aftr_ooc | TEST DRIVE MEME ( 012 )

Test Drive Meme #12

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 June 17th, and Applications on June 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.

There Goes the Neighborhood
Today, you're not merely waking up on an island. Oh, no. You're waking up in the world's most perfect suburb, complete with perfectly-trimmed lawns, white picket fences, and a uniformity that borders on the absurd. Not a fleck of paint is out of place, and not a blade of grass is out of line.

Mu has attempted to imitate the sort of fabricated happiness that adventurers dealt with in the month of May, but without the full power to shape fantasies to the whims of each individuals, has opted instead to attempt for a blanket, painfully generic alternative.

It's a cheap attempt to mimic something that was already a falsehood to begin with, rote and uncommitted. Thus, much of this world is patchworked with palpable holes, both visible and otherwise: neighbors are featureless specters performing daily routines with robotic precision, entire swathes of the neighborhood are perfect replicas of the same painfully generic family, and, of course, there's you.

You obviously don't belong here. The framework of the narrative is so structured that it's not hard to realize things are amiss. The more you think about it, the more it seems like this entire fantasy is deeply, deeply amiss.

But then again, maybe not. Maybe you buy into it, completely and utterly. Maybe you're so eager to escape whatever life you lived prior to this one that you're all too eager to live in this Stepford-esque facsimile. The degree to which your character adheres to this structured world, and how much they remember from their true life, is up to you.

Do it for the Vine
This next scenario is far from pleasant, though it is much more real. The thick, tropical woodland might be difficult to traverse at first, but don't worry - it's about to get much harder.

Do you like earthquakes? How about massive, twisting vines that swarm out from the undergrowth to attempt to snake up around your ankles and shins and root you in place, perhaps smother you in the dirt? Isn't it fortunate that you're being left to contend with both at once? Mu is compensating for the events of May, it seems; commemorating a god whose demise tore an island apart by mimicking with precision efficiency how that must have felt for everyone to bear dramatic witness.

The good news is that while the vines might be both eerily cunning and vast in number, they still are just plants, and plants can be easily pruned or burned. The subterranean rumbles of the ground as it cracks and ruptures underfoot might be less easy to contend with.

To that, our only suggest is simply to run. Good luck!

Taken for Granite
This particular brand of landscape is striped with cliffs and crags, a lifeless mountain range crooked along the horizon with rock the color of fired clay. And not far off from where you've stirred awake is...a rather eccentric rock formation.

By "eccentric", of course, we mean "moving". And by "moving" we mean "it is extricating itself from the ground like some unholy tectonic zombie and it's coming right at you RUN".

Formed entirely from an amalgamation of earth, rocks, ore, and valuable gems, the earth golem is surprisingly territorial for a glorified lump of mud. Approximately fifteen feet tall and half as wide, this lumbering creature has only one concern: the eradication of anything that steps into its territory. It is sensitive to vibrations in the ground, and is thus very difficult to hide from for those moving on foot. However, it is nearly blind and very stupid, preferring to wallop anything within reach using its massive, boulder-sized fists rather than employ any sort of strategy.

Still, unless you're looking to travel to the other side of the area via the Golem Express, avoiding this creature's warpath may be a wise choice. Especially given its talent at re-assembling itself upon destruction.

LOGS ● OOC ● STORIES ● MAIN NAVIGATION

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

The problem with illusions is that, frankly, it requires some level of imagination to be fooled--or at least a shared frame of reference. Kaworu Nagisa is possessed of neither, and so is frankly just confused.

He's never seen houses like this--individual units spaced out along a road, with grass and pavement alternating in an inefficient kind of grid.

On a simple level, he understands what's going on--this isn't where he was earlier, but it is where he is now. But he didn't grasp what about it was wrong. The gigantic spider-human combination doesn't actually tell him what is wrong, but it's definitely not right.

What Jowan, moving backwards, bumps into is and isn't technically Kaworu. It's Kaworu's AT Field, a solid barrier in geometric pattern--and when Jowan turns around he'll see the last hexagonal ripples of it between him and the butt-naked Japanese teenager standing in the middle of the street.

Normal!

Wh--

This is definitely a dream, no doubt about it, now. Jowan catches the movement in his rear eyes, but it seems less actively threatening than the Neighbour until he bumps into it sooner than he expects to and whirls around at spider speed. Just, you know. Normal. Naked teens in the middle of the street with Arcane Shields of some unknown sort around them.

"Are you...ok?" That seems a fair question to ask! Maybe it's just...a mage who's lost his clothing for some reason? He hasn't seen a mage outside of his dreams for quite some time but if this is a dream, then. Fair game.

A mage would probably attack a giant spider person, though, so honestly, who knows.

