TEST DRIVE MEME #5

[futurologists]

test drive 5.0 The world has shifted. Or maybe you’ve shifted? Either way, things have changed, and it’s going to be quite a while before you see them change back again. BASICS You were going about your business as usual until the world went white around you, and when the fog cleared: Oska. You've arrived in a snag of reality between worlds, the full extent of which can be read about here. But in essence, you’ve arrived in a grand, magical, almost empty castle. Outside the castle is an empty, long-abandoned village, partially in ruin. Past that, the world simply fades out into white mist. Your best bet is probably to stick to the castle and its grounds. Suits of armor patrol the quiet hallways, but good luck getting them to speak or answer any questions. There’s absolutely nothing inside them, they move under their own power. They don’t talk, but they also go out of their way not to hurt you. You can even attack one, it will just patiently wait for you to give up and leave. If, however, you ask one for directions, it will dutifully turn and lead the way to wherever you’ve requested. Librarians lurk in the halls of the enormous, well-stocked library, in which you can find nearly any book from nearly any world. The librarians are tall, wide, and very muscular, but they’re also not out to hurt you. Provided you play nice, of course. The usual rules apply: be respectful of the books, keep your voice lowered, and never bring any source of flame into the library. That last one might make the librarians reconsider their nonviolent natures. Outside, there's a greenhouse with every type of flora you can imagine (and more, since they're from all over the universe) — be careful, though, because not all of them are friendly. If you'd like to take a dip, you can check out the lake; just be friendly to the fish. You can catch sight of almost any animal you'd like in the stables, real-world or fantasy. Most of them have been tamed, and won't do any real harm. However, some of them can be a bit testy. Stay away from the unicorns unless you have perfect manners — they hate impoliteness. Current characters in game can assume that the Timeline glitched and sent them temporarily back to Oska. You are welcome to take any threads that happen here as game canon, should both parties arrive in game. Threads done here by prospective players may be used as application samples, and threads done by current players may be used as Bonus AC. PROMPTS ONE ✗ THE KITCHEN The kitchen is always stocked with food, freshly cooked and ready to be eaten — although there was no one to do the cooking, and it might just be you to do the eating. That doesn’t seem to discourage the kitchen in the slightest, which is constantly churning out new, fresh courses. Some of them are more innocent than others today. That tart you just ate? It was harpfruit, native to Cendiares, and has a pesky side effect of making the eater blurt out everything that pops into their head. The completely average-looking salad actually has flakes of Raphian wildflowers, which cause a bit of dancing fever — it isn't contagious, but it does make the sufferer want to dance with everyone they can. The choices and effects are endless and up to you, and don't worry; ALASTAIR is working on getting the kitchen under control as we speak. TWO ✗ THE TRAINING CENTER Maybe you find your way into the Training Center. A lot of work went into setting this room up, and it can construct nearly any scenario that you can imagine. All it takes to activate this room, still and featureless until it comes to life, is the brush of a finger against one of the glowing pads on the wall. The magitek will take it from there. Just envision the setting and any enemies you’d like to train against, and they’ll instantly materialize. Would you rather go sightseeing, without worrying about a fight? No problem! The room is eager to provide you with a sparring partner, but it can be convinced to hold off -- just don’t think of getting into any fights. The Training Center also offers any games you can think of: soccer, basketball, literal freeze tag, etc. Every supply you need will be simulated for you. Additionally, the following scenarios are also preloaded into the system for user convenience, each coming with a small summary of mission objectives: ANWICK: A ruined little village with a massive, dead dragon skewered in the center of it. The goal is to protect her young in a nearby cave. The terrain is treacherous, the wyrmlings are squirmy and unhelpful, and the townsfolk are furious. But for good reason -- it seems dragons have been plaguing them for decades. Even the simulation’s enemies are programmed to say as much, and will do their best to convince you to their side. CHANTES: Chantes, Audentes' first mission, is a typical medieval town cloaked in darkness and surrounded by a winding forest. It comes in two default flavors and difficulty settings. Fairies are the easier enemy; the objective is to collect three jars of unpleasant, glowing sap from their nests without getting your eyes poked out. The fairy goop can also cause disturbances with magical powers, unwanted levitation, and unfortunate cosmetic effects. Demons are the more difficult setting. The task is to clear ominous runes off of various town structures, but when approached, each one releases a red, misty spirit. It will fight tooth and nail to protect its ‘home,’ but is largely invulnerable short of destroying its rune. To prevent this, it may resort to spells, violence, and possessing someone else in the simulation -- consider this a lesson in PvP. (NOTE: You’re also welcome to use anything from the previous events from Chantes as well.) OSKA TRAINING: The goal in this simulation is simple: outlast the timer. It’s exactly the same castle, but after it’s been pelted by a firestorm, architecture ruined to rubble and ash. Navigating the half-destroyed castle is hard enough, and the earthquakes and fireballs raining from the sky will continue until characters survive for a certain amount of time (from an hour to a day) or find a full bushel’s worth of food. And just to rub salt in the wound, all the dirt, grime, and mud in this simulation will last outside of it, so you might need a shower after. NALAWI: An island nation populated by diminutive deer people. The first setting is a mini version of the Gilligan's Island event -- it's less action-packed and more focused on survival. Marooned on the drowned island of Dakal, it's up to you to figure out where to find food and shelter. You might also want to avoid the hungry sea creatures that have made their way up on the island, too. The second setting involves lava monsters erupting out of Nalalona, the largest volcano on the Nalawi islands. Lava imps will do their best to hypnotize recruits into following them back into the volcano, and can be defeated the normal way or non-violently lured into the water. Next comes the fire golems, hulking but fast. Their weak spot is their glowing core, but it will require some cleverness to reach. (NOTE: You're welcome to use any scenarios based on other Nalawi events as well!) ZETA-12: Oh boy, a whole planet to explore! The objective here is simple: protect your delicate goo baby at all costs. Luckily for you, the simulation has seen fit to skip over the frozen wastes! Your first challenge is crossing the deep forest: carnivorous plants try to get a bite out of you, but that isn't the worst part. Eventually, you come to a deep chasm, and have to choose between forcing your wailing, distressed squidge across, or soothing it for several hours until it's willing to go with you. Scenario two is a thick bog inhabited by an aggressive plant monster. It spits a crippling neurotoxin, so anyone attempting to fight it should be wary. Outsmarting or avoiding it would be best for the squidges' well-being, but some people are too hot-blooded for that. What will you do? Finally, there's the desert; it's picturesque, but only if you can ignore the dehydration and punishing heat. There's a cave network for you to seek shelter in, but make no mistake: pretty soon a freak meteor shower causes a cave-in and leaves you trapped inside with an increasingly aggressive squidge. Are you out there dodging meteors or navigating caverns? THREE ✗ HOT SPRINGS EPISODE One of ALASTAIR's teams extracted an enormous, very hot core from a sentient and murderous AI. What better way to put it to use than to heat up the springs? It's a nice place to get some much needed R&R or just hang out. Some enterprising recruits have built wooden decks and stairs around and through the whole affair. It's a little bit of a hike to get there from the castle, but anyone who has visited can agree: it's worth it. FOUR ✗ THE NETWORK There is some good news, along with all these bizarre and fantastical new sights: you’ve arrived with a new piece of jewelry which, if examined, gives you access to anyone else that might be currently inhabiting Oska. You can speak into the jewelry and be heard, you can get it to project moving images of yourself and others, you can even think a message into it and have it arrive as written word to whoever you’re communicating with. It’s a useful little trinket, provided you can get it to work. FIVE ✗ CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE You are free to use any of these settings, or anything from the Settings Page. You may use any virtually created setting you can think of in the Training Center, even scenes from your character’s world (although they’ll be devoid of people, unless they’re brought in as opponents).

