memepad | test drive!

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test drive!

arrival.

We don't have a brilliant arrival prompt as of yet, but you're welcome to take a look at the arrival page and post your character's arrival if you desire! You may count this test drive as a canonical arrival if you decide to keep the character in game. Many of the below prompts are in possible arrival locations, but do not need to be arrivals.

Shopping, or something like it.

Maybe you want a toothbrush. A swimsuit. Enough sun protection to ease the transition for a vampire who'd lived their entire life safely tucked away on a space station far, far away from anything remotely sun-like. Maybe you just want to put yourself someplace everyone else is bound to go, sooner or later. Maybe you're just someone who will always default to "let's go hang out at the mall", for that matter.

Maybe you're used to shoplifting, and won't notice anything about the mall's security levels, at least at first. Maybe you're a scrupulous goody-two-shoes, and you're going to have a problem when you realize that not only is nobody asking you to pay, but there is literally no way to pay for anything you wanted to purchase.

Maybe you're just going to have to throw a temper tantrum when you realize that the Orange Julius-like storefront is also completely unstaffed, and no more automated than any other Orange Julius you've ever seen, and so you don't have any way of getting the perfect smoothie.

(Unless, maybe, you can find someone else who's got more experience with a blender than you have.)

On the shoreline.

Look. You've been to the beach before, haven't you? You know what to expect when you get there: salty water, some sand, the general sinking dread that the overpowering chemical reek of artificial-coconut-scented sunscreen is coming to get you; the usual, right?

This is maybe not your usual beach. Possibly because it's a little more like a coral reef or atoll; possibly because it's a little more like someone got carried away with programming fractals into a really big 3D printer; possibly because it isn't all that much at all like the beach you were just at, if you were maybe at a beach just before you came here anyway. No toddler temper-tantrums in earshot, no seagull con artists waiting for you to be the slightest bit distracted so they can steal your food right out of your hands, no overpowering chemical reek of artificial coconut...

Don't worry too much, though. There is sunscreen, over at the little vending machine over that-a-way, along with coverups and hats and sunglasses (oh my) — pity you can't tell what they're going to look like before the machine has spat them out at you, though.

(The water does, at least, feel like water, and taste like salt, even if the sand is disconcertingly perfectly-just-off-white, and only a few inches deep above the hull.)

By the way—if you came here in a boat, this is going to be home, at least for your boat. These are the only berths you're going to find; you can claim a berth, and if it was empty when you did, you can—presumably—keep it. Some berths are already filled with other boats. Some of these boats were clearly meant for public use, and others seem as if they used to have people living in them, or at least had private owners. Nobody's living in them right now, though. Strange.

Enjoy the spa.

Or else, you can try to enjoy the spa, if you’re motivated or don’t require any staff.

Because there isn’t any. Much like the shoreline, like the mall, like the apartments, there is a whole lot of absolutely nothing unless you can figure out how to wake up the AI—and even if you do, the AI doesn’t have a clue about how to do a massage or a stretch or a chemical peel.

But you can still enjoy the saltwater pools. Or the salt room.

Or the really nice lounge.

Or the lotus pond grid.

You can also get some good skin care supplies, or put up a note on the digital bulletin board stating what you’re looking to get done. There might be another new arrival who can give you the stretch or facial you’re looking for. If you’re someone with those skills? Better stick around. Someone might be in need.

Wildcard.

If none of these inspire you—or if all of them do and you just want to add another thing to respond to, it's up to you whether you want to put one response or several in a top level comment, we're good with anything you like—you've got a whole chunk of an empty solarpunk island to do something with. The further you stray from that shoreline the harder you will be to locate by others, but we encourage you to have fun!

Anything that the setting page inspires is probably fair game! Feel free to ask before posting if you've got any questions that reading through the mod journal doesn't yet clarify; consider this a sort of beta run. ♥

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Reply here! Our FAQ is ever-growing and things asked here may be added to it.

On the shoreline.

Coughing up water, Gideon flails until her arm catches on something. She grabs at the edge with her second arm and pulls herself farther up. The water stops, and she rests her head against the rough grainy surface. Breathing becomes regular, and Gideon pulls up enough to stare at her arms and hands. Yes, that's right, her arms and hands. In one move she pulls herself the rest of the way up, dripping wet, onto the shore.

In the half-second searing glance Gideon gets before shutting her eyes, it's completely foreign and unfamiliar. Even Harrow's dead girlfriend isn't here ordering anyone to do anything. Her minute understanding of the River says she could be anywhere. Well hello Anywhere, it's time to meet Gideon Nav. She gets up and brushes some of the sand off. That mostly gets more grit on the palms of her hands. Whatever. The water is behind her, and the land is in front of her. Somewhere, in the distance, there are buildings and civilization. Gideon pulls her hood over her head and drooping over half her face. Even holding the fabric down below her eyes isn't a great compromise. So she stumbles slowly forward with her hands out in front of her. One step and another. That's all there is to it.

