voidtreckerooc | Test Drive Meme 026

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!tdm

Test Drive Meme 026

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!

Stand Back

The long-awaited laboratory carriage is a place of many delights. And by delights, we mean 'unsafe thaumo-scientific practices'. Whether the chemistry stores, the machine shop and its welding station, the magitech benches sat right next to the physics research area... or the panic showers.

A strange, earthy smell is coming from the biology room. Green smoke is curling under the door of chemistry. The machine shop is eerily quiet, and within a metre of the physics room, things appear to be levitating. At least one of the showers is running, but who knows which room the erstwhile scientist came from? Dare ye investigate?

Autobiography

The library carriage is normally a place of quiet, two storeys of shelves and comfy seating. The shelves are normally a little empty, filled only with what the Voidtreckers have bought themselves... but today, every shelf is filled.

Some books are normal - that one novel you'd been thinking of last week, or the tome of old family recipes you wistfully mentioned to your friend. The lower shelves are replete with activity books for small children, covering topics such as anatomy (for kids! non-human kids, mostly!), holiday activities for familiar and unfamiliar national holidays, and an unnerving number of sticker books that bodes ill for the walls of the train.

Others are larger, gilt or bound in strange covers. Like this one, coloured in a familiar hue, its spine reading only your name.

Fools' Gold

The Voidtrecker Express has landed on the world of Pamsar. More specifically, it has stopped, floating and untraceable, above the mountains holding the castle and surrounding town of the Pale Marquess's march.

It would have landed, but the forests and gardens of the march have petrified. Trees are sweeping spikes and clusters of sharp, smooth jade. Gemstone flowers dot the meadows and twine up walls and around window frames. Mosses have taken on the rough texture of granite. Beautiful as it is, it threatens the march's survival.

Team One

What were cultivated fields of grain are now rows upon rows of pure gold. Blinding, shimmering in the morning light coming over the mountains, but useless for the people of the Pale March. Panic is spreading. This team is tasked with protecting the granaries and food stores from panicked citizens.

Team Two
When pressed, many people appear to know the source of their misfortune. Living at the frontier, the people of their march have grown envious of the palaces and styles of the inner kingdom, and their prayers the last year have been for wealth and prosperity above all else. A wandering deity granted these wishes, to the peoples' regret. This team is to locate the deity's temple in the outlands, and convince them to reverse the blessing. Or else find another of the outsider gods to repair the damage.

Team Three
The forests across the march are now gorgeous, sharped prison bars for the people and creatures that live within them. This team must ingress into the jade woodlands, and rescue those trapped within. For some, a discovery is made: living blood shed on the petrified plants slowly dispels the effect.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Three months. So he hasn't been in complete darkness. She nods to show she's listening. And now she's been brought to this place to...perhaps it's a palace she's been brought to to work through her grief in an external way. Though she doesn't see any other poorly disguised Lan ancestor or elder in their midst. A dragon overhead, but that was it. She looks at him.

A world of their own.

"Then I am a man in this Wei Ying's realm," she concludes.

No, only sixteen years of darkness, don't worry, Lan Zhan, he was fine. Counting the months after that, cursed and solving murder cases that were linked together, also fine. Fine unmasking the reasons things had gone so wrong, and not exonerated, except by others.

"Mm, you are. I'd say for most those from our kind of homes would say the same." He hasn't heard of an exception yet, but that in and of itself is meaningless. "Your other selves here are men." Did he want to tell her there were three of them? Three men who were her, in another realm? Also with their own differences; in the end, that remains true for them all.

Other selves? Would they be like her? Would they be more like her brother? If Wei Ying says that they're her other selves, then they would be like her. Just...as men.

"Are there other Wei Ying here?"

It's strange to ask such a question to Wei Ying. It isn't too strange to consider it: this one is not her Wei Ying after all.

He nods, holding up two fingers. "Right now there's two of us, though there was another one of me, also male. As it is, both have... had slightly different circumstances to mine, but it's hard for me to say if that's necessarily different for you or not."

He pauses, considering, lowering his hand. "Lan Zhan," he says after a moment, "Did we spend time traveling together before the war, in your realm?"

Then it would stand to be possible that her Wei Ying could have ended up here as well. Two others. Different circumstances. He pauses and Lan Wangji watches Wei Ying as he asks his question about her life. She presses her lips together again and sits properly, brushing at the imaginary dust from her shorts.

