♥ October 2019 TEST DRIVE MEME

[hugtopiamods]

October (Lasohm) Test Drive Meme
Premise ♥ Setting ♥ Rules ♥ FAQ ♥ Mod Contact

Havenwell is normally a beautiful city - all tall spires and pure white stone glistening with gold against a blue sky. Now, it's still quite lovely, but it's marred. The wall that surrounds the city has a large glimmering hole broken through the stone and the buildings are missing bits and pieces here and there. The city is still reeling from the aftermath of its siege when a new set of souls are drawn to its shore. Good luck, new arrivals; and please excuse all the dust.

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❥ PROMPT I: Buddy System

With all the changes and the fear of a secondary attack lingering, the natives are a lot more protective of their newest arrivals. When new characters begin to appear at the temples, they receive the welcome speech, get their communicators and the simple map of the city, and a warning to stay away from the walls. Then they get taken to the front of the temple by a helpful robotic priest. Rather than turn the newcomers loose right away, they pull someone seemingly at random off the street and push the two people together with a cheerful, "It's dangerous to go alone, so please show our newest resident around. Please be buddies!" They wait until they're certain the pair is going to be moving off together before going back inside.

They try to place a new arrival with one of those who previously arrived, but who can keep track of all that, right? Characters may find themselves thrown together with an actual veteran or with another new arrival who only came here a day or even just an hour before them! Good luck helping each other out, offworlders, and don't lose your buddy!

❥ PROMPT II: The Havenwell Archives

Lasohm is another month that belongs to Ohma and after such a vicious attack, a small group of citizens decide that it might be great for the offworlders to help with something important to the feline god. These citizens are marked with a sash with the sign of a quill on it, a decidedly antique symbol considering how technologically advanced the people are. They hand out fliers to any who will take them, offering a small amount of Dora in compensation to any who will help the Havenwell Archives repair, catalogue, and restore any books damaged by the attack.

The Archives is a large building in the south and its doors, which have been sealed shut until now, are slightly ajar, allowing people entry. Head to the Archives and you'll be greeted by one of a handful of robotic citizens, all wearing that quill-emblazoned sash, and directed to a small room where you and other offworlders are put to the task of reassembling history texts that have fallen into disrepair or reviewing work that earlier offworlders completed, fixing any glitches that might occur in the text. Most of the writing is illegible, but it seems that these books are important to the Archives for more than just the information contained within. As you work, you might notice that talking and sharing information about yourself or engaging in physical contact near these books with the other people in your room makes the text on your pages a little more legible, a little easier to read and understand, and easier to fix.

❥ PROMPT III: Virtual Research

After the attack, every part of the city is on repair duty and the means the Entertainment District as well. As new arrivals wander the city, they might be called into one of the numerous Virtual Reality cafes. These cafes vary in layout, but most have areas for the natives to plug directly into the machines and other areas which have older looking virtual reality helmets that allow flesh bodied people experience the games. For those who need assistance with their sensory inputs, basic options like audio descriptions of visual scenes, enhanced audio and descriptive speech, closed captions, and crude mobility chairs are available. A handful of cafes have other options like direct visual or audio cortex stimulation to simulate vision or hearing, or suspension tanks to allow simulated movement, but these are currently unavailable due to damage.

All of these facilities are, unfortunately, under repair. The direct plug-in systems are easier for the robot natives to fix because they can do the most important part of it - testing - by themselves. But for the helmets and other interface systems, they need your help. Naturally, they'll pay you for the work, but they need the offworlders to play the available games and record any areas where they find glitches. Playing with a partner increases your chances of finding and fixing any issues, so feel free to log in for free for once and test any of the following games:

• Big Bass Fishing
The beautiful lake has blue-green waters surrounded by forest and rocky, reedy shores. You and your companion are on a small single-motor fishing boat and you have fishing gear - two poles in the water. As the game starts up a read-out announces the objective: Catch the largest fish before the time limit ends. What's the time limit? ...Well, that's your first glitch because it reads as static. Might as well start fishing though, right? It doesn't take long to catch a few regular sized fish, nothing too exciting, and then? You get the big one - it bows your fishing rod nearly in half as you reel it up. The fish leaps into the air and you realize this is your next glitch because the fish hangs there - the size of a minivan - and yells, "BIG. BASS. FISHING. ATTACK." The fish slaps its fins and tails at the boat and now you and your fishing companion better fight this fish or you'll end up in the lake or worse.


