riverviewmod: (Default)
Riverview Moderator ([personal profile] riverviewmod) wrote in [community profile] quaranmeme2017-10-20 08:26 pm

riverview: october test drive meme

riverview test drive meme

Welcome to Riverview's test drive meme! Feel free to dip your toes in on the test drive meme to try out your character in the setting, play out a mission, and get samples for your application at the same time!

● There are currently 31 Character Slots available.
Applications are open but the application and reserve cycle will resume with apps closing on November 7th.
● Providing all parties are amenable, threads on the test drive meme can count as game canon, as the plot in the prompts presented is game canon, and may continue while applicants are waiting on the queue (including spanning multiple TDMs).
● TDM threads do not count for Activity Check, but they do count for Activity Bonus Points, so long as all characters involved are accepted into the game.
● Threading on the TDM is intended for prospective new characters, so top-levels should only be posted by players of these characters. Since the events in the TDM are considered game canon, characters currently in the game are free to use the TDM prompts for logs and posts on the regular communities.

Feel free to use the prompts below or create your own scenario. The setting is built to be flexible, so feel free to make things up as you go.


information resources

premisearrivalsettingask a questioncalendarnavigation


prompt i: high voltage!

Over the course of the past couple months, something has been changing in the Abandoned City, the part of the Quarantine that was abandoned over a decade ago after the great Epidemic that decimated the population of the sprawling city. It hasn't been independent or spontaneous either - Quarantine resident Ava Orlova has been practicing with her energy production powers outside the city in a way that has had some interesting side effects.

With burst after burst of glowing blue energy surging through a spur of one of the abandoned and neglected transit train lines, something has started stirring. The line was connected to a long-dormant hydro-electric power relay station located near on the river just before it connects to the waterfalls (see the crudely-drawn map here), and with all that power being pumped through the train line and ending up in the station, the backup generators have wheezed to life.

What does this mean for Quarantine residents?

Providing the station can be secured and brought back to full power, it means that the overall electrical grid in the city will be much more reliable, the fences will be more secure, and new methods to try to direct the portal to send mistaken arrivals home can be explored. Most importantly, the part of the Abandoned City surrounding the newly-activated power station will be much easier to tame and inhabit. The possibility of expansion is very important for the Quarantine - with new arrivals coming through the portal almost constantly, overpopulation has been a bit of a concern of late.

With all of this at stake, the Perimeter Guard and the Government of Riverview are teaming up to make sure that this new area gets explored, secured, and made useful in as short a time as possible. Anyone with even an inkling of desire to explore will see ads, fliers, or Perimeter Guard Cadets talking up the exploration mission out to the new power relay station. Head over to the Perimeter Guard Headquarters to receive a free package of exploration equipment courtesy of the Government of Riverview (complete with comfortable camouflage jumpsuit, tactical belts, and a lightweight pack with a survival kit including food, water, first aid, flares, and other similar supplies) and be issued a weapon to follow the train line out to the power station and ensure the route is safe.


prompt ii: standing ground

It isn't just the route to the power station that needs to be cleared - with all the activity and the thrum of energy and light at the station, a swarm of interested monsters and creatures has come toward the area. The exploration team and any techs interested in helping to get the station fully operational will need protection, and the station itself will need to be cleared of all threats and secured so the engineers, electricians, and technical geniuses can safely work on establishing a power grid in the area.

Join in the fray, and back up your fellow explorers to get the area safe, secure, and able to be used!

Almost any type of monster is possible, including monsters featured in previous Test Drives, monsters that players make up on the fly, and even monsters from individual character canons that could have conceivably come through the portal. The fight, however, is totally worth it. Once this area is cleared out, there's going to be a lot more space to move around and a few interesting new locations...


prompt iii: ghosts of october

During the 10th month of every year on the moon, due to a complex series of chemical, electromagnetic, and magical forces that no one has ever exactly distinguished or completely understands, the boundaries between the worlds of the living and the dead are weakened almost to the point of nonexistence. During this time, residents of the moon are able to see and interact with the dead - ghosts, manifesting in ways that run the gamut from being a strange sense of being watched or being visible or audible all the way to more corporeal spirits that can affect the world around them. The barriers are weaker in some parts of the city than they are in others, with some areas experiencing little to no ghost activity, while others are so populated with these ghosts that residents can barely go a few feet without running into one. The ghosts are generally the unsettled dead, people who died violently, or who were lost, seeking a place to call home, and their behavior is as varied as it was while they were alive. Some ghosts are angry and vengeful, some are simply lonely and lost.

