The Powers That Be ([personal profile] powersthatbe) wrote in [community profile] synodiporia_ooc2014-02-05 08:29 am
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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.
coglione: (Dancin' around big eyes as well)

Prompt 1

[personal profile] coglione 2014-02-06 05:28 am (UTC)(link)
Upon first arrival, the adjusting does not go well for Rosa. No, she paces the foyer but refuses to take to any of the stairs and curses this place, the people who have brought her here and designed this room in very vivid Italian. Bastardi seems to be a favored one, and the meaning there should be obvious enough. A particularly brave soul could approach her now, but it may be wise to let her cool down first.

It won't take too long, that fire has to die down eventually and it leaves her... well, curious. She chooses to go back the way she came and finds the bath-house, its clean waters a vast difference from the dirty canals of her Venezia. Crouching down she puts a hand in, watching as the grime from her fingers floats away. It has been a good long time since she'd had a proper bath and water this fine is a luxury she feels fairly sure she can take advantage of.

That is, of course, until the voices in her head stop and suddenly there's just one, clear statement. The feeling of a million eyes on her makes her whip her head around, ready for what she assumes will be an attack... that doesn't come.

And now she's just annoyed again.

"Stop your playing and show yourself, porca puttana!" Because Rosa is the most friendly when she's afraid or hurt. "If you wish to speak, we will do it face to face!"
protect_and_serve: (blue eyes)

[personal profile] protect_and_serve 2014-02-06 05:37 am (UTC)(link)
A tall, grey-clad man with ash-blonde hair bound in a tight braid is just stepping into the bath-house as she calls out, and his lips thin at the words, suppressing his reaction. He wears a dagger on either hip, and a half-and-half sword slung over his shoulder, and he bows slightly as he meets her eye, all cool courtesy.

"Forgive him, donna," he says as he straightens. "He means no insult. If you're familiar, think of the first card in a Tarokka deck. A traveler, just setting out."
coglione: (That you’ll send the call out)

[personal profile] coglione 2014-02-06 06:00 am (UTC)(link)
She doesn't look any more at ease after listening to his explanation, her arms settling over her chest, but she is at least ready to be more polite. He isn't the voice that speaking in her head, after all.

"And you? You speak for him, the man putting voices in my head?"
protect_and_serve: (overlook)

[personal profile] protect_and_serve 2014-02-06 06:29 am (UTC)(link)
"The voices are in all our heads," he said, patiently. "You can do the same now, once you've been taught how. Who put them there..." He frowned. "That's a harder question. But as for me, I speak for no-one but myself."
coglione: (A hundred jewels between teeth)

[personal profile] coglione 2014-02-08 10:03 am (UTC)(link)
This isn't ideal at all, but what can she do? This man, he seems to be no threat to her and it wouldn't hurt to have an ally in this strange, unfamiliar place. At the very least, she can get some answers from him.

"Have you been here long, then?" She asks curiously, taking a few steps towards him to make this more a conversation and less her treating him like she expects an attack at any moment. "Certainly you are no new arrival, to have these answers already."
protect_and_serve: (intensity)

[personal profile] protect_and_serve 2014-02-09 03:20 am (UTC)(link)
"...More than a year. Less than two. Keeping a calendar is difficult when the seasons change between one world and the next." There's a reluctance to his admission, one with a hard edge beneath it, although not directed at her. He's bitter; there's no doubt of that.
coglione: (The moon we love like a brother)

[personal profile] coglione 2014-02-09 06:56 am (UTC)(link)
It's easier to treat all of this like a job, that's something she can wrap her head around. Gathering information is the first step and what luck, she's been delivered a handsome young man with more answers than she has. She can work with this.

"I would hear more about your time here, if you don't mind. Get a better idea of what it is I've gotten myself into."
protect_and_serve: (truly?)

[personal profile] protect_and_serve 2014-02-10 02:02 am (UTC)(link)
"Of course. This... changeable and unreal place we are now, they call Liminal Space. A place between places. We are brought here only briefly, before being landed on the shores of a new world. No more than twice a month, no less than once every two."

He pauses, angling an eyebrow, ready to take queries before he continues.
outlets: (pic#7360064)

and ofc he shows up 15 minutes late with assassinbucks

[personal profile] outlets 2014-02-09 06:36 am (UTC)(link)
Ezio was never in a million years about to creep up behind Rosa and give her a push into the water after following her for a little while. He would absolutely never do something like that ever because he's a mature-ass adult who don't play no games and is always about the serious business at hand. But if he were going to do something like that, he'd stop dead in his tracks once there was a voice with no source and some more angry shouting to follow.

With no one to blame for the voice, Ezio looks to Rosa.

"You've likely frightened them away with all this shouting, cara mia."
coglione: (A hundred jewels between teeth)

how many assassinbucks tho

[personal profile] coglione 2014-02-09 06:59 am (UTC)(link)
It's lucky he didn't get a chance to do anything childish, the result would not have been at all pleasant. She's unnerved and, although she's reluctant to admit it, a little afraid. Voices in heads and architecture that turns her stomach and makes her unsure which way is up is just not something an Italian woman is used to seeing.

Seeing Ezio, though, is soothing in its own way. Who can she trust if not him?

"Ezio," she crosses to his side, lifting a hand to place on his chest to be sure he's really there. "You hear it too? When did you arrive here?"
outlets: (pic#7360244)

don't worry, babe. he always brings enough for both.

[personal profile] outlets 2014-02-11 04:10 am (UTC)(link)
"," he says, placing a hand to her arm. He is, in fact, not a figment of her imagination and very much really there. "I arrived more or less at the same time as you."

Which Ezio realizes does not necessarily bring much by way of comfort to her. But Rosa has never been the sort of woman to require excessive hand-holding. When she needs help, she asks for it. When there is no help to be found, she does it herself anyway.

But at the very least, neither one of them is alone with their questions.