test drive meme #11

[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 July 25th, and apps are open August 1st.

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: WORKING TITLE
[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.

Watch out as you explore the streets of Hadriel, because you're not alone, and there's always something lurking in the shadows, waiting for the perfect chance to swarm around you and chow down. This time, the Door has brought in a few Working Joes, from the Alien: Isolation video game series.

Once simply androids meant for mundane jobs, working Joes have had their programming altered to isolate and eliminate threats onboard their ship- which they now believe to be Hadriel. Super strong, yet slow and plodding, an android may ask you for identification before throttling you when you don't have the right answer. They are quite sturdy and difficult to destroy without the right tools. Have fun!]


H O P E

SCENARIO TWO: BEAUTIFICATION DUTY
[The city has always looked a little drab, but now with some tools from Hope, it's up to you guys to spruce it up a bit! Your character will find themselves in a shop filled with various paints, home improvement tools, window stickers, streamers, and various other items and tools used to improve the appearance of the neighborhood.

You're encouraged to add your own little flair to the project in order to improve living standards and make Hope the happiest god in the pantheon. So, what will you do? Paint a mural? Sweep up some rubble? Install a skylight! The cave is your oyster.

This is a mini version of our Extinction v2 event this month!]


S O R R O W

SCENARIO THREE: CRY ME A RIVER
[When you wake up in the morning, something feels... off. It feels like you just watched 20 ASPCA commercials in a row and then topped it all off with the first ten minutes of Up. You're beaten down, depressed, upset by all the horrific acts and trauma in the world, and it's enough to make you want to cry.

Turn on the waterworks, because Hadriel is about to have a shortage of tissues and everyone's getting dehydrated. You might run into your neighbor crying while you're scavenging for food, or you might just find that one whole asshole in the entire movie who isn't affected.

Either way, it's time to get some hugs, some kleenex, and maybe a little bit of chocolate. Happy... crying?]

Comments

river tam / firefly / open to all

[enchangement]

[ o - n - e // hope.exe ]

There's a room full of paint and a girl with bare feet and straggles of paint-filled brown hair across her shoulders. Behind her, a path of blue and purple footprints leads through the door and out to the street, where the building is awash dynamic murals full of stars, in various shades.

She's tapping her foot and her finger against her chin in the same erratic rhythm, addressing you without turning around:

"Oranges and reds next? Or greens and browns? She can't decide."

[ t - w- o // sorrow.404 ]

People are crying and the girl is...not. Instead she tilts her head at others as they pass, patting one on the shoulder and giving another one a bit of cloth to blow their nose in before continuing along.

When she sees you she just shrugs.

"Being sad is exhausting."

hope

[whichend]

[ Arya follows the footprints to the paint-filled room. She wants to make sure that's, in fact, paint and not monster blood. It smells like paint, but stronger -- paint in Westeros is made of more natural stuff. Dyes are expensive.

Arya doesn't expect to find the mural. It's a strange, striking sight, and not just because of the purple stars -- it's never occurred to Arya to paint a wall like this before. But she likes it. ]

Oranges and reds. [ Arya answers, trying to seem sure of herself. ] Greens and browns are land colors, but you're painting the sky.

[enchangement]

[ River gives a sharp nod, gathering up buckets and jars of various shades in fire colors, balancing them on top of each other and in her arms as she turns around and grins at Arya like she's an old friend. ]

Do you want to join? Or you could tell her of the monsters and the men here, it's all new and news alike.

[whichend]

[ Arya chews her lip, uncertain. She'd like to join, but she'd likely ruin the painting. Arya knows she destroys, not creates. That's why she's spent most of the event killing monsters instead of beautifying the city.

But she could manage to paint a few stars, right? A few little dots. ]

Yes. Thank you. [ Arya tries for a smile. ] I can do both at once. [ Arya dips a finger in the red and starts finger-painting some stars. ] I've been with the monsters, mostly. I hunt them for food, because you can't trust the meat here. But there are always monsters. They come in through the Door.

[enchangement]

[ In River's all important opinion, there is no ruining the mural. Once art is made, it's art, to be taken or left behind to be found again, but there is no right or wrong.

Not that she's thinking about that. She's thinking about the red on the tip of Arya's finger, and dips her own in the same pot after. ]

Girls for bleeding, girls for blood.

Didn't we come through the Door? Being a monster is not a new thing. Hunting them is. What's wrong with the meat? Did they drug it?

[ She's just full of questions, and sweeping gestures with both her fingerpaints and hair. Now, there are meteors and bleeding stars in the sky, shining against the blue black. ]

[whichend]

[ Arya has never thought of the people who come here as monsters...but River isn't exactly wrong. Especially given the things Arya has done. ]

They did. Those who ate of the poisoned meat turned into creatures hungry for only human flesh. [ Arya's expression darkens, her strokes becoming wider and more forceful. ] My housemate was afflicted. I had to burn the kitchen. Never again. I'm not letting it happen twice.

[enchangement]

Reavers. [ River's nod turns sage. ] They make others like them. In the punishment, they break the brain until it shatters in. Two sides, one coin; hers isn't shattering to grasp at others and pull them other but it is collapsing and birthing itself again, like a dark star.

