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

Shauna Sadecki (2021) | Yellowjackets

[shipman]

Arrival

[The first thing she does after staggering to her feet is stare. The ocean is jewel blue, and the light glancing off it from the open sky above makes her eyes water, but she just can’t blink. Not yet. She needs to breathe it all in, let it find its place in her.

It doesn’t take. Her lungs are paralyzed, her body frozen. It’s just water soaked to her skin and sand in the sides of her practical loafers — $39 at Target, a good deal at the time. Not at all what she’d have worn today, if only she’d known.

The landscape stretches out on all sides of her. She is dwarfed by the unknown, and she has nothing but the clothes on her back, her car keys in one hand, a radio in the other. That alone is of little concern; she doesn’t need things as much as she needs a sense of realness: there is no adrenaline surge to distract her from how wrong this is.

She drops her things to the sand and puts her hands on herself immediately — her hips, her stomach, her chest, inventorying her own body. ]

Oh my god. [Her voice is soft, almost babyish. It’s finding itself rapidly, growing intense with repetition:] Oh my god, oh my god.



Network

RA151N:
Hi. Is anyone out there?

RA151N:
If you can read this reply immediately.

RA151N:
SOS

RA151N:
SOS

RA151N:
SOS

RA151N:
SOS


[She’ll keep going, if you let her.]




Exploring

[Shauna is out of place. She would look at place in the slightly outdated kitchen of a modest suburban home, or running errands in a Ford Windstar, or on the sidelines of her child’s soccer practice meet. But don’t let the slightly oversize blouse and mom jeans confuse you: she is not, absolutely not a soccer mom. She is just stressed, and it positively radiates off her, her lips pursed, her gaze tense. Unblinking. Sad.

She stares you down, hands at her sides. There’s already muddy smears on the knees of her jeans, dirt under her nails. She draws a deep breath, as if to steady herself. There’s a shred of impatience on her voice.]

So… um. Have you ever done this before?

[She is already hungry.]

Network

[desperate_times_right]

AP251F: Will you relax?

AP251F: This thing's beeping like crazy.

[shipman]

RA151N: Relax?? I'm sorry, did you end up on the part of the beach with Mai tais and cabana boys?

[desperate_times_right]

AP251F: I ended up on the part of the beach where no one’s shooting at me. Counting that as a win.

[shipman]

RA151N: Oh great, I guess this isn't an emergency then!

[desperate_times_right]

AP251F: Literally isn't. Just walk back to the city.

Exploring

[meadqueen]

[Randvi is also a wife who is required to stick close to home, but the centuries separating them make the signifiers difficult to recognize.

Not that she looks much like a jarl’s wife now, pathetic in the warm, humid weather, her braid limp with sweat and her fox fur cloak cradled to her chest like a child. Half undressed, with both a war hammer and a walkie-talkie hanging from her belt, she probably looks more like an extra in a Thor movie than anything else]

Have I ever been lost in a forest? Not in a long time.

[shipman]

[Thor movie is right! She'd seen one, maybe two –– they blur together, all the evenings out justified by two-for-one-plus-popcorn tickets bought at Costco. But they're supposed to blur together, aren't they? Dozens of middle-aged couples like her and her husband, staring into the screen for a couple hours, then staring into silent space on the drive home, nothing more to talk about. It occurs to her she hasn't thought about those movies since, but she's glad to think of them now.

Shauna is sweating too, especially eyeing that war hammer. All she has is car keys.]

So you just around town with that anyway?

[She gestures briefly.]

[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.

arrival | cw: drugs/drug use eyyyyyy

[aluminumandash]

[ It all gets tangled, the jolt that comes with the coke, that lights his blood on fire. The sky opening around him, the fleeting sensation—in his throat in his gut in his empty hands—of spilling. His body cracks against something: for second, a couple of heartbeats, the pain is just another kind of breathlessness.