"Not for leisure. I had been tasked with investigating the Yin Iron that Lan Yi had been trying to purify. You--" She pauses. "Wei Ying invited himself along. Thought I needed protection."

He smiles, a twitch of his lips he doesn't bother disguising. The man he is now is tempered, lacks the easiness of his youth, the particular spark that had made him playful without respite, had made him reckless in pursuit of belief. These days he thinks more in the same pursuits, he recognises fully the dark nature of people's worst, while still believing it's possible for people to have a best.

Not to expect it, not blindly, but to believe in that capacity.

"Or thought you'd be lonely," he says, "And help in an investigation isn't a bad plan, particularly when it had to mean talking to people."

A wry twist of his lips at that: she'd never been the easiest conversationalist, particularly with strangers. Efficient conversation did not always merit the required results, and her reputation had not yet been established, back then.

But it is familiar, and he inclines his head toward her. "That's a difference to mark. My other self here, you'll find he has a fox yao sealed within him, due to circumstances which have nothing to do with this place or events in our home realms—the flow of events from that time is different for him. He doesn't... look like I do, but a bit... prettier. Shorter. Very cute!"

Very much with that hint of Jin bloodline that he technically now has. A different body housing the same soul, and a passenger. Zidian would have a field day.

"How boring," she says automatically at being told she would be lonely.

Oh how her Wei Ying had blustered, going on and on about leaving her good friend behind and how it could be dangerous out there if he was by himself, he needed protection too! There's a faint feeling of the binding talisman that Wei Ying had used in the field that day. Still there after so many years. Her eyes widen.

"A fox yao?" Her lips press into a thin line when he mentions how that Wei Ying is different. "Wei Ying, are the other ones of me different as well?"

Binding, bonding; was it the clothing lent or worn? He's never settled on a name for a technique he rarely uses these days, and has seen in others hands, like his flags, like his compasses, like so many of the inventions of his younger years, and now?

Now he considers, he tinkers, he invents, and wishes he could pry apart the things they're given to understand the ways they work, too. Find the ghosts hidden in the machines, even if machines need not have spirits, let alone be haunted.

"A fox yao," he says, nodding. "They all are, yes, from memory to event. The me with the fox yao, he knew his... he knew Lan Zhan as a man who had likewise suffered a possession, by a cat yao." Don't ask him, he hasn't pressed for details on whatever dark world they had been on, or that he suspects that world exists at least twice over. Always, always with the numbers. "More recently, you've arrived... more unsettled by me being here than you even are now. I don't know the extent, but I suspect he's lost too much." His overwhelming, his silent shocks at the listed names of people in Lan Zhan's life, close and cycling closer.

"You would be better asking him. You know how you are," he says, smile wan, "About discussing things you don't feel are necessary."

There are not enough Lan Xichen's here to make up for his younger sibling's silent omissions and judgment calls.

She resolves to talk to each of the other...Lan Wangji that are on this journey with them. She suspects that she has much in common with the Lan Wangji that had lost a lot. Different times, different existences. Different points in time. She sets her rucksack down beside her.

"Mo Village."

She looks at Wei Ying. Not only would this Wei Ying be a different existence, but perhaps a different period of time.

"I had arrived at Mo Village with Sizhui, Jingyi, and the others and they had just departed to go speak with Madam Mo."

He pauses at that information, shoulders dropping a touch. "Concerning the disturbances?" A longer pause, and he laughs out, shaking his head. "Then you're about to find me again, if there's anything consistent in that particular truth. If Mo Xuanyu remains as desperate in your world as he seems to have been in several of ours."

She nods. Then there is a possibility of her Wei Ying returning. She presses her lips into a thin line again and softly shakes her head.

"Not possible. Wei Ying did not answer Inquiry."

She curls her fingers in her lap, missing her robes as she could hide her fingers. Calluses that had developed over sixteen years of playing Inquiry with no answer from Wei Ying. But this Wei Ying says that it is consistent.

"Wei Ying has always said that Lan Wangji is a man in many of those worlds."

"Yes, in at least... twelve, by my guess. Thirteen including me," he says, laughing for a brief moment, having not added himself to that equation.

"I don't know that for any of us, we responded to inquiry. I... didn't die," and he did, but he didn't, and that will forever be something he cannot explain, "There was never a spirit to respond. The disturbance at the Mo Manor wasn't me, but something else. If that remains true for you, too, then there's a journey ahead of you still."

There always is, for every living one of them.

They never found a body. She looked. Jiang Wanyin looked. She went to the Burial Mounds to look as well. But nothing. Then...perhaps Wei Ying did not die. Or rather, there was no spirit to respond to her Inquiry.

