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riverview: april test drive meme

Welcome to Riverview's test drive meme! Feel free to dip your toes in on the test drive meme to try out your character in the setting, play out a mission, and get samples for your application at the same time!
● Reserves are currently OPEN.
● Applications open on May 1st.
● Providing all parties are amenable, threads on the test drive meme can count as game canon, as the plot in the prompts presented is game canon.
● TDM threads do not count for Activity Check, but they do count for Activity Bonus Points, so long as all characters involved are accepted into the game.
● Threading on the TDM is intended for prospective new characters, so top-levels should only be posted by players of these characters. Since the events in the TDM are considered game canon, characters currently in the game are free to use the TDM prompts logs and posts on the regular communities.
Feel free to use the prompts below or create your own scenario. The setting is built to be flexible, so feel free to make things up as you go.
information resources
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Recently, a team of skilled explorers went out into the jungle to the Northwest of the city to follow up on several sightings of a giant lizardlike behemoth that's been skulking around outside the walls, a creature whose level of aggression (and therefore how dangerous it might be) was unknown. The team, while not exactly as stealthy as they were supposed to be, did manage to find the creature, which they found to have about the intelligence and temperament of a very, very, very large dog. And whom they named Liam.
Having established that the behemoth (which is around the size of a blue whale, snakelike in shape, but with four legs, brown striated scales, large claws and teeth, bad breath, and an affinity for face-licking) is not an intentional danger to the city, the authorities could not rule out the idea that it might cause accidental damage to the city, walls, or crops around the city. As a result, research has been done and a new mission has been drafted and recruited for - baiting the behemoth. The objective of this large-scale mission is for many small, quick-moving teams to take behemoth bait deep into the jungle for the purpose of luring the massive but mostly-harmless creature away from the city and hopefully to a new, less-inhabited feeding area. There is room for many different teams, and all of them should be heading deep into the jungle heading directly away from the city, going Northwest. The authorities in question have come up with a wide variety of food and pheromone scented lures that range from mild to truly stinky, so which type your team gets is up to you.
Each lure is small enough to fit in a cage-shaped canister that can be carried like a backpack by one person with average strength, and each lure-carrier will need to be accompanied by at least one or two fighters. Why, when the behemoth is peaceful? Well....
The behemoth might not be aggressive, but unfortunately it's picked up some unwelcome companions. After last month's near-disaster where a colony of lizardlike monsters had taken up residence in tunnels under the city, wreaking havoc in the power grid, and were subsequently either killed or flushed out of the underground, some of the local fauna has been bumped down the food chain.
The fauna in question is a very large pack of mammalian six-limbed creatures that usually live in the trees and hunt oversized insects in the underbrush. When the lizards escaped the underground into the surrounding jungle, and drastically reduced the population of the insects the mammals usually feed on, the predators became parasites, attacking the only thing left that is more docile than the insects they usually feed on - the behemoth. These creatures are quick-moving, well-camouflaged in the jungle with mottled brown-and-green fur, and sport massive teeth and long tongues that allow them to stick to whatever surface they land on.
Hungry as they are, they will make no distinction between the behemoth's juicy hide and the lure-carrying teams that are trying to help it. Hopefully, their ranks can be thinned enough that the behemoth survives the trip to its new home.

Not everyone is cut out for missions into the jungle or cleaning up angry predatory parasite monsters, but that doesn't mean that staying home means being safe from the weird things that come out of the portal. In the early morning of April 20th, drawn by the warmth of the rising sun, a massive swarm of rainbow-colored fireflies emerges from the portal into the quarantine. Unlike regular fireflies, though, they are bright enough to glow even during the day, and these bugs have bite! While generally harmless aside from stinging a little, the bite of the rainbow fireflies causes certain kinds of emotional response to become heightened, depending on the color of the firefly in question. While scientists have never run into these bugs before and have no idea how it works, they can cause this effect in any kind of sentient creature that is capable of emotion, including androids and characters that are usually unaffected by substances. The effects on emotions are as follows:
● RED: Lust/Anger ● ORANGE: Honesty/Openness ● YELLOW: Fear/Anxiety |
● GREEN: Jealousy/Envy ● BLUE: Sadness/Grief ● VIOLET: Love/Affection |
When a character is bitten, the effects on their emotions can last anywhere from an hour to a week, depending on the character's psychology and resistance to certain emotions - for example, if a character has a hard time dealing with their grief, the effect of a blue firefly may last longer than other colors. How the characters manifest the heightened emotional response or sensitivity is up to the individual player, as different body chemistry or other circumstances might change how characters are affected. Red firefly bites have a 50/50 chance of affecting a character with lust or anger, though characters who have not reached sexual maturity (underage characters) won't get get the lust effect.