• A (un)Familiar Experience
Jump into the life of the temple familiars and see life from their perspective! Choose the temple, any temple is fine, and be transformed into a fledgling rainbow dragon, a purple mouse, a white raven, or a blue feline. You're free to move about the virtual confines of the temples and, in fact, you can even interact with other familiars in their temples - who may be other players in this game. Play, climb, try to get your fledgling wings to fly, tumble about with the other mice, enjoy your simple life as an animal! --or you would if you weren't an insane size. Rather than being a small mouse, you're the size of a horse. That fledgling rainbow dragon? About the size of a fly. The building sizes are off, too - one might have door that's 30 feet tall, but a ceiling that's only 12. Everything else seems fine, but those sizes? Well, you better figure out how to get around that.


• Robot Crossing
Logging in with another character will net you a little farm and a variety of games to choose from:
1. Pick and harvest as many Aellyn vegetables and fruits as you can before the timer runs out! The more you pick, the better your score. Work together with your partner to clear the field in any way you can. Strangely, once you finish clearing a tree or a field row of their bounty, they seem to magically refill when you turn your back. Strangely, when the timer runs out? It flashes 00:00 and the game...doesn't? Stop? In fact, the fruits and vegetables just keep multiplying and multiplying and if you don't hurry up you might just get buried in them all!
   
2. With a partner, use the giant slingshot to launch comically large fruits into a garden patch of other colored fruits. Match a line of 3 or more similarly shaped fruits to clear it from the field. The more fruits you can clear, the higher your score - aka welcome to Fruit Crush. Stack lines of 6 or more to get shining clear diamond fruits that clear the entire row and snag yourself some bonus points. Or they should, but whenever you clear away a matching set, the fruits explode, sending fruit bits and juice everywhere - most notably on you and your partner. Still, the game is going on and it looks like it won't stop until you finish, so good thing it's all a computer game, right? Sure feels real though - reeeeeeally sticky.
   
3. You and your partner(s) are given a magical golden pumpkin and it's your job to grow it into the largest pumpkin possible. Why? There's a county fair of course and the largest pumpkin wins! But how do you grow this pumpkin? Well, for whatever reason? This pumpkin is already the size of a grizzly bear and it just won't stop growing! You and your partner better find a way to stop it from growing out of control or you might get (virtually) crushed! You could do a song and dance routine together to touch the pumpkin's soul to teach it moderation or calm its insane vegetable puberty. You could hold hands and share stories and entertain the pumpkin until it feels satisfied that it's grown enough. You could just hack and slash at it in an attempt to reduce its unwieldy bulk. The possibilities are endless and so is the pumpkin's growth, so you better hurry!

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Have fun however you like with the setting! Make a network post, make up other prompts based on the general setting, go wild. Havenwell is your oyster.

This TDM is for the November application round. If you have any questions, feel free to direct them to the FAQ or to the Mod Question thread below. The reservation round begins on October 30, 2019 at 10:00PM EST and our applications will run from November 2, 2019 to November 9, 2019 from 10:00PM EST to 10:00PM EST.

♥ Taken Characters ♥ Reservations ♥ Applications ♥

Comments

[meridio]

[ After a punch like that, she should know better than to expect easy speech. Breathing is now a conscious task, to say nothing of his eyes, one of which seems to be experiencing problems. Talking is out of the question.

Of course, a conversation demands participation from both parties. He cants his head ever so slightly toward Era to signal that he's heard. That's what she wanted, was it not? ]

[astralera]

[ Era's frown deepens, the earlier concern in her voice now flitting briefly across her face. ]

I had meant to heal the wound before I left regardless, if you'd allow it. If the injury is more severe than I intended, I can do so now instead.

