synodiporia_ooc | Test Drive #0.

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test drive

Test Drive #0.

Welcome to the Synodiporia Test Drive Meme! Below the cut there are four prompts to get you started: the first is if you’d like to test what intro-ing a new character is like, the second if you’d like to just chat and get CR with other prospective players just before the game’s starting event takes place, and the third and fourth for threaders looking for more active challenges to play in the game’s backstory - a bit of a look at what getting involved in this game’s plot would look like.

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!

Before you start, we’d like you to please take a quick look at the game’s Concept, its Rules, and the Liminal Space & Previous Universes pages, just to give you the background, so you know what you’re getting into. And if you’re looking for more information, the Directory is here and the Reserves page is here.

Have fun!

Prompt #1: Liminal Space: New Arrivals

It seems to you that you’ve just stepped through a door, and you can feel the faint breeze of it blowing behind you.

You’ve just stepped into a mansion as imagined by MC Escher. This is the grand foyer, and zigzagging staircases with gilt balustrades curl impossibly along the corners, leading to a ballroom on the right wall, a theater on the left, or a fire-lit banqueting hall on the ceiling, far more rustic than the rest of the mansion looks. The far wall is a scattered collection of doors and windows facing all directions and opening who-knows where. Outside the windows you can see a beach, a mist-shrouded forest, and a starry sky. One door has a sheaf of papers nailed to it. Another has blood trickling out from beneath the doorframe.

When you look behind you, however, there is no door there. Nor, in fact, is there a wall in the traditional sense. Instead, there’s a marble-tiled bath-house.

In all of these places, whatever direction they happen to be facing with respect to tradition gravity, are people in strange clothing. Most of them seem to be looking relatively bored or restless, and only a very few seem at all bothered by the notion that the laws of physics seem to be being held in abeyance - mostly, the people standing nearest to you.

Most disturbing of all, beside the quiet murmur of conversation in your ears, you can also hear voices casually exchanging small talk inside your head.

After a moment, there’s a lull in most of the audible conversations, and a large portion of the room turns and looks your way. Someone -one of the voices in your head - says

Look at that. A new pack of Fools just arrived.

Prompt #2: Liminal Space: Everyone Else

This time, liminal space has manifested as a mansion as imagined by MC Escher. This is the grand foyer, and zigzagging staircases with gilt balustrades curl impossibly along the corners, leading to a ballroom on the right wall, a theater on the left, or a fire-lit banqueting hall on the ceiling, far more rustic than the rest of the mansion looks. The far wall is a scattered collection of doors and windows facing all directions and opening who-knows where. Outside the windows you can see a beach, a mist-shrouded forest, and a starry sky. One door has a sheaf of papers nailed to it. Another has blood trickling out from beneath the doorframe. Behind you, there’s a marble-tiled bath-house.

It’s up to you to find a way to amuse yourself. You’ve been here thirty-six hours, longer than any of your previous Jaunts between worlds has taken, and since the food in the banquet hall vanishes the moment it’s out of your sight (even if it’s inside you), you’re starting to get hungry. When is the portal going to appear?

Prompt #3: Alternities: Locked Rooms In Moebius

You wake up in a new world, but by now you’re familiar with that. Only… something’s wrong. You didn’t step through any portal. You’re lying on a cold surface with something draped over you, and you can hear confused murmuring coming from your left and your right, maybe above and below you too, and you hurt.

You sit up, shrugging off the dingy once-white cloth draped over you. You’re in a morgue. All the alcoves are open, and in many of them, other Travelers are stirring and waking up. Some of them are wild-eyed. Some are blood-spattered. Every last one is criss-crossed with unfamiliar white lines of scarring.

On the slab in the center of a room is a clock. The hands indicate that it is 3:01. A collection of bloody-edged tools - knives and separators and saw and scalpels - sits beside it.

There is one door out, up half a flight of stairs in one corner, and no windows. The door has been barred, and all around the edges doorstops have been jammed in - wedge-toed shoes, folded sheafs of paper, a length of rubber hosing - anything that will fit in the narrow gap between door and frame, used to create a seal.

Scratched into the paint on the door are the words In the name of Blessed Elua, listen to me this time and stay inside. Don’t go out there. Just wait. Please. -JV

Somewhere out there in the distance, close enough to be audible but far enough away to be quiet, barely audible over the hum of the fluorescent lights, there’s a loud, ragged scream, and then the distant voice begins to sob unevenly.

