goneawaymemes | TDM #1

Entry tags:

*test drive meme

TDM #1

TEST DRIVE #1

So it's your first day at your new job! Welcome to the Jorgmund Family™! It's time to settle into your new workplace on the Piper 90 rig, the coziest place of employment this side of the Livable Zone. A leader in its industry, Jorgmund is excited to have you join them in enthusiastically envisioneering team-driven paradigms.

The Piper 90 rig's mission is not only an impressive undertaking in terms of impactful customer-oriented deliverables, it's providing a vital backbone to the Livable Zone by creating a safe region for citizens to live, work, and play. Jorgmund's "outside the box" thinking means they understand the importance of wisely investing in their human capital - you! You'll soon find that you'll take pride in this vital work - and the benefits can't be beat.

Rest assured, Jorgmund's multidisciplinary approach to our world's period of recovery means we know how to keep it real when facing this opportunity for restructuring and growth. Jorgmund: Even if most of the world has gone away, we can make a world of difference!

Synergy!

USEFUL LINKS
It is recommended you check out the following links first for info on the rig, rig conditions, game mechanics, and the intro and slideshow your characters would have to endure that takes place chronologically before the Test Drive Meme:

Welcome/Arrival | Rig Weather & Hazards | Rig Setting Page | Game Mechanics

SCENARIO #1 - MOVE-IN DAY!

After the bewildering and unpleasant onboarding process, you've finally been unleashed on the rig. (Well. To places you're allowed to go on the rig.) It's time to get acquainted with your new surroundings, process some of All Of That™, and meet your fellow captives - err, coworkers!

a) A BIT OF A MESS
Perhaps you're hungry? The mess hall food isn't amazing, but it does the job. Characters that have higher metabolic needs than your average human might be left feeling a little hungry, though. The worst part is actually the electronic sliding door: a small sign helpfully informs you that if you want inside, you need to smile for the camera! In addition to being patronizing, this may be a problem for characters who refuse to play ball, or characters with sufficiently nonhuman faces the door sensor can't read them. Remember, if then company doesn't see people like you, it's not discriminatory -- it's just indifferent! And that isn't legally actionable!

b) GOING NOWHERE FAST
The rig's elevators are a little off-kilter today. Overhead announcements mention this, but downplay the severity and are easy to miss -- which means you and your threadmate are stuck in here, somewhere between the fifth and sixth floor. You can complain into the emergency intercomm, but it might take from a few minutes up to an hour before the elevator gets rolling again. How do you pass the time?

c) SHOULD'VE TAKEN THAT LEFT TURN
You're really just trying to get somewhere else on the rig, but you've gotten hopelessly lost. Oh well, at least you're not alone! Did you run into your threadmate here? Did you lead them astray? Are they at fault? Even worse, are you somewhere full of AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY signs, mysterious equipment, and a worrying number of security cameras?

d) NEED A HAND?
You've been assigned a room and some relatively spare possessions to put in it. Unfortunately, it seems that the staff assigned to help move in new hires are all busy at the moment. Unless you want to wait around, you're going to need to lug and assemble your new assigned foldable den furniture yourself. Do you team up with another newbie? Do you try it alone and find yourself needing help? Do you come to the rescue of someone else who did that?

e) SPECIAL DELIVERY
Somebody in processing decided to give you two a quick little errand: you're supposed to take a couple boxes of files up to the executive deck. Unfortunately, a skeptical security staffer is giving you a hard time on your way there, on account of your funny-looking face, insufficient ID or sketchy-looking package. How do you deal with this and accomplish your task?

f) BLOW OFF STEAM
You're likely still a bit sore from Jorgmund fitting you with the nanochain, but you were promised a gym and you are going to use that gym, dammit. It looks like you're not alone in deciding to try out the training area. Do you train together? Spar to let some frustration out? Or are you gonna argue about whose turn it is on which piece of equipment and resent your lost solitude? You'll also find you have to contend with the communal showers when you're done.

g) NO REST FOR THE WEARY
It's the middle of the night on the rig. You're displaced from home, it's not very warm, your door doesn't shut because privacy is a "privilege" nobody has earned yet, and occasional mysterious clanging noises ring through the rig. You can't sleep, not yet, and perhaps you're not the only insomniac wandering the crew deck?

