memesinthenight | TEST DRIVE MEME #8

Entry tags:

!tdm

TEST DRIVE MEME #8

Hello and welcome to the In the Night test drive meme for January! Thanks for your interest in our game! In an effort to streamline our application process and avoid future confusion between incoming and existing players, we will no longer have a reservation period. Applications open on January 22, and will be judged on a first-come, first-served basis.

While you're here...
Take a look at our rules and faq pages to familiarize yourself with the game.
Note that we have a (current) application cap of 16 apps this month for new players, as the game has a player cap of 70. An accurate count of current players will always be available on the taken page.
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. They are welcome to make posts in the main comms for TDM events as well. Please note, however, that actual plot clues or happenings will not occur in TDM prompts.
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

CAKE BY THE OCEAN

It's a brand new year, and with it, a brand new...you? Well, you are dead, but there's still plenty of ways that you can embrace the spirit of starting fresh, especially when it seems that the forest spirits have their own traditions that they're eager to share! If you've only just arrived, you may find yourself pelted with loaves of bread and accosted with noisemakers, or if you're a seasoned Beaconite, maybe you're wearily unsurprised to find strings of onions being placed around various doorways. Just another day in the afterlife. Best to go along with it, even if some of these practices seem to be somewhat chaotic. It's never a good idea to make the spirits mad, after all, and especially not when they're trying to show you...some sort of semblance of good will, you think. For the most miserable of souls, at least you can be comforted in the knowledge that it should all be over before the day is out.

This is a miniature version of the festivities present during this month's intro log!

I CAN'T FEEL MY FACE WHEN I'M WITH YOU

Winter has made its way to Beacon. It's fortunate that plenty of snow gear has been made available at the general store, so this is a great time for those with little-to-no experience with genuine snow to get out there and draw some angels or build forts for some playful snowball fights! At least...it is, at first. Linger too long and you'll find yourself caught in the middle of a raging blizzard that seems to have swept in out of nowhere. In an instant things seem to go from cold to freezing, and the need to get back inside where there's safety from the elements is pressing. Fortunately, you aren't alone. It might not be your usual residence, but more than one of you have tumbled into the same shelter, and will probably be stuck in there until the worst of the storm passes. No time to get to know each other like the present, right? Gotta break the ice somehow (haha).

network prompts

RUN BOY RUN

The changes in the weather isn't the only thing that residents old and new need to keep weary of. While a great many of the forest spirits remain generally friendly, traveling alone comes with its risks. There's always the possibility that you may encounter a creature that's less inclined to let you pass it by unscathed. And so it goes for you as you venture out into the trees with your lantern and torch in hand. Whatever reason you had for starting out alone, and whatever got you to this point, you've had to take shelter from a very, very displeased spirit. Maybe it has a body not meant for climbing, and you've scaled high up into a tree that it won't let you down from, or maybe you've taken shelter inside of a structure that it's too big to squeeze itself into. Whatever the case, it's clear that your pursuer isn't giving up the ghost (haha), and you'll need to contact someone for some form of help to get yourself out of this.

1000 FORMS OF FEAR

It's a normal day in Beacon...which means that something inconvenient at best and terrifying at worst must be just around the corner. Whether or not you're on edge about the relative calm, it doesn't seem that anything weird is happening...until you try and post to the network. No matter how many times you try, the message you intend to write erases itself. As if someone else has hacked into your tablet, a new message re-types itself in front of your eyes. One of your greatest fears or greatest regrets announces itself for all to see, and there's no getting rid of it. All attempts at getting rid of it are fruitless, and it doesn't seem that you can back out of the new post window now that you're here. Your only option now is to hit send. But, hey, your fellow residents are a pretty understanding lot. Maybe they won't hold whatever it is against you. Maybe you can explain it away. There's always lying, too, if you want to go that method of covering your tracks.

QUICKNAV
comms	\|	network • logs • memes • ooc
pages	\|	rules • faq • taken • mod contact • player contact • calendar • setting • exploration • item requests • full nav

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

You're right on the latter point. I don't mind hearing more about Earth, though. Learn something new every time. You all come from different kingdoms and different times. Sounds like a big place. How about you? Anywhere I might have heard of?

[Yes, that deflection was pretty transparent and he realizes Gregor will probably make a second attempt at asking about where he comes from. That's fine, though. He doesn't really mind giving a barebones description if he's really that curious, there's no harm in it.]

[Gregor shrugs.]

Maybe. Most people from Earth in the last hundred years probably have, so it could've been mentioned.

[And yet he hasn't said it yet. Either he's very much the type to do everything on his own time, or he's being a shit about Rosinante's dodginess. Probably both. The sly, eyes-only smile essentially confirms that.

He'll be nice, though.]

New York City. Largest city in the United States. If nothing else, you've at least probably heard of the county.

[He nods a little. Who was from New York, again? He'd have to pull out his tablet and consult his notes to remember and he doesn't want to demonstrate just how much he keeps written down on everyone right now.]

