xistentiaooc | Test Drive Meme #5

Entry tags:

#meme,
#tdm

Test Drive Meme #5

You wouldn’t wake; i couldn’t sleep for years.

CRASH LANDING

Exit one dimension, enter the next. It was chaos: pressure against your ears, light bending in an impossible, unimaginable way. The very molecules of your body vibrating against one another. If you have windows, the view outside makes no sense. Even if not, your hands, your face, your feet seem like an uncertain thing. It's the feel of reality itself tearing apart, reshaping, reconnecting, thread by thread.

And suddenly, there's a beach— or ocean, whichever you land in. Smoke. Fire. Salt water churning up, fizzing around.

Maybe you crash, in a ship wrecking into sand. Maybe you merely stumble out of a portal, a ragged wormhole in space. Or maybe you fall off the back of an incredible steed, some creature that carried you into this place. Either way, there's pandemonium around you. Incredibly, severe injuries are far and few between— nobody's screaming about the dead. But you might have to help pull someone free of wreckage, or move quickly to salvage burning belongings from the landing craft. Maybe it's the crafts themselves, that you're trying to salvage.

Likely, you don't know them, these other strangers who arrived here^[1]. Maybe you don't trust them— you just came out of a dying world, after all. But you all have one thing in common: you're here now.

When you get a second to breathe, maybe you'll see it. The brilliant green forest across the sand. Beyond that, the glint of a faraway city.

THE RAIN

Here comes the rain. Trickling down the rafters and tinkling down the trees, it starts as a drizzle and steadily increases to a downpour. Maybe it catches you by surprise, chasing you indoors or to share the umbrella of a friendly stranger. There's something oddly elaborate about the gutters of Xistentia's city-- it clearly carries the water toward the temple in the East, a storm system that causes the lamps to pulsate without threatening to shut down.

You'll notice too that you're prone to nostalgia which even infiltrate your dreams, memories sad or happy. This is easily a private experience, but you might find yourself wandering the city to get away from old ghosts or feeling invincible in the glow of memories. More oddly, whether or not you're an artist, you might be inspired to draw on the windows with your finger in the condensation.

Personal symbols, detailed illustrations, these inextricably lead back to the nostalgia. Whatever it is, it might pull someone to ask.

NETWORK

By now, the city of Xistentia has a population of over 400 people. Shops line the streets of downtown, and increasingly well-trodden paths will take you into the agricultural zones nearer to the forest or even down to the beach. There are still distinctive animal presences around— careful with that— but the most common critters you'll see are birds crapping on your stuff outside and tiny winged hairless people creeping your food.

One afternoon, you are taken from whatever you’re doing - taking a walk through the city, sunning yourself on the beach, running around in the forest shoring up defenses - by a message, appearing on your Daemon’s network screen. It’s a simple line of text, that reads:

PHOTO SENT

It would appear that your daemon accidentally sent a picture, perhaps one from your photo roll or instagram, or a random shot of you or your surroundings. Wait. Was that a public network post? Wait—

IMAGE CODE TEMPLATE

CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE

hells yeah

Footnotes

Some of these can be nameless, plot-device NPCs to facilitate interactions! But even in this case, please avoid gore in describing their current state of being. Anyone dead or catastrophically injured will have disappeared by the time your characters make it to Xistentia. There are no corpses or dying here.
But like OOCly ask permission ofc.

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

A mutant?

( what a coincidental occurrence that, at that very moment, a figure steps outside the doors of the clothing shop with big bags in tow, dangling daintily off the sharp bones of his wrists. certainly the modeled form of elegance could be lusted after, bespoke dress clinging to his lean stature in all the right ways, a spokesperson for fashion to the fullest, down to the very red bottoms of his high heeled shoes.

peter nureyev, the flesh and the bones, sighing softly at the sight of rain.

and then turning, debating reentering the shop to find a few more articles to pluck from hangers, when his own eye catches on something shiny and -- not new. not exactly. )

Oh, ( he says this once in surprise -- a moment, fair enough, before he regains himself. calm, collected. the ever present half-smirk of all knowing teases is absent from his face, but his expression does seem open, genuine, and in that, full of lies. ) Juno! What a surprise. I hadn't expected ...

( his eyes trail to the image juno's sketched on the window -- it might look like a thousand different things, but peter is probably the only one who would really know ... and he feels an ache, wide and empty, burrowing in the depth of his stomach, bugs and maggots of feelings that never really did anything other than pester and hurt biting away at him from the inside out. he's stuck by the instinct to run away, from juno, from the illness of heartsickness, but the rain effectively traps him, so.

he swallows, shakes his head. don't draw attention to it. )

It's good to see you're well.

