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glencolaaa2023-05-01 03:59 pm
glencolans) wrote in glencolaaa2023-05-01 03:59 pm
Entry tags:
TDM #1
TEST DRIVE MEME #1
Welcome to Glencola Reef's first Test Drive Meme! This is a place where anyone interested in applying a character - or just curious to see how their characters might interact with the setting and others in the game - can mingle with one another. General prompts are provided below for inspiration.
TDM GUIDELINES
- Please read the rules before posting to the TDM. These still apply here and will be enforced, up to and including deleting tags/toplevels and prebanning.
- Posts from a TDM are required to apply. At least three tags across any number of threads within a TDM, posted within the last 6 months, must be provided in every application.
- TDM threads can be used for AC. Note that new characters only need to check in for their first AC cycle, but established characters can use TDM tags for their AC.
- TDMs are not considered game canon by default. This is mostly for logistics reasons - due to how characters travel on the map, it's unlikely that non-network threads that take place here will actually happen in-game. However, I won't stop anyone from working out how to make parts of threads game canon if they really want to.
- New TDMs will be posted every three months. Keep checking back into the current TDM for new toplevels!
I. ARRIVAL
You awaken on a tropical island beach, soaking wet, powerless, and without any idea how you got here. Were you carrying something important, or wearing powerful armor? How unfortunate - it looks like only the most basic clothes, items in your pockets, and simple weapons managed to make the trip with you. Are you even physically the same as you remember? If you had superhuman abilities tied to your physiology, you might be stuck in a completely different body that lacks your usual senses. You might've been whisked away from a tense battle or a near-death experience and wake up delirious, or even injured.Thankfully, against overwhelming odds, you're not the only one to wake up on this particular stretch of beach. You and your companion have a lot of puzzling out to do.
II. NETWORK
Even if you weren't lucky enough to wake up near someone else, at least you've arrived with a military-grade radio transceiver gripped tightly in your hand (or mouth, or other vaguely opposable appendage of choice). The clunky walkie-talkie will start buzzing and crackling for every public message that starts coming your way. Answering them back is as easy as pressing the "talk" button on the side of the device and either speaking into the receiver, or using the keypad to type into the message box that appears on the screen, then pressing the button again to send. A list of ongoing conversations with responses that are less than 24 hours old can be found by scrolling through the menu, identified by the callsigns that are participating in them. It seems that you've been assigned a callsign, too - it shows up in the top right side of the screen, format AB123C. The letters and numbers picked are...probably random.
This is your easiest avenue to communicating, or coordinating with, or complaining at the other people stuck on this island; how you decide to use this tool is up to you.
III. EXPLORING
For a place that appears, by all signs, to be an equatorial island in the middle of a tropical ocean, the local environments are surprisingly diverse. Beaches range from idyllic white sand to storm-swept pebble crags to cliffs with waterfalls cascading off the edges; the interior forests can be thinned from sandy soil or dense jungles full of prickly underbrush and with towering canopies; and the central mountain peaks, perilous enough to climb on their own, terminate in ravines and sinkholes that are hidden by thick foliage until you already have one foot over the edge.The animals that make their homes here are equally as varied, and sometimes just as dangerous. The standard Earth fare of tropical fish swim right up to most shores, especially where reefs have grown, and a multitude of seafaring and jungle birds make their homes in ocean-facing cliffs and trees. Any one of these creatures would make for an easy snack. But you're not the only opportunistic hunters here; sharks prowl the waters, big cats stalk the jungles, and feral boars raid any camps that smell enticing. And that's just the stuff that looks like it came from modern Earth. Your improvised fishing rod might have captured a trilobite, or maybe that deer you were stalking has rounded on you with a set of alien mandibles full of sharp teeth. Or maybe, among the plants and animals completely foreign to you, you've stumbled across one that's strangely familiar to your home and no one else's.
There's a lot to figure out about this place. At least, in this instance, you aren't doing it alone.
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Any guy on a beach pointing a gun at her knows exactly what happened. This one doesn't look familiar but Shoreline has so many disposable goons that that doesn't really mean anything.
Without her own gun, she doesn't have much of a choice. She stands slowly, trying to angle her body so he can't see the knife at her lower back. Hands up, she shoots him what she clearly thinks is a super charming smile.
“Look, whatever you think I've got, I don't have it anymore.”
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Her smile is charming! He even smiles back. But that doesn't mean anything to him. Lots of dangerous people can be very charming when they want to be.
He would know.
