Test Drive Meme #6 (tw violence)

[spoofer]

Test Drive Meme #6

I want neither revenge nor relief.

INTRODUCTION ⇄ FAQ ⇄ APPLICATIONS

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

1. 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.
   
   
2. 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."

Comments

[spellslots]

[Well, this is going south pretty quickly, huh?

Taako has no idea exactly what kind of energy he's dealing with, so he doesn't waste his time fucking around with shields or deflections, he just flicks his wand and disappears. He's still there, sort of, just in another plane of existence, slightly to the left of the material plane where Mr Robot and his energy beams are. Taako has six seconds, which he uses to kind of hop a couple feet to the side, reappearing there with little fanfare.]

Pick a side, motherfucker!

[Because he's pretty sure Tony was aiming at the soldiers like two seconds ago, so what gives?

(He doesn't connect the angry gesturing he was doing with Tony's actions. It's been a while since he's fought alongside anyone but the IPRE, don't @ him)]

[servomotor]

Did that little red guy just say--

Affirmitive, Mr. Stark, [Fridayd tells him from inside his suit.] He said, 'Pick a side, motherfucker.' [The repulsor is firing up; he's watching the charge race toward ready inside his HUD. Still pointing his glove at the mage on the ground, the tiny splash of color amid the green trees and carnage.

Last minute, he adjusts his aim. Half a degree up. Fires.

The blast of white energy rocks right past Taako, missing him cleanly by several few feet. Just enough to ruffle his Elvish hair. Instead, it takes out a mechanical-looking interloper that had been starting toward Taako, shattering its chassis, flinging it backward.]

[spellslots]

[Taako's ready to slip back into the ethereal plane if Tony fires again, but he watches the change in angle and stays where he is, waiting until he hears the blast connect with something before he twists around to see what got blown up.]

That looks like it hurt.

[There are more coming, but that's fine; Taako throws a hand out towards the approaching soldiers and yanks up through the air. The ground a few feet in front of him forms up into a roughly humanoid shape, then goes lumbering off towards the soldiers.

With that done, Taako looks back up at Tony.]

Are we cool, tin man, or do I have to come up there and kick your ass?

[why is he like this]

[servomotor]

[Codename 'Tin Man' starts to drop toward the ground. At this point, he's a few dozen feet out, but he'd still managed to decelerate so abruptly anyone else, anyone not in Tin Man armor probably would have gotten whiplash. He lands on the ground, a whumpf of impact, metal on soil and leaf litter.]

I don't know about 'cool' for you and me, Arwen, [he says, because Tolkien references are canon for him I guess.] But that-- [he raises one metal arm, servomotors whirring slightly. Somehow, his filtered, tinny, mechanical voice manages to convey a feeling of genuine approval, as he indicates the huge... lumbering... something that Taako summoned, chasing off the soldiers at the other end of the meadow.] That was cool.

You can stay down here and kick my ass. It's an option. You know, a lot of us are firing at red. Any chance you could change up the palette?

[spellslots]

[The reference goes totally over his head, but he's not going to admit that, especially not when there's a compliment to focus on.]

That is an elemental, it's pretty rad, thanks for noticing.

[Not a spell he uses all that often, since he'd rather just blow shit up himself, but it's useful if he wants to take a break from fighting.]

And uh, unless I've abruptly gone fucking colorblind, which - unlikely, you're wearing red too. Also, robot, so you look a hell of a lot more like our asshole friends than I do in my swish as fuck robes.

[servomotor]

Correction-- [Tony raises his gauntlet again, aiming a dozen feet above the mage's head, probably nowhere near him to actually raise the alarm!! and fires off another repulsor blast. He winds up punting a sniper out of a tree, the force inadequate to kill him, but definitely enough to knock him from his perch.] I am the actual asshole friend.

You're new.

[Actually he might not be new. Tony Stark is sometimes paying more attention than he may let on, and there have been several charming comedic bits about that in the past-- but a lot of the time, he is definitely not paying attention. Least of all, to who's who and when in a city of five, six hundred where people magically disappear and reappear all the time.] I'm right, you're wrong. Na na nananana.

[It might be a little hard to tell through the mechanical filter of his mask, but Tony's smiling. And the next instant, he darts to the right, angling his glove again, tracking the sniper running in the distance.]

[spellslots]

[What the entire heck just happened.

He can't believe he just got na na na-ed by a robot, of all things. A robot with cool energy weapons and an attitude, but that's still not the point.

The point is that he needs to win this encounter, which means cool magic shit.]

I got it, pumpkin.

[A large, blue hand appears above the sniper, mimicking Taako's raised hand, which he brings down hard to basically slap the sniper into the ground.]

Do you like-- do you want this dude? Or am I killing him?