TDM #1

[glencolans]

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.

NAVIGATION

Comments

[hyakuoku]

[ It takes him a few moments to respond. He's just going over that info in his mind, because it doesn't sound familiar in the slightest. What a mystery, huh? Last he knew, no one was unpetrified in England. And Randvi doesn't sound modern, but she doesn't sound like any of the natives in the Stone World, either… ]

Indulge me for a sec. Do you know what year it was then?

[meadqueen]

By our own count, it's the second year in the reign of Sigurd Styrbjornsson. By the calendar of the Saxons, the year is 874.

Or it was. I don't know how long I've been away.

[hyakuoku]

[ That tracks with the things she's been saying, and so far he doesn't have a reason to think she's jerking him around. But that's so far before Senku himself was born he can hardly imagine it, and that's not even including the thousands of years it's been since then when all of humanity was petrified. Seems like a lot to hit her with at first, though, at least over a radio that she probably doesn't quite understand. ]

874. Damn. I wasn't even born until 2004. So whoever these kidnappers are, they have the ability to not just take us from where we were, but from when. I've never seen that kind of science in real life, only in fiction.

[ He sounds like this is somehow the best news he's heard all day. Ya boy loves a weird mystery! ]

[meadqueen]

[There was a lot of random button pushing at first, but she figured it out]

Two thousand -

[Even that is enough to almost knock the wind out of her, even though it does make some sense of the device they're communicating through. She's not going to think about it now]

Why kidnap us and then abandon us here? They didn't even take anything.

[hyakuoku]

Hard to believe, huh? But I'm not making it up.

[ Just wait til he eventually tells her he's actually from 3700 years later than that... ]

They didn't take anything from you, huh? I wonder if they took anything from anyone. I'm missing a few things, a couple pouches of rarer supplies. I'd call it coincidence, but that's not very scientific. Sounds to me like they want us to play this game on hard mode.

[meadqueen]

You think they took some of your supplies from you to make survival more difficult?

[At this point that makes about as much sense as anything else. It would at least explain why all of the valuable but useless for survival things that she's wearing were spared while other people's pouches are missing]

It's still strange. This island is too large to serve as an effective prison without guards, and they're allowing us to communicate this way.

[From what she’s heard Gorm has an operation this large in Vinland, but she's fairly certain that the people brought there are aware that they're slaves right away]

[hyakuoku]

That's my current hypothesis, yeah. Well, it's one of them. Another is that the goal is to force us to work together. The radios -- that's the thing we're talking on right now -- is a clue that points to that. Why have them at all? Why give us easy communication if we're meant to exist in isolation? We're all here together for whatever reason, and we're able to both talk to each other and reach each other physically.

Whatever we're here to do, we're doing it together. Though whether it's a prison or not, well...depends on how fast we find enough materials to build something that gets us outta here. Even with a really good shipwright and people working nonstop, we can't exactly build a ship overnight. And let's say we did, that doesn't solve the problem of knowing where to go next, since we don't know where we are.

[ A pause. ]

It also doesn't solve the problem of how to get you home to 874 and me home to when I come from. I'm dying to know how we're gonna do that.

[ He's enjoying this because he's a freak, don't mind him. ]

[meadqueen]

My people will be looking for me - kidnapping me from the safest location in the settlement in broad daylight dishonours them greatly and they'll wish to correct it.

[Not to mention that she does all of the jobs that no one else wants. As soon as someone is demanding restitution for Holger’s latest foolishness they'll certainly notice that Randvi is gone]

And if it's true that some dark seidr has spirited us away to another realm, we have a powerful seer who -

[- who had, before they’d left Fornburg, shared with Eivor a vision so dark that they had both refused to speak of it to Randvi; one that had caused the other woman to avoid her for weeks before they had finally settled into some semblance of normalcy again]

Who may have known about it all along. I don't know what to think.