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quaranmeme2018-07-20 05:01 pm
riverview: july test drive meme
riverview test drive memeWelcome 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 62 Character Slots available.
● Reserves are currently CLOSED and will open on August 15th. Applications are currently CLOSED and will open on September 1st at 10:00 pm EST.
● 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.
● 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
premise ● arrival ● setting ● exploration progress report ● ask a question ● calendar ● navigation
It's definitely not unusual to hear strange things from the jungle north of the city - the stomping and crashing of massive creatures, the mating calls of smaller animals, the sounds of nature at its most deadly and most alive outside the safety of the city's walls. But for the past few days, and continuing on into the month from July 20th, there's a new sound that's rising in intensity and volume over the others. At first, it is a soft, plaintive whimpering noise, the sound of a person or animal in distress, that comes on the evening breeze and echoes with the sound of rustling leaves in the trees.
As the week goes on, though, the sound gets louder, more prevailing, filling the air with the sound of whimpers and cries of distress that would drive even some of the least empathetic people to want to help - or at least just shut it up! It doesn't take much time or effort for the Guard to start recruiting people both from inside its' ranks and outside them, calling upon anyone who is capable of doing so to form troupes or teams to head out into the jungle to search for the source.
The jungle is dangerous, and full of wild beasts, and at this time of year, just following the rainy spring season, there's bound to be a few sinkholes and quicksand pits as well, hidden between the trees and behind decomposing logs. But the further into the jungle that explorers go, the louder the sound becomes, until it becomes all-encompassing, a humming cry that drowns out everything else as teams reach the source...
As the noise reaches its fever pitch, the exploring teams enter a small clearing in the jungle, and the sound stops, silence falling for just a moment before it's replaced by the oddly peaceful sound of leaves rustling in the wind, birdsong, and the soft whuffs of animals breathing.
In the center of the clearing, draped with vines and covered in moss and leaves, sits an out-of-place piece of the modern world, a three-storey-tall creation that's set up like an installation, but which obviously has four large, thick legs. It's made to move. For all that it's obviously not a natural part of the scene, it seems to blend in strangely well, especially since it's covered in not only foliage, but perching birds, lizards, sugar gliders, bats, monkeys, and all sorts of other creatures. Across the side of the machine is painted a code: 5561A-T4M3R.
With a bit of fiddling, exploration teams will find that it's possible to open up a holographic display that allows them to turn off the whimpering noise and get the machine up and moving, and after a check-in with the home base, the orders are clear - escort the T4M3R back to the Inhabited City for study. It won't be easy, because the T4M3R is very large, and the noise it will make attracts monsters, and all the dangers that explorers faced on the way out will be that much harder to avoid with the giant mech in tow.
The T4M3R isn't the only thing that came back to the Inhabited City with the exploration teams - the whole way, the mech has been trailed by a massive flock of little rodents that look much like sugar gliders but in a wide variety of colors from regular old brown and gray to blue, purple, red, pink, and just about any other color you can imagine. At first, they're annoying and just mildly threatening, gliding from tree to tree, chittering away with bright little voices in a massive storm that could easily cause some serious problems for the teams of explorers and the city residents if they took a turn for the feral. But as time goes on it becomes obvious that they have nothing bad in mind. In fact, they just seem drawn to the T4M3R.
And they stay that way.
Even as the old mech is taken to a bunker in the Perimeter Guard paddocks to be studied and examined, the sugar gliders hang around for a while, as if waiting for their robotic friend to return. Slowly, though, they disperse, abandoning the Perimeter Guard area, and spreading throughout the city, jumping down from buildings and landing on unsuspecting residents' heads - still doing no damage. In fact, some of them seem to be getting attached to certain people, following them home and chittering at their windows and doors begging for food.
After a couple of weeks of study, the reason ends up announced on screens and flyers throughout the City - the T4M3R is a discontinued project, put on the back burner when the city's resources had to be redirected to taking care of the epidemic. It is a device that emanates a particular sound wave frequency that is intended to tame animals, an attempt at a non-violent solution to the problem of monsters outside the wall. And while the project was never entirely successful, it did have some small measure of success this month.
Sugar gliders in all colors of the rainbow are now permanently tamed, and available as common pets for any resident of the city to adopt without any cost in Activity Points. Welcome your new flying friends, Quarantine!
What are the odds? Of course the portal is next to impossible to steer to the worlds of people who want to go home, but on the early morning of July 20th, it opens to a world that may be familiar to long-term residents of the Quarantine.
Drawn by the warmth of the rising sun, a massive swarm of rainbow-colored fireflies once again emerges from the portal into the quarantine. Unlike regular fireflies, though, they are bright enough to glow even during the day, and these bugs have bite! While generally harmless aside from stinging a little, the bite of the rainbow fireflies causes certain kinds of emotional response to become heightened, depending on the color of the firefly in question. While scientists have had a chance to study these bugs, they still have no idea why the bites do what they do - they can cause this effect in any kind of sentient creature that is capable of emotion, including androids and characters that are usually unaffected by substances. The effects on emotions are as follows:
| ● RED: Lust/Anger ● ORANGE: Honesty/Openness |
● YELLOW: Fear/Anxiety ● GREEN: Jealousy/Envy |
● BLUE: Sadness/Grief ● VIOLET: Love/Affection |
When a character is bitten, the effects on their emotions can last anywhere from an hour to a week, depending on the character's psychology and resistance to certain emotions - for example, if a character has a hard time dealing with their grief, the effect of a blue firefly may last longer than other colors. How the characters manifest the heightened emotional response or sensitivity is up to the individual player, as different body chemistry or other circumstances might change how characters are affected. Red firefly bites have a 50/50 chance of affecting a character with lust or anger, though characters who have not reached sexual maturity (underage characters) won't get get the lust effect. Effects of the fireflies can layer, so characters can be affected by more than one firefly at the same time.
PLEASE NOTE: Red fireflies with the lust effect don't make characters incapable of controlling themselves or strip their inhibitions, they just heighten feelings of arousal or desire.
Firefly effects can be easily avoided simply by avoiding the fireflies. It won't take long for some of the geniuses in the Quarantine to start making and distributing firefly repellent (this batch has become immune to the repellent that was created last year), and characters can expect sales of mosquito tents to skyrocket.
These alien fireflies have a lifespan of around a month, and they are unable to procreate outside their native environment, which means the last of them will be dying off around AUGUST 20th.
Whether your character is 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.
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.
Use the wildcard prompt to choose your own adventure and do whatever else you like in the setting!
no subject
You did? They educated you?
[She could see why she wouldn't care much about school, in that case.]
no subject
We wouldn't be very good if we weren't taught.
no subject
[It's rather unfortunate.
She looks Gabby over once, and once she's pretty sure she's actually okay, she glances toward the wall.]
Are you going to stay out here?
no subject
no subject
I can go back, too.
I was worried about the strange noises in the jungle... But it's stopped now.
no subject
And get some ice-cream too.
[ does gabby even have money? who knows. ]
no subject
[As she walks through the brush, she considers something seriously.]
I can buy it for you.
[Obviously has a big sister, she must take initiative.
... Even if she's not the big sister here.]
no subject
[ look she may not be much of a killer, but she would 100% gank stuff. ]
no subject
But there are plenty of vending machines to break into.
[Oh dear.]
no subject
In a way where we don't get caught?
no subject
[She smirks a little. This bodes well.]
And you can run fast.
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no subject
Then let's go visit some vending machines.
no subject
Awesome.