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

Wei Wuxian is remaining dedicated to the habit he started last platform: thus he's out there, lounging on a blanket taken off his bunk, parked along one side of the open space closer to the train, away from the overhang meant to protect waiting persons from the elements.

He doesn't need a landscape to look out over, although he'd prefer one. Simply being off train, with no one in any illusion, and no one dying, and nothing going wrong is enough of a blessing.

Thus it's in that form, glimpsed beyond milling bodies on platform, including a dragon that flashes past overhead in the confines of the platform's vertical space, that Wei Wuxian closes his eyes and simply lets the world exist around him, more feral than untamed.

She hates it. She hates that her clothes were gone. She hates the clothes she’s wearing. But at least she has…some things. She reaches up and fixed her forehead ribbon before stepping forward.

But a figure on the platform catches her eyes and she feels the breath catch in her chest.

“Wei Ying?”

She breathes the name that haunts her for the past thirteen years.

Now that? That has him opening his eyes. Not because he hasn't been called out to by name like this time and again, but he's never to memory had a voice like this one, or not exactly this this. His brow furrows as he sits up, looking toward the rest of the platform.

Only to see... a woman, in the odd clothing of this place, just like he is. (Nearing three months, will he ever talk with the spider to end up wearing robes, not cargo pants and hoodies?) Moreover, she's a Lan: the ribbon is immediately identifiable, but he cannot recall ever having much more than passing interactions with any lady of the Lans.

Nor does her face look... unfamiliar. Which poses an unsure quality to his voice when he calls out, tentatively, "Lan Zhan?"

Is Lan Zhan as a woman here. Is Wei Wuxian as a woman going to show up soon too?! Oh he hopes so, he wants to see!

She watches him. He’s just like him. Just like Wei Ying all those years ago. But dressed as she is. She moves forward on leaded legs. Did she die? Is this some fevered hell? Her eyes are wide as she approaches then crouches near him to take in his features.

The features of a dead man. How could this be?

“Wei Ying.”

She crouches down at his level, staring at him still. Yes, those looks, the way she moves, he can say it's familiar, for all her centre of balance has shifted. This is the man, the woman? He knows. He collects his legs, sitting more easily, and offers her a wan smile.

Why he's the one getting to break so many people's grief stricken periods is a kind of heartache in and of itself. One he deserves, he knows, but it doesn't make him better at handling it.

"Yes, it's me. Though I have to say, Lan Zhan, you make as lovely a woman as you make a handsome man." That crooked grin, trying to give her some hint of just how strange this really is for both of them, for different but salient reasons.

She blinks. Not her Wei Ying. Lan Wangji nods slowly and stays kneeling beside him.

“…then the fall didn’t happen.”

She’s hopeful. Hopefully that some version of Wei Ying has something of a life. Perhaps this one did become a farmer somehow and wandered with a-Yuan.

He hesitates, and reaches out, offering her the palm of his hand, fingers lightly curled. An offering, for space he doesn't invade in the same ways for women who aren't his shijie, dead and gone and irrevocably missing from his life.

He hasn't been awake a single year yet, with her gone. That ache is closer than he says, and deeper than he knows. Sixteen years of dark for him was not a respite, was time marked, was nothing resolved. A hell he probably deserved, only he'd not died.

"I fell," he says instead. "Would you believe me, if I said I can't remember what happened? That for a long stretch of time, all I knew was darkness?"

She takes his hand with some hesitation. Is Wei Ying, is not Wei Ying. And she sits on his blanket with him, still remaining a distance as she listens to what he says of his life. Her mouth presses into a thin, tight line when he says that he did fall.

"Lan Zhan. Let me go."

That horrible day when he made the decision for her and had her let him go, let him fall into the abyss.

She nods slowly. Lan Wangji would believe him. Her Wei Ying joked, evaded questions, but he never lied to her; not when it was important. All that time. How long had it been for him? Her Wei Ying never answered Inquiry. It's safe to understand this Wei Ying never answered Inquiry also if he only knew darkness.

He lets her decide how to hold on, though he does curl his fingers around her hand when she takes his, like he would with any Lan Zhan's. Her belief, which he wants to say he's always sure of, is still something granted that leaves his shoulders settling a touch: thankful that this is a constant, so far.

"Do you know anything about this place where we are, yet? Has anyone spoken with you?"

She can ask him what she will, but he doesn't volunteer much of what he continues to hope leave in his past, their past, with the future their proving ground.

She lets go of his hand and looks over at the train. Voidtrecker Express. She looks back at him.

"Invitation to join heroes," she says.

The rucksack and clothes are obvious and she tries hard not to fidget and hide her legs as others here seem to be dressed in a similar manner.

"Is Wei Ying with the Voidtrecker Express?"

"Less of an invitation," he says, smile wry, looking to the black, sleek bulk of the train with its gold lettering. "I've been here for around three months now, yes. Wasn't the first Wei Ying, and am not the last, ah? As you may... see, already, the people summoned to the train all come from our own realms. As if there are countless ones, and there likely are—like a tapestry woven out of innumerous threads. Each thread a person pulled from a world of their own."

He spreads his hands, empty as they are, to encompass some unseen thought, spread across them.

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."

Stand Back

Autobiography

Fools' Gold

Team One

Team Two

Team Three

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