[ that's funny.

juno is pretty sure he just heard the telltale voice of peter nureyev just off to the side. nureyev has a walk that's distinct, sharp, unyielding to hesitance, the kind of thing your heart kicks to desperately because peter nureyev is a lot.

he's too much.

too much. and juno's fingertip stops on the glass just slightly, eyes falling a little to what he's lined out onto the glass in the fog the rain has left behind against the heated windows of the display. no. he's pretty sure he just heard nureyev from somewhere in the back of his mind, like a shadow of a memory (the glancing of yasmin swift's knife, hardly half as deft or cunning, sinking into his shoulder, deep, deep, deep). no. it's not peter nureyev, it's not nureyev. when he turns his head, it's all just going to be a dream, some phantom itch that he'll ignore.

and he turns without fear for half a moment. it's all in your head juno. it's all in your

head.

juno looks and his entire stomach turns, the way you might when you're on the edge of a window, when you've had too much to drink and just want to bury your face in your hands for the rest of the night. there, in front of him, tall and lean and so much heartache, stands peter nureyev looking no less put together than he usually does. ]

This isn't happening. [ he says it simply, voice soft at first, like he's still stuck in some dreamlike state because ] Nuh ah. No way. This? Isn't happening.

[ it's not. it's fucked up. and while that deceptive little yearning part of him is relieved, relieved that nureyev is here (he's resilient, he would have held on regardless) the rest of him is trying to not to bolt.

thankfully, somewhere between staring at nureyev and the shock of it all, his feet have pretty much become cement. ]

It's not.

[ his lips form a thin line, hand smearing through the fading drawing now. he left nureyev sleeping soundly in a hotel room. he remembers the little starlight pinpricks of his teeth, the soft sounds from his mouth, the barely-there whisper of his name that nearly kept him. he left him. ]

Edited 2017-10-01 00:58 (UTC)

( his expression droops by fractions of degrees, a barely there knot formed in the space between two plucked brows. everything hurts -- the look on juno's face hurts, the sight of his handsome jaw or unruly hair that begs to be toyed with, his ever present trench coat, his single eye, the way he smudges the train from the window as if wiping it from history. peter has had a lot of time to practice the art of keeping himself contained into little boxes, the air of grace and elegance blocking out the angrier walks of life, the sadness that pools his heart, the rock at the back of his throat, but --

years and years haven't prepared him for juno steel, that's for sure. he can't bare to look at him after few and far moments shared between them, and he draws his gaze to the rain instead, much more melancholy. fitting, he thinks. he's always liked dramatics. )

It's good to see you're alive, I should say.

( he corrects. in a counter to the peacock at juno's side, peter's own bird perks from the perch on his shoulder -- a magpie, eyes shiny as diamonds, sea green and wistful, a bit like a lady with knots in his hair, and a long trenchcoat, and a sharpshooter's aim.

( 'well,' peter had said, cupping the bird in his hands, feeling its feather soft back under the airy weights of his fingers. 'at least i get to keep his eyes, junod. call me sydney.' )

the bird squawks. )

Sydney, your heart rate --

Well, well, that's enough out of you, bird. Be a dear. ( he taps his finger to the bird's beak in a shhh motion, swiftly nodding back to juno. it's going to be absolutely pathetic if juno ever finds out its real name. ) Really, I should be less surprised. If there was anyone capable enough to make it out of untimely and inevitable doom, it would most certainly be you, Juno dear.

[ dahliad gives a curious tilt of the head, a regal-looking bird that seems hardly befitting of juno's own somewhat bedraggled appearance. sure, he's cleaned up a good bit since the beach. hell, he's even showered, but he's tired-looking, which is something that never quite fades from his eyes, one of which seems to be a bit brighter than the other. ]

Should have figured the same about you, Sydney. Guess the whole thing about you and trouble is true.

[ you just disappear.

and sydney.

that's an awful name. it doesn't suit him. but none of his names suit him more than his real one, not in juno's eyes, not anymore. he bites down on the syllables like they're tough, tangible things in the air as he shoves his hands into his coat pockets and tries to drink in the sight of him standing there before him, like the best dream and worst nightmare, persistent, nipping at his heels.

god. goddamn it. ]

An acquaintance?

