aftr_ooc | TEST DRIVE MEME ( 002 )

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*test drive meme

TEST DRIVE MEME ( 002 )

Test Drive Meme #2

Hello, and welcome to LifeAftr! We’re pleased that you’re expressing an interest in the game. Here, you can test the waters, gauge how your character may fare in the world of LifeAftr, and even gain some in-game incentives, if you so choose.

Remember that Reserves will open on August 17th and that Applications will open on August 24th!

Two important notes:

1. LifeAftr's test drives take place on the island of Mu, which exists apart from the real world and possesses a dream-like quality that characters are innately aware of from the moment they appear on its shores. No need to panic or fret. Dreams are odd things, after all - and anything can happen in them. Why would anyone question where their mind chooses to wander in its sleep?

2. Due to the nature of Mu, threads in our test drive can not only be accepted as thread samples in your application, but can be accepted as game canon as well. In fact, certain choices your character makes in Mu have the potential to bear in-game consequences, largely in the form of test drive reward items.

I'm on a Boat
The rhythmic rocking may be soothing to start with - perhaps reminiscent of how an infant might feel, rocked in the cradle. Well, up until you wake up long enough to take stock of your surroundings. You're on a flimsy wooden raft, comprised of logs lashed together with straw-like twine. You're surrounded by water on four sides, with the only landmass for miles rearing like an inkblot on the horizon.

Right - and you're not alone, either. You have a raftmate, and they're probably just as shocked and displeased to be here as you are. Good thing the boat appears to have come with a pair of oars - as well as a pair of very large butcher knives.

Those, ah...are probably just for survival's sake.

Probably. Though that's rather up to you, isn't it?

The Beast of the Bay
A roaring bonfire, the sound of waves lapping up against the sand, the uniform dark blanketing all but the orange glow of the embers at your feet - what more could you ask for? Those who huddle around the flames for warmth will find themselves oddly compelled to make something of the setting. It's simply too perfect to resist.

It's time, once again, to tell a story.

In fact, your lives may very well depend on it. As long as there is silence, the fires begin to dim, and the flames sink low. And in the distance, you swear you can hear...a snarling, a liquid yip-growl of a great stalking thing with slavering jaws. Maybe you glimpse it in the corner of your eye, dark-furred and clawed with golden slits for eyes that glow like molten amber.

For as long as your fire burns, you're safe. But you'll need a story to fuel it...and if the story is insufficient, if it's more lie than it is truth, then there's a beast that's hungry for your failure.

Get Spelunked On
The caves built into the cliffs lining the beach may be imposing, but you're going to need protection from the elements, and you might not have much choice if you want to last the night. In you inevitably go - or maybe you simply wake up there, having bypassed the need for a raft and a bad-tempered boatmate.

Never fear if you lack a natural means of producing light - it seems that there's all manner of round, glowing orbs buried in the ceiling of each sea cave. Isn't that thoughtful?

Maybe it would have been, if those orbs dispensing that faint cerulean glow weren't sentient - and annoyed at the sight of so many people invading their dark, secluded, peaceful habitat.

Glowgrubs are pale, wormlike creatures that like to dangle from the ceiling like very peculiar stalactites. Most don't grow any larger than two or three feet, but they can be remarkably fast on the ground when they like to be - and they do like to be, when there are intruders afoot. Armed with fanged mouths on both ends of their slightly striated bodies, glowgrubs can deliver a nasty bite that, while not fatal, is dangerous in its own right.

Those who succumb to the bite of a glowgrub will find themselves drawn, trancelike, to deep water. But while a glowgrub can survive submerging itself in those murky depths for hours at a time, most oxygen-breathing creatures cannot.

So don't go wandering about all alone, all right?

LOGS ● OOC ● STORIES ● MAIN NAVIGATION

( CODED BY BOOTYCALL )

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On a Boat!

[A person dressed in full-plate armor and laden down with a fairly ridiculously large sword probably shouldn't stand up in a boat -- but that is exactly what Maridian does, pushing himself to his feet and lifting one hand to shield his eyes.]

[On the plus side, his balance is excellent. The boat barely twitches once he's upright. On the down side, how much benefit does one really get from shielding one's eyes... if one's eyes glow?]

I've definitely been in worse situations, but I'm going to admit that I find this one a little annoying. [And yet he sounds so cheerful about it.] I'm thinking we probably want to be on land instead of out here. Thoughts?

Spelunked

ANAR'ALAH BELORE!

[If anything or anyone in the caves, or any nearby caves, or a fair portion of the beach outside, hadn't realized Mar is there -- well, he's just removed all doubt. His voice, trained to lift over pitched battle and carry across distance and war alike to reach his allies, rings off the cave walls and sets up echoes that don't diminish for several long seconds, well after he's drawn his sword and waded into the fray.]

[If that isn't enough, the brilliant glow of the Light as it clings to his sweeping sword or bursts out of midair with his invocations of spells and retribution on his foes offers a second clue. Though he only faces off against glowgrubs, the paladin holds nothing back as he lays about him with spell and sword, showing these insects no more quarter than he would foe ten times his size and eighty his mass.]

[And if all THAT didn't clue someone in:] THE SIN'DOREI WILL PREVAIL!

[...But for every grub he knocks down, he disturbs at least one more, and they're slowly beginning to surround him. He has armor, but can he really keep relying on that?]

[Thereth does not stand up on the boat, instead holding her hands out cautiously in case Mar falls. She's smiling, but there's something a little uncharacteristically strained about it. She....doesn't really like boats much. She's a creature of the earth, and while she swims just fine, her fur gets all wet and heavy and it's really just not a lot of fun. Though she supposes she could probably just freeze the water and walk to land.]

I agree, dear. I'm sure it won't take us long to row back to shore. [pause.] Unless you have something to summon a dragon in your pockets.

[Is that...uh...a dragon in your pocket or are you just happy to see her???? ]

[Mar looks at her over his shoulder, flashing her one wicked grin.]

There are so many jokes about pants and riding and mounts and dangerous things I might have for you, I don't know where to begin. But I hear that exposure is a problem out here on the sea for those of us who don't possess a silky coat of fur, so maybe we should save that for shore.

[She smothers a laugh with one hand - not that she wasn't expecting a flirty comment from him, but hey, it's fun all the same - and carefully reaches for an oar.]

Ooh, I don't believe I've ever been called silky before. [Experimentally, she drags the oar through the water, but the raft doesn't go forward much.] Don't rafts usually have sails?

Don't rafts usually not just appear beneath you in a strange new world? [Mar shrugs, lowering himself back down with more grace than one would expect from him to grab an oar.] But between the two of us, we should make do.

Hmm. [That is a good point! She does think about it for a moment, but comes up with nothing.]

Alright, then, dear. I'll follow your lead. [Because, yeah - one wouldn't expect Mar to be quite so graceful, or...sensible? but Thereth has known him long enough to know that he's more talented than he looks. She wonders if blood elves are good with boats. They do live right near the sea.]

Oh really? Just how far will you follow my lead? Because there's a couple of places I've been trying to take you to for a while now...

[He arches his eyebrows even as he plunges his oar into the water. Luckily, for all his talk, he's willing to actually act in an effective way.]

[Thereth laughs again, keeping an eye on his movements in order to copy them. He's completely shameless, but she finds it charming. (Yes, it is her. She is the Enabler.)

It only takes a couple of tries to get into a rhythm, and soon enough they're slowly but steadily sailing towards the little island in the distance.]

It looks very nice...and very empty... [Although he probably has better eyesight than her, while she squints off into the horizon.]

Oh sure, it looks empty from here. But then we reach it, and there are giant monsters and xenophobic civilizations and I don't know how many versions of insectoid descendants of the aqir under its soils. [Adventuring has made Mar somewhat cynical, albeit in a cheerful fashion.]

[Isabella winced a bit as Mar stood up, but settled down once she realized that he wasn't going to capsize the raft. She might be able to swim well enough to get back on, but that armor he was wearing looked heavy and hard to remove when oen was sinking to the bottom of the sea.]

[She had quickly accepted she was apparently floating in somewhere that looked most like the islands of the Broken Sea, half a word away from her home in Scirland, and with someone who most resembled a faerie lord out of a Uaine folktale. It was a vivid dream, that was all.]

[She sighted the distant shore.]

If that is an island, there will be fewer predators on the shore. A sea serpent or a large shark would make quick work of the raft.

{Sea serpents weren't normally prone to attacking human boats, even small ones, for food, but if this was the Broken Sea, then sea serpents laid their eggs in coves, and might see their raft as a threat.]

Depends on the island. We could also be facing tigers, dinosaurs, demons, silithids, or -- ugh, gnomes. [Mar doesn't actually dislike gnomes, but they are fun to make fun of.] But I've never been fond of fighting underwater, even back when we had to do it for far too many political reasons.

[He lowers himself back down, moving surprisingly fluidly in all that armor. It isn't exactly made of ordinary boring steel, but he still wears it like a second skin.]

How would those things even arrive on an island in the first place? Small islands far from the mainland tend to be populated by only those creatures which can fly, or swim, or can be carried by ships.

[Isabella wasn't going to argue about how demons weren't real -- certainly plenty of people believed in them, and arguing the point tended to go poorly -- dinosaurs were extinct, and as far as she knew, gnomes were not-real forest spirits. She was dreaming about a boat with someone who probably wasn't real either.]

[She paused, before picking up her oar.]

What is a silithid?

[Because, dream or not, she still wanted to know things.]

Maybe on your world, but on my world, that sort of thing would happen all the times. [The idea that she comes from a different world is pretty easy to reach, considering this wasn't home.] Of course, Azeroth has had so many hands and assorted appendages meddling in its fundamental existence since ages past that nothing at all about it should surprise anyone, but I'm not taking bets this is a normal world with normal behaviors.

[Is it a dream? Quite possibly, but then again, Mar has dealt directly with dream creatures and the Emerald Dream is a very real place, so -- take it as it comes.]

[Scooping up his oar, he sets it to the water with a little grunt of exertion.] The short answer is that silithids are insect creatures. Want the long one?

I am a naturalist, though insects are not my area of greatest interest, so yes.

[Isabella had judged that she'd have a weaker oar stroke than Maridian, so was trying to alternate sides every few strokes. While she had had little chance to row herself -- as most sailors didn't consider it appropriate for a woman, and often she was in a boat for her research, rather than simply to get somewhere -- a son who was fascinated by all things nautical meant she had learned quite a bit.]

Edited 2017-08-18 23:36 (UTC)

So I'm going to start somewhere in the middle, because all history is intertwined. [Never mind the arms and the armor -- history and culture are Maridian's secret true loves, and the elf becomes noticeably more animated as he settles into info-dump mode.] Silithid originally come from the Well of Eternity, because why shouldn't it create yet another races of weirdness? They might have been pretty normal except -- well, locked within Azeroth for various reasons are the Old Gods, one of whom is the great C'Thun who created a servitor race known as the Qiraji out of half of the inset-people known as the aqir.

At least, that's one theory. When you get that long ago and deal with races who have no inclination to share their history even they know it themselves, cause and effect get blurred. But the upshot is that to this very day, the silithid are aggressive conquerors who constantly try to spread their hives out across Kalimdor.

Ah, I can tell I am missing most of that cultural context. So, they are intelligent insects, and it is believed that they came from this Well of Eternity, but were changed by a god into what they are today?

[I mean, it's no weirder than the creation stories Isabella has heard in her travels, but she is used to the climate of believing such things were mostly made up by one's ancestors to explain a world before science was codified. Isabella is not quite an atheist, but definitely on the deist side of thigns.]

[Still, it wasn't like it made a difference at the moment, until they ran into a set and Isabella could make observations of her own. Which didn't sound appealing or safe, as curious as large insects were. Speaking of...]

What exactly do you mean by 'large'?

I know how to summon one large enough to ride. That's... about average? [It's hard to tell where silithid end and qiraji begin sometimes, but...] I've personally seen ones larger than your average house.

['Seen' in this case should be read as 'killed', of course.]

[Isabella regarded him skeptically]

This is a dream, or I'd assume you were exaggerating. I'd imagine an insect that large would collapse under its own weight, let alone a rider.

It does make a striking image. And i would believe it when I see one. If they are domesticated, at least some must be safer to approach.

[And it was possible it simply looked like an insect, but had an alternate biology. Goodness knows, taxonomy could be difficult. When Isabella was a girl, sparklings were considered insects, rather than a diminutive cousin of dragons. People were still arguing about that, actually.]

I'll have to see if I can still summon it here. Not the sort of thing I'm prepared to do on a raft, though. I'm not crazy.

[Mar pauses a moment, considering that statement.]

Well, I am crazy. But not suicidal.

[...]

Okay, the point is that I'm not going to dump you into the water for the sake of a demonstration. Let's settle on that, okay?

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deranged_practicality - 2017-08-24 12:56 (UTC) - Expand

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seesbosscrotch - 2017-08-25 02:57 (UTC) - Expand

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[ This is, uh... a lot.

Mysterious islands, that's bad. Glowing worms, that's really bad. But what in the world is any of what he's seeing right now? Yuuri rubs his eyes beneath his glasses, squeezes them shut until he sees stars and then opens them again. Nope—he's still watching a man in full armor brandishing a sword and putting on what looks like a light show.

Yuuri's just a figure skater, man. This isn't the sort of stuff one sees on a daily basis. ]

...Hey! [ There's only so long he can watch before finding himself blurting out a warning. (Hopefully not one that gets the attention of the glowgrubs, too. Hopefully—he really should have thought about this—do worms even have ears—??) ] Shouldn't you get out of there? They're still coming!

[Whereas Maridian is an (ex-)adventurer of Azeroth. This sort of thing is actually pretty tame compared to the days he'd experienced at the height of his prowess, and that height had run on for a few years.]

While that's certainly true -- [A burst of Light erupts from his hands, blasting one of the grubs into ash.] -- I haven't seen another entrance to these caves. So if we want to explore them...

[ Right. Well. There's a very large chance he hit his head on the ice, except if he has, this is all a stunningly realistic hallucination. ]

Who said anything about exploring!? Who knows what else could be even further inside?

[ It takes Yuuri a second to realize that maybe Maridian means looking for another exit; but also maybe he doesn't, and they still have the same need to weather the storm until it passes. Yuuri doesn't know. All of this is ridiculous. None of this seems believable.

In the midst of trying to process all of this, another mass of glowgrubs drop from the ceiling and begin squirming full speed at Maridian. A few seem to take note of Yuuri, too, turning and wiggling in his direction, but what he does next is pure instinct: which is to grab the nearest rock by his feet and to hurl it, as hard as he can, at the worms surrounding the paladin.

Now he definitely has their attention. ]

...Um.

[Aggro control! Aggro control!]

Oh, I hate escort quests... Get in the light!

[What light? Well, as Maridian shouts that, he takes a hand off his sword, then makes a tossing motion. From the energies within him, a massive golden hammer coalesces to crash into the ground thunderously near Yuuri, lightning crackling about its haft as radiant warmth pours out from it. It won't protect him, but it will at least heal his wounds and harm their foes.]

[ Yuuri has played enough video games to know he's just been relegated to NPC status. He'll have to find time to protest it later, though, because now is really not the time to get into it. Thankfully he has good reflexes (thanks, sports) that kick into gear and have him jumping into the light pouring from the hammer as he's been ordered. Never mind the fact that he's gaping at it. Never mind that he's somewhere caught between shock and disbelief and exasperation all at once. ]

This is some kind of... virtual game I didn't sign up for...

[ Yuuri puts out a hand as though he's about to lean on the hammer, then jumps back as though he's been burned. ]

Right... hammers... worms...

[ He snatches up another rock and sets his jaw. ]

I didn't even pay for a subscription! They're not ending! Hey! [ It's a last hope. ] Can you teleport to your home city?

No, my hearthstone isn't working. [Yes, he just straight out answers that ridiculous question completely seriously, because to Maridian, it's a completely legitimate question that ordinary he would be able to answer affirmatively. Today is just one of those days, though.]

[He swings his sword in an arc that impacts nothing, but sends a blaze of holy light ripping around his body to cut through and sear the grubs surrounding him. At the same time, four golden wings erupt from his back through his armor as he calls on the full strength of the Light.] Die, worms! I've fought bigger than you by far!

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TEST DRIVE MEME ( 002 )

Maridian | World of Warcraft (OC)

i got a nautical theme pashmina afghan

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On a Boat

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spelunked

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