I've heard of it. Think we've had a few from there, though I can't remember who. And a lot of others are from the United States too, but other parts of it. Even heard it's a big enough country where in parts of it you can travel for days without seeing the ocean.

[Which is still mindblowing. Even up on the Red Line, someone wouldn't be more than a day or so from at least a view of the sea.]

Days? It can take over a week if you don't want to be miserable.

[He's never driven a car, never had a need to, but the idea of doing so for twelve or more hours a day is incredibly bleak.]

Don't get me wrong, our world is mostly water. The continents are large, but the oceans are even larger. I take it where you're from, the landmasses aren't that big?

Yeah. Small islands. The biggest ones I've ever been too you can still walk across in a couple days, so it's hard for me to imagine being far from water.

[But that first statement was confusing, wasn't it? What does Gregor even mean?

Also apparently this is a full on conversation now so he gives in and sits at the table. This is awkward since the ground is wet and snowy but it's still better than trying to cramp himself into a too-small chair with his knees hitting the table from below. He finds a spot that at least doesn't look muddy and has a drag from his cigarette.]

How is taking more time less miserable? You mean taking it slow, seeing the sights?

[On the one hand, Rosinante looks very uncomfortable on the floor. On the other, Gregor doesn't have to crane his neck as much to look at him, so there's that.]

Something along those lines. You could rush to wherever you're going and enjoy yourself there, I guess, but I can't imagine how awful it would be to be stuck in a car for two days straight.

If you have to go a long way, might as well make the most of it.

[Give him a second. He almost squints a little as he thinks hard. A car - that's a word he's heard before here, isn't it? But he can't recall ever getting the specifics.]

Stuck in a what?

[He'll just start there, see how Gregor answers.]

A car.

[And because it's then clear that he didn't just mishear, now Gregor has to figure out how to explain what a car is.]

It's a vehicle. A sort of closed wagon that's powered by an engine instead of a pack animal. Modern ones can move quite fast, over a hundred miles per hour if that measurement means anything. Somewhere around... a hundred and sixty kilometers?

[Don't ask him knots he doesn't know shit about that.]

[Kilometers are easier, and his eyes widen as he does a rough conversion in his head. The fastest sailing ships in full sail and strong winds still only travel half that speed and only while the winds are good. The average is far lower. A horse likewise cannot approach that pace.]

Most of our ships are lucky to reach a tenth of that speed. And cars are common on Earth? Enough where people can prefer them?

[Since Gregor had, after all, mentioned travel at those speeds as something mundane. Expected. How do they not crash into things all the time?]

Well, to be clear, those speeds are what cars are capable of. In most places it's only legal to drive them around sixty-five at the most. In kilometers something like... [Hold on, gotta do some mental math.] A hundred and five?

[Still much faster than a ship, or at least one without an engine.]

Cars are extremely common, though most people living in the city I'm from don't bother with them. It's a busy place, things get backed up with everyone trying to use the same roads at once. Faster to just walk or use the subway. [Oh, wait, if he didn't know what a car was, Rosinante definitely doesn't know what a subway is.]

That's an underground train system. [Fingers crossed for trains?]

Still over fifty knots. No ship maintains a speed like that.

[What a wonder this Earth place must be. Even if those speeds are considered safe and normal, and far less than the top speeds, they're incredible to him. He truly can't picture moving that quickly. It would be frightening.

But then here comes another concept - subway. His face takes on a deeply-puzzled look. He's heard of a train before in the news - that shipwright who built the Oro Jackson was supposed to be working on one as penance. The sea train as described in the papers would be built like a segmented series of ships all joined together, able to move at something like those wild speeds across the water's surface. But Tom was already running over his allotted time last he'd heard, and it still seemed like a project that would never truly be finished. Just a way for a criminal to extend his lifespan rather than face execution. How could a city full of people have something like that beneath their homes?]

There's a fishman where I'm from who is trying to build the first train in our world, supposedly. I don't know much about it, except that he's behind schedule. Probably won't ever finish, at this rate. His is supposed to run over the top of the sea, though. How would it even work in the ground?

I'm guessing your ships don't have engines, then? It is hard to maintain a high speed when you're relying on the wind to be nice to you.

[Not that he really knows much about ships. Aside from ferries, he's only been on a "real" one like two times in his whole life.]

Well, our trains run on rails, not water. The rails are built in tunnels under the city, so that they completely avoid the roads. That way, instead of braving all those cars, you can just go straight to the station nearest to the place you want to go.

[Well, with stops at all the other stations, but you know.]

[He shakes his head. No, for a number of reasons they don't have engines, even though he's aware of the existence of some in other applications. They're incredibly uncommon. The resources to create and power them aren't something they have easy access to, for few islands are large enough to provide things like metals and fuel, and few craftsmen know how to work with those materials. Besides, having one would draw the attention of sea kings due to the noise, and pirates wanting to steal it for themselves. It's just not practical as far as he knows.