Edited 2021-07-14 00:26 (UTC)

"Oh, that doesn't look good," says a voice, and then there's a pair of fingertips touching her arm. From Gideon's perspective, Cristabel Oct is nothing but that gentle touch and the sound of her voice. Anyone else might see a woman of about thirty in khaki pants and a loose-fitting white blouse wearing black combat boots and moving like a hybrid between a ninja and a dancer.

"Can I help you?"

Edited 2021-07-14 00:45 (UTC)

Had the voice sounded sarcastic or threatening or any other number of red flags for DANGER DANGER, Gideon would have grappled the attached arm/body. It's soft and genuine. Which could, admittedly, be dead level sarcasm. If someone's going to walk her into a pit or a pillar or anything, the odds are even she'd do so anyway. This way, Gideon thinks, she knows where they are. It isn't the most generous thought, but the last however long has had a lot of people killing and/or trying to kill each other. Including her.

"Do you have a pair of sunglasses I could borrow?" Gideon asks. Last she knew, Pyrrha had them. So it's with her or lost in the River, and Gideon doesn't love that pair enough to jump back into the River for them.

"Believe it or not, yeah, but they're terribly shitty."

Cristabel's sunglasses do exist, and she did have them in one of her cargo pants pockets, so she's able to offer them to Gideon (by way of putting them RIGHT in front of a wandering hand). They're just literally broken; they sit crooked and one lens is busted.

"I can do better than that, though, there's a whole sunglass shop. It's just likely easier with broken lenses than no sight at all to get there—you're not a vampire, are you?" Cristabel's never seen a vampire, and she's pretty sure they're not real, but it's a question that just has to be asked.

"Not that hard to believe," Gideon says. Even if it's not so bad for other people, it's one of the brightest places Gideon has ever been. She remembers needing glasses for the first time. That had seemed so bright. This much later, the memory feels dark, stained with ash.

She pulls the sunglasses under her hood and slips them on. Without raising her head, Gideon opens one eye, then the next. The ground is still horridly bright, like it's going to kill everyone with light, but it's not going to kill her this very second. "You don't need an excuse to invite me back to your place," Gideon jokes. "No, not a vampire. Only seen those in magazines." Fictional ones. In her magazines, usually they are skimpily dressed ladies seducing other ladies and convincing them that they never need to wear so many clothes again. Page-turner stuff.

Cristabel beams, which thankfully doesn't result in an actual glow: that probably would just given Gideon a headache.

"I would definitely invite you back to my place," she says chipperly, offering an arm to lead the way to the mall, "But it's a bit of a mess, very sacrilegious of me. We're going to the store though, so you can get much better sunglasses! And I can get new ones, too, I keep not doing that. I'm Cristabel by the way! Glad you're not a vampire, on account of how you'd probably starve to death out here. I've never seen one either, but this place," she shrugs. "Maybe someday."

Edited 2021-07-14 02:07 (UTC)

"Is mess sacrilegious now?" Gideon snorts. "In that case, I'm a heretic." The only reason her rooms have never been messier is because she's lacked the tangible amount of stuff required to do so. It's nice to imagine such a petty way to give a certain someone the middle finger.

The cheer breaks through Gideon's memory with the name. Namely, the absolutely un-joyful Saint of Joy. "Cristabel... named after Cristabel Oct?" Gideon asks. She cannot imagine an Eighth House person this friendly. Admittedly, the only known record she has is for a myriad ago. The sheer masses of generations since then could mean there is one more out wherever this is.

At the mall

I am overdressed, is the second thing Jedao thinks when he emerges from there - in the middle of a blistering firefight - to here. Jedao's been to shopping areas before, although none configured quite like this. He's guessing that his no-longer-legal Kel uniform, worn these days to intimidate the impressionable, is...not what people here wear, based on the outfits he sees in the windows of the shops.

The first thing, which happens almost without conscious thought, is the assessment he does every time he enters a new location: sight lines, angles of fire, ways to set and avoid ambushes. He has his sidearm and a knife, neither of which are going to help him if he's vastly outnumbered in a space this open. And as empty as this place seems, the people he knows and depends on appear to be...missing. Not a good sign.

It's mostly empty indeed, a few people milling around here and there, and the first person to actually catch Jedao's attention is probably the one who talks. Five foot nine, skinny pale young woman with dark hair, big grey scarf, leather jacket, torn up pants.

"Doesn't it blow," Jess says as if they've met a hundred times before, "to just ... suddenly be at the mall? Of all places. The mall. Surprise!"

Jedao quickly assesses the woman. Probably not from the hexarchate, although she could pass from a distance, with that dark hair. He's going to assume she's deadlier than she looks, always a safe assumption in his line of work. Skinny or not, she's got a few inches on him, he's known assassins with that deceptive light build, and who knows what she's hiding under that jacket.