Prompt #4: Alternities: Extravehicular On The Spark

You’re standing on the curved, chrome-bright hull of a space station that stretches to the horizon in all directions - not a smooth horizon but a busy one, with shapes like distant cityscapes, mountain-ranges of conical turrets glowing faintly with violet light, and a faint if inaudible hum travelling upward through your feet, varying in strength and direction at the passage of distant traffic, scalloped domes sliding over the surface or small treaded runners like motor-trikes zipping by at much greater speeds. A white plastic belt around your waist puffs cool fog every few seconds, a black metal rod in your hand smells of ozone and seems glued to your palm, and your boots are heavy, steel-soled, and have a blinking generator at the heel - but otherwise, save for a pair of goggles tucked into one pocket, you’re wearing street clothes, just what you’d expect yourself to be wearing. Your hair moves around you in a cloud, and your stomach turns uneasily. Even though you seem to have both air and heat there is no gravity. You might as well be hanging from the underside of this craft, not standing on it.

Looking up - or down - anyway, away from the ship - you see a massive planet filling a quarter of the sky, covered in jade-banded rings of cloud that swirl and churn anxiously. Between you and the luminescent green world is suspended a miniscule shape, round, red, like a rough-edged droplet of blood. It and the planet above it appear to be slowly expanding as you watch.

You’re not alone. A group of other people, similarly equipped, stands around you, looking as confused as you feel. A startled expression crosses all their faces at the same moment as an excited, fast-talking voice enters your mind.

-- hacked the telepathic network and scrambled your heads! Bet the champs never thought that was possible! What does that tell you about -- never mind, it can wait. We’re live now, but only for a moment. We need to avoid any *further* psychic interference, so we’re going dark. Repeat, the network is going dark. They won’t be able to get into your heads again. The clock’s at seventy-two minutes at my mark, Fellow Travelers. Aaaand… Mark. Okay. Seventy-two minutes to bring down those engines, or we’re out of the World Series and you can all see how you like floating home! Let’s crash this sucker, kids! See you all on Sangre.

The voice vanishes. You have no idea who it was, and no memory of what it was talking about.

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Living in a jar is an insect's life. At least on the Spark they still got to explore.

Maybe it wasn't perfect, but at least it was peaceful. I think that's a good thing.

Scrambled your heads?

Boy, that sounds distressingly familiar.

None of this looks even vaguely familiar or right, but even the lack of gravity and the strange planetary landscape don't get quite the reaction from Gilbert that the voice in his head does - a sudden, deep tension in his posture that doesn't leave until it shuts up.

But shut up it does, eventually, and he relaxes noticeably, finally turning in place to take a long look around him. The left sleeve of his coat - the one that no longer holds an arm - floats haphazardly around him, drifting up into his field of vision until he reaches up to swat it out of the way with his right hand.

And stops, frowning at the rod in his hand.

This is all ridiculous!

"'They won't be able to get into your heads again'? But it's fine when this other guy does it?"

Hijikata takes it, quite casually, flipping it around in his hand to hold more comfortably and asks, also quite casually: "How hard?"

Look, it's a perfectly legitimate question.

"Right." It's not just them jumping into a TV, here. It's everyone else who's along for this crazy ride. Do they have the right to risk all of that?

Yosuke shakes his head. "Haven't had a good look around yet."

Erik looks back. Which, since he has no designs on becoming Orpheus now or ever, is fine.

Literally every aspect of the space he's just entered seems designed to perturb him, so his affect is like nothing so much as a caged animal's. The uncanny veneer that shellacks even the air, even gravity--that just is what it is. He'd cope with that.

So the problem, what makes the hair stand up on the back of his neck, is this: there are rules to space. They are not that it will operate within standard parameters of physics, they are these (to be executed in one minute or less):

1. You will know what is in that space with you.
2. You will know how to use it, whether that's to build or destroy or any combination of the two.
3. You will know where all the exits are.
4. You will know how to arm yourself.
4a. You will always be armed.

4a, as such, renders 4 in and of itself moot. This does not matter.

He's had enough of other people's thoughts in his head to last him the next several lifetimes. That matters.

What may or may not matter, is that since he goes for the door with the blood (familiar, terribly), his space and Anya's are the same, if only in passing.

She does the briefest, most inconspicuous double take - the lines and angles of his face are horribly familiar, but the way they're set in the rest of him is wrong. It's actually Pietro she thinks of first, with his lean build, but he doesn't move like Pietro, not even in his agitation. She does not veer away. She does not show fear.