Comments

[curdle]

[ Her life has never been one adorned with fine things, for though profit is no sin by the Calvinist model of thought, vanity certainly is. Her fascination with them has usually been limited to the domestic -- her memories of the light cast by glass windows, her mother's silver cup -- but at this moment her eyes catch the glint of gold framing her face and follow it with the same wonder. Despite her strange garb, she seems a fine lady, and Thomasin wonders why she would know such things in the first place. The confusion in her eyes never formulates itself into a question, though; she simply ducks her chin in understanding. ]

The lake, then. I've seen no brook in these parts.

[ Suddenly, she remembers herself and realizes how improper, and covetous, it is to stare at the woman so. She glances away again, not rude enough to start wringing her clothes dry with someone else in the splash zone, and directs her gaze at the steam curling off the surface of the water. ]

I would ask... for what did you come, if not to wash? [ She does have an idea, but it seems immodest. ]

[shri]

[ Lakshmi straightens, shoulders rolling back in a comfortable stretch. There's concern there - she tries not to, Devi would tell her she's a bleeding heart, where she's quite sure she isn't anymore. But once - she'd had a boy all to her own. Laughing sweet who she laid amongst jasmine flowers and sung ragas too, wondering how she could be so blessed.

But she had no boy, anymore, no kingdom, and now - in this place, not even her fight to spare others her same fate.

To all came to much the same point, however: she could not turn her back on a child. ]

If you like, but a sink will do you just as well, and you won't have to traipse through the woods alone. [ The question makes her pause and, no, perhaps it is not proper. Though, in her palace, all the ladies had bathed together, it's not so unfamiliar even if there were more men then she'd suppose she'd liked. Didn't have much pride to stand on any longer, though, not after living in a brothel for the good part of the last few years. Besides, she missed that luxury, no, no ladies to set about her any longer and oil her skin and brush her hair, but she'd like to wash out a decades worth of aches and pains it felt like.