[ She sighs and considers Arya from the corner of her eye. ]

Did the Gods set him back to rights again?

hope.

[torrefied]

Mello is only passing by on his way to his next whitewashing appointment, laying the foundation on the sides of buildings for other people with more talent at art to do - whatever it is they're planning on doing, he doesn't know and doesn't really care, either. The only reason he's participating in this effort at all is so he can get his phone back from the City Guard. (It's a long story, full of blood and death and regrets.)

But he stops when he hears the girl's voice, and looks around - he's the only one here, so she must be talking to him. OK, fine. He'll answer. It's not like he's in a hurry to go slap paint on walls.

"Brown would make the picture look like mud," is his helpful input.

[enchangement]

"If there's too much of it," she agrees. "With oranges, or greens, or reds, or golds, as the shadows, the murky unseen darkness, then it could work, but they're all stars outside. She'll pick another canvas for darker things, drier things. Deserts and shadows. The monsters under the beds, beneath the eyelids."

Suddenly the girl vaults backwards, does a handstand. There's shorts on underneath her dress, and thin but muscular paint-covered legs to go with. She walks on her hands, turning in a circle until she's looking at Mello upside down.

"What would you be doing besides?"

[torrefied]

There's something Mello finds deeply unsettling about the way the girl talks - an abstract quality to her speech pattern while still containing a thread of coherence to follow, like a riddle Mello wasn't aware he was being asked and for which he isn't prepared to come up with an answer. It makes him feel far less intelligent than he actually is, and he doesn't like that feeling, but he is intrigued by it, because so few people have ever been able to make him feel intellectually outclassed.

Also, people don't typically do handstands in casual conversation - or any conversation, for that matter. Mello raises an eyebrow as he watches the girl maneuver her way around.

"Besides talking to you? Painting a wall." Or, if it were up to his discretion, literally anything else. Sifting through the data he's been able to collect over the weeks he's been here, looking for patterns and clues as to something to be done for getting back to where he's supposed to be.

"Doesn't that give you a headache?"

[enchangement]

"Besides painting the wall." He doesn't want to, that much is clear (to her anyway) though the details of why are muddled and she's not terribly interested in them anyway. His mind makes her curious, the same way her speech makes him unsettled.

River lifts one hand off the ground in a shrug, extending her hand out and then lifting it up briefly before putting it back down to stabilize herself.

"Everything gives her a headache. This is better."

[torrefied]

"There are a lot of things I could be doing besides painting a wall." Which doesn't exactly answer the question of what he would be doing. Mello barely had time to adjust to being in Hadriel before Near arrived and set what little footing he'd been able to find completely askew, and not long after that, Sharon da Silva cast a nightmare reality over the entire city and Mello found himself on the run and in hiding for his method of trying to stop her.

Mello tips his head to the side as he studies her increasingly strange movements. "Do you always talk about yourself in third person?" She could also genuinely have a dissociated view of herself, of course. Asking is the natural way to discern which is correct.

[enchangement]

River rolls her eyes before springing back to her feet and shaking out her hands.

"You want to ask her why she talks in circles that are mathematically correct but jagged to the naked eye while you speak in spirals that wind upwards or downwards depending on the source of your sought out truth. What is always? Since the beginning? Or since the fissure?"

There's an answer, Mello. Somewhat.

[scarletcast]

[ She likes this house -- the walls. There is something colossal in the stars, the hum of the painter's presence in it. Something brutally alive. Wanda clasps her hands behind her back and comes in, careful to step over the footprints. ]

Orange and red. I like what you have done with the outside.

[enchangement]

[ At Wanda's suggestion River gives a nod, sharp with her hair flying in front of her face, and laughs as she gathers up several containers of paint, in yellows and reds and oranges. They go stacked on top of one another, with one on her head for good measure. ]

Harder to paint the going's on, the in-between. There's a color to it, for you, for her, not so much. Just spider spindle thinly webbing between the planets and gravity between the atoms never touching but still colliding.

Would paint the halo of red, points each for points of the star. Red with yellow shadows. Better than blue.

Better than blue.

[scarletcast]

[ Laughter like water bubbles. It surrounds her, buoyed, Wanda's eyes briefly flicker closed, listening. It is not flying as they move through stars, but suspension. Small, against infinity. ]

[ She floats. ]

Red is my favourite.

[ The jacket gave her away. ]

[enchangement]

It suits.

[ River grins as she makes her way past the floating woman (she has a Name, and it echoes like someone listening, is she listening?) towards a blank space near the corner of the wall. Here, she draws a flaming star, reaching out towards one of the blue and broken ones, a thin electric smoke line of red between them, blurring the blue into a rich violet. ]

Hated blue, for a while. Skies and sun, dangerous, both, exposed and raw. Too many eyes to see, too many fingers...

But it's all part, isn't it?

And now she's here. And they're not, unless they're in the Gods. Are the Gods real?

[scarletcast]

They are.

[ Powerful enough, not strong. Wanda follows the images of sky and sun, endless bright blue that seems to curve and pour away. Each thread seems spider like one second and the other violin strings. Move carefully. Slowly. Don't startle her. Feet, on the ground. ]

I'm listening.

