test drive meme # 35

[hadrielmods]

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 August 25th, and apps are open September 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: GET YOUR RED CAPE READY
[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.

And they sure are big boys. Big and easily angered and ready to run right over you. This time, the Door has brought in Brontos, from the video game Dragon Age.

Brontos are large oxen-like beasts, though more sure-footed due to spending all their time in caves underground. There are domesticated brontos, bred to haul and be ridden and eaten... but these aren't those. These brontos are wild, one and all, and they are skittish and large and perfectly capable of running you over. Maybe just keep your distance.]

SCENARIO TWO: DESERTED
[You're alone. Completely alone, as far as you can tell. Nothing here works - oh, there's food in the stores, sure, but the water's not running, the electricity isn't working. There's not a soul on the streets, where you would normally expect to see at least a few people here and there.

So what will you do? Smash windows and grab food from the stores? (Well, the doors are all unlocked, but hey, who doesn't love smashing windows.) Shout in the streets in hopes someone will hear? Curl into a ball and cry? All valid choices. But then, what will you do when you do find someone, after thinking you were all alone? Someone you like, someone you hate, a complete stranger?

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

S O R R O W

SCENARIO THREE: ONE MORE CHANCE
[You can't stop thinking about the one who got away. They've been on your mind - well, it feels like forever, but maybe it's only been a few days. A few hours. But you can't stop thinking about them and regretting what could have been.

Maybe it's a failed romance. Maybe a broken friendship. Maybe a family member who walked away - or who you walked away from. Even a business partner who things ended poorly with. Whatever it was, you regret how things went down. If only you had another chance, a chance to fix things!

And then, there they are. The person you've been thinking of. What will you do? Beg forgiveness? Make amends? Run away? Make your decision and take action, because as soon as you do it you might realize it was never that person at all. You might have just poured out your heart and begged forgiveness from a complete stranger.]

Comments

[littlemissfutility]

"I don't know," she admits, the corners of her mouth tugging down as she draws back a little. "For a while, I thought it was just--"

The dead. She'd wondered, in lonelier moments, if this was where she was supposed to go instead of Heaven. If she'd sinned enough that being alone in an abandoned town, forever tensed for walkers that didn't come, was going to be her own personal Hell. You can't say that--he doesn't know, you can't just tell him--

If she says anything about her past--his future--that'll screw things up if he's able to get out of here, won't it? That's how it used to work in movies. And she doubts he'll believe it, anyway, that she's genuinely bursting to hug him right now or that, if he were from a little further down the line, he might let her. He's a ghost of the past, too, the same as Carol's little girl and Mama were, but without the illusion.

The pause is just a little too long, but she's hoping Daryl won't call her on it, or maybe it'll just...smooth out, somehow. What he's seeing is more important to him, they can talk about that. "--just me out here. The people I saw...they weren't them. It's not her."

[dadyl]

Daryl suddenly feels like he's drowning in the sinking depths of his confusion and it shows on his face, his expression crumbling. His life has always been so practical, so grounded in brutal reality, even when that reality turned to horror, but this place is something totally different. He feels so unmoored, so adrift in something he can't scrape his way out of with pure determination and grit. If he notices the pause in Beth's explanation he doesn't know what to do with it, and when he looks back at Sophia, trying to tell himself Beth must be wrong, she isn't there.

She isn't fucking there.

It's all too much. Daryl sits down hard in the dusty street, at such a loss that he feels angry tears burning sharp and sudden in his eyes. "SOPHIA!" he screams one last time, so much furious futility in his voice, like he already knows it's pointless to yell after someone that was never here, but he still can't accept it. His head is spinning and he wipes at his tears angrily with the back of his wrist, ashamed to the point of mortification that he's crying in front of someone over his own failures.

He sniffs hard, trying to contain himself and failing. "So who'd you see?" His voice is breaking in that high pitched way it does when he's upset, and he's just so tired of trying to figure out where he is, of trying to figure out what is going on. How he got here, where the rest of the group is, how he can get back... If Beth doesn't know either then he might as well get her to tell him what she does know.

[littlemissfutility]

It's the kind of pain he usually doesn't let other people see, that bone-deep weariness and fear that gets all tangled up with what he should do instead of what he can do. Beth knows it from seeing it before--he'd blamed himself for the prison, for her daddy's death, for everything he could reach to heap onto his shoulders--and from feeling it herself. They're so powerless so often, it starts to weigh on all of their hearts. If I could just get this right, if I could just do this one thing...

