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

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!