riverview: test drive meme

[riverviewmod]

riverview 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 April 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.
● Since this particular TDM is plot-heavy, current players are welcome to do their own top-levels to interact with the plot. However, since it is still a TDM intended to help potential new players get involved, there will be a special additional +25 Activity Point bonus for any thread submitted by a current player that involves a potential new character rather than focusing on existing CR, for this TDM post.

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. Thanks to player-created plots, this month's Test Drive is set to effect the game setting for the next few months, so please enjoy!

information resources
premise ● arrival ● setting ● ask a question ● calendar ● navigation

plot overview

After just over a week of increasingly serious blackouts and brownouts around the city, the team in charge of the structural integrity and defense of the wall has found the source of the problem, and posted a network entry explaining that the issue is caused by a large quantity of lizard-like monsters that have compromised the underground infrastructure of the city, and requesting volunteers to help do a full-scale manual extermination of monsters and assess the damage and do urgent repairs.

prompt i: a call to arms

The most urgent request presented is for people to help clear out the monsters in the underground tunnels - and there are a lot of them! With estimated monster numbers in the area of 500-1000, ranging from adult to juvenile, there's a lot of work to be done to clear out the underground infrastructure of the city. The Perimeter Guard will have a steady stream of transport trucks going to escort any fight-capable residents who want to volunteer out to the tunnels. They will also provide weapons of various varieties as well as short training sessions on how to use them safely in a confined space for anyone who doesn't have their own.

Whether you fight with a weapon, your fists, magic, or poison darts, your help is more than welcome down in the tunnels. The only real request is to keep seismic or explosive abilities or attacks on the mild side, and to be careful not to poison the city's water supply! Other than that, go wild.

prompt ii: into the depths

Clearing out monsters is all well and good, but they have definitely done some damage to the city's infrastructure. So it isn't just the brawn that needs to step up to help the city, it's the brains. There's a call for anyone with any kind of special ability that would help with emergency repairs. Whether it's engineers, chemists, anyone with first aid, runners to distribute supplies, or any other special ability that would help out in the underground tunnels and fix some of the damage that's been done, anyone is welcome to help. And if you think it's just scientists who are needed, think again - magic is a well-known if not-well-understood facet of life in Riverview Quarantine, and some of this stuff works on a more arcane level than a mundane one.

And, of course, all of these brainiacs are going to need a little backup, so any bruisers to act as escort and protection are also welcome.

prompt iii: trapped in a...

Not everyone has the skills or desire to head out into the jungle and fight for the city, and that's perfectly fine. Inside the Quarantine walls, life is carrying on as normally as it can. That is, aside from the ongoing blackouts.

Wherever you might be in the city, you run a pretty decent risk of getting trapped somewhere for a short period of time. Whether it's trapped in an elevator, a tram car, a store, the housing you share with someone you barely know, or anywhere else in the city, it could happen to you. This could be the start of a beautiful friendship or a meet-cute to tell your grandkids about...at least, that is, if you get along with the person you're stuck with...

prompt iv: friendr/network

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 new, free app is popping up on people's 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.

Code to post your character's bio is in the textbox below, or you can just do a text version of the information in the app. An example of how it looks can be found here.

<center><blockquote style="width: 220px; margin: 0; padding: 0px; background-image: url('http://i42.tinypic.com/2uf53s4.jpg'); font-size: 12px; font-family: verdana; border-radius: 20px; text-align: center;"><div style="padding: 10px 0 0 0; text-align: center;font-size: 25px; font-weight: 900; font-style: italic; color: #528887; text-shadow: -2px 2px 2px rgba(150, 150, 150, 1);">F<span style="font-size: 16px;">RIENDR</span></div> <center><img src="ICON URL HERE" style="border-radius: 50%; width: 70px; height: 70px; box-shadow:-3px 3px 2px 0px rgba(82, 136, 135, .75);"></center> <center><div style="width: 210px; background-color: #528887; color: #fff; padding: 5px; font-size: 14px;">Name of Character</div></center> <center><div style="width: 210px; background-color: #528887; color: #fff; padding: 5px; font-size: 11px; text-align: left;"><b><small>AGE:</small></b> ## <b><small>INTERESTED IN:</small></b> Male/Female/Any <b><small>SEEKING:</small></b> Type(s) of Relationship(s) <b><small>ABOUT ME:</small></b> Blurb goes here, can be as long or short as you wish.</div></center><br> </blockquote></center>
Many thanks to mistojen for coding this especially for Riverview!

prompt v: wildcard

Choose your own adventure and do something else in the setting!

navigation

Comments

[girlexmachina]

It's a bit of a surprise, but not a huge one; she has seen holographic displays before. Not like this, though. Those were generally blue and transparent, superimposed onto the actual world. This is all-encompassing, and more colourful, more vibrant. She could almost believe she could touch it.

She stands with a sharp intake of breath, reaching one hand up, towards the star. "It's like a small sun," Aloy says, her eyes narrowed thoughtfully but a faint smile on her face. "The garden grows under the roof, and this artificial star is like its sun." It's a visual aid for something she's read about, and that moment of insight is always powerful. "Is this a holographic projection? It isn't like the ones I've seen. It's... well, it's better."