"Mmn." She nods. A disturbance at Mo Manor. Nothing that seemed to be too much for the juniors to handle. More questions are on the tip of her tongue. Where was Wei Ying? Why wouldn't he respond to Inquiry? Did he truly not die? "And now Wei Ying is here."

"Mm." He waves a hand; it's not quite that simple. "Months from Mo Manor. There are truths to discover along the way... not that the taste of the how was all that pleasant. Mah, Lan Zhan, I can't say what I know will be what's true for you, but I can suspect. Do you really want to talk about something as nebulous as the future?"

He tips his head toward the train. "I can tell you another immediate version of it, unrelated to the lives we live back home."

Given the choice to know her...their future...and what lays before them, Lan Wangji looks over at the train, then back at Wei Ying.

"Train is more pertinent. It should be addressed first."

If she were stuck here for months, then where would Sizhui be? Who would look after the juniors if they run into something they could not handle?

Wei Wuxian had no answers for any of those questions he had himself, only an awareness that none of them concretely know one way or another. Does time pass? Do they return to the moment they went missing? Have people returned to the train with memories?

Questions without answers that could be proven were questions not to get lost and bogged down pondering over.

"Mm! Well, what have you heard, ah? About our traveling caravan of a vessel, the Voidtrecker Express?"

"Mmn, to provide aid to those who need it," she replies.

Lan Wangji hadn't heard much beyond that. No answer as to where her clothes have gone. Or why she's wearing these clothes instead. Or where she's supposed to go other than the ticket in her hand. Her hand goes to the rucksack, neatly opening it and breathing a small sigh of relief when she finds the qiankun pouch within. She pulls it out and opens it, relieved again to find her guqin and sword in it. She looks at Wei Ying, some concern in her gaze.

"No talisman."

He gives her qiankun pouch a curious glance, settling his chin in his hand, on raised knee. "We arrive with limited supplies," he says. "You might have spare robes, if you traveled with any. Talisman I can make, and have been, but the supplies for proper ones I only recently managed to order."

Offering that as solace, that things are not forever out of reach, and that creative solutions were always a potential, not to be ignored.

"I had Chenqing." Nothing else, but his spiritual tool, with Yanli's encouragement, it deserves a name.

“Important things came.”

No spare robes as she had not been traveling with them at the time. She nods at how he says he’s able to make talisman. And how he apparently is able to earn back actual ones.

“Chenqing? What else did Wei Ying come here with?”

He looks at her, then laughs, a soft and honest sound.

"Chenqing."

There was nothing else. Himself and his spiritual weapon, and that was all.

“Did they tell you how long you are to be here for?”

That was important. She hasn’t quite gotten all of the information yet.

“Are there any others? That we know here?”

He shakes his head, a small motion as he's resting his chin in his hand still. "No, no one knows. It's been about a year as of now since the train started abducting people to form a new crew, and growing along the way. It loses as many people as it pulls in, it feels, though the number you see here on platform proves that the rate of gain is still higher than that of loss."

As far as who was here, he hums and tips his head toward her. "A number. Sizhui, both adopted by the Lans and with his original clan in name. The others of yourself, and your brother, twice over. Jiang Cheng, Wen Ning, Jin Ling, Nie Huaisang." He pauses, blinking. "That guy, Xue Yang. A number were here the last three months that are gone now, too."

A year that this train has taken people. She tucks the pouch back into her rucksack and secures it. As Wei Ying lists the people she may know, she wonders if any of them are from her world. It doesn't seem likely. She hadn't heard of those people disappearing.

"Wen Ning?"

She presses her lips together. Wen Ning had been murdered along with the rest of Wen Remnants that horrible day. There's a very slight crease in her brow when she hears that Sect Leader Jiang is here as well.

Love Wei Wuxian, accept he loves his crow, Jiang Cheng as well.

"Mm, he... things were complicated. Certain parties kept him bound and chained and under their control, with nails..." He waves a hand, not to dismiss it, but to not plunge into those details.

Sect Leader Jiang who had launched Wei Wuxian off the cliff in the first place. At the injustice, she frowns deeply. Lan Wangji reminds herself that things might be different where she's from. Though this seems to be the better option for Young Master Wen. But Sizhui...She should tell Wei Ying about Sizhui. Though she suspects he already knows.

"Did he tell you about Sizhui?"

Stand Back

Autobiography

Fools' Gold

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