voidtreckerooc | Test Drive Meme 015

Welcome to the Test Drive Meme! Here is the place to see how your character might fit the setting, grab samples and have fun!

1. Post with your character, including their name and series in the subject. We’ve written out some prompts but feel free to make up your own, you have a whole train to play with!

2. Assume they've been around long enough for threads to jump right into the action.

3. Have lots of fun. Mandatory, mod-sanctioned fun.

Happy testing!

A Quiet Place

A double carriage with a staircase at each end, the quiet coach has five booths on each floor. With frosted glass doors, locks on the inside, and a pair of comfy benches each, they’re luxuriously private on a train that’s anything but. There are no ICP screens, and each booth is completely soundproof.

Granted, two of the rooms downstairs have been merged in an act of vandalism and are now a workshop-slash-forge, but that has its own attraction. Plenty of things to mess with, plenty of boxes of scraps. The main tinkerer’s not home. Hey, isn’t that a welding torch?

No? Well, you were early enough to snag a room for yourself. Perhaps you’re not alone, or you’re expecting company. Or maybe you forgot to lock the door, and now someone’s in here with you. Awkward.

Too Many Cooks

Once a single room, the kitchen now sprawls over two floors. Banks of industrial electric ovens, a long, steel countertop facing them. Cupboards full of oven trays and pans, racks of implements and appliances. On the first floor, sinks and modern appliances, and cupboards full of crockery.

This month, the month of Harrow, the recipes are centred around chocolate. Chicken Mole, chocolate ravioli, cocoa chilli… it may begin to taste a little sickly sweet after the first week. Fortunately, there’s plenty of room for experimentation as people start to beg for other meals. And a lot of chocolate going spare.

And when the preparation is finished, and the meals have been sent over to the dining carriage… there are stacks, and stacks, and stacks of plates. Pots. Cutlery. And no dishwashers.

Well, no, that’s not strictly true. You’re there.

Allegorical Devices and Other Foes

The world of Torcera, designation #450720816. With a civilisation level roughly equivalent to the medieval ages, the train has deposited its Voidtreckers in a castle town, in which several kingdoms have assembled for an annual tournament. Banners fly from every roof, chattering squires and servants tug mounts this way and that. Some resemble horses with trailing antlers and four lidded eyes, others great flightless birds, and a third popular choice is a species of lanky winged dogs, albeit for the sake of fairness their wings are strapped loosely to their saddles. As a world ignorant of Void travel, you have all been given access to the dressing car’s voluminous stores. Dresses, chainmail, jerkins, or even a few suits of full plate… and plenty of hooded capes. Evil is afoot at the tournament, and you are to root it out.

Team One

Courtiers and their adjutants have travelled from all corners of the planet to assemble for the tournament; the empress herself is said to be participating, and stakes are high. Your team has been tasked with determining the identity of the empress in the tourney, and the identity of her foes, so that Team Two can move in. To this end, you are to mingle with the court and, if necessary, break into personal quarters. Brief instruction in protocol will not be provided.

Team Two

Once you know the identity of the Empress, you can move to defend her - you’re relatively sure she’s either the helmed hedge knight of the crested monlion, or the masked outrider with the seagoose crest and a mount with plumage of deepest blue. But you can’t be sure, and until you are, you’re to sign up for the tourney and look for troublemakers. The melee will be held in the afternoon, and tomorrow the individual lists. Mounts are available, as are a staggering number of weapons. Ideally, the final round would be a number of Voidtreckers, and the Empress. How to arrange that?

Team Three

Team One is in the court. Team Two in the lists. And you, Team Three, are amongst the common folk. Rumours abound, the atmosphere is festive, and several events are open to ordinary citizens on the second day, including one bohort with a single wish of the Empress as the prize. No great problem, perhaps... if not for the tales of a younger brother, long lost, looking to usurp the throne. Unrest is stirring in the town behind the colourful stalls and laughing children, and it's up to you to determine where, and why.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Alfredo did not look up from his book, though if one looked carefully one could see him stiffen slightly in surprise.

"Does Mundus even have mail? I confess I am unfamiliar with most of the places people here are from," he admits.

