Test Drive Meme #15

[seasonshelpers]

Test Drive Meme #15
LOGS | NETWORK | OOC | MEMES | NAVIGATION

Arrival

Part 1

You arrive in an unknown space, dressed in white clothes (player choice what kind of clothes, as long as they cover everything). Whatever was happening to you before no longer happens. It's like everything was put on a pause and you were transferred away from the situation without you realizing it happened.

The space that you find yourself in is one of these four options:

An empty landscape filled with snow and ice, almost like a blank canvas.
A field with cherry blossom trees and spring flowers.
A sunny beach near an ocean that seems never ending.
A quiet forest with falling autumn leaves.

All of the spaces seem to continue endlessly. No matter where or how far you walk it almost seems like you're not moving at all. There are no animals here - just those who happened to wake up there at the same time, in the same place. Everyone is wearing the same kind of plain, white clothes.

Despite the possible rollercoaster of emotions you might be feeling, the place somehow feels familiar. Like somehow you belong there.

And it looks like you're not alone.


Part 2

After half an hour has passed the surroundings change as everyone is teleported into a room with all the other new arrivals, no matter what space they woke up in. It's a large place with plenty of seats to sit in and beverages to enjoy. Medical attention is offered to those who need it and the doctors here are very prepared for any challenging situations.

Here, in this room, everyone gets an answer to where they are and why. A hologram of a man appears at the center of the room, waiting to be heard. He brings a message on behalf of the leaders of Ellipsa. The staff nearby tells them that the message has finally been properly updated from the original one that can still be found from the records.

The Message [ Click to Expand ]

Hello, my name is Olwen. I'm one of the leaders of Ellipsa as it currently is. I'm also one of the four who summoned you here.

Our world is in trouble and we need your help. I apologize for tearing you away from your world and forcing you to come here but I hope you understand. The magic we used doesn't let us ask in advance, nor does it let us choose who we bring here. We wouldn't have resorted to it if we weren't desperate. Our world has lost the majority of power holders who kept the balance in our world and dealt with the dangers of the Segments. Just having one power holder for each Season isn't enough. That's why we have summoned you to become the new Seasonal Power Holders.

This world is composed of four Seasonal Segments. All of them represent one of the seasons: Winter, Spring, Summer and Autumn. They were the places we used to get our resources from, but now they're dangerous places no one should go into unless they have the power to fight back. All of them have their own sets of powerful monsters and natural catastrophes. We have recently managed to regain some footing in the segments and made them safer, but there is still a lot of work to be done. The Darkness still plagues our world, but we are constantly finding ways to fight back.

Otherworlders like you have already made great differences to the world. They have managed to find and free the dragons who in turn helped us expand the area we live in. They also managed to find the Fairy Queen and even the Mermaids and Sirens of the Great Ocean Lake are at peace due to the efforts of a few otherworlders. All of these things we couldn't have accomplished with just four power holders.

My sincere wish is that you would join us in working towards saving this world. We promise to send you home afterwards, or enable a way to travel to your world and back, as a compensation for your efforts here. You're even free to stay here, if that suits you better. This world can also be yours.

I know we're asking you a lot and that it might be hard to trust someone who just talks as a hologram, but you are always free to approach us at our guilds to talk in person.

The hologram can be viewed in private in a separate room later, should someone wish to look at it again. For now, the staff of the Research Center hands everyone their new smartphones with their small flower lucky charms (the flower is anything the player decides). They're also told that the building next door is where everyone can find a room assigned to them with some of their belongings there and possibly even any animal companions. Those concerned about their mount-sized companions are welcomed to the stables downstairs to see if their friends are there. The mounts are allowed to stay there until you find a place more suitable for them.

In the arrival's hall there are also several stands with information pamphlets.

First type of stand is for the local Guilds and about the benefits of joining one.