"Whatever was on you, huh?" His eyebrows raise, like he's interrogating a naughty child. He steps closer to her, gun still on her. "I'll be the judge of that."
He reaches out, to start lightly patting her down with his free hand.
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This demeanour is not putting her at ease - sometimes guys smile at you and act all friendly, then hit you with a car and throw you in an aqueduct. Just like, for example.
When he reaches for her she smiles again, all teeth and nerves. “Hey, looking’s free, but the rest costs extra.”
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His tone is light, and less than sympathetic. He even hums a little as he looks her up at down. He looks her directly in the eye. He can feel the nervous energy rolling off of her.
The gun's muzzle presses gently, but meaningfully, into the flesh of her stomach. "Yeeeeeah, see, I don't think you get to set the prices today, sweetheart," he tells her. "Sorry 'bout that."
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“Okay, okay!” she glares at him resentfully. “Take my granola bars. Jesus.”
The first thing he’ll find is the tactical knife, sheathed horizontally across her lower back. Under her empty holster, a length of rope hangs from her belt, and there's a well-used climbing piton in a loop attached to her bag.
The bag at her hip contains the sort of bric-a-brac that a woman might carry while travelling: bobby pins, a flashlight, a few snacks, a red pen, a waterproof tourist map of Malaysia. No ID, and no money aside from two strange-looking gold coins. At the very bottom of the bag is a small teardrop-shaped figurine of the Hindu god Ganesh, pale on one edge from how often Chloe runs her thumb along it in contemplation.
As he looks through it, Chloe sighs. “Is this, like, your thing? You find women who've already been robbed and steal the stuff the other guys didn't want? Kind of pathetic, dude.”
no subject
The tactical knife, he confiscates immediately. He looks at it approvingly, before looking at her, directly in the eye, and giving her an impressed nod. "Niiice," he coos. A lot of what she has is useful, actually. The flashlight. The snacks, if they aren't too waterlogged to be worth it anymore. The rope. The climbing piton.
It says a lot about someone for them to have all of this on them before arriving here. Interesting that she's at least a little bit religious, he thinks, noting the teardrop-shaped figure. He wasn't expecting that.
He's also undeterred by being called 'pathetic'. "Yeah, well, everybody needs a hobby!" he says cheerfully. Once he's satisfied himself by looking through everything, he gives her a thorough, up-and-down glance.
"I guess now the question is... what to do with you?"
He can see the benefits to keeping her alive, despite the fact that she assuredly hates him and wants revenge right now. She's clearly got the kind of skills that would be useful here, if she's got all of this stuff already. Killing her wouldn't be smart.
But he needs to get a sense of how much of a liability she is.
no subject
This seems like a guy who might forget about her, but with a potential Shoreline affiliation on the table, it's hard to tell.
“Do I get a say, or is this the part where you start monologuing?”
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He gives her an almost theatrical snort of laughter. "Go for it, chica," he says, with a cheery grin and overexaggerated shrug. The gun stays trained on her. His smiles goes all the way up to his eyes, but it's an intense and unsettling one. "Let's hear it. What do you think I should do with you?"
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“Maybe you let me go and I give up on trying to get my stuff back.”
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"Soooo, Miss" -- he pauses; waits for a name -- "how do I know you won't try to shank me the second I let my guard down? Hm? Might be what I would do, in your situation." He gives her a slightly teasing, but meaningful look.
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He does notice she didn't supply a name, and he prompts her a second time with a menacing grin: "So. Your name? It's up to you, but I think you'd might wanna share with it me. Since, y'know, we'll be together for a while."
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“Wow, you really - you really are just some guy, huh?” Somehow it's even more embarrassing to get caught like this by the one guy with a gun who wasn't trying to kill her. Nadine is never going to let her hear the end of this.
“How about this? Special secret: you can call me Mandy.”
It's a name she hasn't answered to in years, but it's probably better for her if this guy doesn't realize he can use her to bargain with the big fish.
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Not even, but it's better for him if SHE thinks that. He continues grinning that same shit-eating grin. "Yeah. That's me. Nobody special. Funny how life works out like that sometimes, isn't it?"
An exaggerated shrug.
"Come on, Mandy. Let's go." He has no idea if that's her real name or not — he'd bet money that it isn't — but it also doesn't really matter. He just needs something to call her.
"Come on," he says, guiding her down the beach. "Let's go."
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Chloe takes a few steps down the beach, but unfortunately she physically can't shut up.
“So... Do I have to keep my hands up the whole time?”