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

[meadqueen]

[Randvi looks down blankly, unsure of what she's carrying that could cause such consternation. Since the other woman also has one of the radios, it must be the hammer]

Of course, it was a wedding gift from my husband.

[These days she's ambivalent about the marriage - four winters behind them and Sigurd is still little more to her than a stranger who comes and goes when it pleases him - but not the hammer. Some of Gunnar’s finest work]

[shipman]

[Shauna nods.]

That's... romantic. [If romance exists, it's definitely in weapons of war: it says here's the instrument to wound my body instead of my heart. With no trepidation that this might be insulting:] Do you know how to use it?

[meadqueen]

[There’s a flash of anger before she can hide it, but it's an old hurt that she nurses sometimes in the way that one pokes at a sore tooth: wild Randvi of the mountains had been sacrificed for a little woman whose little world is barely the size of their village in England, dreaming over a map of places she will never go]

I wasn't always a man’s wife.

[shipman]

[An unexpected grimace of a smile flits on Shauna's face. Too true, sister, too fucking true.]

Things get pretty fucked up when you get married, huh?

[meadqueen]

[Randvi smiles wryly. She seldom talks about this - her closest female friend is her sister in law and there is only so much you can say to a woman about her own brother]

It hasn't been easy. Sometimes I feel like my own ghost.

[shipman]

Yeah. [A pause, pregnant and uncomfortable, despite the persisting smile.] Yeah.

[She looks down suddenly, at the dirt under her nails, and she picks some out.]

We should hunt. Get an idea of where we are while we're at it.

[meadqueen]

[Randvi nods. At least this is something that they can change themselves]

I don't suppose you have a knife with you? The hammer will kill well enough, but it isn't terribly helpful with what comes afterward.

[She squints up through the canopy at the burning sun]

I have never experienced weather like this. I don't know where we could be, or why we would be abandoned here.