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synodiporia_ooc2019-07-02 10:56 pm
powersthatbe) wrote in synodiporia_ooc2019-07-02 10:56 pm
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Test Drive #29
Welcome to the Synodiporia Test Drive Meme! Below the cuts there are three 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 current app round runs through July 10th. The July-August jaunt will be Paramo Riconquista, in which the pirates, mermaids, and ninjas of Crownbreaker Isle travel to the island city-state of Paramo during Li Festivale Di Riconquista, a raucous local holiday, on a mission of undercover - not to mention undersea - piracy; the Walkabout will be Majesty’s House Cup, a return visit to a school for the magical arts.
Prompt #73 is from the beginning of the Paramo Riconquista jaunt: with mermaid Sirens singing the Litany of Breath, they and their pirate companions travel through the shoals near Paramo - underwater.
Prompt #74 features a rather quiet iteration of Liminal Space.
#73
The shoals near Paramo are a marvel for human and mermaid alike - but for opposite reasons. With their ship beached gently in a lagoon thirty miles from land, they’d taken to the waves ten hours ago, doing their best to stick to the shadows, the crevasses, the depths and murky waters where no-one on the surface will see them. That had worked - then. Now, still three miles from shore, they’re passing through the reefs, with clear water no more than five fathoms deep, and sea traffic growing more common - fishing boats, pleasure schooners, the occasional hulking dreadnaught carving across the waves, canons out and pennants flying bright.
Most of the pirates have had a chance to swim in the shoals around Crownbreaker Isle, where the reefs are three times thicker than those here. But the labyrinthine shoals around Crownbreaker don’t have flotillas of pearlescent blue sea-lilies, or the massive whirling clouds of flickering, multicolored minnows like rainbow-tinted storms beneath the waves, and not nearly as many seals and porpoises coming to nose about the swimmers and play. They’re scavengers, all - they know that where humans are, there’s food discarded in the water, food the humans think is waste.
That isn’t what’s marvelous to the merfolk.
Still three miles out, they’re passing beneath stilted houses that hang above the waves, cross-shaped wharves and piers extending out from them. There are discarded anchors everywhere, wave-softened drifts of glass that were once goblets, pleasure-boats with lacquered bands of color across their copper-plated keels. And there are pops and booms of thunder, followed by distorted bursts of color - fireworks. The big festival displays haven’t begun yet, but every trader, fisherman, or petty aristocrat with the coin to spare has purchased a few from the trade-ships from En Zhenming, and they can’t resist showing off to their neighbors, setting them off over the waters like amateur cannon-fire with dyed smoke drifting low over the waves.
It’s very beautiful, and very dangerous. Because if even one Thalassian mermaid is spotted in these waters - if anyone dives underwater close enough to hear Siren Song - then come the patrol-ships and the harpoons. Everyone knows mermaids are dangerous cannibals and witches, every one of them (everyone except anyone who’s actually spoken to a mermaid).
You’re at the center of the map. Here be humans.
#74
The walls are lava.
Well, no. The walls are certainly glowing, shifting colors not unlike a lava lamp taking shapes that hold some sort of meaning to whoever’s looking at them. Whether that meaning is good or bad is in the eye of the beholder. But the walls of this cave-like Liminal Space, to the touch, feel like nothing so much as warm wax, and the stalactites and stalagmites peppered throughout look like dribbly candles.
It’s quiet here, the waxy texture of the space absorbing all but the nearest sounds, so you have to be quite close indeed to someone else to make conversation.
Our current app round runs through July 10th. The July-August jaunt will be Paramo Riconquista, in which the pirates, mermaids, and ninjas of Crownbreaker Isle travel to the island city-state of Paramo during Li Festivale Di Riconquista, a raucous local holiday, on a mission of undercover - not to mention undersea - piracy; the Walkabout will be Majesty’s House Cup, a return visit to a school for the magical arts.
Prompt #73 is from the beginning of the Paramo Riconquista jaunt: with mermaid Sirens singing the Litany of Breath, they and their pirate companions travel through the shoals near Paramo - underwater.
Prompt #74 features a rather quiet iteration of Liminal Space.
#73
The shoals near Paramo are a marvel for human and mermaid alike - but for opposite reasons. With their ship beached gently in a lagoon thirty miles from land, they’d taken to the waves ten hours ago, doing their best to stick to the shadows, the crevasses, the depths and murky waters where no-one on the surface will see them. That had worked - then. Now, still three miles from shore, they’re passing through the reefs, with clear water no more than five fathoms deep, and sea traffic growing more common - fishing boats, pleasure schooners, the occasional hulking dreadnaught carving across the waves, canons out and pennants flying bright.
Most of the pirates have had a chance to swim in the shoals around Crownbreaker Isle, where the reefs are three times thicker than those here. But the labyrinthine shoals around Crownbreaker don’t have flotillas of pearlescent blue sea-lilies, or the massive whirling clouds of flickering, multicolored minnows like rainbow-tinted storms beneath the waves, and not nearly as many seals and porpoises coming to nose about the swimmers and play. They’re scavengers, all - they know that where humans are, there’s food discarded in the water, food the humans think is waste.
That isn’t what’s marvelous to the merfolk.
Still three miles out, they’re passing beneath stilted houses that hang above the waves, cross-shaped wharves and piers extending out from them. There are discarded anchors everywhere, wave-softened drifts of glass that were once goblets, pleasure-boats with lacquered bands of color across their copper-plated keels. And there are pops and booms of thunder, followed by distorted bursts of color - fireworks. The big festival displays haven’t begun yet, but every trader, fisherman, or petty aristocrat with the coin to spare has purchased a few from the trade-ships from En Zhenming, and they can’t resist showing off to their neighbors, setting them off over the waters like amateur cannon-fire with dyed smoke drifting low over the waves.
It’s very beautiful, and very dangerous. Because if even one Thalassian mermaid is spotted in these waters - if anyone dives underwater close enough to hear Siren Song - then come the patrol-ships and the harpoons. Everyone knows mermaids are dangerous cannibals and witches, every one of them (everyone except anyone who’s actually spoken to a mermaid).
You’re at the center of the map. Here be humans.
#74
The walls are lava.
Well, no. The walls are certainly glowing, shifting colors not unlike a lava lamp taking shapes that hold some sort of meaning to whoever’s looking at them. Whether that meaning is good or bad is in the eye of the beholder. But the walls of this cave-like Liminal Space, to the touch, feel like nothing so much as warm wax, and the stalactites and stalagmites peppered throughout look like dribbly candles.
It’s quiet here, the waxy texture of the space absorbing all but the nearest sounds, so you have to be quite close indeed to someone else to make conversation.
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A bit stiffly, and clearly implied is that she can, but she'd rather not.
"It does not matter if it is your goal. It is in human nature. Or human lack of nature, rather."
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