SCENARIO #2 - YOU ARE NOT AUTHORIZED TO PANIC

Around dawn on the morning of Day Two, something goes wrong. (Wrong-er?) You awake to the sound of alarms, and a voice over the speakers telling you NOT TO PANIC! A Stuff storm has caused a brief and contained leak onto Piper 90. You may encounter strange sights or sounds. Any anomalies should be reported immediately to rig security. Thank you for your cooperation!

The nature of the problem isn't immediately clear, but over the next handful of hours you find yourself embroiled in a bizarre fracas: a Stuff leak has caused numerous inanimate objects on the rig to come to life. Furniture and appliances small and large are roaming the decks. Some of them are docile, but others are aggressive (or just troublesome due to their size). Some examples:

A rogue photocopier spewing paper and ink
A mahogany conference table with old clawed feet and a brand new gaping jaw
A water cooler that scuttles the halls, squirting people with jets in varying temperatures
Small office supplies like pencils and paperclips that swarm in large numbers
Dressers and drawers that spit their contents at high velocity
A room's worth of folding chairs that hunt as a pack
An emergency fire hose that attempts to ensnare crew members in its coils
The angriest coffee pot you have ever seen

The objects can be dangerous, but are more strange, troublesome, and determined than deadly. If a foe seems to be incapacitated or "plays dead," even the aggressive conference table or hose will leave them with bruises and move on. Crew members who get in over their heads will be bailed out by security personnel as the incident dies down. Jorgmund staff stresses that the leak has been contained (so no new anomalies will appear), but after the initial surprise it's everyone's job to help hunt down and dispose of the Stuff-altered... stuff. It's gonna be a long morning, and you haven't even been properly briefed yet!

h) GOOD MORNING, PIPER 90
Rise and shine! There are alarms going off, announcements blaring, and people are scrambling around trying to figure out what's going on. You're one of them. Freak out? Spring into action? Team up with someone to shake down a staffer for more details? Run into someone new, perhaps literally?

i) INTERIOR WRECKORATING
You've been ambushed by an animate object that seems to have it in for you, or you've heard the shouts of someone who has and come running to help. What's ruining your morning now, and what are you going to do about it?

j) ON THE RUN
The folding chairs from Presentation Room B operate as a unit, harrying their prey through the halls with much scrambling of legs and flapping of seats. They're after you, at the moment. Can you escape, or perhaps lead them into a trap? Or do you stand your ground?

k) HERE'S THE PLAN
You and your threadmate have found somewhere secure (for now) and are deciding how to deal with a larger enemy. Are you hunting it, or is it hunting you? Are you planning to take it out of commission, or just how to get away from it? Or are you just gonna hide here and lay low until this is over?

l) PROP HUNT
Things are getting back under control, thankfully. Large disturbances have been disposed of, but that leaves the little things like elusive chains of paperclips, a small but vicious stapler, pens and markers that write rude words on walls, and utensils from the mess hall. These anomalies are stealthier, but must still be dealt with, and it's up to you to flush them out.

m) CLEAN UP IN AISLE EVERYTHING
The chaos has passed, and now you've been instructed to clean up a mess. Ink or loose paper from the copier, coffee from the rampaging pot, mopping up after a water cooler, scrubbing marker off a wall, etc. You might get roped into contending with the Yuck Puddle, which is a permanent fixture and not a new development, but someone's always contending with the Yuck Puddle.

OOC DETAILS
➤ Feel free to play around with powers. If your character has powers from canon you want to play around with, go for it. If you'd like to test out possibilities for game powers, also go for it. Feel free to change it up from thread to thread if you need to. This can be handwaved as exposure to Stuff making characters' powers shift a few times before settling.