She does contemplate whether this is the last senseless gasp of a dying mind. Perhaps she should have considered that when she saw the house, but it was more that she didn't care. His uncanny off-mark resemblance, though, that's not just anyone's nonsense, that's something thrown roughly from her own nghtmares like a sloppy clay vase on a potter's wheel, listing irreparably.

She says nothing; slips her hands in her pockets, and watches him out of the corner of her eye.

"Please."

This is real, the request and the respect in it. Being informed is deeply important to her; it was how she stayed alive. She's not sure if that applies, any longer, but she knows that whatever it is, she wants to know.

He is, after this initial drawing in and shoring up (his mind flinging out static, covering barbed wire fences, blood and mud) almost stolidly ignoring any other living presence, just--he can deal with that after his feet are under him. The blood is real, the door is real, he's ascertained that much (within what he can trust, anyway) when he feels that flickering look; if he couldn't tell when someone was looking at him, he'd have been dead a dozen times over by now.

Nothing is inconspicuous about the way he turns, as precise as a puncture wound, and--

(He smells black coffee, the kind that's strong enough to stand a spoon in.

He smells rain, and summer. The summer between one tack on a map and the next, they'd knocked elbows in some insignificant little cafe reaching for the same menial object, and their arms made mirrors. Someone apologized first, he can never remember who, but he remembers the first lilt of her voice, Eastern European in a way he couldn't quite place.

When she left, everything in his spartan little room smelled like her. There would be something romantic in the notion that he'd moved on soon after that, because he couldn't stand to be reminded, but the truth was just that he'd gotten what he came for: a bag of bricks that were not supposed to exist. He remembers the weight on his wrist; even for gold, they were heavy.

He smells home, and for an instant nothing else exists.)

He crosses his arms over his chest, hands folded just above the elbows. A posture like this on anyone else would look self-protective, but just makes Erik longer and leaner, a plowshare re-purposed. What he wonders is not if he's dying, but if in some far off now inaccessible place, he's lost the metal that's meant to cover his brow, shield him with nothing like subtlety. None of the voices he can hear are that warm English accent he'd know anywhere, though, so--he doesn't know. Disorienting, which is in turn infuriating.

"It would be too much to ask that you have any idea what the hell is going on here," he imparts - rhetorically - after what feels like an hour, but has really been only a handful of seconds. There's a tightness in the modality of his voice that suggests he's sealing down everything below the surface, but also that that dryness is customary, and probably the only indicator of the way he behaves when he's not completely out of his depth.

She turns to face him, and although the resemblance is striking, is blaringly obvious, she is not the same woman. She has his jaw. She has his sleek economy of moment, although she doesn't advertise it in the same way, she has the same deep careful coldness in her eyes. She's too small, too deftly hidden to be a knife: she's a little razor tucked in a friendly palm.

He is - he's being threatening, a little, but it's a paltry thing compared to the man she's afraid of. (She is not afraid of him; she killed him; she won. He is nothing.) He doesn't know what's going on either, so he doesn't have the upper hand. It puts her - not on the offensive, exactly. But not on the defensive, either. She feels like she can handle this.

"Yes." Crisply, not as coldly as it it could be. They appear to be in this together, after all. "That seems too much for either of us to ask."

Her accent is just a shade to the west of Magda's, years of French and Swiss German and English as lingua franca leaving their mark on Russian and Romani roots.

Barbara, meanwhile, makes a beeline to the blood seeping under the door. It seems like the thing to do. She seems small, under her oversized coat, but she moves with grim purpose. She'll get to the bottom of this, one way or another.

Except the blood smells like cotton candy.

Her nose wrinkles, and then she hears a voice in her head. Her shoulders tense and her head twists, gaze fixing on each person in turn.

"Then that's where we start. It might be better if we had Teddie and his nose here, but since we don't..."

His mouth tightens. He doesn't like the idea of leaving someone out there, crying... but they don't seem to be in immediate danger. Nothing's interrupting them, at least. That gives them a little time.

"That's no good, chere - not before we know who's going to be the star."

The details of the game are almost unimportant to Remy - he can plat poker in his sleep. And there's no real stake in it at the moment. No, the point is the table talk - the banter between players, seeing who bluffs, who raises who folds, a little game of get to know you most players never realize is happening. He gives Ange his biggest smile, because that's the poker face he prefers, and because sometimes the serious ones are thrown by it.

