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

[droppinnoeaves]

Or not quite. When he straightens up to look out at the water, Sam's hair reveals pointed ears.

"The- where d'seas boil?"

[paperclipsong]

Oh, normally he's better at that. Blame the fact that he just washed up on a strange island.

...Or, uh, not. Something's up.

"On...the Boiling Isles? Where we're from? You...are a witch, aren't you?"

[droppinnoeaves]

Sam narrows his eyes at the elfling, shoulders squaring in indignation.

"I'm mos' certainly not. I'm a hobbit, an' I'm from th'Shire. And I've jus' been to see the sea, and it sure don't boil."

[paperclipsong]

Gus's ears perk up in curiosity. He's just...never heard of a hobbit before.

"The...Shire? I guess that wouldn't be in the Demon Realm if the seas aren't hot...but I've never heard of anything like that in the Human Realm...so...where is it?"

[droppinnoeaves]

"Middle Earth? Arda," he tries - the elfling should at least recognize that. "The Shire's about center b'tween the Grey Havens and Rivendell."

[paperclipsong]

The look is...blank. "Middle Earth? And not just...plain Earth?"

Maybe he needs to go a different way.

"What exactly do you think I am?"

[droppinnoeaves]

"An elf," he says, though just the fact that the lad's asking makes him a bit less certain. "I've never seen an elfling, but I know as they 'ave children like anyone else."

[paperclipsong]

"Oh!" Suddenly a few things click in place and Gus looks quite pleased to have figured it out. "I know what elves are! They're what humans think witches are when we forget to hide our ears!"

He says it too confidently for it to be nonsense.

[droppinnoeaves]

He tilts his head, eyeing him suspiciously. "Aren't witches Men? Humans, of Angmar?" Sam doesn't know much of Angmar, the witch-realm. Not much more than its name, and that the kingdom is no more, and rightful so, for it was an evil place.

This youth doesn't look evil.

[paperclipsong]

Gus doesn't like that look. Doesn't like it at all. He's well aware that some humans don't like witches, and it's hard to face that hobbits, whatever those are, don't like them either.

"I...only know of two humans that can do magic," he starts carefully, "One of them is my friend Luz, and the other is...a really bad man." Gus looks at the ground for a second. He's not sure how much he wants to get into it, and he may already be treading on thin ice.

"To be real? I've never even heard of any place called Angmar. I'm from a place called Bonesburough, in the Upper Ribs."

[droppinnoeaves]

Sam looks away from the boy, out at the water as he chews his lip, brow furrowed.

"An' I've never heard of that. I don't know where we are, but it's not anyplace close t'Angmar," he says earnestly, puzzling through his thoughts aloud. "An' th'witch-king is the last sorcerer in Angmar, an' he was dead when we met an' dead again at Minas Tirith." He rubs his upper arms through his damp shirt, settling goosebumps raised just at the thought of the black-robed spectre and its rotting blade. "They say as he was a Man, but he wasn't like one when he stabbed Mister- My friend."

So something's not adding up.

"Y'say witch like that's its own sort of being."

[paperclipsong]

Gus listens intently, ears perking up in surprise at the end. Not everything makes sense to him...OK, actually not much of that makes sense to him. Or maybe it makes a sideways kind of sense? Dead witch-kings kind of sound like Grimwalkers. A witch-king might be a little -or a lot- like Belos for all he knows. If the way Sam's rubbing his arms is any hint, they inspire the same feelings.

"I'm sorry about your friend." It's an easy natural thing for Gus to say, and he's completely sincere. The Day of Unity, even though they'd stopped it, had taught him way, way too much about that kind of loss.

"We are! At least, they are in the Demon Realm. And that's connected to the Human Realm. Witches and demons live in one, and humans live in the other. Some witches have figured out how to go back and forth, but mostly we keep to ourselves."

[droppinnoeaves]

"You look like an elf, and sound a sight like one, talkin' of realms," he says, but he can hear the stubbornness in his own voice and recognizes that for what it is - unhelpful.

"But if y'say you aren't, you aren't." Or maybe there are witch-elves.

"Is this your demon realm then, d'you think? It doesn't look much like any land of Men I've seen, for sure I haven't seen them all."