Annexed Mod Team (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
modaccount) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
annexedmeme2022-11-06 09:45 pm
modaccount) wrote in annexedmeme2022-11-06 09:45 pm
Entry tags:
Test Drive Meme #3
Test Drive Info
⇝ Test Drive Memes take place in a virtual reality simulation occurring in characters' minds that tests them for 'fitness' before they enter the setting officially. Because it is set in a simulation created by the Sylphid, the missions, while being comparable to regular missions in the game, will be from a Sylphid perspective.
⇝ Characters will not be chipped during the simulation, and will have access to their abilities from canon, but will be chipped upon waking for the rescue.
⇝ Current characters can easily be pulled into the simulation if they are sleeping and dreaming when it's happening. The Sylphid cast a wide net with the simulation to fill it out with characters to interact with for prospective new arrivals.
⇝ Test Drive Meme threads may be considered game canon so long as all parties agree to it.
⇝ Test Drive Meme threads do count for Activity Check.
i. Awakening
It happens in a dream. You fall asleep and the next moment you feel like you're awakening again, but without any exhaustion, as if you've had a full night's sleep. You find yourself in a comfortable bed in a room full of comfortable beds, all of which contain other people waking up just the way you are. The room is large but cozy, with wide windows that are framed by light curtains, and the sun is shining in from an angle that suggests morning.
Once you're up and moving around a little, ready to explore this new place, you'll discover an open door on one of the walls in the room, through which soft strains of music can be heard, and above which there's a sign saying "Free Breakfast." Once you make your way into the room, possibly with some of the other people just waking up in this strange place, you find a buffet table loaded with breakfast foods - some familiar, and some strange, mainly featuring mushrooms and root vegetables. Quiet, soothing music is playing and there are a variety of tables with chairs available to settle down and enjoy some food.
This is just a dream, right? What could be the harm in eating a bit of food, maybe trying out some cool alien cuisine, and getting to know the other people here?
ii. The Mission: The Fungus Among Us
Once everyone has eaten their fill and gotten to know their new compatriots a little better, there is an interruption in the music playing in the room. Three musical chimes sound, and a pleasant female voice speaks.
Attention, new recruits! We have a mission for you.
The intercom goes on to explain that there is a forest of mushrooms called The Troop that borders on the northwest walls of the city, which releases spores near constantly (though more prolific in fall) that have a hallucinogenic effect on sentient beings. These spores can cause people traveling in The Troop to become disoriented and confused, experience vivid auditory and visual hallucinations, and become permanently lost. Generally, the spores aren't a problem inside the city or in the surrounding area because no one has built close enough to the Troop to suffer serious effects. However, this particular fall, the spore count has been significantly higher than previous years, and spores are making their way into the neighborhoods bordering The Troop. Even worse, the spores are having a slightly different effect on top of the usual ones.
The spores, once inhaled, are growing into microscopic fungi that populate in the brains of citizens and take over the brains of the infected. Once taken over, the citizens who are infected are servants of The Troop, and will do whatever they can to infect others by whatever means possible, whether it's by capturing spores and releasing them in people's faces or by gagging up fungi that will infect others. Beyond that, there is a kind of mania about the people who have been infected - they are wide-eyed and high-energy, they will accost random people with spores or fungi, they will chase people down on the street to infect them.
Beyond that, there's another effect. Those inflicted with fungal infection become distinctly lacking in any kind of verbal filter. They will say exactly what they're thinking, they will blurt out secrets, expose themselves emotionally, and share their innermost thoughts and dreams. After all, it's not like the individual mushrooms in The Troop keep secrets, they're all part of a larger whole, and that's how infected individuals will behave. It's as if they're sharing a consciousness, taken over by the hive mind of The Troop, and see others as simply extensions of themselves.
Will your character get infected, try to help the infected somehow, or just plain stay out of the way of all this madness?
iii. The Mission: Full Fungal Smackdown
As the infection gradually progresses, those who are infected start to become more violent, which is a big problem. The infection is slowly spreading throughout the low-income neighborhood that it initiated in and moving toward the city proper, with increasingly aggressive infected doing their best to infect others. Their methods are starting to become more aggressive as well, where before they would simply spray others with spores or present them with mushrooms, they are now altering common devices like leaf blowers to spread the spores over a broader area and violently attacking people to shove mushrooms into people's mouths, curling fingers inside their mouths to force the fungi into their victims' sinuses and infect them.
