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

[rekt]

About three months past 18.

[ is that how long he'd been in eudio? eh, close enough. but he was 17 before showing up, and then he was told he was 18. woohoo.

barely. freaking. legal. ]

[rekt]

[ surprising people still makes murphy a mischievous sort of proud, smirking as he leans a shoulder against the tree, more properly facing axel. ]

I know. Cradle robbing and homo, right? Poor Aaron.

[ so many sketchy things to be at once, poor babbu. it does occur to him to make the morbidly amusing joke of 'hey, i can officially be floated now', but keeps that to himself. ]

[rekt]

[ murphy shrugs, considering mentioning that emori, his actual girlfriend back home, is around 25, so it's really not a concern of his. but, he doesn't really want any of these people knowing about her. or that much about him. the only one who was aware was bellamy and, well, he's gone now, along with all of eudio.

so, it's just a shrug. ] I'm from 2149, no one really gives a crap what genitals you're touching.

[ age, yeah, probably more so, but they didn't have freaking vampires back home, and the thought doesn't bug murphy much. none of the problems he's had in eudio, or these intrapersonal things in xist, have done much in the way of bugging him. ] There's worse issues to have, anyway.

[ after all, even healed over and faded as they are, and difficult to see with the dirt of the forest speckling him, there's still light scars from titus's whip on his cheeks. his forearms, though covered in heavy sleeves, still bear marks from that first time he'd been taken and tortured, redness around his wrists from the last. there's definitely worse issues to have. ]

[rekt]

[ axel starts complaining about forest and murphy near immediately cracks the fuck up. all these freaking city kids, even the goddamn 140 year old vampire, can't freaking handle camping out for a day. ]

If this is anything like places that usually start like this and look like this, the forest is gonna be the least of your worries, sunshine.

[ sunshine, which he assumes doesn't bother axel, because here he is, standing in it, and not comically catching flame like all the dracula movies. ]

If anything, it'll be the city that'll kill us faster. Buildings means someone built them, means there's no good reason why they'd abandon it unless something started killing them. [ this - how to read bad situations, this is what the ground taught murphy, and this is why he grew up so fast. this is why he could care less about aaron's issues and axel's age. this is always why he actually lived to be 18, unlike 60 of the 100 that were shot down with him. ]

So either we're invaders, or we're idiots about to suffer through the same thing.

[rekt]

[ murphy snorts, and shakes his head at the notion of that explanation spiel. ]

No, I don't believe it.

[ simple and to the point. it's too much like ALIE, too much like a lot of things, too much bullshit. and, as a general rule, never trust the first thing someone tells you, it's usually, if not a lie, something meant to ease first impression. ]

But that says something, at least. That I'm allowed to not believe it.

[ if this were ALIE and the City of Light, he wouldn't have a choice in it. maybe he wouldn't even know. who can really say? not like he has anyone here who's been through it. ]

[rekt]

The Daemons said we're computer programs, right?

[ ALIE, ALIE, City of Light, stepford style VR brain washing, ALIE. he hates this place already. ]

How easy is it to swap out coding?

[rekt]

Where I came from, there was a free willed AI that built a chip. [ murphy sighs out, and supposes he's telling this story now. no one's going to be happy to hear it. ]

You - as your human or whatever body - swallow it, it melds up with your organic brain, and takes your consciousness to a virtual reality the psychotic bitch called The City of Light. [ the words come from murphy's lips with a twist, as if spitting out poison he had to suck from a wound. ] No one feels pain in the City of Light, no one dies in the City of Light, and no one gets that they're a fucking zombie there either.

[ everything that was important to emori once went completely away when she took that chip. it rewrites a person all together. ]

She could turn the pain back on, totally scramble your brains, or make you forget stuff entirely. [ a beat, and he stares at axel with eyes dull, listless. ] You getting it yet?