While some people tend to interact with the ghosts only a little and as necessary, others avoid them as completely as possible, and yet others actively seek out souls who are suffering and try to ease that so they can stop coming back year after year. There are other people who have found that ghosts from their home worlds have come through with them, following them through the portal when they arrived, even if they did not die on the moon...

Whether facing death or making peace with those who have died, this is a time to reflect.

A Few OOC Guidelines:
● Characters may see or interact with ghosts from the Quarantine's past. These people will be as varied as the NPCs, from a multitude of different worlds, and characters are welcome to either engage or avoid, as players wish.
● Most Quarantine-based ghosts will have died in either the Great War with the neighboring reality or in the Pandemic that wiped out the population of the Abandoned City years ago.
● Characters may also see or interact with ghosts from their own or other characters' canons, providing the character in question is dead in canon and is not currently being played in the game.
● Canon-based ghosts should not be simply transplanted into the game as they were in canon - they are ghosts, and therefore 'not quite right,' and should not be used as an excuse to NPC a canonmate for a month. These ghosts are there to be used as plot devices to open up new avenues of CR, to create angst, to help a character make peace with their past, or other similar reasons.
● Ghosts should not be complete corporeal physical presences indistinguishable from living people, but barring this, how strongly the ghosts manifest and how much they can interact with the world around them is up to player discretion. Ghosts shouldn't be present the whole month straight, but can disappear and reappear at random times.


prompt iv: making memories

Since October 9th, the residents of the Quarantine have been having a stranger-than-usual experience that's been drawing them closer together (or pushing them apart). The machinery in control of the process that's used for canon updates has gone haywire and is releasing nanites that usually function to restructure characters' bodies to match the updated information. The nanites are doing something different, though - they're sharing memories between characters.

Memories can be shared in several forms:

First Person: This is experiencing another person's memory as if it's your own, seeing through that person's eyes in all its detail. This option wouldn't clearly expose the identity of the person whose memory is being viewed unless the memory includes that information specifically.
Dreamscape: Mostly happening during dreams or with shared flashes during the day, this is watching the memory as if it were a three-dimensional movie, during which you can meet and talk with the person whose memory is being viewed.
Network: These are memories shared through the network by accident, either as audio/video uploads or text-based descriptions transcribed to the network. These would be posted with the ID of the person whose memory is being shared.

● It is up to individual player preference how much feelings can be used in the memory, but knowing the other character's thoughts is not permitted.
● All memories must be from your character's canonpoint or earlier.


prompt v: friendr/network

Whether your character is accidentally sharing a memory, posting up a silly word game, trying to get hold of a friend, or putting out feelers for people to go out into the fray with, the network is going strong.

Alternately, an offer for a free app is popping up on new arrivals' devices - Friendr is a friend-finder and/or dating app. If characters choose to install it, they will fill out a short bio and parameters for what they're looking for, upload a snap of themselves, and then proceed to browse for matches. This is a typical swipe-left-or-right type app.

Code to post your character's bio is in the textbox below. An example of how it looks can be found here.


Friendr base code is by photosynthesis.
The code in the textbox is for the default color scheme, but the Friendr app has a wide variety of themes, so feel free to customize with colors and patterns as you see fit, but do not remove the credit line out of respect for the creator of the code.


prompt vi: wildcard

Use the wildcard prompt to choose your own adventure and do whatever else you like in the setting!


navigation

[jungle relay tower by Robin Bouwmeester]
odenson: (48)

[personal profile] odenson 2017-11-18 10:51 am (UTC)(link)
Ya'd better, considerin' mine's the best. [he's joking, though--and he'll quiet a bit so Ichimatsu can eat a bit before he asks some more questions. Give him a little time to settle in. He's not Karamatsu, who Chibita can talk a mile a minute at; or Osomatsu, who Chibita could easily yell advice at; with Ichimatsu it's better to give him time to relax, rather than bombard him with chatter. Besides, there's nothing wrong with enjoying the quiet sometimes]
ichimyatsu: (pic#10283717)

holy shit you got both cute moe icons who is this cat

[personal profile] ichimyatsu 2017-11-19 11:42 am (UTC)(link)
[This is why he can, if pressed, call you his friend, Chibita. You actually let him do things at his own pace, instead of forcing conversation out of him. You actually pay enough attention to know that he has to be approached carefully or he gets overwhelmed.]

[Whether or not that has anything to do with the fact that when overwhelmed he has a tendency to shit on things is inconsequential, we're sure.]

