TDM #1

[goneawaymod]

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.

Comments

[wheyoftheadept]

The more Saturday hears about this mutant power stuff, the more she wonders if it isn't some kind of magic thing that they're just not calling magic because they don't know better - mana levels rising caused the genetic expression of metatypes, maybe on some other world it works differently. And she's pretty sure that when the magic came back, people looked for scientific explanations right up until Ryumyou did his Fuji flyby - and after.

"Hope I get you on my field team, then. I'm strongest at short range."

[kingofneworleans]

"Guess we'll have to see what dis place holds in store for dat." He leans a little forward against the table. "Still. We en' up doin' field teams, should let you know dat I'm generally called Gambit by teammates."

Often times, it gets included in the introduction. But they'd only traded first names.

[wheyoftheadept]

"Oh." Saturday blinks. "Sorry, I thought Remy was your handle, like the fox or whatever." The fox is Reynard, Saturday, but Maggie isn't here to correct you.

" - uh. Saturday's mine. My handle, that is. I don't usually give out my wallet name on first meetings. Uh. Sorry."

A crisis of etiquette. Oh no.

[kingofneworleans]

He grins at that. "Fox is Reynard. Remy means 'oarsman'. Ain't nearly so poet." And the meaning doesn't really fit him at all. "But don' worry 'bout it. Difference in worlds, hein? 'Long as I got somet'ing to call you dat ain't 'Hey, you', I'm fine."

[wheyoftheadept]

"Think I'll stick with Gambit, though. Wallet names are like - a big trust thing. Would feel weird, even under the circumstances."

It's the first real crossworld misstep she's had, and it isn't even that big, but it still stings a little.

"Tell you what," she says, leaning in and lowering her voice. "My first name's Makoto. Now we're even. Just don't use it, please."

[kingofneworleans]

Which is just unfair. It's FAR easier to make a nick name out of Makoto than Saturday. He'd already been thinking through it and has tossed away several, including the French translation of the word. But there are things you just don't do and invoking the Loa in something like this? Bad juju.

Still, he nods easily enough. "Don' worry, Saturday. It's easy 'nuff for me to 'member. Even known a few back home dat preferred goin' by deir handles dan deir...wallet names." Sure. That works.

[wheyoftheadept]

"All right, then." She nods back, satisfied. The scales are balanced. "Gambit. 'S a good handle. Solid." Probably wasn't just the first word that came to mind and with which he is now stuck forever. She's pretty sure it means like, a risky plan or something, which is also neat. "Good thing, too, 'cause I was about to see if I could make Boom Boom Man stick."

[kingofneworleans]

There's a moment where he just grimaces. Not long. "Dere's already a Boom Boom back home. I'd be lookin' for her you ever said dat. Not very useful. Been Gambit most of my life."

And he just...really doesn't want to be called that, thanks.

[wheyoftheadept]

Not everyone shares Saturday's sense of humour because they're cowards and she accepts that.

"When'd you get into the biz?"

[kingofneworleans]

He nearly asks her which biz before remembering that she doesn't know anything about the X-Men because he hasn't really told her that part. So, the thief bit. "Been trainin' for dat mos' of my life, but officially was 'bout seventeen." When he'd had his Tilling. "Been workin' pretty steady since den."

[wheyoftheadept]

"Oh, hey. I was about fifteen, myself. Hell of a start, right?" She grins at him. "My pops wanted me to wait til twenty, but I talked him around. Good steady work for a while, til - well, a run went bad and that isn't what landed me here, but it was what you'd call the inciting incident. You?"

[kingofneworleans]

"Well, trainin' proper didn' start 'til I was ten." After he'd been adopted. "Wasn' quite on de job myself when I ended up here. Had me a bit of downtime an' all of a sudden, boom. Here I am."

[wheyoftheadept]

Saturday winces. "Aiya. At least you have prior experience with this kinda thing." She sips her coffee again, slowly; she's not desperate-hungry, but she's hungry enough to feel it, and she's never liked that feeling. "Pops took me in when I was four, started training me up 'cause if I was gonna be picking fights with the big kids, I should at least know what I'm doing, right?"

[kingofneworleans]

Oh, coffee. He'll have to grab some of that later. He grabbed water earlier. "Know what you mean. Was my brother dat trained me in fightin'. Wit' dese eyes, he figured I'd be needin' to know how t' throw a punch sooner or later."