Second type of stand is for the Welcome Center that aim to show otherworlders what the world is like and help guide people in the beginning of the journey and helps in getting settled into the new world. They even have people to help if you're unfamiliar with the new phones.

Third type of a stand has various pamphlets about businesses opened by otherworlders.

Once you get your smartphone and necessary information, you're urged to go out and find your apartment. After that whatever you want to do is up to you.

The building next door is where everyone can find their new apartments. As you enter, you're told by a friendly native that for the first two months you can live anywhere rent-free and five meals a day are paid for you. After that they get a monthly payment that helps with some of their living expenses, but otherwise they have to have a job to support themselves.

All of the apartments are comfortable, two bedroom apartments with all necessary utilities. They are also completely soundproof. Sometimes the magic system, however, does glitch and you might find yourself rooming with a stranger. This is not the intention and the staff will immediately prepare you a room of your own. But maybe having a roommate isn't all that bad?

Part 3

The locals have taken upon themselves to advertise the Welcome Center that is run mostly by otherworlders. Newcomers are encouraged to visit it, but sometimes the people might think someone who has been a while is new.

Inside one finds a modern Japanese style lobby with plenty of sofas, soft seats and cushions to sit on. Anyone is welcome to just sit around and eat some home-made snacks. There are also computers for searching information and practicing technology skills. There's usually someone behind the front desk, but if no one seems to be there they might be in the kitchen behind the front desk area.

Upstairs there are many rooms that can be into familiar places for characters (not exactly the same, but similar) with futuristic technology. It's set up to help fight any homesickness and provide a quiet place to relax.

One bonus the Welcome Center provides is a gift basket with some treats, basic ingredients for making meals and some gift cards for the Underground Mall, to possibly shop for new clothes or other necessary items. All of these have been donated by volunteers to help newcomers settle in.

Of course the people working here are always looking for new volunteers to help around! There are plenty of things to do, all in the name of making otherwolders' arrival to a new world more comfortable.

Fix-It Crew

Part 1

The City of Nightwake has seen better days. Windows and fixtures are broken, plants are damaged, roads are charred, rubble and garbage litter the streets with some bloodstains in the alleys and sometimes even in the open. Anyone asked will explain that in late May, a number of crises all happened at once, and while things are calm again, parts of the city are still rebuilding.

Magical and mundane repair help of all kinds is requested by various civilian homes and businesses. Anyone who answers the calls for help can be put to work repairing and restoring any items and buildings, replacing windows, repairing doors, building things, and/or cleaning up messes. Any help is appreciated... especially since people are reporting random garbage falling on them from nowhere, thanks to an ongoing quest!

Anyone who volunteers will also be able to learn a new spell that allows them to repair their clothing or armour on the go. Handy when you're out in the Segments and can't just go to the blacksmith!

Part 2
City council has coordinated the cleanup effort, and snack stations have cropped up near big repair sites so volunteers can get water and food. The snacks vary from place to place, but are always something popular in the district they're in; for example, a stand in Sunwaning might provide curry pan or taiyaki, Dayrise might have fried fish or cream-filled buns, or Coldreach might let you come in for chips or deep-fried pickles.

June and July is also the time of the Solstice, a traditional Ellipsan holiday, and just because everything is in shambles doesn't mean people aren't celebrating. While volunteers take breaks at the snack stations, they're encouraged to weave flower crowns with provided cut flowers that are already enchanted to last longer. Plenty of civilians are already out on the street wearing theirs!

While it's common to make your own flower crown, people are also encouraged to exchange flower crowns with others. Some natives might urge anyone who tries to pay attention to flower language when doing so. After all, while not everyone knows flower language, a crown that says "nice to meet you, can we be friends" is very different from one that says "I hope you lose your fortune" or, for that matter, "elope with me"!

OBLIGATORY BEACH EPISODE

Part 1

With summer just around the corner, word gets around that there's going to be a giant beach party in Solarpeak. The natives see this as another way to thank the otherworlders for their continual efforts to help across Ellipsa. So, just a couple days before it starts, everyone will receive a message inviting them to come to Solarpeak and join in on the festivities and enjoy the decor and events that they'll be hosting.