➤ Potential players may use test drive threads as their log samples. However, at least one post in their thread must fit the requirements for apps, both in length (200 words) and in quality. If you do plan on using a thread as a sample, please make sure the writing throughout your threads is a good example of your writing skills and has some solid examples of the character's voice.

➤ Players can eventually count TDMs towards AC. They can only count towards comment-based AC proofs.

➤ Potential players can opt to keep these threads as game canon when they app in, or start over fresh, based on preference. The Stuff bringing them to the game universe can fog their memories, if players don't want their character to remember TDM threads when introing into the game.

➤ The game is invite-only. Players without invites are allowed to tdm since some of them may know someone in game to ask for one, and since some people enjoy TDMs just for fun in games they don't plan to app into. But an invite is required during the apping process.

➤ The game is at a starting cap at 30 players. Right now the current number of invitees is likely to not exceed the game's 30 slots, but if we go a few over they will still be allowed to app during this first round. Future apps will be rolling apps and will have a wait queue if the cap has been exceeded.

➤ The first game round will be apps only, no reserves. Apps open: Sat 4/11/20. Game start: Fri 4/17/20.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

That's what he was thinking, Monsieur Wall.

"Ain't we all?" That had been his thinking, at least. Then again, who knows?

He's impressed with the way she's putting away food. To be fair, he normally does the same, even with food he likes. High metabolisms are a bitch.

"Pleasure, Saturday." How's he going to make a nick name out of that? Needs thought. "I'm Remy."

She didn't offer her last name, he won't offer his. First names are fine.

"Pleasure's mine, Remy." She finishes off the plate and takes a long drink of, uh, milk, of all things. "Where you from?"

Her right arm, resting on the table, is metallic; somehow she's removed the sleeves of her jumpsuit, and the engraving on it are clearly visible. They appear to be a stylized recounting of various Deeds and Victories: the one he can see most easily from here seems to show her and two other standing in front of what's maybe a portal; two of them are on their knees, and the third is in the process of becoming a dragon. The whole thing is surrounded by a border of... abstract insect parts?

...Sure. That's not the weirdest thing he's ever seen. Though most of the last pictures like that he'd seen were in diaries left by a precog. One of which had detailed what should have been his death.

Doesn't even have a scar to show for that one any more. Hank did good work.

"N'awlins originally, but made my home in upstate New York for de last few years." He takes another bite of food and adds a bit more hot sauce. "You?"

"Red Town, up Seattle way. Don't suppose you've heard of it?" She says this with the glumness of someone who has yet to find anyone from her home reality. Although this guy does have the look about him, that certain something around the eyes. Even if he's not from back home, he's in her line of work, or has been, or she's a goddamned wageslave.

"Hmm. Heard of Redmond up dat way, but not Red Town." But, again, he'd heard that people from other worlds were on the Rig. It isn't that hard for him to imagine that the name's changed in other timelines. "Desole, petite. Dis here's a big place, though. Never know when someone new'll show up."

It's not like he's not looking out for his teammates. This sort of thing is what the various X-teams are always getting pulled in to, after all.

"Used to be called that, yeah. Since the reactor meltdown drove the richies out it's just been Red Town." She sighs. "At least I knew other worlds were a thing before all this or I'd really be freaking out. Did you?"

"Oui, I did. De team I'm wit' back home, we do a lot of..." What's the best way to put this. "Unconventional travelin'. Some of dat's included other worlds, though mos'ly it's been timeline slidin'."

And Remy hates the fucking timeline slides.

"Ha. Unconventional traveling, I like that." She spears a piece of pasta that had tried to escape being eaten. "Time travel's supposed to be impossible where I'm from. I wonder if that means that rule's another thing that isn't totally true, or your metaplane just has different rules."

She's mostly thinking out loud.

"I could never keep track of the time travel plots in the trids. Is it any easier in person?"

"Oh, it's possible. It's jus' a pain in de derrier. I known a couple folks dat came back from de future doin' de Marty McFly t'ing. Wit' varying levels of success, so far." Since...they wouldn't know for a while if they'd managed to stop their home timelines or not. "Back home, usually done by somebody dat's got reality warpin' powers. An' let me tell you, petite. Ain't a one of dem dat ain't got more issues dan de library."

