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

arrival.

[2199]

Suspect is armed-- and not accused of anything. He's just hard to miss; through the treeline, Moss thought the white of this stranger's suit was bleached skull. She saw a glyptodont lumber by some hours ago, and her mind became consumed with images of mastodons and giant sloths.

But, no, it's a man, wearing clothes that should be extinct, but like the coelacanth, stubbornly refuses.

"There's no reason to attack and nothing to fight over." Her voice carries the dull tone of exhausted conviction; if she's lying, she's lying the way someone does at a crime scene. This is for your own good. Why don't you calm down? "I'm guessing I'm as stranded as you."

[vestments]

There's no reason to attack, she says, and in this moment, she's not wrong. In general, though, Marc would disagree on the prudency to be prepared, to be ready, but he acquiesces. He pulls his hand back out of his pocket — empty — and waves it dismissively, not quite disinterestedly. He's heard that tone before — from Jean-Paul, here and there, Marlene once or twice; more often from Detective Flint, tired and fed-up, resigned to dealing with Moon Knight because of the results and not for the relationship. Certainly not for his sparkling wit and charming personality.

(But then, Marc had always felt similarly about Flint.)

It's the kind of tone that has Marc wishing he hadn't pulled his mask off, hadn't dumped it in near panic on the sand. The kind of tone that says this is someone for Moon Knight and not Marc Spector, but unfortunately—.

"I don't know who you are." Firm and pointed, an undercurrent of words don't mean much, but I'm not completely unreasonable. The remark's punctuated by a breath of a pause, a brief glance and a once-over, and then he gestures at the space between the two of them. "But I'd guess so. Neither of us look ready for a day at the beach."

[2199]

Moss is not a cop, not an FBI agent, but her bearing makes similarities inevitable. She speaks to this man, now, like he's someone she has to calm before he does something regrettable. Not yet a perp, just another scared human in the heady storm of causality.

"I don't know who you are either," she says calmly. "We're on even ground."

(They're not on uneven ground. She has a gun, and he has two legs. The prosthetic is largely unnoticeable save for the hard plastic hoof-shape that comes out of her pant leg where a foot should be.)

"Are you injured?" And, because she can't help herself, "do you remember what year it was, before you got here?"

[vestments]

Alas, if Marc were so determined to commit a regrettable action (and he has, more often than he'd like), mere words from a stranger are unlikely to change his mind. Fortunately for the two of them, he's not particularly wed to the idea of fighting someone he's just met unless he has to — and her response, though not particularly winsome, is better than being attacked or even threatened.

A quirk of his lips and he skips past her first response, notes it for later — not from Manhattan, then. No immediate familiarity with Moon Knight (perhaps, though as of right now, sans-mask, she might just assume he's just some guy in a white suit).

"2021," he answers first, brows pulling together in a tight frown, well-worn lines implying this is an expression he wears with some degree of regularity rather than a reflection of inherent displeasure. It's not the first question he'd have jumped to — where feels more prudent than when — but given past experiences, he can't entirely fault her. "Is time travel common enough for you that it's the first thing you ask?"

Then—

"Spector." Spectre? He doesn't clarify. "Uninjured."

[2199]

Moss has a well-trained poker face; if she's lying (and she isn't, just moving the goalposts of the truth-- that information is classified) it's very hard to tell. She says, with amiable seriousness, "I saw a living trilobite. The year seems important to note, don't you think?"

Still with that smoothness, that let's be friends calm employed by those professionally accustomed to the bizarre, the violent, the unsettling. As things go, this man-- Spector, like the musician-- and his suit are a comfortable sort of strange. Silver liquid doesn't pour from his mouth, and he's yet to try and tear off his own face.

(She hasn't noticed the mask; it's just another piece of detritus in the sand.)

"I won't say I'm glad you're here. I don't think anyone should be here." She finds a place to sit, a nearby rock, and equalizes her balance upon it so no more stress is placed upon her prosthetic. "But we're better off in groups."

Oh, and- "1997."

[vestments]

Living trilobite she says, and he doesn't give much in the way of a reaction, not for the moment. For now, it's a thought — the dead living is nothing new to him — and instead, he offers a hum that sits somewhere between acknowledging and disagreeing.

"No more important than the where," he says, attention shifting reflexively from her to the sky. That — Earth or elsewhere — will be easier to figure out once night falls, once the moon and the stars are visible.

(Marc has not always been able to trust what he sees, has not always been able to place faith in his understanding of reality. And yet, despite that, he's never been overly questioning. He's used to weird, to strange and unusual, and though he might wonder, he tends to accept, preferring to focus on what he can change. He might not have any answers as it stands, but it'll be nice to have some base of knowledge.)

As she sits, he bends to pick his mask up from the ground, a flicker of distaste gracing his features as he does so (sand) before he looks back to her. He wouldn't describe her calmness as pleasant but it's inoffensive and, more to the point, she's not wrong.

For lack of anything else to say (or: 1997. Weird, but okay), he opts to inform her—

"The millennium's less eventful than you'd expect." (But.) "We should find somewhere secure for nightfall."

[2199]

Where is an abstraction. When gets you radio signals, satellite imaging, ships that can pick up distress signals. Then billion years ago means nothing. But this man is clearly not debriefed on Deep Time, and she has no interest in changing that. Not least because he might be from an IFT, might try to trap her in a bell jar, might loose his mind at the potential inconsequentiality of his inadmissible existence.

She's becoming tied up in her own thoughts. With a shake of her head, she tries to force herself into a more relaxed posture. It feels unnatural, and probably looks it.

"Most things are," she says. Less eventful. The things you expect are never as impactful as the things you don't. "I have some SERE training," she says, standing slowly, with a balance that is both practiced and careful, "but that was years ago. Elevation and shelter, but I doubt we'll be lucky enough to find a shack on a hill."

Evidence of human habitation seems unlikely, if only because it would mean something has gone very, very wrong.