Rust lands on his ass, one leg pinned under him. A kilo of coke still jammed between his belt and his back. He pulls himself into a sitting position, deduces from the amount of teeth-gritting required that scrambling to his feet isn't an option. ] Where the fuck— [ He says, loud and clear, riding the dizzying wave of pain. His gaze falls on the walkie, too fucking convenient, and he shuts up. Closes his eyes, finds his pulse.

He looks around, deliberate about it now. Sand under his nails, water in his hair. Salt when he licks his lips. The air dense, humid. Rust struggles out of his corduroy jacket, wraps the coke in it. Switches the walkie off but clips it to his belt.

There's a tree six feet away. He starts the long process of scooting toward it, pulling himself backwards with his arms. His good leg contributing the occasional ineffectual kick. An insane sight, not that he thinks about it: a man in a loosened tie and dress shirt hauling himself across the sand. Badge flashing at his waist, in the sun. ]

[shipman]

[The sensation that she's not alone is a powerful one, stopping her mild panic in its tracks, another oh my god dead on her lips. Here's the adrenaline surge she's craved for the past few minutes.

She stoops to pick up her car keys and she positions one between her fingers, the sand gritty on the soft meat between them. She's never been one to do that, not even before crossing a dark parking lot, but that's only because truly bad things can't happen in spitting distance of a Wawa. This is the unknown, again.

Her eyebrows furrow deep, and she calls out to him as she storms in his direction:]

Hey. [She gets closer than she really should, just barely in reach, but that's not on her mind right now. Getting close is an opportunity to size him up, take stock of who she's working with (or against.)] Oh Jesus Christ. You're not going to get very far like that!

[aluminumandash]

[ He resents having to stop, having to listen to himself gulp down air. His hands make fists in the sand. The pain in his leg recedes; he has a wild urge to chew the inside of his mouth, bring some of the sharpness back. What passes for clarity.

Up close sweat's already trickling from his hairline, beading on his lip. He's rolled his sleeves up partway, affording a glimpse of a tattoo on his right arm. His body's wire-taut, his bad leg like a frayed end.

A gun is holstered at his hip. He hasn't moved for it. ] Who the fuck're you? [ He spits, going to work on the question before it's out of his mouth. American. Not Southern. Not sunburned, not yet. He eyes her shoes, looks past her as if he can retrace her steps all the way back to wherever she came from.

Spying her walkie, he takes its twin from his belt and tosses it at her feet. Something defiant in it. ]

[shipman]

[Under her gaze, he's just shy of being a carcass to scavenge. Definitely not local, definitely in decent shape, leg aside. The tattoo isn't a familiar bundle of slashes so all she affords it is the fleeting thought that it just doesn't make fucking sense, anatomically –– the soft parts are usually the first to go. The badge says he's got authority, or thinks he does, but that doesn't matter. Not out here.

What she's really caught up on is the gun, but her gaze snaps off it quick, to the walkie now at her feet. Same as hers, still abandoned in the sand behind her. The look she gives him is plain, unimpressed.]

I have my own, thanks. [Sarcasm doesn't suit her soft voice, but it's there anyway, and easy to reach for.] I'm Shauna. Relax. I'm not going to hurt you.

[She's already creeping closer, lowering herself like she's approaching a wild animal.]

[aluminumandash]

[ He breathes in, and out. His eyes linger on the pair of walkies, his expression shuttered. If the sarcasm registers, he gives no sign. ] Don't know as you'll have a choice. Cohle. [ His speech is pared down, words clipped off before they start to strain. ] Leg's fucked. Leave it be.

[ Despite his drawn and pale face, his ragged breathing, Rust doesn't so much as flinch at her approach. He stares her down, sunlight screaming in his eyes, thoughts clawing at his head.

She doesn't look hurt. Or afraid.

He nods past her to the walkies. Urgency surges in his voice, as if this is what matters. ] You hear someone over it? Tell 'em where you're at?

[just_add_aptx]

Auntie, are you okay? [Asks a voice from behind her. A child's voice, from a little boy who can't be more than six or seven years old. He's also soaking wet with seawater and covered in sand, but he's apparently more concerned about her than about anything else right now.]