"... No, unfortunately. Though I saw one person here who is apparently writing the book on her own world's wizardry; she may be more help."

Alfredo took the question at face value; magic was a new agent to him, and not entirely one he trusted. But that didn't mean other people deserved to be unprepared either.

"The postal service was one of the many things on Mundus we needed to improve," the pixie replies. "And that might be useful. Might not, but better to rule it out than to never check."

He stops, turns, and tilts his head.

"Hmn. Sorry about bulldozing through your own reading. I'm not bothering you, am I?"

He seems genuinely concerned that he might have been.

After a pause, Alfredo shakes his own head.

"No. I'm just... still unused to being here."

He's not just going to out-and-out mention he's dead at home; Alfredo may be unsettled, but that's no excuse to be macabre.

"I wish I could be of more help in general, really; it feels as if I do not have much to contribute."

A voracious learner, he is, but this all seems very out of his depth.

Perhaps it will pass as time moves on, but in the meanwhile...

"But if I do get more points, I understand I can help to order books here?"

"The first time in an isekai situation is never fun," he says, in what he hopes is a sympathetic tone of voice; he always has trouble emoting properly and hopes that by Kannon's mercy that he didn't come off as any less than sincere.

"Let me guess. Noncombatant scholar, and this is your first brush with swords, sorcery, psionics and superscience? And yes! Yes, cash shop books are always useful, thank I think Gnomon in this case they don't have a gashapon system here."

He grins at his little joke, which probably went right over the poor man's head.

Yet more strangeness, though of a less wary-provoking sort.

"Isekai? I- cannot say I've heard of that word." But if that was how to describe this situation, then who was he to poke at it?

"And I do know how to fight; my father was in the King's army, and I'm something of a tactician." Not that Alfredo spoke as if he were one enthusiastic to fight, but he wanted to be sure the truth was known. "But as to the rest, yes. And... gashapon?"

Though perhaps that one was better left unexplained.

"The unethical practice of selling a blind assortment of items with arbitrary rarity," he says, by way of explaining gashapon. "And Isekai is just my mother tongue's world for 'another world,' used by a certain kind of person to mean the state of being spirited away to one."

Seriously. Entire team is weebs. Even his nisei ass.

"And my apologies for the assumption," he adds, with a slight bow. "Alesha would commend you on your alloy of gentleness and valor; a combination we need more of in the world."

Alfredo snorts. "That does sound annoying. And- certain kind of person?"

He shakes his head - that part is not so important here, he feels.

"Isekai is certainly an accurate word, then."

As for the rest, Alfredo looks utterly nonplussed. "Really? I- when you put it that way, I cannot help but agree with you."

He would not describe himself that way, but there should indeed be more people like that in the worlds.

"As a religious thinker I admire once put it, 'The ideal of [the knight] Lancelot is escapism, in a sense never dreamed of by those who use that word,' he quotes, a faint smile on his face. "It provides the only possible escape from a world of wolves who do not understand, and sheep who cannot defend, the things that make life desirable..."

He laughs. "If he wasn't so blinkered by his imperial viewpoint as to think such heroism was a uniquely British phenomenon, I'd count C.S. Lewis among the ranks of the enlightened. For all his is a different tradition than mine, there's value in realizing that lions with courage and kindness both must be forged, not born."

"...Such as my friend Alesha, and such as you, it seems."

Edited 2020-08-20 07:24 (UTC)

The words aren't any Alfredo recognizes, but he accepts the statement in quiet contemplation.

"Heroism isn't so limited, no," he agrees. "It can come from the works of kings, yes, but it is those of the workers and children in hardship that are deserving of more respect than they're given, and support."

Test Drive Meme 015

A Quiet Place

Too Many Cooks

Allegorical Devices and Other Foes

Team One

Team Two

Team Three

Re: Wildcard

Re: Wildcard

Re: Wildcard

Re: Wildcard

Re: Wildcard

Re: Wildcard

no subject

link is to an animatic of "On Chivalry," cw eurocentric racism

Re: link is to an animatic of "On Chivalry," cw eurocentric racism