[ Apology is writ in the whisper, this is one mind she feels she shouldn't be. ]

Sorrow

[hippocratical]

Simon has been carrying grief for so long, grief and worry, that they are more like limbs than reactions, appendages instead of emotions. He isn't crying for the added weight. He's just...tired.

Some of the exhaustion fades at the sight of River, as it always does, to be replaced by a moment of peaky anxiety which fades into relief, watching her as she continues to caretake. Compassion, sympathy, understanding. She's still got those, he sees, and every reminder of who she used to be, who she still is, makes all that grief bearable.

He stands still, watching as she approaches, and the smile he gives her is understanding, quiet. One of the smiles that are just for her, the ones he finds even when he can't smile for anything else.

"I know. But sometimes it's what people need. How are you feeling?"

[enchangement]

"Everyone's crying, tired of crying, tired of suffering but suffering is proof of life. How do you make it better? Sorry it's broken sorry she's broken sorry everything is so hard..."

She's worried about these people, their emotional capacity manipulated beyond their control. She's worried about herself, falling in rhythm with everyone else and then falling out of step quickly enough to make her stomach turn on a coin.

Mostly she's worried about Simon, who has spent so much time these last few years worried about her, and mourning what was taken from her, that he might not have noticed today is different.

River worries at the skin from her bottom lip between her teeth and shrugs. How are you feeling is a loaded question even on the best of days, and today is far from the best.

"Do you want tea?"

[hippocratical]

"You aren't broken, River. There's nothing here for you to be sorry about." She's right. His universe centers on her, revolves around those twists and turns her mind forces her mood down, following roads only she can take. All he can do is observe, is comfort, is be the gravitational center that she comes back to. He hasn't hadn't noticed something is different. There's just too much grief to begin with.

He does notice something is wrong with her, that despite the compassion she's showing everyone else River herself is tense, upset, worried about something he doesn't understand. She's falling again into that stream-of-consciousness banter, and that never bodes well. All that he catches is what he's looking for. Broken. No, she's not broken. And if she is, it's not in the way she thinks.

Her offer, her question is mundane enough that he grasps for it like a lifeline. Maybe the ritual of making tea, having a cup, will calm her down enough that she comes back into orbit, so she can explain to him what's happening. He nods, reaches out, lightly squeezes her upper arm. "Tea sounds good. Let's go back to the house."

[enchangement]

It's an old argument; River obviously doesn't agree that she isn't broken, knowing that she can barely manage what most would consider a coherent train of thought on good days. Argument number 5, in her mind - the recurring ones get numbers, makes it easier.

Simon listens, but sometimes he doesn't hear. Or he hears, but sometimes doesn't listen. She recognizes it in herself, too, that instinct to power through because the problem is not as clear as the solution. Because they're smarter than everyone, why can't they figure themselves out too?

"Because the mirrors are inverted," she murmurs to herself, "and the images are unclear."

Tea, though. Simon reaches out for her and instinctively River folds into him, wrapping her arms around his body before pulling away. "Race you!"

Of course, being the brat she is, she's already broken out into a run.

[hippocratical]

It isn't that. Yes, she's unstable. She can't always control what she is, how she is; they stole that ability from her, stripped it away with a scalpel and there's nothing he can do to undo that. But broken? He won't let himself think that word anymore. She's different. She's changed. But she's still his sister, and whatever she's become, she will still be River. She just needs help stabilizing. He still thinks words like 'fix' but more and more, since Early, since he realized just what she hears, he's tried to stop. It doesn't help. She's as frustrated as he is, he knows. Moreso, maybe, because he knows what it's like to have someone not understand, to have them unable to keep up, and it can only be worse for her.

But then she does things like that, wrapping strong, thin arms around him and squeezing with a strength he forgets she has, and there's no more frustration and distance and worry. There's only a brother and a sister and a memory alive again, both of them children, and he's laughing as he chases after her, sprinting across the barren ground. "Piànzi! You didn't say go!"

She wins, of course. She always wins.

1

[krasnayapautina]

"I think..." Natasha pauses a moment, thinking about the question and also looking at the woman who had just asked it without turning. "Oranges and reds." It seems like it would match better, and, well, Natasha's a little biased as she favours those colours anyway. "Though I suppose you could also paint a planet somewhere in here with the greens and browns." A rather Earth-like planet, probably, considering the two colours.

"It's really pretty, what you've painted so far." She has to compliment the work so far, of course. She's always liked paintings, pictures like these -- it gives a wide open, free, kind of feeling. At least it does to her; probably not everyone feels the same way like that.

[enchangement]

So many people here are from Earth-that-Was that River can't just ignore it. But here's a woman, dangerous and beautiful and something in River is always drawn to that. As if her future goes, here, you can pull it together. You can be this, too.

"Thank you." Suddenly shy, River ducks her head before grabbing a few pots of red, and orange, plus gold. Her painting needs stars and maybe ones that shoot across the sky. "Easier to paint the way it feels. We need the sky here, and it's dangerous to be caved in."