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memesinthenight2019-06-14 11:39 pm
inthenightmods) wrote in memesinthenight2019-06-14 11:39 pm
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TEST DRIVE MEME #1
TEST DRIVE MEME #1
Hello and welcome to the In the Night test drive meme for June! Thanks for your interest in our game! Reserves open on June 20, and applications open on June 22.
While you're here...
- Take a look at our rules and faq pages to familiarize yourself with the game.
- Note that we have a reserve/application cap of
20 apps per month(this has been waived for the first month!).- TDM threads can become game canon if both players wish. If the situation isn't something that could happen in-game, you're free to chalk it up to some strange hallucination, a shared dream, or other mysterious circumstance.
- Note that this is not limited to new characters threading with characters already in-game. If current players wish to thread out the TDM prompts as canon events, they are welcome to do so.
- Though threads can become canon, they cannot count toward AC.
- If you plan to apply, please keep in mind that we do require at least one sample thread on the application to be from our TDM (though it doesn't need to be the current TDM).
- You're welcome to use the provided prompts or come up with something on your own, but we do ask that all threads take place in our game's setting.
Thank you again, and we hope you'll choose to join us!
log prompts
YOU'RE DEAD, JIM
You haven't been in Beacon long when you find yourself in Bonfire Square, staring into the flames and thinking about how you ended up here. Maybe it was an accident, a sudden freak thing that you never saw coming until you woke up on the ferry, or maybe it's a miracle you made it as long as you did. Maybe death was a relief. Maybe it was just your time. Whatever the case, you can't help but reflect on your final moments as you linger in the firelight.
But however you died, it's behind you now, and you're here, stuck in this little town with just a few buildings and a smattering of other people. You're going to be here a while, so you may as well get to know your neighbors, but... Would it be cathartic to commiserate about your deaths? Or is your time better spent stocking up at the general store? Then again, you've got plenty of time, so why not catch a drink or two (or three) at the Invincible? Pretend you're unaffected by your death, and, well. Fake it 'til you make it, perhaps.
Point is, you have options. You're dead, you died, and this is your "life" now. Better get used to it.
AND THEY WERE ROOMMATES
Currently, there's only one place to live (technically speaking) in Beacon: the Invincible, a tavern and inn located in Bonfire Square. Luckily, the place has working amenities (minus light), and the forest spirits don't charge anything for your stay. Unfortunately, it seems there may not be enough rooms for everyone. Guess you'll have to get cozy!
Maybe you'll try to pick a roommate from around town or in the bar downstairs, or maybe you'll just walk into the first room you see and choose that way. Want a room all to yourself? Get ready to fend off any potential intruders. And the fun doesn't end there.
The Invincible's rooms aren't all created equal. Some may have had their furniture stolen or become a dumping ground for unwanted pieces, resulting in a single bed, five dressers, and other equally distressing situations. Will someone sleep on the floor? Will you nail two beds together to form bunk beds? Maybe you just want to make this room into something more like home— potentially to your roommate's chagrin. Whatever you decide, this is where you're staying for now, so you might as well get comfortable.
network prompts
HACKER VOICE: I'M IN
In order to use the network, you have to register a username. Er, at least, that's how it's supposed to work. For some reason, new users have recently been able to bypass that requirement, allowing them to post anonymously. Time to troll strangers on the magical internet!
Eventually though, you'll need a username in order to use the tablet's other functions, like the direct messaging system. So hey, why not take advantage of the ability to source opinions, and workshop your potential usernames on the network? Share ideas, get feedback, steal ideas, critique others, and figure out what you want everyone to call you.
TURN ON YOUR LOCATION
When you wake up, you're in the woods. An iron shackle complete with a chain leashes you to a tree, and the only light you have is your lantern. You've never seen this area of the woods before. You certainly didn't go to sleep here.
Hm.
But, all is not lost. You find your phone in your pocket, as well as a scrap of paper covered back to front in cryptic scribbles. Are these clues to your location? They must be. You also spot a key dangling from a branch, though it's hanging from a tree you'll never be able to reach from here. Perhaps someone on the network will be able to lend you a hand...
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[always sunny theme] "𝑬𝒍𝒊𝒔𝒉𝒂 𝑮𝒆𝒕𝒔 𝑨𝒅𝒅𝒊𝒄𝒕𝒆𝒅"
Well, we have time.
