annexedmeme | Test Drive Meme #1

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!test drive meme

Test Drive Meme #1

Test Drive Info

⇝ Test Drive Memes usually take place in a virtual reality simulation occurring in characters' minds that tests them for 'fitness' before they enter the setting officially. However, for the first TDM, it will be set in the real world and centered around the arrival of the first crop of extra-universal "recruits."
⇝ 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.

Welcome to the Broken World.

You can't even remember how you got here.

All you know is that one moment you were in a world you were used to, comfortable in. It might have been a regular day or the most important day of your life, in the middle of a meal or brushing your teeth or the battle to save the world or the moment of your death. Whoever took you didn't seem to care what you were doing when you were taken, and now that you're here, they still don't seem to care.

You wake up after 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."

i. The Rescue

The moment of peace and freedom doesn't last for long.

Even while you're still disoriented from everything that's happened in the past few hours, the person who's just freed you pushes a gun into your hands. If you're familiar with guns, it's simple enough to use, with a recognizable safety and trigger, a magazine of bullets attached to the bottom. If you're not familiar with guns, well...the person who just rescued you will give you a minute-long introduction to it. Press this button, click this hammer back, pull the trigger to shoot. Nothing fancy, but enough that you won't hurt yourself or anyone else you're not supposed to be hurting. Probably.

After being handed the gun, the person rescuing you looks at you not unkindly and gestures for you to follow, leads you through a maze of concrete corridors to the entrance of the building. There, you'll find something of a small warzone, a battle in progress though almost completed, in the parking and courtyard area between several small, squat concrete buildings. There, huddled in the safety of the building's entryway, the person who just rescued you will point across the courtyard toward an encroaching patch of jungle and quickly explain the situation - you've been brought to this place by the Sylphid, long-standing enemies who will "eat your soul" and replace you if they catch you, and the person rescuing you is part of a resistance army intending to overthrow them. You're to make your way across the courtyard and into the jungle, where you'll find someone named Brycen, a blue-skinned man who will get you out of here even as the battle rages on.

The courtyard is mainly open, with a few benches and trees that can be used as cover, and there is a small group of Sylphid - the enemy, the people who took you and are now shooting at you, but who look like average everyday people - who are taking potshots at whoever crosses the courtyard even as they engage with the rebels. You'll be provided with suppressive fire from those same rebels while you cross the courtyard, but other than that, you're on your own unless you want to take the run with whoever else just got rescued.

ii. Race Through The Jungle

Once you make your way across the courtyard and into the jungle, you'll find Brycen waiting for you about a 10 minute walk in. The moment he sees you, he gestures you over and leads you a few feet further into the underbrush where there are a few All-Terain Vehicles parked in a small clearing. Shooting you a little grin, Brycen spreads his arms to present the vehicles, then heads over to the closest one. What follows is a quick explanation of how to use the ATV, a small hovercraft that can seat two. Brycen points out another ATV that is driven by a member of the resistance, and tells you that this person will guide you to the Witches Camp, where you'll be living from now on. But it's on you to pilot the ATV from here to there.

Well, you and your new friend.

See, there are half as many ATVs as there are people, and each one does seat two. Brycen gestures at the nearest extra-universal arrival and tells both of you to hop on. Now, you're both bound for the Witches Camp together, for better or worse. It's a long walk, so don't piss off your pilot!

Or overturn the ATV or crash it, because the path from the clearing to the Witches Camp is rough, without many trails or paths that have been carved out of the underbrush, something the revolutionaries have done to avoid being tracked back to their home. The ride will be bumpy, hover-vehicle or not, with a lot of swerving to avoid obstacles and dodging to avoid branches. Hopefully, you won't have a run-in with any of the local jungle wildlife, which can range from small, relatively harmless animals to lizards the size of small dinosaurs and wild cats.

It's a wild ride, but eventually you make it to the Witches Camp, a sprawling maze of low-to-the-ground buildings and markets interspersed with jungle for cover, and the rebel leading you keeps doing so until you pull up in front of Central Command. This building is one of the nicer ones in the area, and houses the Witch herself as well as the seat of the revolution. This is where all of the rebel plans are made and where new arrivals are put up.

iii. Welcome Home

Once you enter Central Command, you'll find that they've prepared space for you. First, you'll be led to the residential area of the large building and given the keycard to your new apartment, a small furnished studio apartment with a main living/sleeping area, a desk, kitchenette, bathroom with shower stall, and a walk-in closet for storage. Once you've been oriented to your new apartment, you'll be taken to pick your network device from an array of devices ranging from ultra-modern tablets that can fold into the shape of a phone to an equivalent of regular modern-day cell phones to magical tablets or books that can be interacted with by characters unfamiliar with technology. They'll also offer to alter your own phone or device to access the network, if you prefer that.