[ dahliad says it cooly, in a tone that's almost familiar, cocksure and brightly toned, like an echo. it's not juno's fault. absolutely not. ]

You could say that, [ juno replies softly, voice more difficult to scrounge up with every second that passes. so he closes his eyes a moment, lifts a hand to his temples because he doesn't get to run away from this, doesn't get to run away from nureyev who's standing here right in front of him with an armful of bags and a smile smeared over his face like he didn't ditch him like yesterday's dirty laundry in the hopes that he might find something better than him. someone with less... juno to them.

he doesn't deserve a man like peter nureyev. that's part of the problem.

juno gestures a little vaguely to the bags now, trying to... trying to come up with some sort of talk that doesn't involve him turning tail and running. ]

So what's all this for? Settling in real fast, I take it?

correct. we're considered the next step in human evolution. we're born with something called the 'x-gene,' which allows us to naturally develop superhuman abilities.

[ It is! The highest of compliments from (1) Rosie-dear. ]

god I can only imagine
I've always wanted to put color in mine
maybe pink or purple, that'd be cute

missing a hand? [give him a minute to check . . .]

no, i'm not.

[wow, she's way too cute for Kurt not to smile.]

i've learned a trick or two.
if you like, i could even help put color in your hair sometime!

[ She does have that effect on people. Unless you're Kaz, probably. ]

!!!
would you?!
that'd be so awesome, dude!!
i was always sure I'd mess it up if I tried since I'm me but

[it's a shame that he's an awkward mess around pretty ladies!!]

of course!
it will be interesting to dye hair that isn't my own.
i can't promise that it will be perfect, but no one has said anything about my bangs, so ...

i got an encyclpedic fuckin knowledge of the different types of gay

[Iron Man is way cooler than that andromeda nonsense!! and Tony would explain it so if he had further insider knowledge beside the slightly funny look onJuno's face for a minute here. It's fine. People are very often giving tony stark funny looks. He's grown quite accustomed to it, actually. it's his life, and narcissism allows him to wilfully reinterpret most things into flattery of some type.

He puts his robot arms under Juno and lifts him easily. The next instant, the boot repulsors are fired up again, scattering concentric circles across the uneven pits of beach sand. If heights are the actual worst, then Juno's life gets significantly worse in that instant— the Iron Man suit is a miracle of engine power!! and shoots them both up into the sky with stomach-dropping suddenness. Of course, it could be a considerably more violent takeoff; Tony's being gentle, sort of.]

And you are?

[He's audible over the rush of wind noise.]

[ Actually, for Rose, that might be even better. She loves them bumbling and blushing. Especially around her. ]

I'm sure it'll be perfect!
do you think you could do ALL the colors?
like a rainbow???

[ Close enough to the real thing to insult Jack, apparently. But it seems the jabs are done for now as Toothiana takes the stage and practically demands Jack's attention just by virtue of being her and all up in his personal space. She definitely frowns at that bruise. Her slender fingers brush up against it gingerly even to make sure that it's not too serious. It might hurt a little, but better safe than sorry! ]

Me? Oh, I'm perfectly alright! [ As are her fairies, which are congregating now around the Guardian of Fun happily. They're just as excited to see their favorite snow spirit. They all give amused peeps at his antics, following Toothiana's own smile at him checking in on her. ] Well, it's been a bit of an adjustment getting used to things here and trying to figure out what I can do, but I've been managing alright I think! I'm just glad that you're safe and I hope that the others aren't too far behind.

Edited 2017-10-01 10:56 (UTC)

[ yeah okay. this is fine. this is going to be just fine. except when he can feel the slight rumble of noise from the suit as it hurtles into the air. for a moment, juno is pretty sure he left some part of him back on the beach, and not in that soulful kind of reflective way, but more of the "maybe my stomach is still there on the sand while the rest of me is up here" way.

don't look down is probably easy advice to remember from all of rita's streams, but holy shit is it hard not to. which is why juno is definitely squeezing his eyes shut. haha heights, fuck you, can't see you (but he can sure feel them. wow. yikes.)

he can hear tony over the sound of the wind, which seems like a good distraction so he just clings a little. maybe peeks with one eye to focus very firmly on some portion of tony's suit instead. yeah. that works. ]

A detective. No fancy weird name or anything.

[ that'll do! ]

I was more or less commenting on your admirable ability to run away, though I suppose we have it in common. I'll be more blunt with my quips in the future. ( after a brief, calming pause. ) Sydney. It means wide meadow.