[ guess you don't clip it, he thinks as he glances down at this so-called cigarette - at least, given that the corporal gestures for him to light the end without any prior ado. perhaps they just come that way in the carton. he does, and initially puffs on it - then realizes that this fellow is inhaling the smoke and probably knows a bit more about these things than he himself does both by virtue of the time he comes from and the place he comes from and follows along. nothing like southern tobacco, even though elisha, unlike some of his peers in his last life, would never say as much out loud.
but this - oh, this is just vile. it's hardly aromatic, more... chemical. soulless. not a trace of the cedar he was admittedly hoping for. he wrinkles his nose slightly, but doesn't make a scene, and before too long the taste is forgotten, pushed to the edge of his consciousness by a pleasant feeling of lightheadedness and a strange but very welcome numbness. ]
That's good.
lmao WHOOPS... at least it wasn't anything worse than nicotine. also gosh what a fun oc!!
gene nods to him, lets him enjoy the nicotine while he marshals his thoughts. can't explain his war without explaining the first of them. the great war. his ma's fight, an' she was just as deep in it as any man. bein' a nurse weren't easier than bein' a soldier, it was just. different, is all.
so he starts with that. the assassination of the archduke, the declarations of war that followed. how many countries got into it an' how bad and bloody the fights were. he describes the effects of mustard gas with a clench to his jaw that speaks to his disapproval, an' though he ain't poetic about the trenches, he doesn't touch too deeply on anything.
maybe it's obvious he knows more about it than he should. but the ghosts were fresh on the landscape at the somme and christ o'lordy they were so young. it's always worse when they die violent. the land was still pocked with scars of that old fight, and when the 82nd dropped into france in '44 they knew they had to watch out for those yellow and green canisters, an' if they saw any they had to report straightaway to the engineering corps.
about halfway through the telling, he takes out a cigarette of his own, seein' as how the other man seems to be enjoying his. )
An' after the Armistice, well. We had about twenty years of no especial peace, an' then Germany got into it again.
skdfjlskfj thank you.... right back atchu i love gene
[ elisha takes a long drag from the cigarette he was given a few minutes ago before he offers anything more eloquent than the brief flash of blasphemy. ] People will do unimaginable things to each other. [ would the confederates have thrown canisters into their trenches in atlanta they the option? would they have thrown their own back? he doesn't want to think about the answer, or what it would feel like suffocating to death. as far as ways to die go, suffocation and drowning are the worst, if you ask him. and to suffocate and burn at the same time... he can't even begin to think of what that would feel like. that extent of cruelty for what? keeping one's word to a foreign power? a piece of paper?
it's further startling to think about the people he'd gotten to know over the course of the year he spent in berlin as a young man taking up arms against his fellow countrymen, although really he supposes that it would be more accurate to imagine their grandchildren in such a role. and to think that they didn't learn, they didn't learn from the carnage he spent four years wading through and they didn't learn from the Mustard Gas war.
it all brings to mind some of the more grisly burns he'd seen - men with entire swaths of their forearms red and glistening with exposed plasma after being seared by gunpowder, the hands of inexperienced artillerymen burnt to lifelong uselessness by the hot metal of canons because they forgot themselves in the chaos, or because the men tasked with keeping an eye on them were now spread too thin to do so. and the screaming - jesus christ, the way they screamed when nurses covered the burns in wheatlead paint to put something between them and the open air. he realizes after a few seconds that he's lapsed into silence again. he's been doing that more and more these days, or so it feels like. ]
Is it still used, in your war? The mustard gas.
no subject
( he saw the after effects. veterans aplenty, some of whom drowned slow over the next twenty years in the mess and ruin of their own lungs. it ain't a thing he'd wish on anyone, much less the boys under his care. if anythin' could've stirred him to great violence, it'd have been the inhumanity of that.
a bullet's one thing. it ain't nice, often ain't quick or clean, but there's somethin' one helluva lot fairer about that than there is about chemical warfare. hard to say why he thinks as much, it ain't like there's much distinction. death's death, after all.
he lights his own cigarette off his lantern and takes a drag, tipping his head politely to one side to blow out the ensuing smoke. )
No, we mostly just shoot each other. Or, ah. We've got these vehicles now, airplanes. Imagine somethin' like a train, but it's capable of flight an' ain't usually longer than a dozen yards or so. They can carry crews, weapons, that sort'a thing. Bombs, too.
no subject
[ elisha takes another drag from the cigarette he was given, this time mimicking the corporal's deliberate effort to keep the smoke away from the man beside him. contrary to what the boys on the other side would have liked to believe, he's not rude. well, most of the time, he's not. and when he is, he's earned the right to be, as far as he's concerned.
there are answers to a lot of questions that this boy has, provided he's willing to broach the topic - which he is. ] Tell me what you know about the Southern prisons. What happened to them, the men inside. [ asking feels like walking out into the snow without a jacket on and waiting for the icy air to bite his skin. it's not a wise question and he knows he isn't ready for the answers he's going to hear but he has to ask. it's his obligation to ask. ] And the plantations.