But for now - she nods, to the many others doing the same. ] And I came here to soak for awhile.

[curdle]

[ Thomasin is planning on asking about sinks, since she would indeed prefer not to go through the woods alone every time something needs washing, but then she follows the direction the woman indicates with her nod. In doing so, she looks past the small sphere of the earth beneath her, the water directly before her, and Lakshmi herself for the first time in some time, and immediately notices what she means. ]

... Oh.

[ Color floods her face, and her shoulders jerk back as if she would skitter back from the bank on her hands and knees. It's not the implication of nudity that does it -- she has seen her father shirtless, her mother breastfeeding, and her littler siblings stark naked plenty of times, the natural result of living in such close quarters and being tasked with childcare -- and though bathing regularly is hardly in the purview of the 1630s, and she's used to cleaning her hands and face only, the occasional dip isn't completely unheard of. No, what shocks her is the apparently mixed company now streaming towards (and a few already immersed in) the hot springs. She is quite sure they cannot all be brothers and sisters. ]

I'd not have come hither if I knew... [ Knew what? Can she really say that this is a place of especial sin, when she herself is only here because of her sins? She had never gone naked into the wood to dance with the devil, as she told Mercy to scare her, but who knows what she might yet do? Is she any better than the least of them? She's still certain that this isn't proper, but she doesn't know if she dares say it out loud and risk angering someone. ] Is this -- of a custom?

[shri]

[ She does her best to keep her face straight, but it dances there in plain amusement. A quiet girl, then, not one used to being amongst so many people. Or people quite so bar. As scandalised it looks like, as only the finest women were. How sweet. ]

From the look of it, I would say so. They seem quite comfortable with it, don't they? [ Though in truth, yes, once, this would have been unthinkable. She was rani, and to been such was unacceptable to her titles. Though the rules of purdah were not half so strict in Jhansi as they were in other places. There were still expectations of a ruler especially. Though in summer, she would wear fine linens over herself to assuage the heat. They did not hide over much. Granted, seldom was anyone allowed to approach or touch her, either.

But that was before she had spent the last years in a brothel, fighting down to the bone. Being able to soak her body in clean water had become a distant dream, one she's not keen to turn her back on now. ] Not one I have kept, exactly like this, but my people had something similar. The women in my palace would often bathe together once per day.

[curdle]

[ So she is of a fine upbringing, if not royal than somehow noble. (None that she knows of, for she knows little of any kingdom not that of heaven. Even her knowledge of England is largely memory, filtered through the small lens of a child's perspective -- a child whose separatist father had plenty to say against its monarch, at that.) It must be a strange and backwards place indeed, for those in its higher orders to bathe so often. Thinking about this hypothetical kingdom is helping her not think about the numerous naked people in her orbit, so she's going to ride this train as far as it'll go! ]

Once a day? [ Thomasin's incongruously dark eyebrows rise. ] Surely not all the year. Such cannot be healthy.

[ Everybody knows that bathing too often strips away the protective coating of dirt and opens your body up to the dangers of toxic miasma!! Also she has no frame of reference for a non-temperate climate zone and is picturing bathing in a river, in Massachusetts, in January, before global warming. Oh, but-- ]

I mustn't keep you.

[shri]

[ She shakes her head - though to what she is, that she is being kept or at this girl's ... view on bathing. ]

You are not at all keeping me. [ It's faintly amusing, really, listening to her shock and outrage.

But, right, now to that latter. The tone she adopts then is of that which she seldom is any longer. But more frank, less like royalty and more an exasperation that - well, mothers achieve easily. ] When was the last time you had a bath?

spoilers and also... a panic attack out of nowhere i'm so sorry

[curdle]

[ There was a time when hearing such a tone might have made her defiant, if but inwardly. If the added demands of tending to a fledgling farm hadn't snuffed that out, or her mother's misery after Sam vanished, what happened to bloody her shift would have. But to take such a tone over bathing of all things...! ]

I washed my hands and face this very morn, [ she says primly, maybe not completely free of teenage rebellion. ] And we did play by the brook a-time, but t'was too cold for any such thing on the farm.

[ After the terror of arriving she had looked in vain for a washbasin and cloth to wipe away what blood remained on her before settling on a bowl and pitcher from the kitchen. They still sit in her room. But of course there's more dimension to the question than simply the practical, and it makes her afraid. Worse, it makes her remember. She looks down at the water and tries to calm herself by continuing. ]

Besides, I was told it opens the body to all manner of ills. My Mother saith... she did say that...