[wheyoftheadept]

"They're not bad-looking," she says, not flirting. "But I guess people would see them and know you were - uh, jeez, mutant seems rude. That's what you prefer?" She's just checking.

[kingofneworleans]

Remy's mouth quirks up in a half smile. "T' you, dey don' look too bad. T' the God-fearin' folk of de city?" He shakes his head, taking another sip of his water. "You'd've t'ought de Devil 'imself had come t' town."

[wheyoftheadept]

"Yeah - Pops and Mama Sofia and the older folk talk about it sometimes, how when goblinization hit you had like, half the world thought it was the best thing since sliced bread and the other half thought it meant the end times had come." She smiles in a sad way; at least before the rig, there was almost always someone trying to kill them right that second, and no time to remember and feel sad about home.

"Turned out it didn't mean much of anything, really. Maybe things will settle that way for you guys, over time? It took a good fifty years or so to reach equilibrium, doesn't look like you guys've been spiking for that long."

[kingofneworleans]

"Pro'ly get dere eventually. Jus' gonna take time." Of course, with M-Day, that was going to take longer now. "Still, 'til we get dere, gonna have to make sure de pups can defen' demselves, too."

And that turn of phrase in particular was probably Jean-Luc's doing. Family, at the very least.

[wheyoftheadept]

"Makes sense. And this outfit you run with, they do a lot of that work? Outreach stuff, organizing?"

Not that Saturday is sounding out potential allies or anything. Surely Jorgmundr will let them all peacefully leave when their contracts are up. They seem like such a reasonable, sensible, above board kind of company. Certainly not the kind of thing you have to secretly organize against.

[kingofneworleans]

"Depen's on which outfit you're talkin' 'bout." He's open enough about one of those back home, really. "De family dat brought me up? Non, dey ain't so much on de mutant rights. Love me as deir own, 'acourse, but not so much int' mutant outreach.

"Now, de folks I run wit' dese days? Lot more of dat goin' on. Out dere makin' sure dat de regular folk are kept safe from dose dat t'ink dat power makes 'em better, or dat not bein' a mutant makes DEM better."

As much as he believes in Charlie's dream, some days the fights are enough to give him a headache.

[wheyoftheadept]

"I mean, someone has to." Saturday says this with the quiet certainty of someone who counts herself among those someone who have to. "'S hard enough solving social problems and the like without superpowers around. I know for us, magic and rest fixed some problems and made a whole bunch of new other ones."

She twitches, like she was considering moving - maybe she's been sitting still too long - then settles.

"It can't be easy, though." There's an invitation there to say more, if he wants.

[kingofneworleans]

He goes back and forth about the X-Men sometimes, and definitely wouldn't consider himself a hero, but helping those in need?

Well, that's what got him into all this in the first place.

He hmms at that. "Ain't easy, fightin' for a world dat hates and fears you. But, like you say. Somebody has to."

[wheyoftheadept]

Snorting at that slightly pretentious tagline would be rude, so she doesn't. She does, however, wonder briefly if this is how Indril felt when they filed into her little office with a story about injustice at the highest levels of government. Besides, Gambit seems like a good egg, and it's not like Saturday doesn't have her own catchphrases.

"No justice, just us," she says idly. "My pops said that a lot, training me."

[kingofneworleans]

Oh, it's absolutely trite and Remy knows it. He's probably given Scott Summers shit over that phrasing at least once, probably more than that.

It doesn't mean it's not TRUE. It's just trite and pretentious.

"Mmm. Never quite works dat way, in my 'sperience. Still, you got somebody dat flings 'round lightnin', usually helps to have someone dat can fling it back." Or take a lot of lighting to the head. Not Remy, but Logan's definitely taken his share of hits. "So long as you try to make sure everybody gets out at de end of de day. You an' de innocents, at least."

[wheyoftheadept]

"Yeah." Saturday is remembering things she doesn't want to: bodies twisted and broken, forced marriages of flesh and machinery. People - reduced in body, in sanity, made lesser and cringing from the light, unwilling to walk through the open cell door. And Maggie on the gurney -

"At least, whichever ones you can," she says, shoving all that back down the memory hole.