[ and he adds, as an aside half-spoken to himself from behind a bitter smile: ] Guess this experience settles the question of what kind of god would allow that.
[ it's a sight, a smell he'll never be able to forget - watching mesmerized from atop the swaybacked old nag that had accompanied him since '62 as fire devoured a plantation's endless hills of cotton like a fast-rising orange tide, his eyes watering not from any undeserved sorrow for these people but from the sting of the white smoke that billowed from the ground and the beams of barns. and he remembers the nauseating, contagious panic, the civilians who were too arrogant to evacuate suddenly realizing that their final reckoning had come, the overlords of plantations who didn't want to abandon ship in a frenzy to stop them, the men and women and children they'd kept like livestock begging to be taken with them - starving alongside the whites uncle billy's men, he himself included by extension, were attempting to figuratively and perhaps literally smoke out -
and he remembers the urge to kill. how dry his mouth felt as he looked down at a sleeping patient who had owned human beings, watching the soft rise and fall of the man's chest and the faint movements of his fragile throat, thinking about how easy it would be to put both hands on his neck and snap it like a pheasant's. why should he live? he recalls thinking. what right does he have to stay on this earth when three young men who just wanted to go the hell home like everyone else in this godforsaken outfit died before noon?
the recollection ends suddenly; he tunes back in, canting his head in the corporal's direction to indicate that despite his momentary lapse in focus he's still listening, if anything more intently than before now that he has something he'd like to be distracted from. ]
no subject
gene's felt it. though he staves off the guilt well enough even in the darkest hours, he knows that it'd be all too possible for him to slip into that pit an' lose himself in the mire of it all. seems this man is in the thick of it.
only way to help a fella outta a hole is to offer a hand up. only problem is, some learn to love the dark. )
Reckon the Almighty don't allow or disallow much when it comes to men doin' evil to each other. That's on us.
( it ain't argumentative in the least, just a mild statement of his own belief. reggie's told him about the camps in europe. the deplorable conditions. the horror of it all. most common soldiers ain't yet encountered them, too far back yet from the tide of it all, but. but gene's had to wrestle with it, the anger that comes with knowin'. most folk think him calm, but they ain't got a clue that the ocean always is when you go deep enough. his trick is that he mimics the depths instead of the swell of the surf. but this war has put it in him, sure enough. in a way that cruel beginnings and a hard life never did manage. )
Plantations survived, mostly. Those what'd been slaves had a hard time findin' work outside'a what they'd done before. Them what'd owned 'em found a way to exploit that. The language changed, the situation much didn't. Don't think anybody was ever really punished on the matter.
( folks in power tend not to want to surrender it. an' what looks like equality to some looks like oppression to those used to havin' the upper hand. )
An' to the camps — lotta folk died on both sides. Conditions were deplorable. Disease an' starvation ran riot. Reckon some fifteen — twenty, maybe? — percent of the incarcerated died to one thing or another.
no subject
it takes several seconds for his thoughts to return to corporal hicks' earlier comment on the almighty. it's unsurprising that he's religious - god knows southerners love their dogma (and, to be fair, so do a lot of rural pennsylvanians). it would seem that war still has the effect of making men atheists or fervent believers and nothing in between. by now he thoroughly falls into the prior category. his loosely episcopalian past self would probably feel sorry for him.
elisha's shoulders fall as he exhales. don't allow. present tense. where does he think we are, then? how someone could cling so tightly to their need for a god that they would continue to believe the gospel after being unmistakeably proven wrong about the afterlife is indecipherable to him. he leans forward, resting his elbows on his knees, and stares out at the water again. ]
But you do believe that he's both all-powerful and benevolent. [ it's a question spoken like a statement. and real, he wants to add but doesn't. ]
no subject
( he recognizes the challenge for what it is, an' sidesteps it plain. he's seen enough of theology in the trenches to last him a lifetime. )
An' respectfully, it ain't a point on which I'll argue, if it's all the same to you.
( his tone stays mild. he genuinely doesn't want to cause offense, but should he, he'll deal with it just the same. )
no subject
it could very well be that this man is in denial. don't make me think about it, he seems to be saying, truly. it's obnoxious, but understandable - and after a few moments of thought, he decides not to probe, seeing as at least the man's not being sanctimonious. just foolish, and probably in shock, a pattern which he spent four goddamn years becoming intimately familiar with through watching it in others.
...well, he doesn't probe, with the exception of a single question that he can't keep himself from verbalizing: ]
Where do you think we are?
[ his tone isn't particularly hostile. just... baffled. ]