Test Drive Meme 016

[voidtreckermods]

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!

Silence in the Library

The library is a double carriage. Downstairs is brightly-coloured, with cover posters across the walls, tables and chairs in the strong colours of the team uniforms, and a wooden model train placed as though winding its way through the carriage with carriages of shelves in tow. The walls are shelving, and beanbags litter the floor. Upstairs is quieter, rows of nonfiction shelves with private desks at the end of each row; the sound up here is muffled.

You don't know who, you don't know why, but someone or something has had a bad power day. How do you know? Well, the fact that the characters of any book you read keep coming to life as tiny versions of themselves and running riot around the carriage... that might have been a clue.

You just wish you'd picked a different book before realising it.

An Apple a Day

Medical is another double carriage, though it boasts one of the few person-sized lifts on the train as well as stairs. On the bottom floor, two of the three rooms are examination rooms, with simple beds, equipment and first-aid capacity. The third is a surgical bay, albeit a simpler one than some passengers may anticipate. All three rooms have ICPs with instructions and manuals for all equipment and a number of medical procedures.

Upstairs, there are four private recovery rooms, with a medical bed and an accessible en-suite. It's possible to check a passenger into one of these rooms, at which point they cannot leave until discharged by the person who checked them in.

Which, unfortunately, you are entirely aware of. You've been here for three days, and you're climbing the walls. But that'll teach you to get injured in such a stupid way. Or so they hope.

Sprockets and Skysong

In which a train arrives among the smokestacks of Little Underpool with some unexpected visitors.

Little Underpool is a township on Void world #30630687444. Caught up in the middle of what appears to be a series of industrial revolutions, the world is in a state of constant, chaotic innovation. Currently, that means that there is a power struggle going on between the skywhaling megacorporation Scrimshaw Inc and the Zephyr Company, an airship manufacturer, over control of the skies above Underpool, and the rapidly diminishing population of skywhales, whose bones are used in most modern airships, and whose blood is a key fuel source for a great number of new devices and engines. The voidtreckers are, this mission, to rescue the whales, rather than any humanoids.

Team One

Infiltrating Scrimshaw Inc, this team's job is to sabotage the tracking drones used to locate the whale pods, to allow the great beasts to migrate successfully away from Underpool. The offices of the corporation are in a series of spiralling brass and bone towers in the centre of the town, connected by exposed cable bridges that run to dizzying heights. Their clockwork guards are numerous, but often faulty, and highly vulnerable to tinkering.

Team Two

This team's job is to hijack some of the Zephyr Company's airships, and use them to defend the whale pods closest to Underpool. Several pods contain whale calves, and cannot evacuate as fast as the larger bachelor groups. The airships are light, and handle well, but their oddly organic design can be rather unsettling. The primary weapons are harpoons and short-range bomb slings, both as deadly against other airships as they are against their original targets.

Team Three

The final team's task is less direct - they must go among the populace of Underpool and spread unrest, redirecting the attention of the people towards the plight of their nonhuman neighbours in the sky, and the wrongdoings of their resident megacorporations. The people are not aware that the whales are an entirely sentient species, which appears to be a deliberate obfuscation by the town's council and sponsors. Your job is to change that.

Comments

[aluciner]

There's a long moment where it seems like maybe Ronan isn't going to say anything. It can be hard to tell with Ronan what's silence and what's a longer than usual pause where he tries to fit words together in a semblance of sense. Eventually, he says something in a tone that's not quite a whisper but might not be loud enough for Adam to hear.

"I thought I'd never see you again." Even though Ronan is looking down, he is still facing Adam. Then, louder: "Odi et amo. Quare id faciam, fortasse requiris. Nescio, sed fieri sentio et excrucior."

Ronan's recitation has never been good, exactly, but for once he doesn't need it to be. He just lets the emptiness that's been gnawing at him since he arrived leak into the words, because it's easier in Latin. He can use Catullus' words to convey something he can't quite manage to put together in English: the warring feelings of being so overwhelmed with relief that Adam is here, that Adam is safe, and the knowledge that something could be happening back home and they wouldn't be there to stop it. That the train isn't safe, exactly. They've never been safe, but in the makeshift sphere of the summer Ronan never wanted to end it had been easy to pretend everything could be safe.

Before he kissed Adam because the world seemed like it might end and Ronan decided that if that was true then it was worth shifting the entire world into something unknown, Ronan never let himself come to close to Adam because he was utterly terrified of what would happen. Now that they're inextricably entangled like two trees that have braided themselves into one, Ronan is no less terrified of the entirety of what he feels for Adam.

[forleaving]

He strained to hear the first thing Ronan said, turning his hearing ear more towards him, but he still didn't quite catch it. He wasn't going to ask him to repeat himself though, because after taking a moment to process the Latin, he thought he understood. Not just what the Latin meant, but what Ronan meant.

Shifting around to be able to reach, he stretched out his uninjured arm and snagged Ronan's hand, for the sake of touching him. "I'm here now." He couldn't apologize for not being there sooner, because no one really wanted to be kidnapped, but he'd rather be here than have Ronan be here alone. He hadn't even known Ronan was gone, and the potential implications that made about how time worked here was something he'd focus on another time. "And I'm not going anywhere." Probably. At least if he was, he wouldn't go alone so long as he could help it.

"We'll figure out a way to get home. Together." They were pretty good at figuring things out, and if they couldn't... if they couldn't, Adam didn't know what he would do. He'd still rather be somewhere far from home with Ronan than be alone.