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]

The twenty-first century is impossible.

[Even if she manages to avoid all the ways to die that lie in wait for a jarl’s wife living in contested territory, she won't live to see the eleventh. The idea of another thousand years on top of that makes her head spin]

Our world is not as small as you might imagine. My clan has been as far as Constantinople, and I have scouts in Vinland.

[Of course, to someone with the technology to speak across large distances maybe that's nothing. Perhaps this woman could close her eyes on this island and open them in England.

If she sounds excessively defensive it's mostly because her own physical world is so stiflingly small: Grantebridge is less than a day’s ride away and she's never been there]

[cactusy]

Vinland, huh.

[It's been a while since she's had any sort of history class, but she's almost positive that that was northern Canada, so--]

I'm from south of there. Called something different now, though.

[meadqueen]

Vinland, ah - I’m relieved that we can speak the same language.

[Her scouts communicate with the Vinlanders using their hand signs, which obviously isn't feasible on this sort of device]

I have so many questions, but I doubt that those sagas are still sung in your age, even if we win.

[cactusy]

We shouldn't be speaking the same language. I don't know diddly about Old Norse or... whatever.

[Which definitely lends credence to the idea that this is all, in some form or another, not real. Joy and bliss.]

But hey, as long as we're talking about impossibilities, try me.

[meadqueen]

[She’s about to get defensive about naming her language that way, but of course in the 21st century it is old. Shaw probably can't speak the Mercian English dialect that Randvi knows either.

The other matter is more important anyway]

I've received word that Gorm Kjotvesson of the Wolf Clan fled to Vinland following his exile from Norway. My scouts report that he has acquired one of these speaking stones and is importing more thralls by the day to uncover something hidden underground.

I cannot allow him to bring whatever dark magic he is seeking back to Norway, but if I send a large group to overthrow him, our settlement will have no defenders. My plan is to send my best warrior alone, but she can be... brash, and Gorm’s father dishonoured her family and tarnished her own name. I fear that if I send her off to Vinland, she will not return to me.

[There’s something a little too raw in her voice, a little too honest. She clears her throat, embarrassed]

If she failed, whatever Gorm uncovered may be terrible enough that the people there still remember it.