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synodiporia_ooc2014-02-05 08:29 am
powersthatbe) wrote in synodiporia_ooc2014-02-05 08:29 am
Entry tags:
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.
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.
no subject
There is an instinct in Anders, though, overriding the shock and confusion, and he's acting now without even thinking about it. He looks around desperately, checking all directions - he's learned now, up and down as well - and casting around for an angry or determined face, for anyone turning towards them, heading in their direction. The Templars, he knows, are everywhere, and they never quite go off duty.
He's expecting to be grabbed and arrested any second now, and for the same to happen to Hawke as well.
"Is it safe?" he asks, quietly. It's a little late to ask that, after he already cast a spell himself. But his had been less obvious, just a light and some movement, easy to miss if you weren't looking, especially in such a brightly lit area as this. Fire spells were different, and you'd expect even regular people to react to that. They weren't used to people burning their own hands.
He reaches out to grab Hawke's elbow, pulling his arm down in the hope he'll release his spell. He's saving his confusion at this impossible situation for now - he'll figure out what's going on later. Fist, he has to make sure he's safe.
"You can't be so careless!" he says, still barely above a whisper. "Even if there are no Templars-" he can't see any yet, at least- "most people would be frightened."
Except that if this is the Fade, like he still wants to believe, then it truly makes no difference. And if it's an illusion made by magic, then whoever created it obviously isn't siding with the Templars. If it's like Hawke says, though, and it's neither, then he can't possibly know what to expect. And experience tells him to expect the very worst.
no subject
Maker. This is a stranger. Or at the least--he is a stranger to Anders.
"You think if it wasn't, I'd risk your safety to show off."
One of those questions that turns down at the end; not quite a statement because it can't bear to be. He's managed to close his hand by now, gaze hooking onto Anders' own eyes and then sliding away. "Magic is far from the strangest thing most of them have seen."
'Them', being, as Hawke indicates with the incline of his head, the general populace roiling in all directions at odds with gravity. He's been here long enough to have made some kind of contact with everyone, as is his way, and so the fact that his thoughts are touching on them now turns a few heads, but garners no active hostility.
"I know it's not what you're used to," he hastens to reassure; his own initial reaction hadn't been so different. Summoning up the energy to be wary had been a pretty daunting task at the time, but what else was there to do? "I just thought--" That Anders would know. That after so long it would be a foregone conclusion that anyone who wanted him had Hawke to contend with first. "You really don't know me, do you?"
What he's supposed to do with that, he doesn't know. What he does know is that Anders will definitely have to be the one to pull away first; even shadowed with the vague understanding he has now Hawke can't make himself break his grip.
no subject
And he can see that Hawke - this Hawke, the way he acts now, whatever that is - thinks of him as a friend. And that is information he is utterly lost as to how to deal with.
It's becoming more and more difficult to shrug this place off as a dream or a desperate hallucination, too. It doesn't feel like one, and he should have enough experience by now to tell. That means that this Hawke - whoever he is - it's still almost too strange to think of him as real. But he had to be. A real person, at least. Trying to work that out is only going to give him a headache.
He turns away, unable to quite meet that gaze, dropping his hand down in the process. He shrugs a little, to cover the momentary silence.
"Tell me about this place," he suggest. He's ready to listen. At least, it's easier to talk about that then how it is that they know different versions of each other. Is someone playing a trick on them?
They can work that out later. For now he has to know how to react to everything else.
no subject
Which, as metaphors go, is probably too medically advanced for Hawke to follow in the first place, and even if he could he's not sure what his own heart is doing right now. Trying to turn into a square, probably. --right. Not helping. He bridges his hands together over his mouth again and spends a second working out where to start, casting half a glance at Anders the way people do when they're trying to look anywhere else. His coat is different, he realizes; or more accurately it's the same. The coat he'd spent weeks being mournful at before Hawke had beguiled him into a tailor's.
That keeps him quiet for another few seconds. Eventually: "It's all blasphemous to the core," he warns, dropping his hands - and revealing in the process that his mouth has gone back to faintly humorous even if the ghosts at the corners of his eyes don't match - "so do try to remember it's not my idea. I'd hate for you to have less reason to trust me."
...as a joke, the precept sort of falls flat on its face and then off a cliff. Hawke winces. "Right. To start with, you've got to throw out the idea that there's one world."
no subject
He sighs a little. "Alright," he says, because that's not a lot of information to go on. Does he mean like the Fade, or something else?
Definitely something else. The Fade is familiar, and he hopes, at least, that Hawke would be explaining it a bit different if it was that simple. Then again, he might not, being so different as i is.
"And does "different worlds" entail different people looking exactly like ones you know?" he asks. He can't really help it, despite having decided to save that conversation until, at least, the room they were in stopped worrying him so much. Until he knew what to expect from anyone else.
"You're... nothing like him."
no subject
Almost instantly: "Or near enough to fool most people."