After that, you will be guided to one of the big board rooms in the Central Command, where you'll find a large spread of food on the table, ready to be dug into - all the staff at Central Command have brought food from home to share with the new arrivals. You'll also find notebooks and pens to take notes, because this is the official orientation, and you'll come out of it having learned pretty much everything about the rebellion, the Sylphid, how the rebellion originated and most importantly, how you got here and how you can go home.

This is where the rebels point out that helping them is helping yourself, because the only way to send you home is to commandeer the device that brought you here in the first place, and the only way to do that is to overthrow the Sylphid overlords.

After this presentation, no matter how accepting or skeptical you are, you'll be given a small stipend and set free to explore the city, linger around and chat over the potluck leftovers, go back to your apartment, make a network entry to meet other people, or whatever else you'd like to do. Want some new clothes? They can direct you to the markets. Looking to start learning magic? They can direct you to the Mage's Sector where you can find a teacher. Looking to dance your cares away in the wake of this terrible upheaval? They can direct you to a club in The Electric Heart that sells cocktails that'll erase all your pain for the evening.

Go wild. The Witches Camp is your new home. What will you make of it?

iv. Network

Once you've settled into your apartment in the evening, you're free to browse the internet and intranet on your new network device. Care to make an entry and meet the others in your same situation?

NAVIGATION

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It's not the worst division of responsibilities. While Layla is more than a little reluctant to give up her gun, to leave herself unarmed in a war zone and trust her safety to a complete stranger, she'd glimpsed the man in action during the mad flight across the courtyard and--

She's a good shot. He's better, by an order of magnitude. Her ego's healthy enough to make that admission, and it leaves her with precious few arguments against handing over her weapon, letting him stand as gunner while she pilots the vehicle.

The controls are just unfamiliar enough that it takes most of her attention at first to maintain speed through the rough terrain of the jungle, skipping the hovercraft over thick undergrowth and fallen trees. Eventually, pursuit falls off, either discouraged or opting to aim for easier prey. She doesn't relax, coiled tense behind the wheel, but it's enough for her to retreat from her near-complete focus on escape, to notice the tension in his expression and interpret it through a very familiar lens.

"Are you hit?" she asks.

He's shot a couple pursuers. And one very large bird that swooped past the roof of the vehicle. It's been quiet for about half a mile, by his judge of distance, but he doesn't relax his vigilance, just in case. It's not like they showed them a map, he has no idea how much further they have to go.

The question gets his face to half-turn in her direction, though his eyes don't land on her for more than a split second. "Graze on one leg. Minimal damage, easily ignorable." No, it's something else. A deep burning pain all along his left side.

It's familiar. He knows it. But it doesn't normally last this long, and that's... kind of disturbing.

She gives him a sharp look - and a brief one. The trees are close, and what passes for a path is barely more than a game trail. Looking away from the road for more than a second or two would probably mean hitting something, and then they'd be stuck hiking through the jungle, hoping they can find the correct path before something pops up to shoot at them.

"You're not supposed to ignore bullet wounds. There's got to be a first aid kit in here somewhere - whoever these people actually are, they came equipped."

"It's nothing. They always heal," he says, looking further away from her again. This time it might not, he thinks briefly-- it should be a scab by now. It's been almost an hour. And the rest of him still aches.

But he still doesn't really think it needs that much attention. It hardly even bled. He just wishes he knew what to do about the other pain. Whatever it is, it won't be in a first aid kid, though, he's sure. So he adds, "Don't waste the supplies on me."

"It isn't a waste," Layla protests, chancing another look over at him, expression shading slightly exasperated. "We're in the middle of a jungle on what's apparently an alien planet. There's probably about a thousand infections you could pick up that'll take a hell of a lot more resources to treat. --Shit!"

The last comes as something fast and bright gold darts across the path, and she swerves to avoid it, tree branches rattling against the roof of the vehicle as they miss clipping one of the massive trunks by a far narrower margin than is comfortable.

He rides out the swerve without flinching, and as they pass the ferns the gold thing disappeared into, he shoots, and something falls.

Then he informs her, "I can't get infections."

He pauses, and then makes a grudging admission, "I couldn't before. Something may be. Wrong. Here. I don't feel right."

She startles at that, a soft hitch of breath that's almost but not quite inaudible beneath the sound of the ATV's engine. "What do you mean?" she asks carefully.

He eyes her for a moment, wary. He's pretty sure she's not HYDRA. And his physical capabilities matter right now, because he's tasked with keeping her safe while she drives. It's a valid question and she probably deserves an answer.

"I should be healing faster. I'm not. The internal damage from the arm should be negligible. It's not. And it's heavier than it should be."

"Internal damage?" she asks, and while there's concern in her voice, it isn't quite the concern of someone weighing the potential usefulness of a bodyguard.

"No - forget I asked that. Maybe they gave you something while you were out to inhibit your ability to heal. Captives who don't have to worry about staying injured would be difficult to deal with." She pauses, then adds a little more gently, "Clean out the wound. It might be a while before we get where we're going. You can figure out your limits when we're somewhere secure, yeah?"