"Maybe it be you tonight... but maybe it's still me."

"I'm sure I can find more out there somewhere, mon ami," he replied with an easy laugh. "Every world worth visiting has card games, I think. Life gets too boring without them. But then, maybe that's what you meant?"

The chips passed hands from hand to hand with Remy barely seeming to notice. He still won more hands than he lost, but not suspiciously more, but it was clear the game was less about the cards on the table and more about the people around it. Remy had something of a power bloc among the Travelers, casual, poorly acknowledged, rarely exercised - in part because nothing more formal could possibly have lasted. A card game could be anything from a recruitment drive to a council of war under the banter. This one, though, was probably nothing more than a way to kill time.

Batman didn't train her for this.

I mean, he told her things could get freaky. (Not in those exact words.) He warned her that their world could get bizarre and confusing, that she needed to be prepared for anything.

But this is like - some sort of funhouse mirror, or something. It's almost a reflection of reality, but twisted in ways that don't make any sense.

The strangest thing, though, is that most people don't seem bothered at all.

Steph - Robin, she's Robin right now - crosses her arms, glaring at nothing in particular. She knows she needs to do something, but she has no idea what. She's still not sure this isn't some kind of dream, or a new kind of fear gas.

Then there are words in her head and she almost jumps a foot in the air. At least she doesn't yelp.

"It leaves the question of if we're safer staying or leaving," he nodded, frowning. "But that's not all." He tapped the warning where it read this time. "How many times have we done this? And... if someone could make me forget writing this, could they have made me write it, as well?"

"The place we're in now is unreal," he said, distaste coloring his expression at the thought. "Anything you set down or leave unattended will vanish. Food you eat won't prevent you being hungry minutes later. Stay away from holes, deep shadows, or ripples in the air. And bear in mind that it's temporary - at any moment, we may be evicted again into a place even stranger than this."

"Just enough to break the skin is fine." The question seems to surprise him, as if, among other things, it doesn't really matter.

He hesitates, just a moment, and grinds his teeth together, then adds, without explanation, "It's a bad idea for me to do it myself."

Cattle sties are peaceful, too, but most people wouldn't want to live in them.

It's not that she's been through anything stranger; she hasn't. But she's been through worse, and she can roll with it.

"Can we starve, then? Or do we become a little unreal ourselves?"

Practical concerns first.

"We've never been here long enough to find out." There's a certain grim tone to his voice that begs the question, and for people to whom food is unreal, there certainly seem to be a great many people sitting to meals in the banqueting hall over their heads.

Amidst the faces in the crowd over her head there's one that might look at least slightly familiar - the general aesthetic, if not the specific design. The mask was lying beside him on the table, but he puts it on, threading through the crowd and vaulting from landing to landing on the staircases with an acrobatic grace likely to draw her eye if she hadn't seen him sooner.

He'd heard things like this could happen, so it's not a surprise, at least, not categorically, but it does put his heart in his throat as he tries to sort through the details. How old does she look? Is there any sign in what she's wearing just what differences he should expect?

... And whether or not she'd usually recognize Tim Drake, this stranger might still confuse her. Twenty or twenty-one, long-haired, inches too short to be Nightwing, and looking at her... well, strangely.

"Robin."

He wasn't the voice in her head, but there is one face - a masked face - that's likely to catch her eye, not just for the aesthetic of the suit he's wearing, but because he's staring right at her with a curious frown. He's short, slender, early twenties. Probably not familiar, at least not with the gap in their relative ages.

Robin tenses, arms falling to her side, ready to defend or strike. Most people who know who she is run away or try to punch her. Which is cool with her, mostly, but she's way too off-balance to be at her best.

But this guy - well, he doesn't seem hostile, behind the mask. And there's something...

She should probably answer. "Yeah. And you are?"

She wonders if it's possible to die here at all. There are candles flickering in the banquet hall; she wonders whether the fire is real enough to burn. Her scars do not ache.

She nods. It's enough to be getting on with.

"Evicted by whom?" And since he is so familiar with the place, despite inhabiting it for increments of three days or less, if the same rules apply to water as food - "And, presumably, drawn back?"

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Page 5 of 15

Test Drive #0.

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prompt #4 (canon point: Retrace XC)

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absolutely!

Stephanie Brown | DC Comics AU | Prompt 1

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oops wrong robin

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