dankmemes | Test Drive Meme #30

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!test drive

Test Drive Meme #30

Welcome to Hadriel's test drive, and thank you again for your interest in the game! As always, our reserves page is here, and our applications page is here! Reserves open March 25th, and apps are open April 1st. Please remember that there is an app cap of 20 apps.

Two quick points here as well:
1. Any thread made in Hadriel's test drive will be accepted as the sole Action Log sample in the application.
2. All threads made in the test drive can be considered game canon, either through handwaving or through a shared mental experience while coming through the Door!

Test drives will be broken up into specific god mini-events, during which your characters can see how well they fare under the watchful eye of one of the gods. Choose wisely or just simply pick 'em all, and have fun!

F E A R

SCENARIO ONE: CHOMP CHOMP
[The Door brings in all that is chaotic and evil in the world. This may include you, may include the person next to you... and may include the monster behind you.

Or sticking out of that pipe, even. Yes, that's right, the Door seems to have brought in an infestation of piranha plants, which may be familiar to you, since they've been in nearly every Mario game.

Piranha plants are large orb-shaped plants with big ol' teeth, all the better for biting you with. They can't walk around, but their stalks can stretch pretty far, so they'll be perfectly happy to stretch out and bite the heck out of you if you get too close - and some of them are good at hiding. You might not see them until it's too late. Luckily, while the biting is pretty bad, it's just about all they can do. You'll be fine, as long as you keep your distance.]

SCENARIO TWO: THEY'RE COMING TO GET YOU
[You've got a scratchy throat, a little cough, a general feeling of awfulness. It sucks being sick, doesn't it? Maybe you can find someone to get you some juice, or hold your hand, or just be sympathetic to how crappy you feel. After all, no one likes being sick. But how can you know that person is actually trying to help you? They have an untrustworthy look in their eye, and you're pretty sure you just heard them mutter something about leaving your body in a ditch.

Or maybe you're the one trying to take care of a sick friend. You have only the best intentions, but they don't seem interested in cooperating at all. In fact, it seems like they think you're trying to hurt them! What the hell? And here you were trying to be a good person for once. Oh shit - did you just sneeze? This isn't going to end well.

This is a mini version of our Flu Season event this month.]

H O P E

SCENARIO THREE: FONDLY YOURS
[When you stepped out of the house this morning, you found a small bouquet of flowers on the doorstep, just waiting for you. They're just the sort you like - your favorite kind, in fact - so they must be meant for you. But who could they be from?

Of course, there must be someone you wish they were from. A lover, a long-term flirtation, your best friend thinking of you. Or maybe you're hoping for something else: an apology from someone who hurt you, or an olive branch from and enemy. Whoever you're hoping they're from, well - the only way to know is ask, right?

Unless you'd rather leave a secret bouquet for them, instead.]

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Carolina had started going without her suit, although it was more out of necessity than by choice. It was a second skin to her, something that she did feel comfortable in. Of course, her little brief retirement had gotten her more used to being without it but overall, her padawan training at being lazy had only gone so far.

As it were, it wasn't Carolina who had left it, yet the call did have a frown forming over her features as she glanced back in the direction of the person calling out, not understanding what her problem was. Yet even as she started to respond, her brain was clicking pieces in to place. "Who do I think I am?"

There was a certain roughness to her voice, a less than impressed expression on her face, yet she paused again, stilling.

Tex paused. She hadn't thought much of seeing a redhead walking down her street until the woman turned around. In fact, it really wasn't until the woman spoke that Tex recognized her. It was Carolina.

Tex's expression went from hard and annoyed to something softer, but there was an inscrutable quality to her expression now, as she tried not to show how unsure she was. She hated to seem unsure. This should be impossible, but so should Tex arriving here in the first place.

"The flowers," Tex finally explained, reaching out and dropping them back on the porch. "I know you."

She tilted her head a little, waiting to see if Carolina would recognize her from her voice alone, or if she would need more prompting than that.

There was uncertainty on her own face, as already her mind was filling in the puzzle, although there wasn't just one answer to what she was seeing. Carolina had learned that much about this place, that it could be any number of things. Look at Epsilon, for starters, with a human body, even though he had been deconstructed back in their galaxy, and Sharkface- Ephemera - still alive and breathing here, even though he had taken his last breath on Chorus.

