Test Drive Meme 026

[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!

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.

Comments

[weifinder]

"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.

[lanerguniang]

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."

[weifinder]

"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."

[lanerguniang]

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?

[weifinder]

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?"

[lanerguniang]

"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."

[weifinder]

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.

[lanerguniang]

“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?”

[weifinder]

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.

[lanerguniang]

“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?”

[weifinder]

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."

[lanerguniang]

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.

[weifinder]

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.

[lanerguniang]

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?"

[weifinder]

He pauses, then laughs, an exhalation paired with a shake of his head.

"No, ah, it was Sizhui who did, once he remembered." Lan Zhan following it up with, I meant to, but finding the time... He shakes his head again, lifting his chin to use his hand to wave off whatever. "I was so happy learning A-Yuan hadn't..."

Died. Like the rest of his remaining relatives, but for Wen Ning.

[lanerguniang]

The line in her shoulders relaxes a little.

"Hadn't been alone," she supplements.

She knows what he wishes to say -- that his beloved child hadn't perished with the rest of the Wen Remnants. Lan Wangji smiles to herself a little.

"He never felt alone. Scared when his fever broke."

[weifinder]

He nods to her words, unnecessary confirmation. He doesn't think on the what if's, the "if only I'd known"'s, because he hadn't. Wen Yuan had been left on that mountain, surrounded by the resentful energies that would creep in without Wei Wuxian's border guard, and Lan Zhan had been swift enough to find and save him.

"I can imagine," he says instead, voice soft. "It's scary at any age, not remembering what's happened, feeling unmoored from any sense of the past."

[lanerguniang]

She nods at that, recalling Sizhui when she first brought the boy to the Cloud Recesses.

"Glad that Wei Ying knows." She pauses before amending herself. "That this Wei Ying knows."

As she had not told her own yet.

[weifinder]

"When the one you know comes back, let him know." He says this, faint humour fading from his features. "Please, Lan Zhan. Let him know. It... it's going to help with the drinking."

He remembers those months, and Lan Zhan's sudden flowing largesse, and he remembers not always feeling better for being tipsy and trying for drunk, never quite making it. Never quite pressing on to finally be over that edge, too, not like years and years before.

One less thought to haunt his mind, one less reason to drink to calm them. He knows himself. He knows she does, too.

[lanerguniang]

She nods. After hearing this Wei Ying speak of it, her resolve is strengthened to tell her own Wei Ying when he arrives or when they meet again as this Wei Ying is so sure of.

“…when I see him.”

A part of her is skeptical that the joyous event of reuniting with Wei Ying.

[weifinder]

He smiles again, brief and small, eyes closing for a breath.

"Thank you, Lan Zhan." One small kindness, if she can remember it, if she's feeling generous in turn. "Thank you. And, I'm sorry."

To each Lan Zhan who had to raise their son alone.

[lanerguniang]

Lan Wangji shakes her head at that.

“There are no apologies between us.”

Not hers nor from any Wei Ying.

“…you would like him. Wei Ying. There are very little differences.”

[weifinder]

He pauses, then shakes his head.

"I learned from a wise friend that two things we all have to say in our lives are thank you, and I'm sorry. I'm not exempt from that. You're worth the courtesy, and wrongs aren't things to choose to ignore. Even when they're small, or unintended."

Yet, on the topic of Sizhui, his shoulders relax. He smiles. "He's a credit to ask who know him. I couldn't be any more proud."