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

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Is that what he's turning into? Someone who reconstructs the dead, chasing dark blots of shadow in the hopes of conjuring up some memory that turns out to ease the pressure clamped down around the fringes of himself? Who's it gonna be next? Maine? North? Does he even want to know?

The helmets make it easy. You can be as impersonal as you want, through a visor. Maybe that's part of the appeal.

"Yeah," he repeats, slowly, then louder, "yeah? Yeah?" Splintering in disbelief, in shock, on the precipice of something he doesn't want to look at. "Whose memory is this, who am I - ?"

"It's not a memory!" She says it louder than she means to, in her panic, gripping his hand tight enough to hurt in an effort to hold on to him, not to lose him to madness and disbelief. Shit. Shit, she should've known how he'd react, she should've been more careful - "I know it doesn't make any sense. I know, okay? But I swear, I swear this is real. I - I don't know where we are, or how we got here, but...I'm alive. They brought me back. I'm here, I'm real. And you - you're Wash. You're Wash."

"Who? Who's they, how are you - how are you here right now?" You're Wash, she says, like he doesn't know that - doesn't he know that? Doesn't he? My name is, uh...it's, uh...

It's shelled in mnemonic ghost-white, a holo-avatar in SPARTAN gear, screaming when he rips away the piece of himself that can analyze what's happening, that can deconstruct and understand with perfect fucking clarity what's being done to him, and kicking it away, to god knows where.

I'm not crazy, okay?

That was the joke. That was always the fucking joke, because he must be, because there's no other explanation for whatever's happening right now.

"You wouldn't believe me if I told you," she mutters, because it's true. He's barely hanging on to reality right now as it is - she doesn't want to think about what it might do to him if she tried to explain Airlocked, and the network, and everything they'd done to her. She glances around, at the blue pollen wafting through the air, and shakes her head - not because she suspects anything from the flowers, but just because...well, there's gotta be someplace better for them to do this than the middle of a fucking field. And Wash seems stable enough to move now, at least.

"Come on, let's get out of here." And hopefully not find anything worse as they explore.

The part of him that's still lost in the flare-and-spiral of Alpha's memories can allow for it - for someone who can give him an order and make it sound like the most sensible thing in the world - with a minimum of struggling. She says they should get out of here, and there are, actually, too many parts of him that agree with that.

The part that still remembers what it is to be under Freelancer's thumb complies readily. Meaning he should probably stand.

His throat feels raw and scratched, like the vocal cords are bleeding, and this isn't the loudest you've ever screamed in your life, Agent Washington. He knows it's not. He knows it's not.

So he plants his free palm against the grass and starts to lever himself to his feet.

"Is there even...anywhere for us to go?"

"We won't find out by sitting here."

In other words, she has no idea. Maybe there's not. Maybe they'll wander and find nothing and no one, maybe this is another trap from the Network, risen from the ashes somehow, maybe she's the one who's crazy and Wash isn't really here at all.

But if she'd learned anything from Airlocked, it's that you have to keep trying. Keep trying to escape, keep trying to communicate, keep trying to save each other, even if it seems hopeless. Sometimes, if you don't give up, everything works out.

Eventually.

She hauls herself up and then reaches out a hand to help Wash up, or just to steady him if he needs it. She has no idea how long he's been here, how long he's...been like this, and she looks at him anxiously, trying to evaluate him through his armor.

"Can you walk?"

Thus far, he's yet to draw the connection between the flowers and him losing his goddamn mind, largely because he's fairly positive that he's already predisposed to lose his own mind, and that sort of thing is fairly regular when your neural topography has been so fucked over by AIs entering and exiting with extreme prejudice and a civilian COC that was more preoccupied with running its agents into the ground and shifting them around like chess pieces than it was with giving them what they actually needed.

"Yes," he says, automatically, because survivability is an instinct, and that's the same instinct that has him powering through the fog slammed down over his brain and straightening despite the surge of vertigo to his gut. He could take a bullet to the chest cavity and still drag himself toward a terminal, coughing hard enough to jog the fluid in his lungs.