[ Her voice trails off. Images are coming to her as though she were scrying like the witch they all thought her, not of the future but the very recent past.

Come hither, child. Hurry back.

You are smeared with his sin. You reek of evil. You've made a covenant with death!

I love you, I love you, I love you--

Water splashes everywhere as Thomasin pulls the bundle of wet cloth free and clutches it to her chest, breathing hard. The warmth is a lie. It will go cold soon enough. ]

this is wonderful, ah, and I hope this is okay. Let me know if you need me to change it!

[shri]

[ Her eyebrow goes up, an almost exasperated sigh on her mouth as she hears the petulance of tone. It's nothing she has not heard, truthfully, there were few in the slums of Whitechapel where she lived that could afford to have a bath and a very long time since Lakshmi had been able to indulge in warm water, moreover. ( How she envied the knights their palaces ).

Nor was she going to, anytime soon, once she sees the panic that seems to set in front of her. Steps forward then, to catch the girl by the chin, her fingers are light if calloused, worn things. No noble woman's hands any longer. They knew work, swords and guns and horses reigns gripped tightly and weathered them.

But right now, they are gently in their direction. To turn her face up, to look at her. ]

Look at me, child.

[ It was not her business from where the worry stemmed. But she was used to soldiers, the shock that came from gunfire and blood, of holding steady when it was needed for the sake of others. ]

SEVENTY YEARS LATER no not at all this is lovely

[curdle]

[ Mother. Mother calling her near and kissing her forehead before she went to bed down the goats. Mother throwing her against the wall. Mother's rough hands wrapping around her throat and squeezing. Mother's grip slackening as her blood spattered Thomasin's face. She gasps when she feels a similarly rough pair of hands touching her, though the location is for now less vital, and wants to fight or flee, but she cannot move. She cannot speak. She stiffly allows her face to be turned up, breathing as erratically as she had that morning. Blind panic is written all over it.

After the initial reaction to being touched, though, there is some grounding in being forced to recognize Lakshmi, whose hands are the only physical attribute held in common with her mother. Thomasin's mouth works as if she would speak; nothing properly audible comes out. She's still trembling, and the white still stands out all around her dark eyes, but at least it seems she's looking at her instead of through. ]

[shri]

[ She keeps her fingers there until she is sure she's got the girls attention. It's no different than dealing with soldiers tasting battle for the first time, their minds stuttering over the violence that followed. There was nothing for it but patience, small gestures and waiting for the wash of panic to calm.

But once she's sure the girl is looking, she brings herself to stand squarely in front of now. ] Easy now, just think on your breathing for me. In and out, one after another, can you do that?

[ Her hand comes up, brushing the threads of hair from her face. Feeling at her brow to see if she was sick at all, if the shock was bad enough. ]

[curdle]

[ Thomasin, who has been still half on her knees for much of this, rises shakily, as if her legs were new. Though the force of this attack has triggered sweat and her pulse beats relentlessly in her temples, her forehead is no warmer than usual.

Think on your breathing, she had said, and she is trying to do so. The hands brushing her hair out of the way and testing her forehead make that harder. It is a gentleness she has not been shown since Father held her by the tree; a part of her does not believe she deserves it. Her eyes gleam. Surely she at least owes the strange woman an answer in kind. ]

Yes, I — [ she cuts herself off with a choking breath that sounds more like a sob ] — yes.

[ This is about all she can manage. A good Puritan maid might turn to prayer to steady her mind and clear her soul, but now she is capable only of doing what she's been told, focusing on breath and what is close at hand. Later, perhaps, she will remember how Jonas had forgotten his prayer beside Caleb's sickbed. Right now she closes her eyes and lets the tears breach their bounds. Her grip loosens, becomes less strangling, but she still holds the shift to her chest and tries to feel its movement in time with her thoughts. Rise, fall. In, out. Please. ]

[shri]

[ She leaves a moment, almost letting her go about steadying herself privately if she wished. Especially as she stands up, Lakshmi follows, unfolding herself up to her full height. Always stiff-backed and set in her stance, even so, she cautiously watches her, giving the space she might need. Sufficed that she was just wearing it through as it was. Devi certainly never liked being coddled -

Up until she sees the tear begin to trickle down her cheeks. Lakshmi sighs softly, a little cluck of her tongue that's nothing but warm affection as she tugs the scarf about her neck. The blue and gold threaded material was rich, once, but it is well worn in now. It smelled of gunpowder and leather, and under that, the spices and honey of somewhere far, far warmer. A home long forgotten. Turmeric and sandalwood, the monsoon rains. Gently she dabs at her cheeks, her other hand rising to cup her cheek to keep her still as she blots them away. ]

Good girl. [ It's murmured soft nothings, it means little and much so much as something to break up the wracking feeling. ] Just keep at that, there you go.