Test Drive Meme #1 (cw vehicular crash, moderate injury)

[spoofer]

Test Drive Meme #1

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world.

You don't need an invite to test
but please remember we're currently invite-only

CRASH LANDING

Exit one dimension, enter the next. It was chaos: pressure against your ears, light bending in an impossible, unimaginable way. The very molecules of your body vibrating against one another. If you have windows, the view outside makes no sense. Even if not, your hands, your face, your feet seem like an uncertain thing. It's the feel of reality itself tearing apart, reshaping, reconnecting, thread by thread.

And suddenly, there's a beach— or ocean, whichever you land in. Smoke. Fire. Salt water churning up, fizzing around.

Maybe you crash, in a ship wrecking into sand. Maybe you merely stumble out of a portal, a ragged wormhole in space. Or maybe you fall off the back of an incredible steed, some creature that carried you into this place. Either way, there's pandemonium around you. Incredibly, severe injuries are far and few between— nobody's screaming about the dead. But you might have to help pull someone free of wreckage, or move quickly to salvage burning belongings from the landing craft. Maybe it's the crafts themselves, that you're trying to salvage.

Likely, you don't know them, these other strangers who arrived here^[1]. Maybe you don't trust them— you just came out of a dying world, after all. But you all have one thing in common: you're here now.

When you get a second to breathe, maybe you'll see it. The brilliant green forest across the sand. Beyond that, the glint of a faraway city.

INTO THE WOODS

Your first night at Xistentia does not feature five-star accommodations, but as the sun begins to set, the forest offers everything you need to survive. By now, you may even have met your daemon, who'll help guide you through this. There is fallen wood to make fires for warmth and cooking, any number of rabbits, deer, and fish if that's what you're into eating. Those very same animals also provide guidance as to what vegetation is edible, including a variety of vine mushrooms, fruits, and flowers. If you're the kind of creature that mostly eats other sentient creatures, well. Technically, there are a lot of those hanging out too^[2]! Now and then, you'll see tiny, winged humanoid creatures the height of a finger dart in and out of view.

A resourceful group, the multiversal refugees have determined ways to create shelters, using wreckage, supplies, and basic survival knowhow. There aren't enough blankets to go around, but the weather is mild and the fires seem to keep out any aggressive creatures.


Things get quiet. This could be a good time to meet the others under less fraught circumstances. Maybe you'll see some familiar faces and reunite with others who fled from your dying world; maybe you'll meet someone new.

Try not to seek out and fight any Rock Trolls. It's still early.

ENTER THE CITY

The city is beautiful, even with the vines covering everything, the streams running down half the streets, the massive white deer leaping off under the highway overpasses. The architecture of the skyscrapers is incredible to look at, modern and sweeping. It's clear that terraced gardens were part of the building design, and some of the greenery that lines the street had been part of the original city plan. This is a city of great potential.

And it knows you're here. As you walk by, beacons like streetlamps begin to emit a gentle glow, registering your presence. No doors are locked, though you might find yourself chasing out nests of silver-winged birds and bug-eyed rabbits.

Here, you can claim empty shops or the clothing and other sales items inside of them. Apartment complexes aren't difficult to find in a range of sizes; nor are standalone homes, brownstones, loft studios. Penthouses may not feel like penthouses when there's a thin layer of dust growing on everything and a flower growing out of the sink, but you know what? Maybe that little bud is gonna be your first roommate.

It's the strangest thing. After a few days, the lights begin to work and the water begins to run, fully operational within the unseen sewer system. At some point, the keys to your house or residence are going to turn up. Your daemon will help you find what you need. F.A.TE.S. welcomes you.

NETWORK

By now you've settled in. You have some time to explore the city, the woods, and your new kit.

Chances are pretty good that your daemon is not a phone or a computer or a wax-sealed piece of parchment or a Howler, nothing with a convenient camera or a keyboard; it probably isn't even a pocket sized. Likelier, it stares at you with eyes that contain the lenses-- or powers-- of a camera, and some part of its body projects a holographic keyboard into the air. For those of us who are not accustomed to manipulating intangible light prisms, it's about as intuitive to type on as shaping a cloud with your fingers.

But here's your network access. Accessible to all your fellow travelers in XISTENTIA.

Misfires, typos, and blurry video footage are likely. Time to feel like a Luddite!

CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE

hells yeah

Footnotes

1. Some of these can be nameless, plot-device NPCs to facilitate interactions! But even in this case, please avoid gore in describing their current state of being. Anyone dead or catastrophically injured will have disappeared by the time your characters make it to Xistentia. There are no corpses or dying here.
   
   
2. But like OOCly ask permission ofc.

Comments

Blue Sargent | The Raven Cycle | OTA

[amplifyings]

[ and i crashed landed ]


[ Blue knows how to swim, she's actually a fairly strong swimmer when it all comes down to it -- probably not enough to pull another person to shore if they were drowning, but enough to keep herself afloat and get from one point to another without any difficulty. -- but suddenly it's like her body has forgotten the steps it takes to get mobile in the water. She panics and flails, inhaling water and being unable to cough any of it up while still being submerged completely.

And, like anyone who's ever panicked in the water, she immediately starts to sink. Like a rock dropping straight to the bottom of... whatever she's in. She tastes saltwater, likely the ocean and who knows just how far of a drop it would have been before she reached the bottom. It takes everything Blue has to calm herself, to send the signals from her brain to her limbs to start moving.