Upon entering Solarpeak, visitors will see everything looks ike it's part of the party. There's stalls with a variety of savory foods, drinks, desserts, and frozen treats. Otherworlders can totally find their favorite summer treats in the assortment - the natives did their research!

There's also several events scattered in the sandy landscape and in the pool itself. In the pool - there's floaties, pool noodles, and a variety of fun pool games. On land there's an inflated obstacle course, slip-n-slides, a water gun fight arena, and beach volleyball set up. Party goers are also encouraged to start up their own activities Don't worry - there's plenty of shady spots to relax, too!

Oh - and don't miss the giant bonfire everyday at dark! The bonfire will also include sparklers and smores.


Part 2
As part of the summer event, Sage Blaze is hosting a cooking competition. Sage is the most recent winner of one of Ellipsa's televised cooking competition shows – Culinary Quest. This competition isn't just about being the best chef, either, it's about learning how to cook with love. Sage will be showing anyone who wants to participate how to make sure that the chefs are cooking with feeling – literally!

People who are tasting the food of the participants will be able to taste the feelings of that participants in the food. That means a dish made with love have a boost in flavor, and if the same dish is made with hate it'll be noticeably less tasty.

While there's no real winner in the competition, participants will walk away with a handy new trick. Sage may also call out when they feel a dish is especially tasty or creative – as long as they can taste the love!

OOC TIPS

Summary of the prompts [ Click to Expand ]

Arrival
• Characters appear in one of the four seasonal spaces, depending on what season they are
• After half an hour they are teleported to the Research Center lobby and given information
• Hologram of Olwen (Winter Guild Leader) plays, explaining the situation
• They're given their smartphone-like device and told about the Starter Apartments next door
• Possibility of finding a roommate!
• Welcome Center welcomes newcomers and those who have been here for a while alike

Fix-It Crew
• The city is recovering from a disaster, so buildings and fixtures all over need repairs and cleanup
• Garbage and debris may randomly fall on characters due to someone else using a defective magic item for cleanup
• Characters who take part in repair efforts are taught a spell to repair clothing and armour
• Snack stands offer food and a place to rest to volunteers
• During rest breaks, they can also make enchanted flower crowns for the Solstice holiday

OBLIGATORY BEACH EPISODE
• Solarpeak is hosting a beach/pool party!
• Stalls with food, drink, desserts, and frozen treats.
• There's several pool games, floaties, etc.
• Options to play beach volleyball, water gun fight, slip-n-slide, etc.
• When it gets dark, there's a big bonfire with smores and sparklers.
• Cooking competition where participants learn to "cook with love".

- Ask your questions related to the TDM here.

- The TDM is available only to friends of the mods and their friends. If you want to play in the TDM, please leave a note here to inform us who invited you over. We will get to you as soon as possible.

- Test Drive is open for current characters to make a toplevel as well. New characters can add TDM on their subject line to indicate they're new!

- Current characters cannot access the starting area again to meet new arrivals. They can, however, be at the Research Center when the newbies are teleported in.

- The TDM is game canon so anything in the TDM can happen for your character(s) in the game as well.

- Smut is not allowed on the TDM. You can play situations leading to it, but if the thread is turning into smut, please move it to a private space such a post in your character's journal, or a locked post in the game's log community if you decide to app!

- Check Locations: City to find more areas to explore inside the city. Every place in the districts is open.

- Similarly, Locations: Segments is useful for outdoors adventures.

- You can find monsters to encounter in the Bestiary.

- The FAQ has information on characters' smartphones as well as general things about the world that might be handy.

code bases by tricklet

Comments

[schrodingerscockroach]

He chuckled. "Yeah. We are a complex web of familial adoptions," he said. "Choco and I love doing the introductions." They are here for the bit. "Choco for close, Korone for less close, and you really should go for Korone first because she thinks you're the coolest and it might give her a heart attack to get Choco by surprise."