Technically, Kaworu is related to a giant spider--or 'spider,' anyway--and the only part of Jowan's anatomical situation that he cares about is how Lilim escaped the confines of the human form.

"Well, I'm lost," Kaworu responds, in a tone that suggests this doesn't bother him in the slightest. His red eyes are bright, fixed on Jowan's human-issue blues.

"Where are you going?"

Jowan would also like to know that, if only to reverse it. De-escape. Lock the human form jail and eat the key.

"A....way?" Jowan says slowly, and then remembers, and freezes, and completely chickens out of turning back around to check. "Listen, actually, can you see a man behind me? Staring?"

Kaworu pauses without dropping his smile, then raises his gaze--or breaks it with Jowan, anyway--to make eye contact with the smiling neighbour, who did not walk towards them so much as he simply... was there now, where he wasn't before. It's like he'd teleported in the moments during which no one's eyes were on him.

"Yes." Then, in nearly the same friendly tone that he'd declared himself lost:

"Hello!"

Kaworu can't feel him at all--not the way he can 'feel' Jowan's presence, the invisible barrier of his AT Field in contact with Kaworu's. Similarly absent are the slight, ambient movements of living things--breathing, shifting, blinking.

Interesting.

Though if Jowan was hoping someone else would confirm this experience as weird, though, he's going to be terribly disappointed.

Edited 2018-06-19 02:33 (UTC)

Usually, Jowan can sense the movement of a person, through his feet, through vague shapes in his hind vision. The fact that Kaworu looks up and immediately makes eye contact just over Jowan's shoulder fills him with immediate, shuddering terror all the way down both of his backs. He's been surrounded by monsters and horror for months, he should be used to this. But there's something so quiet and unknown about this particular terror that Jowan doesn't think he could ever be prepared.

"Hello, Karl," says the Neighbour, "look at that weather, huh?"

"Help," says Jowan, faintly. If his eyes weren't entirely blue-black now, white would be showing all the way around them.

Kaworu looks up obediently into the clouds, and continues looking at them for a second or two as though sincerely considering the matter of the weather. This is an entirely superficial behaviour, mind--Kaworu has never in his (extremely short) life had a single thought about the weather, and is in fact entirely incapable of forming an opinion on it. But the neighbour didn't tell him to think about the weather. He was told to look at it.

So he is.

Except then the spider-human asks for help, and he returns his attention to more earthly matters. (Though not to imply that the weather itself is not an essential function of the earth.)

He frowns slightly, brow furrowing in bemusement.

"What do you want me to do about it?"

Does he think this is still about the weather, or has he figured out Jowan's problem is the neighbour?

Yes.

"You comin' to the barbecue?" asks the Neighbour, not put off by Kaworu's lack of weather response. At least, he's sure still smiling.

"I don't know what he wants," Jowan whispers, almost silent. He is a terrified and panicking giant spider man with like three kinds of natural weapon. "He won't stop looking..." He's gripping his front legs that he has drawn up by his human waist so hard that he's gone white-knuckled.

"It sounds like he wants to know if you're coming to the barbecue," Kaworu reports matter-of-factly. The benign tone lasts another half second before he asks the inevitable.

"What's a barbecue?" He looks up at the unnatural neighbour, then at Jowan, not actually sure where he can expect an answer.

"Cooked.....meat?" Jowan whispers, still refusing to look around. "Over a fire. Maker, he thinks I'm already coming, why is he following me?"

"Haha, you fellas are such jokers," says the Neighbour, repetitively. "How's the wife?" Which wife? Whose wife? Who knows.

Good news: Kaworu knows what a wife is.

But he doesn't have one, and he doesn't understand what Jowan is so upset about. Can this misshapen human tell the 'neighbour' has no AT Field--no soul? There's no such thing, of course. A human without a soul doesn't exist. This is getting weirder and less easily ignored. He isn't supposed to do anything because anything he does might give him away. But he's also not supposed to be out of doors naked.

He glances at Jowan speculatively.

"Do you have a wife?" he asks.

Jowan can tell that....all of his senses are totally creeped out by the Neighbour. He's also honestly starting to get unsettled by the naked teenager. At this point, he feels like...he'd honestly be so lucky for this to be a dream? He's probably finally accidentally found his way into Ryslig's version of the Fade and these are both demons who are going to...eat him. Or something. Probably not possess, as this seems an odd way to go about it.

"Do I look like the sort of person who'd...have a wife?" he asks, eventually, and the Neighbour, simultaneously, says, "Polly's looking forward to seeing her!"

Kaworu stares at Jowan blankly.

Does he... what? What does that mean? Look like someone who...?

....?????

TEST DRIVE MEME ( 012 )

CW: nudity

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