Her lungs burn for oxygen, the edges of her consciousness start to slowly fade out and she's not entirely sure she'll even make it to the surface of the water. She spent too much time in a sinking frenzy and now has to cover twice as much ground -- or water, technically -- to get back. Blue on the very brink of passing out when she finally reaches the surface and inhales deeply.

Immediately she coughs and sputters, battling with getting air into her lungs where there had once been nothing but seawater. Her hands scrub over her face, clearing the water from her eyes and pushing her soaked hair back on her forehead.

And then she sees it. Another something floating a short distance away. A piece of debris? (There was plenty of it around, after all. And even more, it looks, on the shore.)

No. A person?

Kicking herself into gear, Blue quickly covers the distance between herself and the floating body -- which, as she comes upon it, she really hopes isn't dead. She's not sure her stomach could handle that just yet. Reaching out with a careful hand she nudges the body enough that it turns over and...

Yep. It's dead.

Bile crawls up the back of Blue's throat and after literally nor more than a second of staring at the corpse in disbelief, she's almost comically booking it to the shore as fast as her little limbs can carry her. The second she reaches the shore, she digs her fingers in the sand and retches. Nothing more than bile and saltwater leaving her before she's doing nothing more than dry heaving.

She knew her stomach couldn't handle it.

It takes Blue a few short seconds before she finally calms and focuses on the reality around her -- fire, screaming, people running in every direction, pure chaos that sends her heart racing with panic. ]

Where am I? What's happening? [ She asks no one in particular -- and avoids voicing the most important question in her mind: Why was someone dead? (And, the follow up question: Who were they?) ]



[ are we out of the woods yet? ]


[ While there's still the bustle of people, as well as the scurrying of creatures around, there's significantly less chaos in the forest. It's busy and just as loud, but not in a way that causes a deafening sort of panic, in a way that Blue finds relaxing, comforting, and maybe even just a little bit familiar.

In the vaguest of ways, of course, the wildlife is different than any she's ever seen. The plants look like a mixture of real and fantasy, and there are treehouses and small camps around that remind her of Neverland and Peter Pan's lost boys. Although, it seems as though there are far more adults around than children who never want to grow up. (To be fair, Blue isn't even sure herself which one she is. Stuck right in the middle of being too young and too old -- she'd like to meet the person who claimed teenage years were the best times of a person's life, she'd probably punch them right in the face.

Following the girl through the woods is a small sapient tree, scurrying around her feet and pointing one of its long branch-like appendages at different berries, plants, and mushrooms and letting Blue know which were safe to eat.

(All done in a somewhat robotic-sounding voice, but Blue doesn't question it, nor where it comes from considering the little thing doesn't have a mouth. Just leaves, twigs and a few aphids that had jumped on for a ride and a quick snack. There's already enough here that she doesn't understand, so she just adds it to the growing list.) ]

These berries are safe for humanoid consumption.

[ Blue crouches down to eye the fruit growing from a vine that's wrapped an endless number of times around the thick trunk of a tree. ]

Could you stop calling me a humanoid? [ She picks off one of the berries and inspects it, as though she's able to tell whether it's fatal or not by doing nothing more than looking at it. ]

What would you prefer to be called?

[ Popping the berry into her mouth, she eyes the little plant as it alternates between balancing on each of its "legs". ] Blue is fine.

Blue. Adjective. Of a color intermediate between green and violet, as of the sky or sea on a sunny day. Also; melancholy, sad, or depressed. Or; a joke, movie, or sto--

I know what my name means. I know what my names means. [ She liked trees a lot better when they didn't talk. ] Now, [ And in goes another 'safe for humanoid consumption' berry into her mouth. ] you wouldn't be able to build something, would you?

[ She'd probably have better luck asking an actual person, but... ]



[ out on the network ]


Are you sure anyone can even see me?

[ First, there's just the voice of a girl. Not so young as to obviously be written off as that of a child, but still just shy of being a full grown woman. There's a tone to the voice that's distinctly teenager paired with the drawn out vowels, clipped syllables and occasionally mashed together sounds of a Henrietta accent.

Southern, but not so far that it sounds like a different dialect of English completely. Southern like sticky humidity, cold glasses of sweet tea and late summer thunderstorms. ] You have all of these leaves in the way-- and where's the camera even?

[ The video suddenly comes into focus and there's the form of Blue Sargent standing in all five feet of her eccentric glory. Dressed today in a sundress that looks to be made from three layers of completely different fabrics in contrasting prints, high-top Converses that she's attacked with paint, markers, a needle and thread, and various other art supplies and her short, wild hair pinned away with tens of clips that fo very little to keep it controlled. ]

I am currently recording.

[ Blue straightens up, suddenly she has no clue what she wants to say. What does one say when addressing an unknown group of people at large? ]

Hi. I'm Blue.

[ Nailed it. ]

Has anyone else gotten the hang of these things yet? [ She points at the camera, obviously meaning the daemon that's doing the recording. ] There's not an instruction manual or something right? Mine doesn't re--

[ The video ends, but voices can still be heard. ]

Transmission ended

I wasn't done yet! You can't just cut me of--



[ wildcard ]


Whatever you want is whatever I want! Brackets or prose, I'll match whatever.