Yet her words turned her attention to the blossoms, not having noticed them before. They weren't from Carolina, if that was what she had thought, as one, she hadn't even known that she was here, if she really was here at all and not something that was happening around this place. It was a guess, one based on the various thoughts going through her head and on what she had learned since coming here. "... Texas?"

"Yes," she said, a bit softer. "It's me."

She hadn't stepped entirely out of the doorway and onto the porch but she does so now, letting the door shut behind her. She's uncertain what's happening, whether this place is some kind of afterlife, as she had been suspecting, but the presence of Carolina seems to confirm it. Carolina is dead. Tex saw her fall with her own two eyes—or at least, her own optic sensors.

After this there's nothing really to do but wait for Carolina to react, to perhaps reject her violently, as she'd always tended to do back where they came from. Unconsciously, she sets a folded hand on her chest and takes a deep breath.

There were still aspects of Carolina that remained the same. She could be competitive and she still did like to be in charge. She was strong willed and she was ambitious. Yet, somewhere along the way, the lines had started to soften. She could laugh with others, and laugh at herself. She trusted and cared for others, for family. If she fell down, she knew that they would give her a hand up.

There was the army of robotic Tex drones, but that hadn't been her. Not since that day on the cliff. She's gone, just like many other Freelancers, although Texas never did know that Carolina had survived, at least as far as she knew. She had been good at covering her tracks, not wanting to be found, and there were some regrets. Not that having them could really change anything.

She can still be violent, but it wasn't like before. There was a shift in her posture, but if anything it was an awkwardness and an unease merged together. York. Texas. Even Illinois. Faces that she had never thought to see again. "It's... been a while."

She nods.

"For me it has," she says.

She lowers the arm that was on her chest and decides to come forward, off the porch, climbing down the short flight of steps. She doesn't quite know what the change in Carolina's stance had meant, but she's not shying away from it. If Carolina wants to hit her, well then, she can hit her. Tex had screwed everything up; she deserves that much. She won't take anything more than that, but at least that, she knows she's due.

Now they're standing pretty much face-to-face. Tex pauses again, shakes her head a little, and glances off to the side. She's not one to spend a lot of time exploring feelings—things happened the way they happened and there's not a lot of point expounding on how that effects them in the aftermath. But she figures she ought to say this much. If this is the afterlife, well, maybe it counts for something.

"I fucked up," she says, not able to quite look Carolina in the face. "I figure you'd want to hear me say that. I fucked the whole thing up. And I, uh... I'm sorry."

Truth be told, Carolina's not entirely certain how to react. Of all the situations she might have found herself it, this one has not been a possibility. Wouldn't be a possibility, if she wasn't here. There's much that she's learned since that day by the cliff, an understanding now of why things had been the way they had been, of the lies and deceit. Her anger, ambition, and jealousy had drive her, blinded her. She'd held on to that for too long, until she had come to realize with the help of her friends, her family, that nothing good would come from remaining consumed.

They aren't words that Carolina expects either, and the blink of surprise comes quite clear across her features. It could almost be a joke, as if they were talking about fucking up, Carolina could bury herself beneath a mountain of them. She'd let her emotions cloud her from the truth, and it was only years later that she had started to get a complete picture. Then again, she wouldn't have accepted anyone's words back then. To her, York had betrayed her and Tex and betrayed them all.

"You don't-" She halts, working on her words, on what to say. The resentment and animosity has started to dissipate, and she could easily recall how she had felt entering the portal, watching them all die again, and the fact that there was nothing that she could do about it. "I know. About Project Freelancer. About the Director. ... about what was happening."

That makes sense. Carolina must have learned about it after arriving here. Which would also explain why Carolina isn't angry enough to try striking out at her, or to yell at her. Tex has been bracing herself for a blow, but now she relaxes—slightly, anyway.

"That doesn't mean I didn't need to apologize," Tex says, guessing at what Carolina had interrupted herself from saying. "Probably makes it so you understand it even better, actually."

There are some things that Carolina certainly has learned since coming here, but that not one of them. It's something she's learned the hard way, although Tex has no way of knowing that. She has no way of knowing that Carolina's fall hadn't been her demise, that her grappling hook had saved her. That she had let everyone and anyone think that she was dead, and most had died thinking that.