( even getting mad feels sickly, upsetting, and peter wants no part of the proceedings. is it so difficult to go back to wrex glass, the dark matters operative, who looked at juno like he wanted to take a bite and save the rest for dinner? well yes, peter suppose it would be. there was a time when things were decidedly less between them -- less complicated and less emotional, less disastrous, less difficult, but that time is long since passed. on another day he would've teased juno, pushed his hair behind his ear and his lips to the column of his throat, but for now they're

acquaintances. strangers, practically. the pain of conversation with someone who used to love you. someone who decided your best just wasn't good enough.

it burns the pit of his stomach, juno's words. saying so little and so much at the same time -- laced with implications he's not sure juno even meant to be there, and yet here is peter nureyev, lingering on every glance, every word. stuffing himself full of juno steel, satiating himself for the long road ahead of him whenever he gets off this planet and away from juno's grasp forever.

wringing out his hands, peter sets his bags down on the ground and takes the few steps over to the bench, heels hitting sharply on the wooden floorboard. he takes a seat, tucking one leg behind the other. the peacock acts as their buffer. )

The end of Mars as we know it is no reason not to keep up appearances. The selection left a bit to be desired, but there were a few diamonds in the rough, as they say. ( raising his eyebrows, ) If you wish to discuss clothes and politics, why don't we start with you, my dear, dear detective? Soaking wet in front of a clothing shop, where all articles are free? I must say, it does bore my thieving fingers, but it is practical for bulk shopping. Let's put you in something. What do you say?

😎

so that's you in the picture, right?

[ Another slightly aggravated noise, and for a moment the air beneath her fingers forms purple hexagonals that have a staticky pixelation to them, the circuitboard pattern that stretches out to her fingers like a tattoo suddenly flaring purple. But still, nothing happens. ]

Okay. Okay.

[ She pinches her nose, ignoring his question for a moment. ]

I thought this world was meant to be data-based, but if it is, I have cero permissions. What a pain.

[ She looks at him suddenly. ]

Did you get a daemon? I haven't tried interfacing with someone else's.

oh
is he ur kid?

[this dynamic sounds like one kavinsky's familiar with himself, as a recently turned former person, now vampire.]

THAT'S CREEPY.

NOT THAT HE HAS A BEST FRIEND, I GUESS THAT WOULD FALL UNDER THE UMBRELLA OF 'CUTE.'

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCES BEING CREEPY IS I SUPPOSE CONSISTENT WITH THE GENRE.

WHO ARE YOU?

we grew up in the same orphanage together
before we were taken in by vampires.

[ but yuu is more than that, not that mika would explain. yuu is his life and everything that matters to him. it's because of yuu that he's a complete vampire now, but if he hadn't drank yuu's blood, he surely would've died. they've saved each other time and again and mika already feels an ache from missing him. ]

[kavinsky's flapping his shirt under the table, sprinkling droplets across the top and against the post holding up the furniture below. presumably this is meant to kind of dry him off.] Ion? [he asks distractedly.] Ion.

That's a science word. Like when you mix two test tubes together and something other than 98% pure methamphetamine comes out. [he laughs at his own joke, because let's be real, he almost certainly watched breaking bad if it was available in his homeworld.] 'Abel Nightroad' on the other hand sounds like some fantasy era shit. You come from a weird world, son. And also, your daddy's pretty hot. ['father abel,' get it? get it? do you get it?

kavinsky definitely does not get it.] Gonna assume it's 'cause your world, anyway. Were you fucking him?

i don't think teen boys being best friends typically falls under "cute". Let's say "cool" instead.

[ except nothing about Ned and Peter is cool. ]

I'm Ned. Who are you and why are you yelling?

[ooc: wbsjvndjkva i didn't even think to mention this, which is my bad, but it's not pronounced how it's spelled - actual pronunciation is "ee-yon", for future reference. ^.^;;]

[It's the sort of thing he would have gotten a slap on the back of the hand for, growing up - but the months spent undercover as he traveled back to the Empire bred at least a little tolerance of things he finds uncomfortable and uncouth. So long as he doesn't get sprayed himself, he won't let it bother him.

The blather about science words and methamphetamines in response to his name is met with a blank stare - a weird world indeed, one in which Breaking Bad ceased to exist hundreds of years ago. Safe to say, he doesn't get it.]

Not my father. [He bites out, visibly flustered again. 'Daddies' in the kinky sense are also not in his lexicon, but he knows he doesn't like the way Kavinsky said that.] He's a priest.

[Then comes that question, and he chokes despite the fact that he wasn't drinking anything.] No!

Priests of the Vatican are required to take vows of celibacy. [Abeld supplies helpfully, and Ion rounds on it.] You-! Stop helping, damn it!

Edited 2017-10-13 00:57 (UTC)

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Page 6 of 15

Test Drive Meme #5

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raaaaaain

YOU KEEP DOING THIS TO ME AND I KEEP DYING.

i dont ... feel bad ....

you???? should.

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c:

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2bad.

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you're plus welcome

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