annexedmeme | Test Drive Meme #3

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!test drive meme

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."

NAVIGATION

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He can tug all he wants. Vader's grip doesn't loosen, himself thinking of finding Obi-Wan injured, hanging by his wrists as a master interrogator got to work. His head flopping as Vader had carried him out. Had it been anything buy possessiveness? Obsessively claiming the older Jedi? Something else? He hadn't had time to think about it then and had refused to since.

"Jungle. Then camp." He wasn't going to give more information than that here. The Slyphid knew that much already.

Once they exited the building - the last it seemed of those Vader had freed, the chaos of the rescue missions already normal to Vader, enemy bodies down, confused people fleeing in broken down hover ATVs, Vader pressed the blaster pistol into Obi-Wan's hands. "If they are attacking us, shoot them because I will kill them." The blaster would take a few shots to kill, unless he took out a throat or head. Vader knew Kenobi would want to preserve life as much possible. "They are like the brain worms on Geonosis only far worse."

...this is not the Anakin he'd faced. What is going on? Obi-Wan abandons the idea of pulling himself free for now. Vader isn't about to let go, and his grip isn't particularly cruel. Obi-Wan makes himself breathe, and makes himself start to pay more attention to his environment. Act, not react.

If this 'jungle' or 'camp' involve any kind of imprisonment or torture, he can address that when he must. But Vader is escaping whatever has happened here. Not causing it.

Then there's metal, cool but beginning to warm, pushed into his hands, and two statements that startle the hell out of him, but there's no time. He keeps moving, trusting to Vader (of all things) to handle their direction while he peers around. "You're letting me save people?"

There. He aims for the knee, gets the thigh instead, but the person about to jump at them still goes down. Alive.

"Better than you choosing now to decide standing firm as a Jedi against a Sith is more important than your survival." If Obi-Wan had...well.

Vader is aware he's chipped. He'll get knocked out and Vader will kill his way to safety. Unless he's being particularly difficult, then he can watch the carnage without being about to stop it. But neither really aligns with Vader's end goals, making this the preferred action.

And he can still pull Obi-Wan through the rescue turner battle until they get to a speeder-type craft marked with what most would see as an ornate pyramid painted on the rear. Obi-Wan would recognize it a a drawing of a Sith holocron. The craft is somewhat like the ATV crafts but clearly cobbled together and not finished. It's also one I'd the last crafts there.

Someone - a person (once) with a mass of lekku-like projections across a face marked with ridges and spikes, disproportionately large mouth filled with needle-like teeth - rushed Vader, only to be met with a sickening crack of his metal forearm slamming into those teeth, shards flying at the two of them, before using a Force blast to throw the opponent a good seventy meters into a solid tree. They may be alive or not - Vader doesn't bother to check since it would mean pulling his captive-rescuee deeper into the fray.

"Your aim better improve once your watching both our backs." It's grumbled more than barked - and Obi-Wan may unlike the Vader he's met, this one speaks in Anakin's voice, not the deep strange one of the vocal modulator. It's not something he has anymore.

It's been a difficult few years. Obi-Wan isn't foolish enough to think that he's always made the right choice in every situation, but he has begun to realize, very slowly, very reluctantly, that at times there is no right choice. That at times to stand on principle serves no purpose.

.....and that he's not entirely sure he has the right to call himself a Jedi any more. ~~(Does he even wish to?)~~

"I need to find out what's going on," he says instead, grimly. Part truth, and part buying time.

The voice is...... perplexing, to say the least. There's a part of Obi-Wan that sings to hear it, sings at the thought that perhaps he didn't entirely kill his padawan and friend, but it adds to the complexity of this whole situation.

There's a spray of shards flying at them both, and Obi-Wan reacts reflexively to divert the biggest with the Force. It works, a little. His control is still shot to hell.

Vader complains, and Obi-Wan responds reflexively with, "Patience, Anakin," before shooting the next assailant in the stomach. It's someone colored in red and green, barbs all over their skin. They go down well enough.

"Geonosisian brain worms are trying to eat your soul and possess your body. For reasons I am currently doubting, I am trying to prevent that." Stop asking questions when people are actively trying to kill you, he wants to shout and he's reasonably sure his grandson can sense his irritation is not his desire to just throw someone into his vehicle.

"Not to mention we can't be followed." So don't let them be. His son and grandson are back there, or will be once they get back - he's one of the last to bail out - and he isn't riding their capture.

The one Kenobi dropped Vader shoved aside, grabbed his saber, and swept his arm back, the end of the hilt crashing into bone as he ignited it, a four-fingered limb falling. Given they were mostly being attacked from the rear, he shoved Kenobi ahead of him, using his armored frame as a literal shield.

Which hurt. He'd definitely gotten hit with something.

Not Anakin. Vader. His kinesics are throwing off Obi-Wan. The voice is only making it worse.

"Fine," Obi-Wan snaps. "I don't know this planet. I'll accept your judgement for the moment, but only for the moment. If you want me to not get in your way, just tell me where we're headed."

