Test Drive Meme 022

[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.

Happy testing!

Mix It Up

Normally, the morning announcement has you waking up in your designated bed, in your designated cabin, with your three designated roommates. This morning, something's wrong - you're waking up in a bed, in a cabin, with three roommates. But it isn't your bed, your cabin, or your roommates.

It looks like you've all been shuffled during the night. Pity no one's belongings got the memo, you don't recognise any of this stuff. At least you're in your own pyjamas.

Let Slip The Hot Dogs Of War

The carriage-length table and benches of the dining carriage are practical. Sturdy. Easy to clean. It's a good thing, too, because roughly thirty seconds ago, a handful of boiled vegetables went flying across the room and hit someone with a wet splat.

Twenty-nine seconds ago, war was declared.

One overturned bench and three pots of cabbage later, you've picked a side. Or a side has picked you, with a projectile sailing towards your face.

Follow Your Heart

The glittering, futuristic world of Tresques has long been protected by the Ciel Maidens, young women who wield their mighty empathic abilities to subdue and pilot gigantic mechanical monsters called Arc Frames. Now, with disaster on the horizon, their powers have vanished.

Team One

The primary foes of the Ciel Maidens are the Morne, hulking many-limbed shadows born from the nightmares and fears of the people of Tresques. Intangible, they roam the cities feeding on heightened emotions and stirring ill thoughts. Granted emergency Ciel badges and the use of the Arc Frames, team one are to combat the Morne wielding happiness, friendship and love as their weapons. Miniskirts are optional.

Team Two

Camille, ace of the Ciel Maidens, has disappeared, after sealing the empathic powers of the entire order to avoid the loss of any more Maidens to tragedy such as that killed her partner and destroyed their Arc Frame. Team two, based in the order headquarters, are to find out as much as they can about the fate of her beloved, find Camille, and convince her to unseal the powers of the Ciel Maidens.

Team Three

The Ciel Maidens have scattered to the far reaches of Tresques, seeking to restore their own powers and their confidence in themselves and each other. Some are so affected as to have birthed Morne of their own, the creatures possessing the Arc Frames and wreaking havoc. Team three are to search for the Maidens and bring them home.

Comments

[zombiemessiah]

Okay, well, that's weird, but he'll take it. It's better than being on the ground.

He steps onto the lift field, and from there he makes a good grab at the balcony railing. Running from humans has made him pretty flexible, even if he's got a lanky body better for running than fighting.

He lands on the balcony.

Not much of a talker, huh? Murphy thinks at him rather than says at him, trying to get a feel for how this guy works. Not an infected, not by a long shot. But he's receptive enough, and Murphy's more than game to see who he can reach out to on this godforsaken train. He's torn between loving the quiet and hating that none of his people are here. Maybe it'd be nice to have someone to talk to. Maybe.

[morganizedchaos]

There's a slight pingback of surprise, and then an expressive physical shrug. Ghost isn't quite used to other people just being able to do that, but there's no malice in the surprise and no defensiveness unless Murphy tries to go digging. Ghost is holding back some, but it has a distinct feeling of being for his own sake that he doesn't want to get too mentally close, no offense.

The problem with being an experimental alien hybrid is that there's still a few kinks to work out. It's not perfect, straight words - "experimental" carries a sense that no one involved really knew what they were doing or really expected it to work, "hybrid" carries a tinge of "the other part is human, if that wasn't obvious," and the entire thing has a dry wryness to it that carries a bit of "but, y'know, what am I supposed to do about existing? Complain?" Verbal words are hard, - that's both "the physical act of making word sounds is hard" and "expressing thoughts in a language is hard" - so I make fucking do.

[zombiemessiah]

Fortunately for Ghost, Murphy probably couldn't dig if he wanted to. Why? The process of doing so isn't exactly appetizing and usually requires him cracking someone's skull open. Which he's done on a few occasions but he really doesn't like doing it 'cause it's kind of an inconvenience to make happen.