"Reality warping?" Saturday blinks. "Like, making people see stuff that isn't really there?"

She has no context for this; where she's from, if you can do something like that, it's because you're something that should emphatically not be in the local realspace.

"Uh..." And that sound is more because Remy needs a moment to get his head around the explanation himself. "I mean...some of dem can do illusions. More of dem jus'..." He makes a rolling motion with his hand, searching for the words. "Some of de powerful ones can ben' time an' space to deir will. So goin' back in time ain't no nevermind to dem. 'Course, de problem comes from what dey DO when dey do dat."

Which, as always, brings to mind memories of a crystal wave, a first kiss and a long blank space afterward when they'd all lived.

Saturday's expression grows more horrified as Remy's explanation continues. By the end of it she's blanching.

"And they're - people? Like, definitely not horror-marked or anything? Who can just make like, actual reality be different... or is it just, you know, like a magical change, it's still itself just in a new form?"

Please be the second one, the second one she can handle.

"I ain't got a clue what 'horror-marked' means, petite. So you're gonna have t' lemme in on dat."

Still, from the rest of what she'd said...

"Dey're still people, though. It's..." His frown deepened in thought. "Back home, dey ten' to be mutants. People born wit' an extra gene in deir make up dat gives dem powers when it turns on. Though some of us get lucky an' have bits of it turn on when we're born."

Which may explain the eyes, if Saturday has been wondering.

Saturday had taken the eyes in stride; she comes from a place with much wilder body mods and types than that.

"...that's uh. That's." Processing, processing. Little wheel spinning behind her eyes. "So, that's... gotta be real goddamn hard for everyone," she settles on, as the implications of what he's saying seep in. "Like - unless I understand it wrong - you're making it sound like it's just kinda random? What powers you get, I mean. Or like... can you predict it? How does this work, exactly?"

Saturday shakes her head, clearing her thoughts.

"Sorry - I'm not trying to be rude, just. Jeez." She'd thought Sixth World social problems were intractable. "Have things always been like that? We had kind of a thing about fifty years back when the magic returned and people starting coming up awakened and goblinization hit and all that, but this sounds more - " She searches for the words. "Just - harder. For everyone."

"It ain't even e'erybody. Can't remember how common it was at de highest, but not e'veryone dat had de gene would develop powers. But it was more an' more common as time went on." At least until M-Day, but that's not anything she needs to know about. "Seemed mos'ly random, includin' some powers dat were definitely evolutionary dead ends."

Really. Ask him about his ex-girlfriend's powers. Or, you know, don't.

"Could kinda predict de secon' generation, if deir parents were mutants, too, but it don't always work. Know a woman who inherited her father's powers over magnetism, but her half brother an' sister had completely different powers. An' all of dem only had deir father with de gene, near as I know." And he really wasn't up on the Lehnsherr family at all. "Ain't always been like dat, though. Only in de pas'..." There's a moment of calculation ~~because Marvel's sliding timeline~~ because he's trying to remember things. "Fi'ty years? Sixty? Well, since de big boom in dem. De gene's been 'round for a long time in my world, jus' didn' switch on wit' mos' folks 'til after de nuclear testin' started in the forties an' fifties."

And then what she's saying kicks in and he blinks. "Goblin...ization." Magic, no problem. He's from a place where magic is practically part of the fabric of life. Goblins, on the other hand...that's a bit weirder. Even for the X-Men.

"And the range is from - manipulating natural forces to rewriting reality itself? Criminy. How - I mean, you've implied that people who get those power don't also get, I don't know, super-emotional-stability so... god." Saturday is working out the logistics of trying to protect the unpowered from the god-powered and not liking the results. "How did you keep people safe? Like, people with the gene from people without and vice versa? Things in my world settled down after a while because it was predictable, there were limits to what you could develop and how, and eventually everything kinda balanced itself out - "

Saturday catches herself. "Ain't my world. Don't mean to sound judgemental. And yeah. When the magic cycled back in, people started waking up as trolls and orcs and elves and dwarves and all that." She spears a limp round red thing that could be a tomato, sure. "My world is on this cycle, and on one end there's magic so thick that basically everyone has access to it. And on the other end, magic is just flat out impossible. Fifty years ago we started moving back into the magic end of things."

