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

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.

The sound and sensation of someone else deferring to him, even briefly, is enough to conjure a hell of a lot of associations. He's not the leader, is he? That wouldn't make sense. He calls someone else Boss in the absence of any easy, conventional chain of command, he moves people up and down the board based on combat rankings, he doesn't interact with any agents in the field but he calls the shots and makes the calculations necessary to know where to send them and with what, he flounders to act like he knows whatever the hell he's talking about to a group of hapless sim troopers.

"Weeeee..." He stalls out like an idling engine, straining to rope something of what he remembers into a useable fucking skill or implementation or something. "We...try and find someplace isolated. Somewhere we can think without more shit going wrong."

It is his plan, after all. And though she's (mostly) gotten herself out from under the looming shadow of the board and her perpetual failure to measure up, CT's still a far cry from being a leader herself.

Besides, this is Wash. Without being able to see him, without that visual reminder of how much he's struggling to control the different personalities battling for dominance in his head, all she has is his voice in the dark. It's easy to just cling to it like a lifeline, to trust him to - at least - get them both out of this immediate crisis.

"Right." She nods, swallowing. "Is there...Can we get out of the field? Away from the pollen?" Maybe they'll be lucky, and the effects will wear off as soon as they get away.

"Uhhhhhhhh."

So here's the part where he does another sweep of their surroundings, and notes that, nope, it's pretty much all grass. Pretty much all just field as far as the eye can see. Rolling green-gold waves pocked with vibrant blooms that at least stand out enough to be avoided. Assuming that little batshit theory is correct.

There's not much reason to keep his helmet on; CT can breathe fine without it, and it's not filtering out whatever's making them lose their heads. He thumbs the seal with a faint pneumatic hiss.

She might not be able to see it, but let all parties be advised that Agent Washington has always and will continue to have helmet hair like a motherfucker.

He breathes in, long and deep. It takes a few lungfuls, but he picks up on something that's so quintessentially Earther that it makes something in his chest spool up. Nothing to do with the girl from Texas, because that was such an integral piece of her (the smell of eggs, the swarming of red-brown dust, hair that glinted under the full heat of the southern sun). Everything to do with an inner city west coast kid who can recognize the crisp littoral air cut with salt.

"I think we're near the ocean. It might not be a way out, but it's somewhere that isn't here."

She waits, fighting to keep patient as Wash thinks. He doesn't say anything for a while, and that's unnerving enough. Not that she thinks he'd just wander off, even if she can't see him, can't hear him, but...

She does hear the hiss of his helmet releasing, and that's interesting enogh that she raises her head, even if it doesn't do any good. Wash had always been keener than most to keep his helmet on, even on the ship. She'd heard he'd even tried to eat wearing it, once...

Finally, he speaks again, and her expression turns hopeful. The ocean isn't exactly an escape, not unless they happen to stumble across a fully stocked and unattended boat on their quest, but...at least flowers can't grow on the beach.

And it's something. Better than standing around doing nothing. CT nods, once and then more firmly, setting her jaw.

"Okay." She takes a breath. "Okay." She pauses for a second, and then reaches a hand out, expectantly.

He balances the thing across his hip like a striped bowling ball, the weight heavy and familiar even if its current resting place is anything but, and takes Connecticut's hand without much prompting. Kevlar on kevlar, two special agents shelled in tactical armor - one minus her sight, the other minus every ounce of stability that his memories once allowed.

He breathes out. Can't tell if the instinct to remove his helmet stemmed from his own impulses or ones borrowed from a civilian who was better at losing himself in eddies of memory than he was running a special ops research program. Doesn't take the time to examine it at length.

"I think...okay. Yeah." He can guide her there. It's awkward progress, but he recognizes ocean air - recognizes its scent. "It's this way. I, uh...I think."

Even through two layers of kevlar, as soon as he takes her hand she can feel what she hadn't been able to from his hand on the unyielding plate of her armor. He may be keeping it together on the surface, might not be clutching his hands to his head or speaking in someone else's voice, but Wash is far from okay. The knowledge makes fear and concern spike in her gut, and she squeezes his hand instinctively, doing her best to reassure him. She has to suppress the urge to lean heavily against his side, seeking comfort and giving it at once, as she would have with Max or Varric. This isn't either of them. This is Wash, and...well, it wouldn't do much good through the armor, anyway.

But she has to do something. She tilts her head up to him, trying to give him an encouraging smile. Difficult, when she can't tell if she's really looking in the right place, when she can't tell if he's looking at her at all.

"We'll find it." They have to. But more than that... "I trust you."

I trust you.

Even if she can't quite look him in the eye, her stare strange and unfocused, the words coil somewhere beneath his sternum, couched between the pressure of a demolition config helmet being shoved roughly into his hands, the cerulean glow of names lit up in sequence glinting off the brown streak of her hair. The pitch and cadence of her voice had been clipped and cold, simmering with resentment, even if he can't quite remember why. Is he in the right head? The right memory?

Wash manages an uneasy laugh, a hitch and drag that catches in his throat.

"That makes one of us. I, uh. Don't really know if I trust me right now."

She can't know what he's thinking, what he's remembering, but it really doesn't matter. It's enough to hear that uneasy laugh, the skepticism inherent in the sound. Her words aren't exactly reassuring; she knows they're not, not when he can probably barely trust his own senses, but - well.

This is all she can do. It'll have to be enough.

"I know." She nods, turning her head away from him again, eyes unseeing and unfocused, staring into the middle distance. Her grip on his hand never wavers. "You don't have to. Just - We have to try."

Someone's acerbic retort whipcracks across the space between one recollection and the next. A shrill response in aqua to the tired mantra of, You just need to... try.

It doesn't present itself to him quickly enough for him to cling to it. It slips away. Instead, Wash starts to walk in the direction he hopes might take them to the sea, guiding CT by the hand. Catches himself wondering idly if he has some kind of nostalgia for the ocean, and if he does, what that might mean for the person whose memory he's borrowing.

"I think maybe I missed you," he ventures at last. "Or...one of me did. It's hard to tell. Someone in here - they missed you."

He coughs. His vocal cords still feel scraped raw from when he was screaming himself hoarse in the grass.

"Thought...I guess maybe you'd want to...know that."

God why is he like this.

She looks surprised, maybe just at the candidness of his response, the acknowledgement of his own muddled identity. She knows he's trying to hold it together, but...it's good, right, that he can admit that it's not that easy?

And then she thinks for a minute, and nods.

"It's you, Wash. You missed me." Who else could it be? The Director surely hadn't missed her. And Church - Alpha, or Epsilon, this Church, whoever he is, had never known her. Wash is the only one in his own head who might. She sighs, keeping pace with him as they make their way across the field.

"I missed you too."

TEST DRIVE MEME ( 011 )

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