She could laugh, almost does. Had someone once told her that she'd be having a some what civilized talk with Texas, and that she'd be apologizing to her, Carolina would have scoffed. It's easy enough to look back and know where she went wrong, at how she had been so driven to be the best, to beat her, to know where she herself had screwed everything up. Family should have come first, but it had gotten lost somewhere along the line until Carolina had forgotten all meaning of it.

"I understand a lot, now." Like how she should have been a leader but instead she had let everyone down. There is a faint quiver on her lips, a glimpse of a Carolina before ambition had eaten away at her. "They made me see it. The Reds and the Blues. Wash. ... Epsilon."

Tex's eyebrows go up a little. She wouldn't have expected to hear those words, those names, out of Carolina's mouth. She tilts her head slightly, looking at Carolina a bit more directly than she had been.

Tex herself knows how unlikely this conversation happening is. Carolina had never given Tex much of a chance after her arrival in the Project, and over time Tex had come to a point where she doesn't really blame her for that. Tex hadn't really taken the rivalry seriously until the training room, and she hadn't understood it well until finding Connie's evidence. She'd blown her chance at anything like this during the break-in of the Mother of Invention. And then Carolina had died, and that had been that.

"There were a lot of Reds and Blues," she responds. Wash and Epsilon, though, there's only one of them. Tex's expression changes a little, her brow drawing closer together, and she frowns slightly. "So Wash died, too, then," she adds. "Not long ago, I guess."

Subtle changes, maybe. Older, but not by that much. The weight of the world still on her shoulders, but it was a different weight now. She's found a place for herself again, although she's still a soldier, a killer- she just tries not to be unless she absolutely has to. It's a stain that can never be washed clean. That much she knows.

"There are, but you know the ones. Caboose. Tucker. Sarge. Grif..." She could go on, go down the list, but she lets that sink in. "No. We've been close a few times, but Wash is still alive."

Although his actual status isn't something that Carolina knows. Being shot could mean any number of things. That he's made it through it what matters. They had stopped Temple, stopped his plan, and they hadn't lost anyone in the process. Not that she's not kicking herself over Wash, knowing that she should have kept a better eye on him, that he had been worse off than her.

"It was my grappling hook." She supplies that, letting Tex fill in the blanks. The cliff had been her death, but it hadn't killed her. She's smart enough to put all the pieces together, that Carolina is still alive, that she'd ended up with the same group of people that Tex had.

Tex lets that sink in, angling her head away again, looking back into the street. Carolina had lived. Carolina had lived and had done everything she could to evade Tex afterward. She can't blame Carolina for that, can't blame Carolina for playing dead all that time. Even when Tex had been absorbed into the Meta, no one among them had had any idea Carolina had still been alive.

Nothing in Carolina's tone implies she's got any kind of ill will toward the Reds and Blues; to the contrary, she seems to imply that they had helped her. Tex licks her lips.

"I get the feeling there's a history there," she says. "I'd like to hear more about it, if you're willing to explain."

But if not...

"I thought this was some kind of afterlife," she adds. "Where I came from, I was in the middle of dying. Me and the AIs in the Meta, all of us. Wash was wiping us out with an Emp."

Texas isn't the only one on that list. Carolina had avoided everyone that she had ever known. The only reason that she had made herself known was because she had been ready to move against the Director. Even then, she hadn't gone looking for anyone that she had known, anyone that might have known the truth like Tex had, or even York. Things might have been different if she had. A lot of people might still be alive.

Yet she also knows that there is a possibility that she might not have met everyone that she has met, that she might not have been there to help on Chorus. One doesn't outweigh the other, but the past isn't something you can change. You have to live with it, as well as you can, every single day.

There might be a hint of emotion that plays across her lips. There's quite a bit now. She can recall first meeting them, and how much it has changed now. Then, she would have killed them if they had gotten in her way, and now she'd die for them. "It's... a long story."

Although her tone doesn't say that she's opposed to it. She's just laying it all out there. She could give the cliff notes version, although even that might take some time. She nods, hands shoving in to her pockets, her mind turning to Epsilon and his passing... "I heard about that."

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Test Drive Meme #30

fondly-ish

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