"Petite, nobody comes wit' super emotional stability. Still human, after all. Even if dere's some extras." The world would be a lot easier to deal with if everybody did, but that wasn't possible. "Can't say as it's easy. De group I run wit', we do a lot of outreach, tryin' to get people who're in a bad way outta trouble. Protectin' mutants wit' either physical mutations dat make dem a target or regular people from de sorts dat t'ink gettin' power means dat dey're de ones makin' de rules. More reactionary, maybe, 'cause de hope's al'ays been dat we fin' a way to coexist." A shake of his head. "It ain't easy, though."

That sounds like an interesting sort of world. Remy takes a few moments to eat, because he's been neglecting that. Which is not a normal thing for him at all. "Got some magic users back home, too. I ain't so much up on dat, though."

"Well, yeah, that's the problem - always is, with power." The sheer scale of it still gives Saturday the willies, though. "That's just. A lot of power. By the standards I'm used to."

She shakes her head again. "At least there's people trying to do the right thing. Man, and I thought I had a hard time of it. Christ." And she lets the silence sit while Remy eats, trying not to worry too hard about a world she has no connection to.

"Oh, yeah?" she says, when he speaks again. "I'm guessing it doesn't work much the way it does where I'm from... for us, magic power comes from essence, which is sort of like, this energy everything alive just has naturally, because it's alive. Even on the nonmagical ends of the cycle it's present, only there's no excess to chuck fireballs and such with."

Remy snorts at that last. "I ain't got any clue how magic works. Ma tante uses it, but she's a traiteur. A healer. She raised me an' taught me all her cookin' secrets, but de magic? Dat she's kept back. Save it for someone dat's got some aptitude. Mine al'ays lay elsewhere."

Saturday laughs a little. "Yeah, that's not us. So where did you aptitudes lie?"

She's almost certain she knows the answer to this question - but that's half the fun.

Remy pauses, considering the way to answer that. Oh, he's got his suspicions about the girl. You live around thieves and the like as long as he has? You get a sense about it.

Still. It's not the sort of thing you say out loud. Generally. "Let's jus' say I specialize in testin' security systems an'...item reclamation."

Just that the people he tends to reclaim items for weren't always the original owners. Every man has a price, after all, and Remy gets paid well for what he does.

"Sounds like we're in a similar line of work. Fair number of folk like that on the rig. Makes a body wonder."

Saturday was always more on the muscle and grift side of things, but she appreciates a good thief. A thief and a face work together like peanut butter and jelly.

And there do seem to be an oddly high assortment of rogues, scoundrels, and outcasts landing feet first in this mess. Saturday used to believe in coincidence, but not anymore. Everything in her life always ends up tangled like a bag of snakes.

"Dat it does, petite. Dat it does." Because these sorts of things never pull just random people in. There's a rhyme and reason somewhere, even if the pattern isn't immediately seen.

He may not believe in destiny or fate any more, but he's never been a fan of coincidence, either.

He hmms in thought. "'Course, reckon we're gonna en' wit' a good number of de hero sort as well." Not that he's going to admit to that one himself.

"There's more overlap than people reckon." Saturday almost smiles at that, before it pulls down into a frown as she remembers, again, that her people aren't here and she's all alone. So instead she finishes off her plate, and contemplates trying to sweet-talk more out of the servers or just coming back later.

The way he tilts his head agrees with Saturday, even if he doesn't say it out loud. He'd never call himself a hero, but he's certainly been in the business long enough by now.

He finishes his food as well, though not with much interest. The food's kinda terrible. "I ever served dis back when I did short order, I'da been outta a job."

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saturday @marvelverse 'are you okay?'

No. No, they are not. Especially when it comes to mutants.

Re: No. No, they are not. Especially when it comes to mutants.

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