And control? So far Murphy's only been able to control the infected and that keeps getting thrown around with plot twists. God, he hates those. Some new infected comes along and he has to figure them out or run very, very fast.

But! He can listen. And he can talk. And it seems this alien guy just is here for a show and a good time and Murphy imagine that occasionally he can be good conversation (if you're looking for the entertainment factor and not the high compassion factor, 'cause ew).

"Don't you hate it when they do that?" He says out loud of being a hybrid, and whatever would make someone an alien human hybrid. I'm a Z-hybrid. Z as in 'Zombie'. Gen Z in my world? Whole other meaning. Less ego and dance videos, more headshots.

[morganizedchaos]

We have fun here in the read-only permissions club! (Which, yes, actually is kind of how Ghost thinks of it. He is in fact, arguably, a Zoomer.)

"Can't bitch too much." Verbal commentary gets a verbal response, even if it's moderated through the phone. This one's one of those stock phrases that's a little easier to put through - there's probably a lightning-fast echo of the phrase should Murphy be fast enough to catch it before it goes into the technopath connection to the phone.

How the hell does that even work? Dead human, not-quite-dead human, live human, there doesn't seem to be a lot you can do to hybridize those. At least not without getting a lot of necrotic tissue involved in a bad way. I'm a neural hybrid - shove human brain patterns into an alien to see what happens, turns out what happens is accidentally making a person. "Shove" has the sensation of a needle but no clear details, "see what happens" and "accidentally" are more than a little sarcastic because making something at least like a person was actually the intention. There's a tangle there of issues that are in the don't get into it the first time you meet someone unless they invite it category, really.

[zombiemessiah]

The needle of thought makes him flinch and he looks into his nearly finished drink. Maybe there's something else up here? Possibly.

Murphy's situation is notorious back home. The Murphy was hunted across the entire former US, wanted for an undetermined amount of money, desperately coveted by the CDC or crime lords or whoever else wanted a part in the post-world. So while his creation was traumatic, he tends to wear it with a badge of pride. He's the Murphy, after all.

Alien first, huh? I bet we're a treat to get used to. And then he shrugs. I started as alive, he remembers, being strapped to a gurney, to the 'cure' being pumped into him just in time for him to be mauled by zombies that broke into the facility. But then I began to shed. He thinks hard, back to how he used to be. To his first skin before he spent a while damnably blue. Before his teeth fell out and were replaced by new ones. I do know the technicalities- because he took them out of the scientist who did it to him -but I don't exactly have a whiteboard and I don't want to be that boring guy at a party.

Then he tips his head. "So do you get to do all the fun stuff humans do or are you still taking that thing for a test drive?" And he throws on his best cheeky grin.

[morganizedchaos]

There's almost certainly something else up there, but Ghost isn't going to pry. Instead he laughs, more at the question than anything, before leaning back against the railing. Hard to tell if it's that he's confident in it holding his weight or that he can catch himself if it can't; probably some from column A and some from column B.

My neural model is a guy who got a doctorate at 22. Technicalities and whiteboards are his idea of a fun party. Underneath it is a layer of 'traditional human ideas of taking the body out for a spin aren't all that interesting to me really,' but he's not saying that outright. And yes, Ghost is enough like his neural model that he's more curious about those technicalities than anything, but he also has the sense to keep that curiosity to himself, thanks. This is why you shouldn't leave neuroscientists unsupervised.

The tone there is very much 'this is why you shouldn't leave young children unsupervised,' with the accompanying thought of 'they'll put small objects in their mouths and choke' being instead 'they'll put alien matter in their brains and develop psychic powers.'

[zombiemessiah]

Supervision doesn't help. It just gives them a sense of 'hold my beer'. Murphy snorts. Damn shame about the nerd inclinations, though. The human body is cute. This is why pansexual polyamorous zombie-hybrids sometimes find it difficult to communicate unknown alien-human hybrids. Is that a thing? Well, that's a thing that just happened, anyway.