[shipman]

[The voice stops her in her tracks. She doesn't recognize it, of course, but there are no little boys in her life, and that stark absence makes the sound behind her that much more alarming. Her brain can't put the sound together for a moment, not in any way that feels coherent, and so she is forced to turn and look at him. Her expression is frozen on the cusp of terror, her eyes wide.

She manages:]

I–– yes. [With a hard breath, afraid:] No! I don't know! Who are you? Where is your...?

[She trails off, openly looking around for someone else, some parent. Some indication that just out of sight, there is a whole beach worth of people with colourful spades and cheery umbrellas, and she is safe, having simply wandered down to some Jersey beach in a fugue state.]

[just_add_aptx]

[Her panic seems real. That's both reassuring (actual kidnap victim, not a threat) and unsettling (still no useful information about what's going on) and Conan doesn't like it at all.]

I don't know where anybody else is. I'm Conan, I was just at school... [He trails off, looking like he's thinking about it. He's dressed like he was probably at school, in a uniform with a blazer and shorts and a little red bow tie.]

This is really weird. Do you know where we are? Where were you before?

[shipman]

[It's not easy to drag herself into some semblance of calm, but she gives it the old college try. When her gaze comes back to him, it stays there, as if he might vanish into the aether if she just blinked.]

Okay. Conan. [She repeats his name and nods. Her voice is fine-tuned for talking to little kids; there's a distinctive maternal edge to it, no matter how freaked out she is.] I don't know where we are, but we'll figure that out, okay? [No answer to the second question.] I'll keep you safe.

Exploring

[salamanca]

[ Lalo watches her with interest, trying to gauge what she's going to do. She looks very normal and very boring; not the kind of person he'd ever glance at twice without a good reason. But there's something else in her, too. The way she carries herself, maybe. Or the look in her eyes.

Or maybe it's the fact that she's already covered in mud and dirt. That suggests a willingness to at least try to do something to improve her situation. He assesses that she might be useful after all, appearances to the contrary.

He feels the mounting stress coming off of her, too, and that draws him in for an entirely different reason.

Lalo is not an empathetic man. Other people's feelings rarely trouble him. But the anger that courses through him even now -- not directed at her, not even directed at this new situation; the events before his arrival here haven't left his mind even amidst the intense strangeness of his new predicament -- finds the stress radiating from this woman to be almost a kind of cousin, and it wants to wind around it and mingle with it.

Lalo shuts that feeling off like a tap before that can happen.

Letting rage and stress become entangled and feed off each other like that would only be a distraction, probably a fatal one. And hey: he can't take bloody revenge and kill a bunch of people if he dies here first.

He smiles. ]

What? This? Lady, I hate to break it to ya, but I don't think anyone has done this before. [ A laugh. But then he waves away her concern. His easy, relaxed looseness, of body language and voice, contrasts with her impatience. ] But you don't need to worry about it! Let's say I've done a few similar things. [ Similar enough, anyway! ] First things first-- [ Lalo winks at her. ]

I don't know about you, but I could go for a beer right now! [ It's a terrible joke, made even more insufferable by their situation, but it's a testament to how much he thinks he's Got This. ]

lmao i love him

[shipman]

[The man before her is full of red flags: excited and upbeat in the midst of certain peril, the implication that his similar things will matter once hunger is clawing into his guts so deeply he can't think, and that patronizing little hand wave. Ugh! She eyes the crispness of his shirt and wonders if he's ever taken so much as a stroll. God, it's so easy to be a judgmental bitch about these things.

So Shauna rolls her eyes at the joke, and move like she might just walk off entirely, but the only thing worse than a strange man is being entirely alone. She stays where she is with a little huff.]

You never heard of Amelia Earhart? [It's only half the point, but no one having ever done this before feels like a technicality she just can't let slide, even if she still doesn't want to implicate herself. This is now about testing his mettle, whether he's fit to survive. She lays out a small challenge, her soft voice a little skeptical:] What's similar that you've done?