The clarification about the trains does help explain them somewhat. It's still clearly just very alien to his own experience and he can't really picture how it all must look.]

I can see how that's useful when you have so much land to cross. I wonder if they had something like that here? There are mineshafts somewhere down below. Maybe they had underground trains, too?

[And for his part, Gregor can't really fathom how a train is supposed to work on water, so there's that. Is it just several ships chained together? How is that helpful?]

You know, that's a good point. Where I'm from, most mines have their own set of rails, for either a train or to make it easier to cart things out. What I'm saying is, they probably had the means.

This place feels remote. That didn't seem strange to me before, I'm used to everywhere being remote. Now? I wonder how far the nearest next town is.

[He had expected there would be others around the lakeshore. He's still upset - angry, actually, though not in a way he can be productive with - that the spirits in the water are so violent. He's not sure why he wants so badly for there to be more, though. Maybe the thought that they're all alone here is too heavy for him to bear.

If they can't cross the lake, then he's heard there are difficult mountains and cliffs surrounding them. But there must have been a way in and out, for the cycling maps he found advertised trails that seemed to stretch for far longer than just the little trip to downtown. They had tourists here. They got here somehow. Whether by lake or road, there's more out there.]

Hard to say. Though the lake seems larger than the shore we can see, and larger settlements tend to spring up around important waterways. If the lake was good for fishing or moving goods, we're probably not far from a city.

[And probably not the only small town along the lake's edge, for that matter. Of course, this is him assuming that civilization in this world tended to progress like it did in his own. Seems like a safe guess, though.]

You have to wonder, though: if there's a whole world out there, why put us here? Just because this is where that portal is, or because this is where we need to be?

[The questions about why here will have to remain rhetorical - though the portal, he imagines, is the primary candidate for the reasoning.]

First day I got here I figured there must be other settlements around the lake. Must be a river that feeds into and out of it. I was told repeatedly it wasn't worth investigating, that nobody was out there. Got myself a boat built, and got eaten alive by the things that live in the lake. I don't know how to get out farther to look.

[And that is honestly a major source of his anger and frustration at the situation to this day. Can't sail, can't fly; hell, there's probably too many dangerous spirits in the forest to walk the whole thing but he's sure thought about doing it anyway. Being unable to get out across the water just feels wrong. Makes him feel caged.]

We probably ought to map out our own settlement before we start looking for others.

[But that's just his two cents.]

Maybe you were told it wasn't worth it because everyone who's tried got eaten alive. Though I guess that probably depends on who told you.

[And whether they did or did not know what they were talking about.]

It would have been helpful had they said that, or anything else specific. As I recall, responses were more along the lines of "you could lose your lantern" and "it's a waste of time."

[And thus he is perpetually unimpressed with Robin. Even Winters hadn't been very helpful, which is disappointing as he likes to think of the guy as pretty selfless and helpful, but maybe that's just from a general tendency to think well of the dead. Much as he liked Winters, it isn't like he got to know him well.]

Anyway, there's enough of us where there's no harm in doing both. Or there wouldn't be if we could figure out a safe way to travel farther.

So, not technically lying, but not exactly telling the whole truth.

[Which is about as good as lying, in some cases. Especially in situations where death is a possibility. This seems to have caught his attention more than the traveling thing.]

Should I assume the people telling you this were the ones who've been here longest? The lighthouse keeper, Rastus?

Yeah. They have a tendency to act like it's better for us to risk whatever counts for life now finding things out firsthand instead of warning us appropriately, or helping by telling what they know.

[Frustrating as hell but there's not a single thing he can do about it other than play along and make nice even when he doesn't feel like it. There are some people who can be threatened and intimidated into yielding, but Robin is not one of them, up there in her tower, so it's never been a tactic worth trying. Even though sometimes it's all he wants to do.]

Robin has a full map of this place and the ability to communicate with others we've only recently begun to meet. There's a lot she could have done from the start to speed things along, but she never has.

[Yeah, he's coming to the exact same conclusion: coercion isn't a viable method here. One, because the person with all the information is inaccessible. Two, because she's apparently a teenager.

He doesn't have very many limits, but that's one of them.]

Assuming she wants to fix this situation as much as the rest of us, there's only so many reasons she'd withhold information. She could be worried about our reaction to what we learn. Maybe she doesn't want to be the one to tell us.

That's been one of the excuses.

[Not a very good one in his mind, but he's surprised by how quickly Gregor came to that guess. It seems like the guy might understand people awfully well. That's good to know, and good to be wary of. Helpful in the right situation.]

Hopefully they'll start coming around to giving us real answers. Some of us have been here plenty long now, long enough to judge our reactions - which are usually pretty good. It sounds like past groups weren't as cooperative. Plus, we're running out of time.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

TEST DRIVE MEME #8

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject