aftr_ooc | TEST DRIVE MEME ( 011 )

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*test drive meme

TEST DRIVE MEME ( 011 )

Test Drive Meme #11

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 May 17th, and Applications on May 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.

Damn It, Todd
The island breeze is cool and pleasant, temperature-wise. The sun is beaming cheerfully overhead, and the waves lapping up against the beach are a crystalline aquamarine. The place may as well be a postcard, with how picturesque it is: from the thick copses of palm trees to the soft white sand, it's a truly gorgeous, becoming setting.

It makes up for the chaos of its inhabitants.

Mu has adopted what promises to be a highly frustrating backdrop for its dreamers, this fine evening. The island looks normal enough, seems normal enough, but for whatever reason, the physics and general behavior seems oddly...glitched.

We don't just mean in the general sense, either. At random intervals, you may find yourself being launched several feet in the air by an invisible abuse of physics, or clipping through trees at breakneck speeds. Maybe you're walking around several feet above the ground, or your hands are much larger than the rest of you. Regardless, the possibilities are virtually endless and promise to be, for the most part, quite harmless for those afflicted - just very annoying. Whether you're swimming in the air, repeating the same lines of dialogue over and over again, or stuck halfway through the ground, it's not clear how one is meant to undo these glitches once they set in.

You could always try helping each other! Though that may simply make things worse; who can say if these glitches might bleed into one another and complicate things even further?

(Oh, and they do. They absolutely do.)

This is Dragonna Suck
When you wake in a lovely, tranquil woodland, it perhaps seems too good to be true. The trees are dense with canopies flowering overhead, and the grass has formed a thick, plush carpet on the forest floor. There's the sound of birds chattering happily in the branches, and the rustle of forest creatures in the undergrowth. That's around the time that a loud, angry roar splits the silence, and something very large and very green barrels into the clearing you occupy with large, barklike claws.

This, dear adventurers, is a rootwyrm. While undeniably draconian in appearance, the effect is offset by the fact that the rootwyrm's skin is more akin to the texture of bark than it is scales. One can generally discern the age of these creatures by counting the number of rather stubby legs that support its ample middle - the youngest will only have two, while the oldest will have as many as twelve.

Rootwyrms move slowly, thanks to the turtle-like shell that sits astride their back in lieu of wings, but they make up for this by hitting quite hard in a fight. Instead of breathing fire, rootwyrms spit a caustic, stinging acid if they can't get close enough to their prey, though they'll be more than happy to try and dispatch you the old-fashioned way: with an extremely large set of reptilian jaws.

Did we mention they don't like trespassers? And that you're standing square in the middle of their territory?

You're Pollen My Leg!
The open spread of the grasslands allows for a clear view of the cloud-scudded sky. This particular setting is that of a meadow, vast and seemingly infinite, hosting a sweeping expanse of rolling hills. The wind's rippling over the fields of rich green and buff-colored grass lends itself to the impression that the hills are in constant motion, as if you're standing in the middle of a verdant ocean.

Naturally, such is not the case. As you roam the landscape, you'll probably notice the dollops of color sprinkled here and there: flowers growing in bright clumps amidst the tufts of grass.

They're not ordinary flowers. Why would they be? They're in full bloom, meaning that thick spores of pollen have begun to waft freely into the air. Careful not to draw too close, because this pollen, when inhaled, ingested, or otherwise interacted with in any nonspecific capacity, will have a variety of...side effects, depending on which particular plant's spores you've just unwittingly imbibed.

There are five variants you may encounter in your dream-travels, each of which will have a different result, depending on the color.

[ ♆ ] Blue flowers will induce short-term amnesia and general confusion. Forgetting your sense of identity, difficulty discerning the difference between right and left, and an intense sensation of vertigo are all common side effects.

[ ♆ ] Red flowers will make you intensely and inconsolably angry at just about everything. You know that guy who chewed gum behind your ear that one time? Fuck that guy! That person over there, with the yellow shirt? Fuck their shirt! Yellow is a stupid color, and you're stupid for wearing it!

[ ♆ ] Green flowers will induce a loss of one important sense - sight, smell, taste, touch, or hearing - though loss of powers is also known to have occurred.

[ ♆ ] Purple flowers will induce silence. We hope you aren't very talkative by nature, or that you can communicate exclusively via rude hand gestures, because now you can't speak at all.

[ ♆ ] Orange flowers will fill you an indescribable terror regarding just about everything. The slightest motion, the most innocent hello, the most harmless small animal - all will tap directly into every primal fight-or-flight response to danger you have.

These status effects can and will stack, by the by. Maybe start up a little game of pollen bingo, and see how many fanfiction tropes you can rack up in one day.

LOGS ● OOC ● STORIES ● MAIN NAVIGATION

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His hand on his shoulder helps, at least tells her where he is. That he's still there. She turns her face towards him, still trying in vain to see him, as if she blinks enough or squints just right it'll all come back, and shakes her head.

"All at once. I thought there was something wrong with my helmet." She's surprised to hear her voice come out as steady as his had. Trying to match him, maybe. Not to let him down. She pauses, and - she knows it's stupid, but she can't help asking anyway. "...Can you still see?"

That would've been his first thought. Equipment malfunction. It happens with experimental tech. That was one of the first things the rookies would always hear, going in: That's Carolina. She's the who's gonna be saving your ass, unless your equipment explodes.

That was...him. He was one of those rookies.

"Yeah. Yeah, I can." Try not to sound like you're having trouble forcing the words out, Wash, because seeing her isn't a luxury you'd expected to ever be allowed again in your life. "Still got a bitch of a headache. Still...not really sure which person I am, but I can still see. And you..."

Swallow down whatever comes next. And you saw what was coming miles before anyone did, and we never listened. We should've stopped and thought for a second. Should've woken the fuck up, like you said. Tex never let go of your dog-tags.

What comes out is:

"Can I...is your armor still tapped into your biocomms?"

A part of her is fighting to stay calm, not to just start screaming because this is stupid and it isn't fair and she's scared. Going suddenly blind is frightening enough, but what scares her more is what it suggests. People don't suddenly lose their vision out of nowhere. Not if they're real people.

Maybe if they're digital, though, their real bodies frozen and locked away and their consciousness uploaded into VR, all controlled by someone else. The network is gone, everyone behind Airlocked in prison where they belong. She knows that. They'd all come back, woken up in their real bodies in the real world...

But now she's here. Not in Kirkwall, with Varric, where she'd been, but here, wherever this is, with Wash of all people. And he's hearing voices and she's going blind. She fights back the sinking suspicion, the terror threatening to overwhelm her, forcing herself to focus on Wash's words.

"I...yeah. It should be." She nods. Maybe he's right, maybe there's a different explanation. "Go ahead."

He remembers this, remembers how to run equipment. The variations and variegations in who he is compared to who he isn't, and he's lucky that they all boil down to a singular fixed, familiar point. They all ran under the same colors, once, until they fractured the same way most things do.

Biometrics feed back a spiked heartrate, which isn't surprising.

"I'm not seeing anything...nothing that would suggest an injury, or anything like that." Either he or someone else in his skull got real good at reading these things in the adrenaline of combat, picking apart which injuries are critical and how badly gut-fucked you're about to be if you can't get someone to drag you to medical, fast. "Does it...hurt?"

"No."

There's that, at least. It doesn't hurt. She's not really surprised he hadn't found anything; she hadn't felt anything. Nothing had happened, her vision had just...disappeared. She looks around, helplessly, in the dark. "Wash...do you remember...coming here? You said you were...somewhere called Chorus. Did you leave there? Did you come here, do you remember?"

"I don't remember anything right now." That's a lie, really; he remembers too much, arsenic coursing in his skull, and his main issue is in separating every diverging pathway from the one that preceded it and constructing a narrative that makes sense and complies with what he knows of Agent Washington. "I mean, I remember...I don't know which ones are mine. For someone - for one of them, there was Chorus, and then...waking up here."

What does that mean for her? Did she wake up here too, after getting - what is it the report said? Something about Agent Texas using a titanium-grade axe, and the armor being a total loss.

The agent, of course, wasn't the priority.

"What about you?"

It's too, too familiar. It's the same story, the same thing that had happened to her and to everyone else on the show. I was somewhere else, and I woke up here. I remember dying, and then I woke up here. Where is everyone? Where am I? Who are you?

She shakes her head, eyes shifting away automatically, even if she can't really make eye contact, so she can't avoid it, either.

"I don't remember, either. How I came here. I was...I just appeared, and then I saw you, and..."

And nothing else had mattered, when she'd found Wash screaming, all but tearing himself apart in anguish. She takes in a deep breath.

"I don't know where we are, exactly, but I know it isn't good. We have to try...We have to try to get out of here. Please. Before...before anything worse happens."

It cuts a fucking knife-ache in his chest, it really does. She was the one steadying him, and the roles have abruptly flipped before he can even wholly get his bearings. She keeps saying Wash, and that's his anchor. You're Agent Washington. Not the man who moved him around like a chess piece on a board, or the wirework of ones and zeroes that slit into his neural implants and set him ablaze, or the thing that it was sheared from.

"Look, right now...the worst that's happened is you've lost your sight, and I've lost my - " And I've lost my shit. " - memory."

There's a joke there about how many times has that happened, right? but he bites it down before it can worm its way out. Not a good time for it. Whether that instinct belongs to him or someone with slightly more advanced talents in interacting with people without making everything worse, he can't say. "It might not be permanent. It could be the atmo, or..."

Fuck. With Connecticut out of commission, he's the only one who do any spotting.

"All I see is just...grass. For miles. And flowers too, I guess, but there's nothing - no door or anything that might show how we got here."

Lost his memory. That's how it starts, isn't it? She laughs, half-hysterical, and reaches for him, instinctively, because he'd taken his hand off her shoulder to check her biometrics and now she can hear him but she can't see him, she can't feel him, and they could take him away right now and she wouldn't even know.

"Wash, listen to me." She steps closer. She hopes. "Something like this happened to me before. That's why...that's why I'm here, that's why I'm alive, because they brought me back, somehow. They..." She bites her lip, thinking. "They kidnapped people. From all over, from across time, even, and they stuck us together and took our memories and...and made us kill each other." She takes a breath, wishing she could see his face. See how he's reacting to this. "They made us murder innocent people just for a chance at escape."

Who the hell is they, he wants to ask, but there's every chance that it won't matter - that Connecticut herself might not even know. Her hand floats out, groping for someone that's no longer tethering her. Because it feels...almost normal, he drops his hand back to her shoulder.

"We don't know for sure if that's what's going on right now. Right now, it's just us. I don't see anyone else." He tries to follow that up - tries to say her name, like that might assure her that he's starting to become relatively compos mentis, but she'd introduced herself as Connie and a memory of her snapping that it makes her sound like a fucking kid stops him dead. C.T.?

Was that his memory?

"Do you know who...they were?"

There he is. And the longer he talks, the more he sounds like Wash, and the less he sounds like...everyone else. She tilts her face up towards him, just letting herself listen to his voice for a moment. Pretend like everything is normal, like everything's gonna be okay. It's been such a long time.

Right now, it's just us. Yeah. She's been trying to not think about that. To not think about the fact that she'd somehow been brought here, wherever here is, from Kirkwall, and Varric's not at her side. She swallows past the sudden lump in her throat, the sudden stab of loneliness and uncertainty, and nods.

"It was...a television network. They were broadcasting us, for entertainment, and..." She turns her head, not because she can look around at the moment but more as if she's listening, as if expecting someone to be there, watching them. "We stopped them. Exposed them. They should all be in prison now. But...I don't know."

Not Chorus, then, and sure as hell not something that sounds familiar. Broadcasting murder for entertainment is a far cry from a civil war on a backwater planet. People with the power to bring back the dead as something more than an encryption in a handful of dog-tags?

“Didn’t look anything like this, did it?” She’s blind right now, moron. Immediately, he backpedals with a wince that’s as pointless as the apology. “I mean - sorry, I meant more like...this place looks like a meadow, and I don’t see anything that looks like your typical kind of surveillance.”

Even the sim trooper outposts had reasonable places to survey from a distance, purely by design. And this kind of hilly grassland is he opposite of ideal.

She doesn't take offense - she knows what the field looks like - but she does smirk a little, not quite laughing at him. It's the kind of thoughtless slip-up she's used to from Wash, the old Wash she knew. Him, I mean it, I mean her, I mean - She shakes her head, and tries to explain.

"No. It was - we were on a ship, and then there was a station. But...there was a VR component, too. They could make it look like we were anywhere. A mall. A city." She takes a breath. "I don't even know if we're really here right now."

Okay, that's a little trickier. Maybe if he weren't such a wreck if he could think clearer if he wasn't being hung up on useless fucking tangents he could keep everything under wraps keep the crazy under wraps and just don't fucking lose it, Epsilon, don't

Focus.

Focus.

Focus.

"Okay," he says slowly, trying to steady the tremor threatening to overtake his tone. A flash of something he's trying not to be. She keeps calling him Wash. Remember that. Remember the dimple of a tiny hint of a smile on one side of her face. Remember the sound of her panic, paralleled with the way she calms when there's something physical here to anchor her. "Okay, so we...confirm what's real. Were you asleep? How was it...simulated, do you know?"

Asleep? We were dead. But he doesn't need to hear that, and besides, it hadn't been true. They'd been uploaded long before anyone had been killed; none of it had been real, in the end.

She can't see his face, can't pick up on any body language giving away just how hard he's still fighting to keep it together. But she does notice how long it takes him to respond, each second of silence seeming to stretch interminably without any way for her to tell what's taking so long. If he's going to answer at all.

But he does, and she makes herself just concentrate on the words instead of what's wrong with Wash and where are we and where's Varric and am I ever going to see again.

"We were...frozen. Cryostorage. Our consciousnesses were uploaded into...Something. I don't know." She shakes her head. "I wasn't...I wasn't one of the ones who got us all out." She bows her head, in shame. She'd tried, of course, but she'd been dead by then, dead a second time, and there wasn't much she could do.

"Clearly you did get out, so I wouldn't call that 'nothing'," he says, maybe more lighthearted than the situation strictly deserves, particularly considering that their opponents can, apparently, rewrite reality to suit whatever they want people to see, because this isn't reality.

No one thinks like that. You're just overreacting. You've always been hard on yourself, Connie.

There's that name again. He knew her. Or someone in his head did, one of the voices that manages to shrink back when the others scream twice as loud. Connie.

"What about tells? Glitches in the matrix, stuff like that?"

She just frowns in response to that, but without quite the same suggestion of self-blame and bitterness there had once been. No, she'd had to be saved in the end, instead of saving anyone else, but she'd tried. She'd done her best. And Church and the other had saved them, and it had all worked out.

And now, maybe, she's back again. She shakes her head.

"The whole simulation was failing, near the end. There were too many of us, too much of a drain on system resources. Before that, though..." She wrinkles her brow in thought, and starts to pace back and forth - small, tentative steps, because though she knows they're in an empty field it's still a little terrifying stepping where she can't see. She's got to move, though, even if only a little. "I don't...I don't think so. It looked real. It felt real. It...it still hurt, when..."

When her own knife had been plunged into her chest, and she'd bled out a second time.

When...

She doesn't finish. That doesn't imply anything good, but what's he supposed to say? She can't see, and he can barely remember who he's supposed to be. A right pair they make to sort this shit out.

"Okay. Okay, so we...figure out if that's what's happening, and we break out the way everyone else did last time. Easy." That sounds a bit too optimistic. Easy doesn't really correlate with a virtual reality where people's deaths are broadcasted for someone else's entertainment. "How'd you all manage that?"

She looks doubtful, and with good reason. It hadn't been easy. That was the whole point. It had been hard, and it had taken months, and right up until the end she'd been terrified that it wouldn't work at all.

"We had help from the outside, for one thing," she says sourly, and then stops pacing, voice rising again as she throws her hands in the air. "And we aren't going to do anything. How can I help figure out what's happening if I can't even see?"

"Woah, woah, we can...we can figure this out, okay?" He hasn't even finished saying it before he recognizes the words for the hopeless, formless, baseless shit they are. He's just riding an instinct to help without any legitimate plan to back it up. It's beyond useless; it's insulting.

She can't see, and he's lost a good chunk of...whoever he's supposed to be. That doesn't add up. There's no impetus that makes the slightest bit of sense for their afflictions to be the way they are, and there's nothing here save for a bunch of multicolored flowers -

A bunch of multicolored flowers.

He's not a scientist (one of him is a doctor, but it's hard to say which), but discerning whether a planet's atmo is breathable is a pretty basic function for anyone's equipment. Breathable, sure. But not without its irregularities.

Flowers. Some chemical anomaly in the atmosphere, so faint as to be almost undetectable. An echo murmurs something about residual heat signatures and follows it up with a flat, in the desert, dry enough to desiccate oceans. But that would be - way too simple, right? Way too simple. Dumb, even. No. Yes? No.

"Oh my god," he mutters, torn between incredulity and ball-splitting frustration. "It's - the flowers. Connie, I think it's the fucking flowers."

It's meaningless crap, and they both know it. CT makes a noise of contempt and throws herself down to sit hunched over on the grass, because it's not as if they're going anywhere. Fuck this, seriously.

"What's the flowers?" she mutters caustically, hardly caring about the answer, because he's not making any sense. And then - shit. Wash had been past the edge of sanity when she'd found him, screaming and babbling and using voices that weren't his own, and now he's not making any sense. She glances in his direction, unseeing eyes wide and worried, and starts to scramble to her feet. "Wash...?"

"I think they're what's...messing with us." Oh sure, he loses his memory, loses his sense of self, but when hasn't he? When hasn't he been someone else's memories shelled in gray, straining to make sense of the foreign thoughts co-opting too many parts of his brain? That's normal for him. What isn't normal is abruptly losing your sight when you don't even have a history of that sort of thing.

"There was this patch of blue ones, and suddenly I...don't remember who I am. And then we walk over here, and - " Yep, he's got sights on them. Bright green. "Most pollen isn't a contaminant unless it's toxic. Filtration systems wouldn't catch that. I mean, it doesn't make much sense, but what about any of this makes sense?"

"You think the flowers blinded me." And nearly drove him out of his mind, they can't forget that now. Her voice is flat with skepticism and hopelessness, but her brow is furrowed in thought. She remembers the flowers all around Wash when she'd found him, so bright blue it almost hurt to look at them. And then -

"...Green flowers." She looks around, as if pinpointing the (possible) cause of her blindness will cure it, then shakes her head. "But I know who I am. And you can still see." For now. She swallows. "Why wouldn't they affect us the same way?"

"I dunno, maybe they're color-coded?" There's a joke somewhere around here about reds and blues, but he can't recover enough context to arrange it in a way that makes sense. "Weirder things have happened." Presumably. "Maybe I'm reaching, but if I'm wrong, then I dunno what else it could be, 'cause there's literally nothing else out here besides just grass and some really bright flowers."

The longer he talks, the more...maybe the word confident doesn't really apply, but it feels more familiar, an instinct for stacking words into the silence. Did he know people like this, who were just generally laconic and needed someone to fill their ears with noise in the absence of anything else?

Something about that feels right.

"Either way, I don't think we're in trouble yet. Not...critically, anyway. This could be temporary, or just some kind of simulation experiment, or...anything."

CT rubs her forehead, squeezing her eyes shut. She's been unconsciously straining them, trying to see even though she knows it's pointless, and it's starting to give her a headache.

"Okay..." She's still not sure she buys it, but honestly, it's the best theory they've got right now. And the only one that doesn't involve some unknown, untouchable power controlling everything about what they're experiencing through some VR interface for their own malicious purposes.

Wash sounds like he believes it, anyway. His eager rambling is almost familiar (though not from any interaction she'd ever had with Wash) and so optimistic that she can't help but start to feel a little hopeful too. "So...what do we do about it?"

It's not as though they can kill all the flowers.

TEST DRIVE MEME ( 011 )

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