Travelers’ private created spaces. If you’ve been looking for a chance to wash your clothes, you can even do that; there are stacks of odd gold coins marked with five-pointed stars around, apparently of a perfect size to slot into the machines.

Of course, first you have to free a machine of its resident hamsters.

They’re not true animals - instead, they’re made of cloth. One might be flannel, another denim, and so on. They’re all running endlessly in the washer and dryers like they’re hamster wheels, and the detergent and fabric softener dispensers in the Liminal Laundromat look more like a drip-feed water bottle you’d leave upended in an actual hamster’s cage.

#63

(For a quick rundown of the Grid’s various factions, see here. Automata are not on this short list, since their functions changed significantly after the last jaunt and we haven’t formally sorted out how yet.)

It took quite a bit of scanning, but the Defenders in this system are now satisfied that the Programs visiting from the Grid to help with their data reclamation didn’t come bearing new and unusual strains of corruption. Their wariness isn’t uncalled for, given that Programs come in one of two colors, and the Grid’s visitors apparently have another three to come to grips with.

With the conclusion of the quarantine protocol, all Programs are now free to explore the area and see what they can find. The task goes faster in groups of Programs, and a fair amount of work is required before a sector is considered fully processed. You might find nothing, or you might find something - or you might find danger, in the form of corrupted data.

Comments

[finalizes]

"You never know if another will be able to see colours, either. Or consider them markers."

He decides that Drake is likely not a danger - not right now, not under these circumstances, not to him, anyway - and sits his butt down, tilting his head to the side in question.

"You've never seen something like this?" He wouldn't be surprised. Going by what he knows about the other two of Drake's kind.

[teamblue]

That draws a brief, toothless smile. It's taking a bit of effort to weigh the furry shape and guess what might be seen as a friendly gesture versus one that might be hostile. Showing teeth in a smile had once been friendly even to the Brutes, but that changed when fangs happened.. "In that place, all could recognize them, and lived or died based on their ability to mind them. It is the way things are." There's a slight shrug. Many things just were the way they were, and Drake didn't spend a lot of time wondering why. "Expecting it to be elsewhere the same way would be silly. Especially when there's small rodents running around the cleaning machines."

His first taste of liminal: exceedingly bizarre.

When Laughs sits, it seems appropriate that he does too simply so he's not looming about. The stone here is nearly as good as the warm stone above, he has no complaints, and plunks down as gracelessly as he had before.

"I .. might have." His brow furrows, gaze tracking out across the open space to the mountains far distant. "But those memories were ... a lifetime ago." Literally, in this case. "Nothing in this lifetime compares. The colors, the sounds. What little I can smell. This light." He turns one hand palm-up to the sunlight, thoughtful. "It's warm, not hateful. It feels ..."

Articulating things of that nature seem to be a bit of a struggle, as after a few moments he gives up with another bit of a shrug. "A little closer to 'Nirvana' than any world I've known. You're lucky it's yours."

[finalizes]

"It isn't mine. It just is."

Yes, he created it, and he controls this space - and it is nothing but a weak copy of true wilderness, in his mind. It seems alive and right, it breathes and lives like true wilderness does because he knows it so intimately, because he doesn't truly try to control it past how he has to.

But, of course - it is not true wilderness, exactly because it isn't just. Because he made it, because it only is because of him. Making it permanent at least helped a little bit with that, and introducing the bunnies and having others around the place helped, too.

Nirvana means nothing to him, but he thinks he understands anyway. A memory of a space closer to Wyld than Weaver or Wyrm resonating somewhere in the soul of a creature of the Wyld.

"You lived before?"

[teamblue]

Something in what the wolf says draws a puzzled look from Drake, who doesn't say anything immediately, instead trying to work it out for himself.

This effort fails, after several long moments.

"Of course. ...Doesn't everybody?"

This comes with the thought that maybe not everyone did. That was somehow more disturbing than the sun's warmth was pleasant.

[finalizes]

It's easier for him to grasp since back where he's from, some select few people are reborn while the vast majority aren't, and he knows some people who are. So he's had that discussion a good long while ago from the other side.

"Most people here don't. In Liminal, those who die come back to life, but that's different, they come back as they were and the process is traumatic.

So there's no point in killing for other reasons than food." He doesn't know how much Drake has been told already, so he feels like that should be said. "And there is no reason to kill for food because maybe half of everyone here can just create food items, so if you need food just ask me or someone else who can."

[teamblue]

A resurrection that while traumatic, puts people back the way they are instead of beginning a new life? Drake looks thoughtful, but doesn't say anything on it immediately. That didn't remove the point, that made death a viable tool in far more situations.

"If I can't even help in catching it and killing it, I don't deserve to eat it." He's not going to be very interested in 'created food items', he can't hunt them. "And if killing it is only a temporary inconvenience for it, then there's even less of a problem doing it than usual." That's not how he's supposed to be taking that information, but he sounds a little bit relieved, whatever way he IS taking it.

Of course in turn it means he's likely to get eaten at some point in the future too, but he'd deal with that and the connected trauma when the time came. Karma spins on. "There has always been worse things than death, it seems now even more than usual. That's good, something nice to tell my Leader when he arrives." Now death can be a proper education tool and not just an object lesson for other people!