"It beat being shot at," Jedao says easily, making no attempt to suppress his native drawl, "which is what was going on before I landed here. That's assuming we're not about to be shot at, anyway. I'm Jedao, by the way, pleased to meet you. D'you think they have anything decent to drink?"

There's a sudden look of surprise from Cristabel to Gideon; that wasn't something she was expecting at all.

"It is for me, considering I am Cristabel Oct," comes out in a tone that's half bubbly-excited and half wary. If anyone can manage that, it's Cristabel. "And my House does like things neat. Unless there are people named after me, which, I don't know, maybe there are! I think I'm the only Cristabel Oct. Do you know someone who knew me?"

"... Most things beat being shot at. Have to give you that one. I'm not anticipating any attackers at the moment." Jessica shrugs, her normal slouching posture resulting in her shoulders and earlobes briefly making friends.

The dude definitely looks military. Weird military, but military.

"There's a bar and grill off to the left that's only sort of useless. Good drinks," that she's been drinking out of a plastic cup half the time, "no staff, no food, just ingredients." Oh, right, names: "I'm Jessica. I don't cook."

Jedao's eyebrows raise at the description. "I know my way around a grill if it comes to that," he says, "and I don't mind cooking, but I'm not hungry yet, unless you are?" And: "I only just arrived. How long have you been here? Is it always this sparsely populated? Run by civilians, I presume?"

Of course, his version of "cooking" literally is bar food, but maybe that's not all bad.

"I have been eating vending machine food for the two days I've been in this mall," Jessica offers by way of explanation. It is, technically, not an answer. The vending machine gave her a reasonable facsimile of food. "So not exactly, but on the other hand, I wasn't shot at recently either."

She's been shot at ever, but not recently, and, well: the bar has perfect ingredients for bar food!

"There's basically no one here and everyone who is here has, uh. Not been here long. Or is from here. This entire place has no employees. Haven't been outside yet just in case this is a Romero situation."

Shopping, or something like it.

Murderbot 2.0 issn't sure exactly what it had expected to find. At a minimum: something connected to a comm network and TargetContact. It isn't on a network. It's loaded directly into some piece of hardware. Could TargetContact sense it and divert it into an isolated system? That sounds bad. Murderbot 2.0 starts playing an episode of The Rise and Fall of Sanctuary Moon. It's not ignoring its problems, but Murderbot 1.0 has watched this episode so many times, 2.0 figures it's helpful. It's calming.

Time for business. Murderbot 2.0 extends throughout the hardware system and powers it up. It appears to be some kind of drone at factory settings. The Targets are reusing all tech at their command, so it's suspicious. The drone is also stuck inside a small container with no visibility. Luckily, the drone has some capacity to deal with that. It extends an arm to explore the limits of the container. It's rigid but relatively soft. Not metal. Not glass. It opens easily. Murderbot 2.0 eases the thrusters up and exits the container. It scans constantly and discovers it came from one of many identical boxes. To be safe, it opens another box, copies its killware and small media sampling onto a second drone and leaves it behind. If it's destroyed, Murderbot 2.1 will hopefully recognize something went wrong and perform better.

Because 1.0 always likes to have a map of anywhere it goes (preferably) and there is no network 2.0 can download a map from, it scans in sweeps, slowly building a map from the sensor data the drone records. Murderbot 2.0 is sucking up what programming is useful and generally writing over anything that wouldn't want it to exist. Shopping districts, as it's in, only exist for people to use them, so it keeps an eye out for people, grey-skinned with implants on the back of their neck or otherwise.

Edited 2021-07-19 02:44 (UTC)

This makes no sense. People don't try to murder someone (with the side effect of near complete genocide) for someone who is having some kind of sunglasses breaking vacation/vocation/whatever this is. "Sort of, briefly," Gideon says. "She and everyone else so far as I know were under the impression you were dead. Are you dead? Am I dead? Are we both dead together and that's how this meeting is happening?" Perhaps cavaliers all went to the same afterlife. Special soul battery purgatory? It would explain the lack of people.

"Mostly dead," Cristabel says, as she keeps on walking vaguely mall-wards, "More like perpetually dying? But then I ended up here. I think—I think I don't want to know what to think about how that happened."

She knows it's because Mercymorn's died or been otherwise permanently cut off from her.

She refuses to accept it.

"Who ... she? Who did you know who knew me?"

"Relatable," Gideon says. She's not sure anyone's been in her exact position before. Maybe Pyrrha is in the same one at the same time. Gideon will keep an eye out for her. "There's really only shitty answers when you've a cav, huh." More of a statement.