Eventually it let me control the undead, and for once have compassion for something other than himself. Maybe a forced sense of compassion, he doesn't know, but his heart grew three sizes that day for hearts that were no longer beating. And I can bite others and make them immune.

Then he taps his head, points to Ghost's. And it lets me hear when people shout out on the same wavelength. So what else is it that an alien hybrid does for fun?

[morganizedchaos]

'Supervision doesn't help' gets an immediate sense of acknowledgement, the kind of yeah it sure doesn't, does it that says there's a hell of a lot more going on there than meets the eye. 'Out loud,' Ghost sends, Considering that the known side effect of the experiments he ran on himself was memory loss, Morgan forgot about a lot of the beers he was making people hold.

That's the nicest way of putting it, really. Using yourself as a test subject is also not the best decision anywhere.

At least 'what do you for fun?' has an easy, reflexive answer that doesn't have any bad feelings associated with it, no deep nuance between a general sense of camaraderie. Telekinetic table tennis. The thought is accompanied by a mental image/sensation of exactly what it sounds like - chuck-and-catch with pure psychic powers, mostly with table tennis balls but also tomatoes, for some reason.

[zombiemessiah]

Oh? Nice. Telekinesis is a trick I never got to do. Let me make you some space. He goes to sit on the balcony railing, one leg propped up along it and back against the wall.

He gestures loosely at Ghost.

"Go on, I wanna see. Show off, hot stuff."

God he can think of so many times that would have been good to have.

[morganizedchaos]

It's not that impressive. The comment comes with a feeling like a laugh.

Still with a faint wave of Ghost's hand for prompting, the folding lawn chair lifts into the air, folds, and then unfolds in a backflip before dropping back into mostly the same position it was in.

I'm pretty much limited to one thing or group of things at once, so it's really just like having a third hand around that isn't attached anywhere. He might be underselling it a little, but it's definitely less visually impressive than, say, the electricity thing. I'm still working on the dexterity to be able to do useful things with it instead of just throwing shit around. I've got a friend back home who can almost write with it, but she didn't have much choice but to learn. That's distinctly 'human friend,' and the didn't have much choice part carries the image of shaking, uncontrolled hands and a brain injury.

[zombiemessiah]

"Are you kidding me?"

It's impressive enough! Seriously, how helpful would that alone have been in a zombie apocalypse setting. In the early days it took so much concentration to turn off someone's hunger.

But, oh. That's unfortunate. The mental image of shaking hands pressed into his mind.

I could have cured that, he thinks blatantly. He thinks, pointedly, enough to conjure up mental images, of some of the dying and chronically ill people that he bit. Sure, it meant they were linked to him, put them in the similar state of 'in-between' that he lives in. But there were a lot of people that come to him just for that and surprisingly few regretted it.

[morganizedchaos]

That would have been useful. A couple mental images come up in response - not just Mary's shaking hands but a couple other people with the aftermath of concussions, someone's arm with deep electrical burns, a woman in a chair trying to work feeling into her leg and the phrase "I can only walk on good days, now." We've got one doctor but there's only so much she can do, even with a couple neurosci to do her bidding and a medical Operator to handle the small shit. ('Medical Operator' is said roughly concurrent with 'med robot' to skip the explanations.)

There's a definite feeling of 'different apocalypse, same problems' to it - Typhon aren't zombies but the end result isn't that far off, in terms of the total breakdown of society and infrastructure, at least assuming Murphy's version isn't that different from the standard movie fare.

Luckily Mary's got people to be her hands for the kinds of complicated fiddly shit she can't afford to screw up, but it's been about six months so she's probably not getting any better. 'Complicated fiddly shit' is fine computer part soldering and putting microchips in place - the mental images are clear because Ghost served a couple shifts as her hands himself, so he knows exactly what she needed help with.