It isn't just infection techniques that are getting more aggressive. Their behavior in general is aggressive - the infected are starting fights, are attacking people, often shouting in a strange, unintelligible language. The tone of the attack is that of people defending their own territory, fighting off intruders or predators, even if the person they're attacking made no moves to strike first. Attackers may fight hand-to-hand or even employ weapons that they are familiar with to attack others, whether it's guns, knives, laser swords, or anything else they might use in their regular uninfected life. Even those who were non-combatants will use kitchen knives or other makeshift weapons to attack the uninfected.
They never attack the infected, somehow they seem to know immediately who is and who isn't part of the hivemind.
As the attacks start to really escalate and there is panic in the streets, characters will be informed that a cure for the infection has been found, and everyone who isn't infected should stop by one of the Sylphid trucks carrying syringes of the cure and load up. Anyone who's able to fight, or even who is just capable of carrying and using a syringe, is asked to take a bandeau of them and to inoculate anyone infected. Unfortunately, though, the only real way to tell if someone is infected is by that wide-eyed look, and the attack that comes out of nowhere.
iv. Welcome to the Broken World.
The simulation is over, and you don't even know how you got here from there.
All you know is that one moment you were participating in a mission to save the Sylphid children, to uphold peace talks, and then you were asleep again, after the mission was over.
You wake up in what seems like the blink of an eye, nauseous and dizzy but otherwise unscathed, possessions taken away, barefoot and dressed only in a set of plain grey clothing, like the most bland uniform ever imagined, in an empty room with empty walls and one single door with a small barred window and a single number printed just above it. The door is locked and cannot be broken by any means, you can feel your connection with any superhuman powers you had severed, leaving them just out of reach - you can feel them there, tingling at your fingertips or in the back of your brain, but you just can't get to them. There is no one to greet you or explain what's happening. You start to lose track of time, the only sound the distant ticking of what sounds like a massive clock.
Just when things seem hopeless, when you feel like you're about to go mad, there's the sound of a commotion outside your door. The sounds of a battle, or perhaps an infiltration gone just slightly wrong. Either way, when the door opens, there is a figure there with a hand outstretched.
"Welcome to the Broken World. Come on, we'll explain everything just as soon as we get you and the others out of here."
no subject
[He's definitely not going to complain about an extra barrier either!]
Er, normally I'd love to test theories but in this particular instance I think I'll err on the side of caution.
[That however is a flashy name. His brows lift as he glances at her before grinning and turning his attention back outward.]
Lux, huh? Goes right with your illuminating magic. I'm Donatello- or you can call me Donnie, easier to say in a pinch. Now let me introduce you to my mystic....tech!
[He hops forward to knock back another attacker who wields a garden hoe before he lifts his bo, spinning it over his head. Vibrant violet light traces around it, and around him form roughly a dozen slender cylinders with points- the outline of mini-rockets that all blast forth with a gesture. They blaze forth and plunge into the ground in a polygonal perimeter surrounding another group of incoming fungi-maddened people before the ends extend upwards and then sheets of hardlight form from each, connecting to the other for a makeshift pen.]
That'll hold them but not for long, and I'm not sure how effective inoculating everyone individually is going to be. It's spreading way too fast!
no subject
[But it does answer the - maybe she's born with it, maybe it's Maybelline question quite nicely.]
That's why I warned you. The battlefield isn't a great place for being careless.
[At his assertion that her name is quite convenient, she laughs, but it's not entirely a happy one.]
And to think, my parents don't even know I have magic. It's all a twist of fate.
[But the story of how she's been hiding her magic for most of her life and all the complications? Not really fit for this sort of environment. So instead, she gives him a bright smile.]
Guess you could say destiny works in funny ways!
[Then he's leaping into action and she just watches with wide eyes. That's really impressive. Once they're snared she allows herself a brief moment to applaud his tech.]
Oooh! Now that's impressive!
[Maybe she can study it again another time, learn something from it to improve her own snare. Considering she'd adapted her light binding from someone else's magic in the first place, it's not entirely impossible.]
It's too bad we can't make it rain the cure down, it'd be so much faster!
[But that'd require a lot of time and cure, among other things.]
Do you have any doses left?
[She's already moving to administer it to a few of the trapped targets, it's just a matter of if they're both capable of sharing this part of the load or not.]
no subject
[If there's one thing that'll bolster him in the middle of a fight against gross fungi-possessed, spore-spreading people, it's praise. If he could possibly glow any brighter than the outlines tracing his battle shell and purple markings, he'd probably be radiating glee.
His grin does shift into a more thoughtful expression as he focuses back on the problem at hand.]