As two sentences go, that pair rings ...fairly complicated. Even if he wanted to he wouldn't be able to staunch the tidal wave of fondness that crashes over the first four words; whatever Anders is, or is to Hawke, it's something that matters, beyond measure or price. The kind of value most people can't put words to.
Then there's the tacit implication that Hawke isn't, in this scenario, 'most people.' He makes some move with a hand over his mouth and tries to put that aside for the moment. "It's funny, I always thought I was inimitable myself."
....truly. Probably all the worlds at large should be horrified by the idea that there is more than one Hawke. "But I shouldn't have been surprised. It can entail that. It can entail--anything you can dream up, Anders. Everyone I've met, everyone you can see--the places they come from, some of them we don't even have in stories."
A part of him that can be heard now, or seen in the expansive gesture he makes, is fascinated by that. He wasn't pleased to be plucked away from home on the cusp of what was almost certain to be war, but someone with Hawke's life either develops an adventurer's spirit or dies trying.
no subject
Because the implication had been clear enough. What isn't said is why Hawke would bother paying that close attention. But then, they've known each other for a while now, and there are a few things you can't help but notice about someone after that long. It's strange, though, imagining a version of himself that's not the same.
Actually, he's not sure if he can. The fact that Hawke is sounding slightly excited isn't helping, either. He rubs at his eyes, and his expression says clearly that he's hoping that his eyesight will clear up and he'll be back in Kirkwall again.
Maker, he never thought he'd be hoping to see Kirkwall.
"I don't think I want to hear about all the possibilities just yet," he says, cutting Hawke off before he can go on some more. It's already overwhelming, and he'd just like to know how to deal with the here and now. But that might be impossible. What he needs is-- Actually, he could really use a drink. Except that Justice hasn't let him get drunk in years.
no subject
So here he is, as exhilarated by possibility as he is annoyed by the circumstances: hurtled into chaos he will, as always, fight. A wall at his back just means he has something to push off of.
In all the time he's known Anders, though--every ounce of energy he has has been devoted to one singular cause. Realization clips Hawke a sharp blow to the back of the head; Anders can't know how it ends. If he did there would be more than small differences; Hawke is more familiar than he wants to discuss with anyone how a person grieving looks. He remembers the difference between his brother and his mother; there were pieces ripped out of Carver he'd never get back, but Leandra--for weeks after she moved like she'd died with Bethany.
He can't see that yet, in Anders, when he studies him with all the indulgence 'how am I different' affords. "You look tired," he starts--dryly honest, this has always been true-- "More tired. If there's such a thing. I don't--"
How can he articulate this, how does he condense seven years into the kind of package one person hands another? "We looked out for each other," he decides, eventually, looking at his hands, "and you don't look like anyone's been doing that."
no subject
He can handle it, because he wanted this, the situation he's placed himself in and the fight that defines his life. And Hawke, no matter who he claims he is now, should understand that.
And he should still be, well. He'd still be angry, wouldn't he?
He reaches out to lift a goblet off the table, twirling it slowly in his hands and looking at the pattern. He has no intention to drink anything here, but he's feeling angry again, and he'd rather not start lashing out while he's trapped in some unfamiliar situation. He'll focus instead on how it feels real when he touches it, and that means that even if this is some sort of dreamworld, or different world, he still needs to treat it like it's real and like it's dangerous. After all, the Fade is like that, and he'd never be incautious there.
He can't afford to remind Hawke of his anger while he still needs an ally.
"That's not entirely true," he says, slowly. He sets the goblet down again, reaching out instead to grab a fork and poke at some of the food. It definitely seems real.
And he doesn't have time for this. Whatever it is, whatever Hawke is, no matter what's gong on. He'd been so close. That's why Hawke had abandoned him. He only had a little more to go, and it'd be over, but he couldn't afford a single more distraction. So why did this have to happen now.
"You have no idea at all how to get back?"
no subject
A hidden half-smile, even if he can only speculate (or hope, despite how little a person like Hawke is served by hope) his friend still bars hungry gangs from certain places in Darktown. Silence holds for a few beats after, and then: "I--no. No, I can't say that I do."
It's not ...short, precisely, but it is entirely free of the silliness or light self-deprecation that might otherwise gloss such an admission. He won't say that he's tried everything he can think of, or list of those things the way another person might do, because those would be tantamount to admitting failure. "Maker knows you might have better success."
Inflection: mysterious. Anders has compelling reasons to claw his way back to Kirkwall; in light of this conversation, Hawke ...can't be sure that he does. A person (uh, Anders, probably, that person) could tell him until he's blue in the fact that this cause should be Hawke's too, but the fact is that anyone fighting a war is fighting for his future, and he isn't even sure he knows what that's supposed to look like anymore, if it doesn't have Anders in it.
It's not selfless, and it's not noble, but frankly it's other people who commonly insist Hawke is either of those. "And you do have a more or less captive audience, if you want to make inquiries."
Look at all those people!