xistentiaooc | Test Drive Meme #6 (tw violence)

Test Drive Meme #6

I want neither revenge nor relief.

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.

BATTLE WITH D.E.S.T.I.N.Y.

November has barely begun, when chaos strikes again ^[2]. Perhaps you've had weeks to settle in, finding yourself a new home and getting accustomed to the neighborhoods... or maybe you've had no time at all. Your daemon warns you of a massive invasion coming from the West, the ocean where you first arrived.

The enemy has come for you again. D.E.S.T.I.N.Y., the cosmic threat to not only your homeworld but the entire Multiverse.

When the violence makes land, it's shockingly similar to the exit from your original world, yet mashed in with the experiences and genres and world details of other refugees— soldiers in red armor wielding weapons of all kinds, both advanced and rudimentary; airships, bizarre monsters; firestorms and quakes that seem sentient in the way that they move, pursuing people through the beach and the forest. You see the injured and the dead, and people running in panic. Heat and gunfire break up the ordinary peace of wilderness, driving animals into stampedes and filling the sky with panicking birds.

There are children and doctors and engineers among the many refugees of Xistentia, and not everyone can fight back— but maybe you're one of those who can.

Think fast— that's a crimson spear launching at your head now.

The city's defenses are buckling too. While ordinarily, the civlization possesses unnatural physics that subvert violence, the onslaught starts to wear agains them. The only safe place is the Temple. Here, civilians and injured combatants are banding together to try and boost morale... which coincidentally also can boost the defenses of the land by with the energy collected from emotional connectivity. For better or worse, there is plenty of negative feeling to go around, the air thick with fear.

Whether you're recovering from injury or afraid to fight, you can still contribute here. Tell a story, sing a song, make a meal out of one of the cookfires started in the hallway, or even help with medicine. One thing is for certain: we're in this together.

NETWORK

Today, it's peace time. By now, the city of Xistentia has a population of over 500 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 notification, that reads:

TEXT MESSAGE SENT

It would appear that your daemon accidentally sent a text message misfire.

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.
This is connected to the war plot, coming up in November. Please read the announcement for more information! Features include good, old-fashioned violence, hurt/comfort, and "drift compatibility."

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Battle: I'm ready to take them down now
[Ann has seen a lot of monsters in the last year, both the ones that look like them on the outside and the kind who look human but are even more disgusting on the inside, so the sight of the red soldiers doesn't scare her. Some of them even look like Shadows, kind of.

What scares her is what they're doing. Even when her world was falling apart thanks to that dumbass giant cup, the Shadows hadn't been attacking people. They'd made them happy to be slaves or made them vanish, but they hadn't...hadn't…

She squashes down that fear as much as she can, the fear that belonged to the helpless puppet she tries not to be anymore, charging down the beach with a fierceness she doesn't quite feel. Not without the others here to give her strength. She hasn't tried to draw Carmen to her since she arrived, not knowing if her other self can come out in this place, but she has to try.

She stands right in front of a line of those red-armored creatures, taking a heavy breath before holding out her hands, hoping for the first time that in a moment her sweatshirt and leggings will be replaced with that ridiculous latex suit]

Come to me, Carmen.

[it's only breathed; she doesn't mean to scare the creatures off with just words. Because if this works, something much more terrifying should do the job.

She feels herself enveloped in that strange flame, feels the mask back on her face and the long whip in her hand. That's a relief, but not as much as the sensation of the large woman-shaped being rising up behind her, almost giggling as it whispers in Ann's mind]

We will avenge them

[Ann doesn't need to ask who Carmen means--the bodies both laying silent on the ground and running screaming around them. She's sure the sight of her with her whip and machine gun and the glowing being behind her won't help their fear, but they will understand when she's saved them]

Yes. [she says, simply, before running down the beach at the nearest red-armored being] Go, Carmen! [this is said much more joyfully, as she lets the Persona throw out a ball of flame, hoping it will do something. Sorry, any already scared people who haven't seen much like this yet, a teenager in a red latex catsuit with a big giant fire throwing lady can't be helping your nerves]

wildcard
[if you want the sweet-looking angry Phantom Theif somewhere else, hit me up at

keenquing]

[there's a crunch of impact, a friction-heavy sound of force moving against-- or through flesh. janus straightens, half-turns. sand scatters across their clothes, their arms. they see that a red warrior had been trying to kill them, their bristling spear still weighing heavy in a half-raised hand. but they see too, flames curling around the armor, a flailing of the empty, gauntleted arm. the enemy drops their spear, and janus stoops agilely, picking it up.

they heft it just once. raise it, and throw. it goes soaring, following a trajectory of deadly accuracy. then it catches the red-armored being squarely through the gut. they watch long enough to see the thing's biology begin to fail, stumbling and weaving. copper-colored blood leaking out, visible under the glint of still-burning fire.

then they look at the oncoming stranger and her oddly enormous companion. they blink.] Hello, Thank you.

Test Drive Meme #6 (tw violence)

Ann Takamaki | Persona 5 | OTA

no subject