Firefly effects can be easily avoided simply by avoiding the fireflies. It won't take long for some of the geniuses in the Quarantine to start making and distributing firefly repellent, and characters can expect sales of mosquito tents to skyrocket.
These alien fireflies have a lifespan of around a month, and they are unable to procreate outside their native environment, which means the last of them will be dying off around May 20th.
CLARIFICATION: In response to a player question, the effects of the fireflies CAN layer, so they can be affected by more than one at the same time. Red fireflies with the lust effect don't make characters incapable of controlling themselves, just heighten feelings of arousal/desire.
Whether your character is posting up a silly word game to distract people from the dangerous mission going on, trying to get hold of a friend, or putting out feelers for people to go out into the fray with, the network is going strong.
Alternately, an offer for a free app is popping up on new arrivals' devices - Friendr is a friend-finder and/or dating app. If characters choose to install it, they will fill out a short bio and parameters for what they're looking for, upload a snap of themselves, and then proceed to browse for matches. This is a typical swipe-left-or-right type app.
Many thanks to
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Choose your own adventure and do something else in the setting!
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You don't know who i am, do you
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That's not how we know each other. Like at all
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[ look he's not exactly mad that axel assumed they'd slept together before and then pretended he remembered doing so but... he is quite eager to forget about that part. ]
We met before. Maybe in your future or a different version of you
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Right
You seem to be taking that in stride
[ unsurprising of axel. he can't say he isn't a little sad to see his friend here but without memories of their time together, but he won't be making a point of that to this one. ]
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Yeah. It's something any of us can do much about. And we're stuck here for a while.
If it's weird for you to... be around someone who knows you or a version of you I get it
That whole business of alternates and doppelgangers is weird.
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It's fine, kind of used to this whole business by now. It's no one's fault, even if it's uncomfortable [ ah, if only axel had references for the #struggles alec experienced on that level. ]
Feels kind of unfair that I know things about you that you don't remember telling me, or that I just... know you, when you don't know anything about me
So if it's too much at whatever point just say so and I'll leave u be
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Yeah, at the other place we were all there voluntarily. They would offer you something in exchange for you to stay, and you could leave whenever
Alright. I don't want this to get weird so. I know about Oz, and you showed me a memory of watching the moon landing once. At your neighbor's place
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he can apologize later, if anything. once axel has asked the questions he needs to ask and received the answers alec can give him. ]
The city had a program in place where you could share memories with others. It was meant to bring people closer together and foster intimacy
He picked what he was comfortable showing and to who
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It was... relevant to me at the time
And I think it was stuff that is difficult to convey w words, so that was a good opportunity
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]
Yeah I know
I guess I could start from the beginning, if you want? Like how we met and got to talking
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I guess we really became friends after I got angry with you. I didn't know you but you were talking like you knew me and what my relationship was like, and it's... a thing I have. People assuming they know things about me or my life.
But we talked it out after. I explained why and you got it and I understood you didn't mean it the way I thought you did. Then we talked about a bit of everything, I guess. After that we hung out in the same spaces a lot, since we had friends in common and you worked for Magnus.
When I needed some insight on immortality from someone that chose it, you — he listened. And he listened after the memory share stuff.
[ alec didn't realise until now just how sad he is that axel doesn't remember him. he'll deal, as he deals with everything, but typing all that up and conjuring the memories suddenly makes him very, very tired. ]
I don't know if that helps. Probably not
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I'll answer whatever questions you have, and I guess give you more details as we... or you get to know me.
At least this time around I won't lose my temper so quickly since I already know you
[ that's... him attempting to be Light, here. instead of saying that axel had been a very, very good and dear friend to him, someone he could sit with and talk about things he didn't speak of with many others, someone who tended to think the way he did about others and his place in the lives of his loved ones.
it would make him sadder, and he doesn't want to think of that axel as someone that's gone. ]
no subject
I'm a Shadowhunter. Back home, that means I kill demons and keep mundanes safe.
[ that's not what he asked, alec... he sends another text. ]
I like reading. Training and sparring. Some movies. Baking. I'm still figuring it out. I didn't do much outside of work before I ended up in Eudio
[ it's a bit of both, really. better and worse. like axel being here but not really being here at all. ]
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