test drive!

[lilypadmin]

Code

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. ♥

Comments

[tobeclosetohim]

She's so young is what Jo hinges on again, even older, and Jo finds herself punched in the sternum with Krissy's second set of words. She might have avoided that a few seconds longer, but it wasn't like she could. It wasn't like she'd have allowed herself all that much further. There's so much more of her mother in that she wants, or could see, in the way she meets it head-on.

"I'd hope to get to talk to you before it happened." To tell her; to ask. Something short of the begging Jo didn't know how to do especially when her existence was negated down to nothing. "Before, it had to be that." It was one thing to hear it from Merlin, a wholly other to be able to accept it, write it. She'd have gotten to saying it to Krissy's face. She knows she would have. Somehow. Krissy, who Merlin called her little sister. Said she'd chosen, not the other way around. Merlin, who always loaded the gun, put it to her heart, and pulled the trigger for her. Without blinking.

Because someone had to. (But there'd been no one to in the Rat Trap.)

She wants to say that she's sorry, but the words stick so hard.

"Did they -- is Roadhouse --" But how does she ask those questions she rarely even let herself think over the last year. Are they okay? Are they still there? Is the Roadhouse still standing? Did she do one thing right finally?

[heredis]

"Yeah, well, since when does the multiverse give you a choice in anything, right?" Jo had made her opinions on the whole of it known well enough around the core of the crew at the RoadHouse, after all. If not all rocky details of what that really all meant, that the feelings toward the thing as a whole existed was at least acknowledged. "At least you... had that. I don't know what might have happened if we didn't know what you wanted." It's a quiet admission that doesn't quite hide just how lost everyone was in those first days as they dragged on into weeks and further still into months without her.

Those not-quite-questions make her lips tug up in a smile and she nods. "Yeah. Yeah, we– everyone stayed together. Most everyone, anyway. Some people disappeared, others... left. Moved onto their own things, but us–" she gestures at nothing to indicate, somehow, the main group. "that core group, we were together."

She glances down with a soft huff before looking back up at her again. "Your shoes aren't the easiest to fill, yanno."

[tobeclosetohim]

It doesn't. They all know that. Her favorite words, the fucking multiverse, dropped not often but more often than anyone else could miss. That bitterness that stuck around like one of the many splinters she couldn't dig out of her skin. That she never got to stay. No matter how much a place meant or the people in it. Even if no one got it as much as Merlin.

Or at least no one else was willing to punch her in the jaw with it squarely.

There's a pain in the hearing (they all got to keep each other); it's a relief, too. They stayed, they kept to each other. The house was still standing. The people gone and still growing, too. Being what it should. A port in the totally fucked up storm. The first one that was more like her parents' Roadhouse than not. So many, too many iterations in.

The last words hit hard for being so soft and looked away from.

"What, you can't drink too much and never sleep yet?"

It's a fitting toss out of her worst, but something guilty in those copper eyes.
Krissy'd never had the chance to say no. She should have had that right.

[heredis]

She huffs a soft sound that's almost a laugh. "Yeah, well you know, I'm still a few years behind you on the drink tolerance scale." Give her time, she'll get there.

"So... where did it take you?" She asks into the silence that threatened to choke her senseless. "Did you... did you have people there?" Did she do it again? Make that solid central space for people to go to, to feel safe in?

(Was there another in her place, somewhere she couldn't follow?)