There is also some Alters in the mix that makes these things a little more delicate on top of just like. Manners.

"Fifth kidnapping. I've been to more dimensions, its just the other ones were by choice. Got dimension hopping abilities from Kyriakos, the Aurora, and the Temple," he said. "The Forest is the fourth one and they were stingy."

The Forest was also the most personally nightmarish.

"So I was able to visit my new friends, so that was nice. And time gets weird, so I don't even have to be missed."

[brisance]

She wants to ask you've been telling her about me - and in a way that makes them think she's the coolest - but she holds the question in, listening to Wash's explanation. The names aren't familiar to her; some tell her a little bit about what the place might have been like, while others are a mystery.

Then he mentions time, and that has her sobering a little.

"Speaking of time getting weird," she says, finally ready to poke at the elephant in the room. "Maine."

Just the name says a lot. That Maine is here, that he can still speak, and yet the way she says it, looking at Wash gently, means that she's asking if he's okay. He'd run into Maine without any warning.

(Maine had mentioned Wash seemed jumpy. She wasn't sure what Wash had told him, so she'd edged around it having been a while since they'd seen each other.)

[schrodingerscockroach]

"I pulled a gun on him at first and Macaque threatened him because I had explained why I was loyal to the guys, but not the full context of the Meta," Wash said, expression sobering up. "I've since corrected Mac on that tragic backstory." A bit of gallows humor.

Nothing like having to explain one of your close friends got mind fucked to kingdom come and tried to kill you.

"Choco has full Maine context and I've warned her. So she'll probably go full friendly because she's good like that. Lucifer knows Meta, but not Maine, but I'll make sure he's not talking about it. He shouldn't. That was a 'I am revealing shit I don't talk about for good reason' conversation," he said

He takes a deep breath and sighs, rubbing his face. "So Maine knows something happened where I couldn't discount him trying to kill me. I managed to talk around it, said I found out things I shouldn't have and left the Project. Which is true, just, you know....implied a wildly different timeline of events."

[brisance]

She frowns a little as Wash explains, nodding her head slightly in acknowledgement.

"I told him that the Project was shut down. That what the director was doing had messed a lot of us up," she explains. She knows it meant a lot to hear her say that - she'd been one of the Project's most loyal members, even if not quite for the same reasons as the others. Not for the same reason Maine was there.

"Obviously, I left out the biggest reason," she says dryly. "He knows I had Epsilon on Chorus; I don't know if he knows that he was from the Project. I brought up a different story to avoid getting into the details. I didn't mention the - injury, either."

[schrodingerscockroach]

He nods. He knows it means a lot from Carolina. Certainly gives more weight to his own decision. "It's not exactly a leap to assume the Project was doing something shady, most were. Just the question of was it worth it. I said I believed the premise was ultimately flawed and not going to work and couldn't keep paying the price for it. All still technically true."

"He knows he got a scar on his neck, but not how bad. Mac let slip about AI implantation, since he thought it was more common from how Choco and I spoke about it. And honestly, probably better not to hide it from him," he said, hand moving to the back of his neck.

"I had a hoody on, but he's going to see my neck eventually and see the extra port." And the scars. Maine is going to clock Wash seemed to try and tear open the back of his own neck or some human tried at least. "He isn't far from when they announced the AI anyway."

"And....we really should keep to the truth as much as we can," he said, lowering his hand to look at Carolina. "I know the magic bullshit. There WILL be a time when there will be some rain or flower or monster, something, that forces people to tell the truth. Not if. WHEN. Then it's just a matter of you're in the blast radius. The more truth we can stick to, the easier it will be to talk around any compulsions," he said. "Mentally having Maine and Meta as separate entities helps a lot for the worst of it, at least."