Perhaps one of them has been possessed by worms already.

He grunts as Vader shoves him ahead, then his eyes dart back over his shoulder. The other man's moving oddly. Injured?

Still Vader. But...softer in a couple of ways. Both beaten down by life and repeated loss and purposefully trying. The great terrible thing he's become showing cracks and weathering.

"Get in the speeder." The scrap built one, of course.

He doesn't grunt. His movements have stiffened, tightened, but it's only apparent how much if you've seen Vader in his prime. He's still fighting, turning on his attacker to kill, left hand using guiding Force-based attacks, right using his saber, which flickered for a moment - almost like it was flipped on and off instantly - before a slightly longer, much brighter red blade replaced the 'normal' one. He'd switched to the second crystal for more power.

Obi-Wan blasts another assailant away and dives into the speeder, turning a worried look behind him for an instant. Then he checks the readouts, and starts flicking switches. The controls aren't too unfamiliar. He can at least get the engine thrumming while Vader... does whatever he's doing.

This has been an interesting day, to say the least.

Obi-Wan replays what he's seen in his mind. The younger man's moving more slowly, though with no less efficiency. Obi-Wan still doesn't understand why Vader hasn't either left him to be dismembered or possessed, or hasn't truly taken him prisoner to be tortured later. This feels far too much like he's giving Obi-Wan free will.

At least with the - three? four? he's not sure - who'd jumped his back when he'd been injured had been ~~killed~~ dealt with, the others are beating a retreat. He can just barely make out them muttering something about a 'red blade' and 'black mask' - proof his grandson's blade has made a point even if he's best known for his helmet - and they are creating their own legends here.

They shouldn't have brought them here, and Vader's inclined to make them pay for that mistake. Dearly.

Keeping his pacing to a prowl as he closed in on the speeder, he dropped himself in, and the vehicle tilted a little under his weight until he could roughly fine-tune the balance, all one-handed, attempting to manhandle Kenobi to turn backward to work as the gunman. "They will decide to chase us even if that group," the one Vader had witnessed run, "decided to live another day." There, the engine coughed and sputtered but then roared to life, and Vader slammed them into half the full speed to cover the ground into the jungle.

Obi-Wan nearly backhands Vader as he grabs him, then stops himself. Foolishness. As he is now, a panicky reflex will have no impact and for all that it's insane, Vader is actually helping him, and knows their destination. So he lets Vader shift him to the rear.

"I see," he murmurs, gripping his perch with his thighs and flipping switches on the big blaster. He hasn't seen this particular tech before, but it's familiar enough. There's a building whine as it powers up.

He could really use a nap and a good meal. He suspects Vader needs first aid before that.

Luckily he didn't, as one, Vader's mask was durasteel and the edges sharper than you'd think and Kenobi has soft biological hands, not mechanical ones and two, Vader would have smacked him back just on instinct.

Luckily Vader will have someone he can hand Kenobi off too - Luke or Rey, whoever he can get first - and then get himself patched up. He has his grandson and Tech he can lean on there. It's not like he has ever allowed medical treatment before everything was settled and he knows there's a debriefing coming that he'll attend (again) and he'll Kenobi to it as well.

He suspects simply pouring tea into a cup and pointing at the room with a 'debriefing' will get him going though.

The whine of the blaster sets in his implants badly - he needs to work on it more - and it's not blending well with the sound on the engine. It makes him push the throttle to get the trip over with faster and make abrupt movements to make them that much harder to target.

Not to mention follow. He'll toss his old Master into a ditch and mow down the Slyphid before he allows them to be followed.

Obi-Wan has never been great at making sensible decisions, but at least he stopped himself from a horrible one here.

It would be quite pleasant to go through a day, even two, without having to question his personal experiences, morality and ethics, but that has yet to happen in recent times. He is, simply put, on a speeder with Vader of all people. Obi-Wan sighs grimly and fires, then fires again. One of their followers spins off into a tree and an explosion. Another one speeds up.

Irritating a highly volatile Sith who was genuinely trying to rescue you was up there a far as horrible ideas.

Vader heard the exceleration and mutters a colorful phrase under his breath, once again using the Force to grip into Kenobi as he sharply veered to one side, so steeply it pitched them at a 30 degree angle while also spinning them on their y-axis a close 160 degrees. All at a speed which has the engine screaming and has them now charging their pursuers.

Hanging into the handle bars one handled, he drew his saber, ignited it and set his course. The Slyphid would back down or find themselves impaled.

The latter was his preference.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Test Drive Meme #3

No Problem also I can pm links to the Kenobi icons in the morning when i'm home

lmao I shouldn't take advantage of people being kind when I'm lazy, and yet here we are <3

If it makes you feel better, it's self serving because I want you to join

lmao! a certain person we both appreciate says very nice things about you and I sure do agree

Thank you! they may have flung the link to me in discord

mwahaha fabulous

I'm honest about it!

lmao and I appreciate honesty

honesty is easier and i'm lazy

oof I hear that

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