That would be an ideal way of spreading the cure, but I'm not sure how effective it would be if not directly infused into the bloodstream. If we had more time instead of being hustled out so fast maybe I could have figured out how to tweak this formula!
[He blinks and heads over to follow her lead, pulling out a few prepared cures from a belt pouch.]
A few. Hey! Stop squirming! -what if I just make a rifle and load it up with the syringes...
no subject
[Okay, moving on, because honestly she can spend entirely too much time talking about the mountain of a man that is her older brother. Because he's great. And apparently is more loyal to her than he is to duty. Which is honestly a bit of a surprise. She'd have thought duty meant everything to him.... apparently not before baby sister anyway.
Yes, that's what she likes to see! It takes so little to help bring the light to other people. Seeing them happy and confident, that's exactly how it should be! She's always happy to spread her light to others, metaphorically or literally.]
... Shoot it at them?
[Guns aren't super common in Demacia, her country is pretty old fashioned, but she knows enough about them.]
Can you do that without killing them?
[Though that seems like it'd take time, which isn't exactly on their side right now. Which is why she'll just leap around jabbing captive infected for now instead. Which is, actually kind of fun if she's being honest. She's not a Noxian, she doesn't live for battle, but there's a thrill to danger even Lux can admit that.]
no subject
[That's the vibe he's getting anyway. True enough that this may not be the best time to be delving into such subjects, not with rabid mushroom people to deal with. Donnie isn't as eager to jump right into them even when they're confined, dancing back after each administration of a shot.]
Oh yeah, wouldn't kill them. The needles aren't that long either so even a badly aimed projectile wouldn't cause any lethal damage. [Boy does he sound way to casual about that. He's studying another syringe, removing the cap before he snakes in another dose between flailing arms.]
These'd need some modifications to inject upon impact...
[He grabs several more syringes between his fingers like throwing knives, yanking off the caps before the familiar glow trademark of his mystic tech starts to trace around them, encasing them roughly in a cylindrical layer. Then he tucks his bo behind him to free up his hand for his next trick, purple lines spreading out like a schematic forming in real-time.
His grin is borderline manic as holds up the outlines of a futuristic rifle, loading up the syringes.]
Aaaaand voilà!
no subject
[When you're the daughter of a high ranking family in a country that despises magic and punishes all mages? And happen to be a mage? It's... yeah, complicated works.
Honestly? She'd take the infected over a fight with Nocturne, so this isn't so bad. Plus, it feels so much less high stakes. Being a dream and all. Which is a good thing, because for a few moments she just stops and stares.]
Just like that?
[Seriously she has got to study how he does things, because... if he can do it, maybe she can do it too. The joys of being a magical prodigy. Only, since he's not exactly doing magic, she might not be so lucky.]
Oops!
[A quick dodge as she almost gets caught, the barrier flickering as it takes a blow.]
Hehe, my bad.
[Time to get out of the way entirely, so she darts back to his side.]
You really think that'll work?
no subject
Just like that.
[He looks only briefly concerned as the barrier starts to dissipate, but he cocks the rifle with a confident grin.]
Only one way to find out!
[Those that had already been administered the cure stagger and stumble disoriented once the holding pen vanishes. The ones that aren't start to push past, at least making themselves obvious targets. Donnie lines up his first shot, firing one into the leg of the most immediate attacker.]
no subject
Well, guess we won't know until we try!
[And as he gets things set up, she'll throw out some light to bind some of the remaining clearly hostile infected. Then there's a moment of focus to reapply her barrier, it's been up for a while and probably needed some TLC anyway, and then she's back to keenly watching to see if it works.]
It's all on you! No pressure~
no subject
[He watches anxiously before pumping a fist as the added dimension around the syringe itself depresses upon impact and vanishes in a flash of pleasing purple light. The one he'd shot staggers and sags.]
One down- I don't even wanna know how many more to go but let's do this!
[Tipping his goggles down, he swings his mystic tech rifle around and starts shooting at the others that Lux manages to trap.]
Wahahaha!
no subject
Good work!
[He gets a bright, beaming smile at that. But honestly, using that much magic is a little tiring. Takes a lot of energy and while she's got a lot to begin with, it's not exactly endless.]
They don't even know what hit them. Literally.
[But being a little worn out isn't going to dim her sparkle and she giggles as she looks at all the people who seem to slowly be coming around.]
We made a great team!
no subject
Ammo's nearly spent but I think we have this area covered so boo-to-the-yah, I concur!