He looks vaguely annoyed at the way she phrased it, she isn't his handler to be ordering him about, but at least she ordered him nicely. He's generally unused to anyone particularly caring about patching him up, and he thinks the arm hurts worse and there's nothing to do about that.

But after a moment of stubborn resistance he drops from his stance clinging to the ATV's back rigging to sit properly, tucking his good food into a stirrup for stability and leaning down to dig into the compartment under the seats.

He somehow manages to do this without touching Layla at all. It's tricky, given the small space they have to work with.

She notices it, that lack of contact, and given the close quarters, there's no mistaking it for anything but deliberate. Between that and his stilted manner of speaking and the gleam of the metal arm, it paints a picture she doesn't much like.

She's silent for a mile or two, focused on her driving, giving him as much space as she can when there's barely enough room to breathe in the vehicles cab. Eventually, though, she asks, "How long were you in the compound?"

By then he's hiked up his pants leg, cleaned the blood and dirt off the wound, and is starting to unwrap gauze to stick on it with some tape. "At least twenty-four hours. Not more than forty-eight, I think. My cell had no window."

He pauses a beat to crumple up the gauze wrapper, searching for more that he should say there. "You?" he finally comes up with.

"I don't think any of them did," Layla notes absently - the cell block had been almost disorienting in its uniformity on the way out, something that was almost certainly deliberate.

"A day, that I was aware of, give or take an hour or two. Probably not much longer than that." Long enough to be hungry, to be somewhat dehydrated. Not long enough to be risking delirium from it.

He tapes down the gauze and gives her a sidelong, assessing look. Regular people shouldn't go that long without food or water, should they? "Were you given meals?"

"I'm fine," she says, which isn't quite an answer. "I promise I'm not going to pass out behind the wheel." Yoke. Whatever it is the controls of this vehicle ought to be called.

"Didn't think you were," he says, which is not entirely true. He's not even sure what her dietary requirements are (he has a rote understanding of his own, which happens to be utterly inadequate for his usual metabolism, but he's not a normal person, is he?), but it's not going to help his concern that he feels that's wrong somehow.

All patched up now, though, he puts the first aid kit back into its compartment, and swings back up onto the rigging in the back to get back to work. If she wants to keep pestering him, he'll respond, but right now he's decided getting them back to civilization in one piece is the priority. So she can eat.

For several minutes, and several miles, it seems as though she's decided against continued pestering. There's no more evident pursuit, and for the moment the wildlife opts to leave them alone, but the terrain is still difficult, and it still takes most of her concentration to keep the vehicle steady and their guide in view.

Eventually, though, she asks, "What's your background? Before all this."

He shifts a little, then says bluntly, "Assassin. The fist of HYDRA." Then, a pause and slightly more accurate, "Former fist of HYDRA. I. Didn't go back, after the mission." He might still kill people. He certainly did getting out of that prison. But he doesn't do it for HYDRA anymore. That's got to matter, somehow.

That startles her enough that she does jerk around to look at him, then curses as they thump over an exposed tree route.

"HYDRA? Now there's a name I haven't heard in almost a decade." And even then, she hadn't heard much. Strange things entering the black market, contacts of contacts vanishing, gone to ground or caught by organizations looking to regain some face. She's never run in the sort of circle that touched heavily on international espionage, and has never particularly wanted to.

He doesn't look at her, though he has her in the corner of his eye so he sees her looking. "Then you must have missed the news. Their latest plan stopped by." He pauses, braces himself, and finishes, "Captain America." There's no way he can get to him, here. Steve is safe, even if the mission rears its ugly head.

Layla snorts quietly. "Is that what they're saying now?" she asks, not bothering to hide her skepticism. She may not follow the Avengers and their affiliates closely, but when the new Captain America all but beheads a refugee activist on camera, word circulates.

"The new one doesn't seem all that interested in HYDRA, just maintaining the status quo."

He looks at her now, and his brows are low and confused-looking. There's something in him that just... knows that's wrong. Captain America has no love for any kind of status quo, if that status quo is bad. There's something in him that's almost offended.

"He stopped the helicarriers," he says. "He stopped me."

"Stopped the - wait." She refrains from turning to stare at him, just. "Are you talking about the helicarriers that crashed in Washington? When all that classified intel was leaked?"

And information brokers, thieves, and other black-and-grey market veterans had almost wet themselves in paroxysms of joy - the ones who weren't wetting themselves in sheer terror at the sudden shift in the tectonic plates of the associated sectors of the underworld.

He's seen a paper or two since his flight from the river, so he knows about the leak. He'd been kind of terrified by it, afraid some records about him got out. "Yes. Two days ago. What were you talking about."

"Two days--" she repeats, in a tone of dawning horror. "That was ten years ago."

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worthallthis - 2022-08-31 07:20 (UTC) - Expand

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scarabwings - 2022-09-03 03:51 (UTC) - Expand

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Test Drive Meme #1

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