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

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Isabella had been gathering her own food, but also searching for some sign of habitation. Hearing someone caused her to pause, before deciding that she had no reason to assume someone was hostile. Deedee could probably hear her approach.

Cue a woman who is in her late thirties, with one arm with an impromptu splint and the other trying to wrangle a bundle of extra clothing. The clothes she was wearing had been the innermost layer, and still was more designed to trap warmth as opposed to letting the skin breathe. The styles were 19th century European, albeit with trousers rather than skirts.

"Oh, what a relief, someone else." Isabella's accent would sound English to someone from Earth. At the moment she wasn't noticing that her companion didn't exactly look human; Isabella's naturalist training was trying to signal that the 'ears' she saw were not just a decorative hair ornament, but Isabella was also exhausted, in pain and had never met a person who wasn't a human (as her canonpoint is just before that changes).

Deedee's ears swivel in place towards Isabella's voice before the vulpecian turns her head, which might help Isabella realize they aren't ornamental.

Deedee winces at the obvious injury on the stranger and gets up, hurrying to help her sit at the cookfire.

"Yeah," she says, "good thing you found me. Hooboy. I'm not sure how much I can do, but I've getting food going and can try to look at the arm."

"Thank you, I..." Isabella noticed the ears.

"Are those real? They would have to be congenital rather than a modification, but I've never observed both a shift in ear placement and anatomy in a human skull. Certainly not one that mimicked other mammalian ear structure. Not my area of specialty, of course."

She paused. "I'm sorry, that was impolite. I'd say it was the events of the day, but I have been out of practice for behaving in polite society."

Polite behavior for 'nosy foreigner trying to ask questions of the locals without annoying them too much' was a bit more relaxed, and it helped that Isabella then had to translate the questions into a language the locals understood (or ask someone to translate), and could leave any scientific speculation to her native tongue.

"There wouldn't be other Vulpecians here, would there," Deedee says more to herself than anyone. Then, to Isabella, "If that's the rudest someone is about it I'm counting myself lucky. How I got those isn't a long story, but it's got a lot of footnotes."

She takes Isabella's wounded arm and gently checks it. It turns out that some of her healing and diagnostic skill was skill, and still available to her.

Still, habits die hard, and she mutters: "She of the Jar, witness to the first and last breaths, grant me your surgeon's eyes and I shall use them to heal the sick, and make a burning in your name of the best part of my food, so I vow."

Isabella is not from a world with divine magic; she assumes the incantation is a prayer to some god she's never heard of.

Isabella's arm appears to be broken; she did a moderately good job of at least immobilizing it given she had to do it one-handed and with whatever she had on hand.

"We may well have time. Are you also a... a visitor?" She didn't really have a word for 'suddenly woke up in an entirely different place, nowhere near where she lost consciousness'. She was only certain she wasn't dead because she was alone.

"A visitor to this place? Yes," she says. "Done got iseka- spirited away from the world I knew to this one, too."

She releases the hand. "I can't risk doing more without access to Mundane magic, but this is a decent enough splint that this should heal on it's own - given food, water, and rest. And I'd boil any water you find before drinking it, unless you have better ways of purifying it."

After a moment's thought, she takes some of the berries and chestnuts she's been cooking and tosses them directly into the flames. Vow to burn the best of her food: fulfilled.

Isabella frowned at the mention of magic; she's going to group that under superstition. "I've been on field expeditions before, so it would not be the first time I've had to do that. This looks quite a bit like the Broken Sea, but the plants and animals are mostly wrong."

"Field expeditions," she echoes. "Making you an adventurer and naturalist?"

Isabella grinned. "Exactly, though the adventure is more incidental to the naturalist work. Isabella Trent. A pleasure to meet you."

She offers her hand to shake. "Deedee Yeowoo. I was a Cleric but will probably need to lean more on martial arts here."

Isabella took it with her good hand.

"I'm afraid I don't follow that logic."

Yes, she knew what a priest was, but she saw no connection between religious belief and martial arts.

"The Gods I bothered were very specifically the gods of Mundus," she says. "I sincerely doubt that, say, Aurora of the Empire has any sway over events outside of the old Empire. Their lessons came with me. Their orisons probably didn't."

"And their lessons included martial arts?" Isabella asked.

“For when we were called on to defend our flocks,” she confirms. “As battlefield medics, cursebreakers and monster-hunters.”

She frowns. “I hope for less excitement here, for all of our sakes.”

"What manner of monsters?" Isabella frowned. While she's encountered plenty of legends, all 'monsters' she's heard of people actually finding turned out to be wild animals or humans.

TDM #1

TEST DRIVE MEME #1

TDM GUIDELINES

I. ARRIVAL

II. NETWORK

III. EXPLORING

Re: Deedee Yeowoo | Isekai/Online

Re: Deedee Yeowoo | Isekai/Online

Re: Deedee Yeowoo | Isekai/Online

Re: Deedee Yeowoo | Isekai/Online

Re: Deedee Yeowoo | Isekai/Online

Re: Deedee Yeowoo | Isekai/Online

Re: Deedee Yeowoo | Isekai/Online

Re: Deedee Yeowoo | Isekai/Online

Re: Deedee Yeowoo | Isekai/Online

Re: Deedee Yeowoo | Isekai/Online

Re: Deedee Yeowoo | Isekai/Online

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