[brisance]

"That's how I've been thinking of them," Carolina agrees with a small wince. In truth, she's sure some part of Maine was in the Meta, and that the potential to become it will always be in Maine. But marking a clear line of change - before, and after - keeps her from fearing one of her friends.

"I agree, even if not for the truth-bullshit flower reasons. I just don't want to lie to him that much," she admits. "We've done so much of that already."

She's tired of it. Tired of a lot of things, like fighting the fallout from Freelancer. The fact that it tied back to Malcolm Hargrove was just the icing on the problematic cake they'd been dealing with on Chorus.

"We're just making sure our stories are straight, then. Project was shut down due to illegal work. We can even admit it had to do with illegal AI cloning, if we want to point that out. You dug into what they were doing and saw how bad it got too."

She considers the AI implantation, wincing. "It's up to you, but... we may want to admit that your implantation didn't go well. We can say that's why I lost Eta and Iota too - I couldn't handle two of them in my head and they had to be removed. I don't know if we should tell him who was in your head; he already knows I ended up with Epsilon. That story can stay the same, I think."

[schrodingerscockroach]

Wash knows Maine could become something like the Meta. But it was the same way he could become Recovery One. Put under enough stress and pressure, people could become their worst selves. What mattered was Maine wasn't now and given the right support and care, he wouldn't.

"There is that too," Wash said. "Lying does get exhausting and there is always the chance he'll notice when the bullshit is just a bit too much."

He takes a deep breath and let's it out. Then he holds up his hand. There is a mark there, faded as it is, but it looks like the symbol for Epsilon if the points were made into arrows. "Not the safest bet, he might know Greek letters," he said with a bit of a put upon look. It wasn't immediately obvious, but if someone was thinking Greek letters, it does start to look like it. "You get weird soul tattoos and it likes to rat you out."

"Easy enough to say the twins were too much, two other voices is a lot for anyone, and it could have even been your wake up call, made you aware of all the stress the people were under," he said, lowering his hand. "I can tell him about everything that happened with Epsilon. Its come up a few times over the years. Its gotten easier to tell the story. If anything, it makes the 'implied' timeline a lot more believable. Get an AI in my head, he has no idea how to deal with his trauma, dumps it into my head, of course I want to bolt and have brand new trust issues. Most of his fucked up memories are ripped out of his head, and has time to actually figure out how to be a person that he was all right by the time he meets you. He already knows you and I didn't run into each other a until a lot later. I already told him I've had some Agents take a shot, no need to say you had to deal with that bullshit too."

"And there's too much chance something will force out the truth about Epsilon," Wash said and grimaced. "Especially because, uh....Choco and Macaque got to....experience an echo of those memories." And he kind of hates himself everyday about it. "Magic bullshit. Macaque is pretty good at keeping it underwraps, the advantages of being a centuries old monkey, you can deal with a lot of very bad trauma, but it did a pretty good number on helping Choco develop her own Dissociative Identity Disorder and when one of the alters considers herself an AI and we have years together, it starts to look suspicious. So definitely need to tell him about my implantation being bad, and hiding it was Epsilon is a risk when we don't really need to hide that truth."

He picks at the bark of the log. "The Meta stuff we lie about. We go with the Oversight Committee realized what was going on with the AI and that was deemed too far officially. We could even tell him Malcolm Hargrove had a personal vendetta with Director so it was especially harsh. We could say Agents ran if they couldn't cut a deal because of how harsh he wanted things to be. I'm pretty sure that's why those who weren't involved in the crash started scattering. Freelancer was being too weird in its operations and they read that writing on the wall." He paused. "Being number one is enough reason for Malcolm Hargrove to have not cut you a deal, and between being able to do some good or being thrown into a cell, Maine knows what you'd choose. It could even go a long way in explaining your anger if he ever finds out about the revenge quest without having to...tell too much."

And if the truth about her relation ever came out, well, who could blame that lie?