LMAO GOOD I AM SORRY btw thanks in advance for putting up with... /gestures to his everything

[salamanca]

[ He watches the little dance of her feet as she tries to decide whether to stay or go with dispassionate amusement. She gonna go? Stay? Makes no difference to him either way. Determined and steely or not, they both know she's in more danger on her own than he is.

She makes her decision, and his gaze flits quickly back up to her face. The brightly flickering warning sign that is that smile is unfaded. The eye roll and the disdainful little huff only feed his tickled sense of self-satisfaction.

It's funny how someone can be so right about a person and so wrong at the same time. So right that he's someone to be wary of. He's not fooling anybody, is he?

But so wrong, at the same time, that he can't handle himself. ]

Amelia Earhart? [ He laughs. She's challenging him now? She's challenging him? He's both surprised and impressed. He'd give her points for audacity if she had any reason to know who he is. What he's done. What he could do. To her.

It's promising, though. It means his estimation that there's more to her than what meets the eye wasn't wrong.

But he only winks! ]

Watch and learn, chica.

[ Something snaps under Lalo's boots as he moves to a break in the trees, where the lush tropics fade gradually into something closer to what he considers to be home.

He hoists himself up onto the branch of a piñon pine with an almost cartoonish agility, all but flinging himself up. He's showing off as much as he's doing anything useful, unable to not enjoy having an audience. He decides he'd rather she stays after all, if only so somebody can see how awesome he is. He grabs a few pine cones and then, in one smooth motion, he doesn't so much jump down as drop down. He doesn't fall. He just drops or even flings himself onto the ground.

He gestures for her to come to him. He wonders if she will. She seems like the type that might want him to go to her. ]

Hey, c'mere! See these? [ He holds up the pine cones. ] They have 'em where I'm from. You can eat the nuts!

exploring!

[torsion]

[ Jill is intense looking. Between the battlesuit that shows off her every curve and the heavy knife at her calf, it's clear she's some kind of special operations agent with how she stalks the land. She's made a point of helping anyone that comes along, even people who seem capable and she does her best not to assume but can't help but be a little more supportive toward people who seem like they may not have a lot of experience in this sort of thing.

She's less messy; the fabric of the battlesuit has dirt slide off it like a silky landslide, but there's soot on her cheek and a tired look in her eyes that give way to her age beneath how vibrant and eager she may seem otherwise. She flips her ponytail over her shoulder and huffs back, almost laughing. ]

It's sort of my lifestyle, actually. Can't say I've done a lot of scavenging outside of Delta Force but I wasn't even my twenties back then. [ Jill frowns, wondering if maybe attempting to fish might be better. ] I can spear fish with a stick if I make it sharp enough. I know how to bone and descale them, but I'm not sure if they're poisonous or not.

[ It might be safer to go with whatever else the island provides. In the meantime, she crouches slightly into a squat and settles that way, as if she's comfortably sitting. It's clear from the suit that every muscle on Jill's body works to its purpose and she's probably getting hungry and needing a hit of protein herself sometime soon. ]

...my name's Jill. Jill Valentine. [ She looks up to the other woman expectantly, but not with the same harshness as she might have had in her voice moments ago. It's clear she's the kind of person that can't help it and is trying her best to be approachable now. ] What's yours?

Arrival (let me know what you're comfortable with spoiler-wise)

[doomcame]

[Taissa is still clutching her own radio in her hand as she treks along the beach, a trail of footprints stretching out behind her in the sand. She hasn't been... wherever she is... very long, but still challenges the sight before her as a possible illusion.]

Shauna? [She calls out to the other woman. She can't entirely trust her eyes, not with what had happened with Sammy, but she also can't turn down the comfort of a familiar face right now. She feels herself running to close the space between them before she knows it and embraces Shauna in a tight hug.]

It's getting so, so much worse. [Her voice shakes a little. Unfortunately for them both, she turns to the non-sleepwalker for answers.] What happened? Where are we?

[There's a pregnant pause but the words "What did I do?" never quite make it out of her mouth. Not yet, at least.]