xistentiaooc | Test Drive Meme #5

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.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[ It's... all a bit convoluted at the end of the day and hard to believe anything he might have been told or learned or sees around him -- much less the strange person he's talking to now. He does appraise her a bit more than he had previously, there's some things that seem vaguely like they could be recognizable but not quite. In the end she doesn't seem like something -- or someone -- that he would have thought up in his head. ]

Elliot.

[ Because exchanging names, that's an easy enough social norm that he complies with mostly. ]

What exactly? [ His interest is perked. ]

[ 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.

[ Elliot's sanity is certainly still in question as he continues to observe her. It's indirect, of course, he doesn't stare in the way that normal people do. It's in the corner of his eyes, a constantly twitching gaze that always searches to preemptively avoid direct eye contact. ]

That doesn't have to stop anyone.

[ Much less him but he hasn't really tried. He's still more disoriented than he'd like to admit.

Daemon? Right... it was around somewhere. Flipperd, a small black dog that seemed to make itself known again now that it was being talked about. Elliot's been mostly ignoring it since he's certain that he was hallucinating it for a while there -- after all, he definitely doesn't have Flipper any longer. ]

What do you want to do?

[ What's the point of beating around the bush? There isn't one. ]

Test Drive Meme #5

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