That was him, wasn't it?

There's a hand available to him. He takes it. It's not sheathed in turquoise, but it's still familiar in too many ways for him to dissect right now.

"I keep thinking I've done the psychotic break already. I guess there's not a hard limit on those."

That...that feels more right. That kind of low, sardonic muttering, spoken as an afterthought ground out between gritted teeth. That sounds like him; more like who he's supposed to be.

CT looks doubtful at his assertion, but doesn't question it. Doing anything other than sitting around trying not to fall apart kind of necessitates Wash being able to move under his own power, after all.

And at least moving is something, gives them both something to focus on other than lost memories and the impossibility of this entire situation. Or where exactly they are, for that matter. Or what's going to happen next...

Maybe walking isn't so distracting after all. She shakes her head to clear it, glancing up and over in Wash's direction.

"I guess not." It's not much of a response, but what else can she say? She frowns, squinting idly at the field before them. They're starting to leave the bright blue flowers behind, and up ahead there's just grass, or is that...green flowers? Weird.

"Do you remember what you were doing, or where you were, before...this?" The field. The psychotic break. All of it.

Untangling the pieces of him lost in the circuits of someone else's recollection isn't what he'd call an easy task. Living longer just increases the amount of shit you have to card through until you land where you want. Do you remember what you were doing? He remembers what a lot of people were doing. He remembers watching a streak of blue-white charge the Meta, full-tilt, the golden EVA shuddering beneath the weight of too many AI screaming into its head. He remembers trying to rip himself from a screaming Freelancer's head, a backbreaking shockwave of I hate goodbyes turning blood to ash. He remembers a list of names: who died, how, and just how much of this is your fault, that stopped being lies somewhere down the line, because there was no one left to lie about.

Think. Fucking think, Washington.

"...Chorus," he says slowly, parsing. Either it's right, or he's just seized the wrong memory at random. "We were winning. We were almost out."

Does that mean anything to her? Would it mean anything if she were real? Is she real?

She felt real when she offered him her hand. When she gripped it tight enough to ache through the kevlar.

Edited 2018-05-15 14:09 (UTC)

"Chorus?" It's not familiar - but then, of course, that makes sense. KIA, he'd said, she'd died and he hadn't. Freelancer had come down at last and Wash had moved on to other things.

She shakes her head, breathing in deep as she tries to figure out where to go from here. Keeping him talking seems to help - and it helps her too - but figuring out what to say that won't trigger something and make things worse is a challenge in itself. She stops suddenly as everything goes dark, reaching up to her helmet.

"Hang on - something's wrong - " CT fiddles with the display for a moment, frowning, then makes a noise of frustration and just tugs the whole thing off.

And then stops, because everything is still dark, even with her helmet off and her eyes wide open.

"...Wash?" She rubs at her eyes, frantically, and then turns to where she'd last seen him, fear in her voice despite her efforts to fight down rising panic. "Wash, I can't - I can't see."

He shouldn't let it get to him the way it does - she said, she said he's Agent Washington, and she keeps calling him that with an offhand sort of familiarity that feels right, so he's not Church and she's not Allison, he's not the sort of person that pours every ounce of himself into finding someone at the expense of all else (tell that to the Director) - but it still catches him off guard when the helmet seal hisses and it's not an unfocused memory fuzzy with static that looks back out at him. It's her against-regs haircut, the face that always seemed heart-shaped to him, not as sharp around the edges as South or Carolina.

It catches his breath twice over: the first time when he really, truly sees her again after years, after years, and the second time when he notes her expression: frantic, scared.

It's easy to ride on instinct. Work past it, Agent, snarls one variant. What the fuck am I supposed to do about it? snaps another.

The third moves forward and settles one hand against the plating of her shoulder. The third is already breaking down the situation into its composite parts. The third, right now, feels the most trustworthy because it feels the most sympathetic, and that might not the sort of person he is but it's the sort of person he thinks he would prefer to be, in this moment.

Wash, if he is Wash, can keep his tone steady in a crisis as he says, "all of a sudden, or was it slow?"

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?"

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