[meridio]

[ If anyone can assess the injury more accurately, it should be her. He lowers the cloth to reveal more of his battered face. Era can see the damage for herself, whereas he'll need a mirror to know what fractures and bruises he sustained.

He isn't impressed. She acted with a plan, but that plan was poorly executed if she was unable to gauge her own strength when dealing the blow. Regardless, he'll let her continue to play it out. ]

[astralera]

[ Taking the motion as an invitation to offer aid, Era does just that. While she is generally well aware of her own strength, the problem with the multiverse is she doesn't know the strength of others — and, as is certainly the case in this world, no longer knows her own strength as well as she used to.

Moira had taught her a fair amount regarding more modern medical techniques, which does help to ease the loss of what advanced healing magicks she was apparently trained in. The nose is certainly broken, but not in a way that should impede breathing beyond the initial flow of blood. It leaves her to consider that perhaps she cracked the cheekbone or jaw.

Her (uninjured) hand is lifted after her analysis, aglow with bright healing aether, and while she moves it toward the man she pauses before placing it near enough for the spell to reach him, looking at him in query for consent to continue. ]

[meridio]

[ In spite of the light near his face (and the physical discomfort of what he does next), he drops his gaze to Era's injured hand. Foolish woman. A dead man isn't worth the effort . . . but he won't voice this for more reasons than one.

He closes his eyes. This is his consent. ]

[astralera]

[ Permission given, she is quick to place her hand an ilm away from his cheek, pushing the aether into skin and flesh and bone, allowing it to speed up the natural healing process until things are mostly knit back together.

She pulls away before it's fully healed, not simply because she means for it to linger (it would not do for him to forget her warning), but also because it is a strain upon her recovering health. Her skin takes on a sickly pallor; drained of colour, and accentuated by a faint sheen of perspiration on her brow. The desire to curl up in her warm bed, with an equally warm drink prepared for her by Hades, grows within her breast. Era shoves this aside for now, because Ardyn is more important. ]

...He deserved better than what you did to him. He deserves better.

[meridio]

[ She's pushed herself. He sees it in her pallor and her brow, dotted with perspiration, and Somnus thinks that Era is as bad as his brother used to be. Leaning back on his seat, he straightens.

He knows. He also knows that the gods will brook no deviation from the intended path.

After holding her gaze for several beats, he wordlessly rises from his seat to leave the room. ]

[astralera]

[ She has sense enough not to get up right away, no matter how much she may wish to leave the archives now. There is no desire to follow the broken man, though she feels dissatisfied. The punch had been sorely needed for her own sake, but what is there to be done? It isn't as though she can change the past of another world.

(Except that, with the way her life has gone, it may not be entirely out of the question.) ]

I've one last question for you if you would humour me, Somnus Lucis Caelum.

Was it the outcome you sought, or are you just another pawn to your Bahamut?

[meridio]

[ One foot is out the door. Before the other crosses the threshold, she poses a loaded question to which she deserves no answer. But because it involves his brother, Somnus stops. ]

I did it for the future of our people.

[ Even if it meant dirtying his hands with the blood of the person he loved most in the world. He, in his primordial ignorance, had once believed himself in possession of such self-determination as a member of House Caelum. ]

Just as the gods bade.

[ He trusts that he's sufficiently humored her. With that, he quits the Archives. ]

[astralera]

[ 'For the future of our people' is something Era can understand, though it is difficult for her to comprehend doing so because the 'gods' bade it. Despite Hydaelyn gifting her with Her power and entrusting a weighty duty upon her, Era could have always chosen not to fulfill it. It was just that she could never sit idly by when she could help, and so she chose to do so.

(Or so she can only assume. She does not know who she was before Hydaelyn.)

If the gods brought about the Starscourge and the gods bade the torture of her friend, then perhaps the next world she needs to visit — if ever given a choice in the matter — is one in need of someone with her particular skill set.

As Somnus rids himself of her presence, Era comments to her dream guide; idle, quiet, thoughtful: ]

How would a slayer of Primals fare against Astrals, I wonder?

[ She would dearly love to kill that world's Bahamut. ]