Gideon has no good feelings about the person she's about to namedrop. She's pretty sure it was a bad day when they met. A bad decade. A bad century. A bad millennium. Whatever, she tried to kill Harrow and then some. Gideon does like Cristabel and her life saving sunglasses already. That's the larger hesitation.

"Mercymorn the First, also known as the Saint of Joy," Gideon says. There was an ironic name if ever she's heard one. "Your uh... necromancer?" She wants to be corrected so hard.

"Oh, and I don't recognize you at all," Cristabel exclaims, sounding guilty, "It must really be an awfully long time since I've been able to pay attention! I used to notice people when we met them, I used to try to hang on, it's just not that easy when most of your soul's busy doing other things."

She is a little bit hangdog about that; she looks a little sad and her enthusiastic pace slows slightly, but it's not completely gone. Joy is certainly a good name for the cavalier half. "I was the very first one, the very first cavalier, that is, not—the first Lyctor, but I'm sure you already know that." That was a sore point. Mercymorn should have been first, but the normally so patient and steady Alfred had been even more enthusiastic. And that was Cristabel's own fault, wasn't it? "So I hate to think the job has turned into only shitty answers, but I suppose in our case it's possible you're right. Except that this place isn't bad, only very quiet and I'm not that big on quiet."

(As was obvious because she kept talking.)

Edited 2021-07-15 00:59 (UTC)

"That sounds like a vote for cooking." Jedao smiles his tilted smile, reflex; he's not flirting (or at least, not intending to, not with a stranger at the far end of eternity). The part about everyone being new is more concerning. "I'm definitely not from here, and I take it you aren't either, then. You mentioned vending machines and I don't have any cash, but I'm not even sure my money would be good here if I had it." Especially since he usually relies on fraud or hacking anytime he needs to "pay" for something, but best not to mention that just in case Jessica is some kind of cop.

He heads off to the left, still talking amiably, giving Jessica the option to follow or not. "Are you allergic to anything?" His voice drifts off as he examines the ingredients available. "I could grill some kebobs...I see bell peppers, onions, red meat of some kind..." The real question is what are they going to do for food after this stuff runs out, but that's no reason they shouldn't eat now.

It's too bright to look around and to determine how old this place is. Perhaps Cristabel Oct has spent the last myriad here. In which case, things could have gone a lot less shitty if the necromancers had known that. "You've been here... the whole time?" Gideon asks. "Since, uh, however you guys did it. Getting eaten." She's never gone out of her way to learn more about this stuff. Not that she's sure the answers were available.

"Mine didn't want to eat me," Gideon says. "So... it's been weird." She glances over at the older cavalier. Is this really how it is? Is it bad that Gideon's, well, paying attention?

"Hmm, no, no, I've been in the River most of the time. Sometimes I could look back and—see things, when Mercy had my eyes. Sometimes I could feel things, the fighting. When she needed me the most." Cris takes a deep breath to stop herself from tearing up, because those memories hurt, even if she still stands behind her 'dying for her necromancer' decision.

"I've only been here about, oh, a month I think? If you count thirty days as a month, anyway. Augustine didn't want to do it either, but he must've gotten used to the idea. Also blamed me, I'm sure. Very healthy of him. Very healthy man, Augustine."

Hopefully the sarcasm was obvious.

"Did something go wrong, with you?" Maybe she can help, maybe she can just be supportive. She's happy for either. She's happy for conversation.

"Oh. Ha. No. I just gave the thing my fingerprint."

She had managed to figure that much out, at least: it had what looked like a fingerprint pad. Apply fingerprint, get M&Ms. Pretzels. A package of weird knock-off Oreos.

"I think I accidentally started a vending machine tab, but since there's no one here to complain I don't have any local currency ... no," she concludes. "No allergies except to really disgusting beer, don't try tap four. You cook, I'll bartend, what do you want?" They're the only ones in the abandoned bar and grill, so it's not like anyone has to pay for the drinks. "I do actually know how. To bartend."

Gideon groans. "A myriad in the River? Gross. No one shared that fine print," she says. No one told any of them anything at Canaan House. It was very reinvent the wheel since heirs are so smart. Not that she wants to go back and change her decision. She thinks. She's pretty sure.

Augustine after ten thousand years is probably (was probably) not the same man than he was back at the start. Nothing and no one seems healthy after that long. Not even ~god~. "As healthy as anyone who tries to kill John Gaius can be," Gideon sasses back. That's three of the final four lyctors so far as she can count. Which is basically half of them. Wow, they sure fell like flies at the end.

Gideon sighs, "Well I didn't get eaten. The River basically somehow tore me right out of my necromancer and plopped me in my well-preserved hot bod. Whatever that means." She doesn't know. She doubts anyone really does.

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test drive!

Questions, comments, etc.

Gideon Nav | The Locked Tomb

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Shuos Jedao | Machineries of Empire

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Murderbot 2.0 | The Murderbot Diaries

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