[He chuffs, shrugging at the comment, because-- Really, Chibita's oden was the best, but he certainly wasn't about to stoke his ego about it. Left to the pleasant silence he does just that, munching carefully on his plate and looking more and more like a pleased cat as he goes. It's the most comforting thing he's experienced since arriving in Quarantine, even if it's also the most stabbingly homesick-inducing thing.]
odenson: (28)

OMG WHAT A CUTE BOY it's an oden miracle

[personal profile] odenson 2017-11-19 08:41 pm (UTC)(link)
[Chibita is content to let the silence settle around them for a good several minutes, only broken by the bubbling of the broth, the click of his chopsticks as he turns some of the skewers over, and his own quiet humming of some sort of oden-seller's song. Eventually, once he sees that Ichimatsu's made it through a couple of skewers, he'll move to replace the eaten skewers with a couple new ones, before speaking.]

So. What's this about a spaceship?
ichimyatsu: (pic#10396996)

[personal profile] ichimyatsu 2017-11-19 10:51 pm (UTC)(link)
[He chokes on his bite of stewed egg, coughing for a moment longer than necessary just to avoid answering. Of all things, Chibita. You ask about the one he hates talking about most. It's his own fault for putting it out there in the first place, but... RIP. He swallows roughly around the bite of food and looks up with a somewhat rueful expression.]

Me 'n Karamatsu... and Osomatsu, real briefly, were on this awful spaceship. Not much worth talking about. [More like not much he's willing to talk about. He doesn't want to tell someone like Chibita that he and Karamatsu found an eviscerated body strung up through the trees of an atrium, and her heart in a box. Not now, not probably ever.]
odenson: (90)

[personal profile] odenson 2017-11-21 01:43 pm (UTC)(link)
[Eh? He didn't expect Ichimatsu to start choking--and he starts, leaning on his cutting board a bit--] Oi, oi, don't die on me, ya idjit--

[he quiets, though, as Ichimatsu seems to...be okay? Was it the spaceship? There's a slight frown between Chibita's brows that deepens. Awful spaceship? It honestly makes him even more curious...especially if his brothers were there with him. So. Probably better to ask them about it rather than Ichimatsu, because it looks like he doesn't want to talk about it. And Chibita knows when to leave well-enough alone.]

Ah. Alright. What about this place, then? How long ya been here?
Edited 2017-11-21 13:48 (UTC)
ichimyatsu: (pic#10396993)

[personal profile] ichimyatsu 2017-11-22 02:07 am (UTC)(link)
[Again, this is why he likes you, Chibita. He feels a little bad, maybe, because overall that's probably something you're supposed to tell your friends-- talk about your hardships, strengthen bonds, and some other collection of things Ichimatsu knows next to nothing about. But... truth be told, he just flat out didn't want to talk about it. So when Chibita allows the redirection of the conversation, he goes with it.]

Ah... [He ponders that, raising one hand and counting wordlessly on his fingers.] Almost seven months, now.
odenson: (23)

[personal profile] odenson 2017-11-23 09:42 pm (UTC)(link)
Eh, really? That long? [Chibita considers this, folding his arms over his chest in contemplation] Whatcha been doin' all that time? [because listen Ichimatsu may've said he and his brothers have been holding down jobs for a couple months, but there's no way they've had them the whole time.]
ichimyatsu: (007)

[personal profile] ichimyatsu 2017-11-25 05:35 am (UTC)(link)
Since right after our birthday. Who the fuck misses their twenty-fourth birthday, anyway? Me, apparently.

[And surprise, Chibita, Ichimatsu had at least gotten and kept the job he was assigned to. Karamatsu may have swapped around, he couldn't be assed to keep up with what he did all the time. He shrugs, picking up an oden skewer and chewing absently.]

Lotta nothing, really. Same old, apart from working. [And, you know, making friends and eating questionable cookies and getting force-fed potions that made you share pain with a guy whose cells were constantly dying and reconstructing themselves. The usual.]
odenson: (28)

[personal profile] odenson 2017-11-25 08:53 am (UTC)(link)
Well, that's not the same old, anyway. Th' job part. [Honestly, he is pretty surprised he's held a job down for that long, but also, pretty proud of him??? That's honestly great! So he grins a bit at Ichimatsu, snapping his fingers as he hits upon an idea] But if ya missed your birthday, why don't we just celebrate it now?
ichimyatsu: (197)

[personal profile] ichimyatsu 2017-11-25 09:58 am (UTC)(link)
Yeah, I guess that is pretty different. It's not really hard, though, and I didn't have to apply for it, they just... told me that was my job, if I wanted it.

[The snap startles him, and he jolts, looking up. He stays still for a long moment, stunned, and then huffs a soft laugh.]

Pretty sure Osomatsu and Karamatsu would want in on that, too.
odenson: (07)

[personal profile] odenson 2017-11-30 11:45 am (UTC)(link)
[His grin widens at Ichimatsu's laugh, pleased with himself] I guess they can come. It was their birthday also, yeah?