Beth crouches down beside him, paying no attention to the dirty road. (They've been filthy before, and they'll be filthy again, right?) She's silent for a moment or two after his question makes it into the air, swallowing hard, but it's not fair to leave him alone in his anguish. Even though she doesn't want to say it--and can't quite figure out in that moment if it's because it hurts or because it feels safer kept to herself--she makes herself. "My mom. Like she was before, not..."

Not what she became. Not what she was when Beth had gone to her and she'd made that unforgettable rattling noise, trying to drag her down and devour her. Tentatively, she sets her hand on Daryl's arm again, torn between offering comfort and getting an earful of misplaced rage.

WHOOPS what is brevity (cry-cons for everyone!)

[dadyl]

Daryl doesn't remember seeing her mom at the farm, though no one had been inclined to share much with him anyway. He was just the drifter, despite the fact that he never left them (not willingly anyway, not until this point), the one that no one was inclined to trust, despite how reliable he'd tried to be. How useful he'd wanted to be. Now, he thinks it's pathetic how much he'd tried to earn his keep with that batch of strangers. No one except Carol would really talk to him, but he was pretty sure that was only because she knew he was the best chance she had of finding her daughter again in those Georgia woods. God knew Rick and Shane weren't going to get the job done, with all that was boiling between them. Why else would anyone want to be around Daryl, other than because he could do something for them that they couldn't do themselves?

But he couldn't just leave her out there, and his singular focus is making things here even more confusing and upsetting.

Still, he nods a little, looking at the ground. He doesn't need to ask Beth for clarification, not after what's she's just said. It must have happened before they got there, he assumes. Before Carl was shot. It probably happened just like it had for so many others; every walker in the world was related to somebody, and every survivor had walkers they knew. He's still trying not to think about his brother, one-handed, wounded, and abandoned in the city. Merle is probably dead and among them now because Daryl was too weak to stay and look for him, and that stings almost as bad as giving up a little girl for dead, too. He'd been too weak to leave the group that seemed half-inclined to take him in then, too weak to find the girl that group had then counted on him to find. It's all running through his head now, it's all too much...

...and he jumps when she suddenly touches him, all his muscles tensing at the unexpected gesture. His head snaps up, a frightened glower on his face as he pulls his arm away like he's been burned, but it breaks him halfway out of his deep well of self-pity. Daryl eyes Beth as suspiciously as though she's just pulled a weapon on him, the kindness and empathy being aimed at him feeling like another cut to his ego. Weaklings need to be comforted by sweet little girls. Pussies. He's supposed to be taking care of people like her, not the other way around.

Still blinking away angry tears, embarrassment leading quickly to new boiling fury, Daryl forces himself to his feet to put some space between them and for a few moments he can look anywhere but at her. "It ain't safe out here," he chokes out, water and shame and edginess in his voice. "Ain't seen any walkers, but there's... weirder stuff around. We should move." But his eyes flick to Beth again and how different she looks starts to sink in for the first time, another confused frown bunching his brow together. "How'd you get those?" Meaning her scars. He'd only just seen her yesterday...

[littlemissfutility]

He looks at her as blankly as if she'd said she'd seen the president--like he hadn't realized she'd had a mother, let alone one she might miss. And she wonders then, what's he even remember? He knows what happened to Sophia, doesn't he?

If he doesn't, that's why he doesn't know about Mama. That means it's Daryl from back when the farm was still theirs, before Shane went crazy and ripped the barn doors open and made Beth and Maggie and their father see the truth about the walkers: that there was nothing there worth saving, only worth burying and missing. It's a Daryl she barely remembers, one she definitely doesn't know how to act around. He doesn't know how they lost everything and got drunk and ate peanut-butter sandwiches and...anything, he doesn't know anything about the good and bad the world's going to give them.

He doesn't even know about Judith.

But he sure as hell doesn't wanna be touched, so her hand goes back on instinct, like he smacked it away. Standing up, she wraps her arms around her middle--half crossing them, half hugging herself--and keeps a step between them. If Daryl wants her to keep back, then she will.

"I don't think they have walkers here," she says, quiet but certain. That anger is something she remembers good and well, but she wants it to keep from bubbling over. He does stupid things when he's pissed, mean, desperate things, and she's not going to be part of that.

Before she can try and run the conversation in a different direction, though, he does, and it trips her up. The cuts might be healing--she'll have to find a way to rip the stitches out in a week or two--but the memory of where they came from hasn't. She can taste bile at the thought of telling him about Grady. "Got in some trouble. They had to stitch me up."