[morganknight]

"Mmm," Morgan said, relaxing out of his form. Needless to say, he wasn't even breathing hard; the exertion had been trivial. "I mean, it's a generated image, so call it 'a holographic projection' or an 'illusion' or whatever term you want. The mechanics aren't technological, though. Most people would call it Magick."

Which neatly glossed over centuries of philosophical and pragmatic distinctions that had led to literal war and bloodshed at times. Skip all that, it didn't matter here or to her.

[girlexmachina]

"Magick," Aloy echoes, some small amount of scepticism in her voice. She has more sense than to call him out on what sounds like superstition to her, and superstition is just eternally frustrating. Anyway, it apparently works, whatever he wants to call it.

"How is it done, if it isn't technological?"

[morganknight]

Hard to argue when it was obviously producing results, wasn't it?

"Now that's getting into a quagmire," he said, again glossing over a history of war and conflict that could literally be dooming mankind. "But the short version of it is... reality is only what we perceive it to be. So if you change what you perceive, you change reality."

[girlexmachina]

Aloy tilts her head, looking no more believing than she was before. "That doesn't make any sense," she says. "You can't just change reality. It exists whether or not we're looking at it."

[morganknight]

That was the logical counterargument. To which Morgan spread his hands, and said, "How do you know it does if you're not looking at it? If you're not observing it in some way?"

[girlexmachina]

She thinks about this for a moment. "If something is buried in the ground and no one can see it, it's still there whether or not you know it's there, though. It doesn't stop existing just because no one knows it's there. If you discover something that no one else knows, that doesn't mean it wasn't true before you learned it."

[morganknight]

Morgan waved a hand idly. "And how do you know someone hasn't dug it up, as soon as you look away? Even if you set someone to watch the spot constantly and reported back to you, how could you be absolutely certain they were telling the truth? Even if you watched the spot yourself, slept right on top of it so no one could disturb it, how could you know -- absolutely, positively know -- that someone hadn't very quietly tunneled up beneath it and removed it without disturbing the surface?"

[girlexmachina]

"How can you know something doesn't exist until you see it?" There's a degree of heat to her tone. It's all well and good for people to have their religion, she has to suppose, but this is something else entirely. "If you shut your eyes, I don't cease to exist, even if you can't perceive me."

[morganknight]

If everyone understood, really understood the idea of subjective reality, everyone would be a Mage. Morgan took no offense from her tone, nor did his own move away from reasonable discourse. "Well, sure. You believe you exist, I believe you exist, so you exist. Same with that buried treasure. You believe it's there, so it's there. Belief defines reality."

He reached out to brush away the illusion he'd created. "I believed I could create this image by manipulating my ki, and I did. That's Magick, in its simplest form. Oversimplified form, really."

[girlexmachina]

Her mouth twists. This conversation isn't going to go anywhere, she can see that. She's seen enough to not really want to get into the habit of arguing people's religion with them, and as far as she's concerned, this isn't much better than that. There has to be some better reason for why it works. She just doesn't know it.

"Okay," she says. Aloy leans back in her seat a little. "We're obviously not going to agree on this."

[morganknight]

Not at all bothered by the declaration, Morgan just grinned across the aisle at her. "So long as I get results if you're depending on me in a fight, the means don't really matter, right?"

That was a terrible lie, from Morgan's perspective. The belief in magick, in possibility, was no less than a fight for humanity's very soul. Whether it was ground into the dirt by the elimination of possibility and all the hope and potential it held was ground out of it... But the side that wanted to achieve that was winning the war. The automatic disbelief on Aloy's part, never mind their circumstances, was just one more facet in that Technocratic thought policing.

But swordpoint conversions solved nothing, whether the sword was metaphorical or literal. One woman's disbelief was a drop in the ocean.

"You are a fighter, right? Aside from moving like one..." He motioned to her spear.

[girlexmachina]

"I suppose that's so. It does seem to work for you."

She considers terminology for a moment. "And a hunter," she says. "But yes, 'fighter' works too." Sometimes it was fighting that needed to be done, but hunter was always what she trained for, growing up. "Though there aren't machines to hunt, here."

[morganknight]

Clearly, now it was her turn to say strange things he didn't quite understand.

"You're going to have to unpack that for me a bit." They were, after all, riding in a machine. Or... sitting and waiting for the machine to move, anyway.

[girlexmachina]

Machines are so ubiquitous to her. It's hard to imagine them not existing, even if she knows, intellectually, that it must be true. How to describe them to someone who had never seen them?

"The machines are creatures of metal," Aloy says. "They're huge, and dangerous to hunt, but you can find valuable parts on them to make things out of." She holds out her spear as an example, which is certainly a fairly sophisticated weapon.

[morganknight]

He'd noted the spear already -- the quality of the metal in particular, and what a strange juxtaposition it was.

What he envisioned was not exactly accurate. The machines he pictured were more like weapons of war than animals, and her world overall he imagined as far more post-apocalyptically modern. But machines roaming the land, needing to be hunted? Got her there.

He nodded, once he'd formed up that mental picture. "Sounds like a hell of a lifestyle," he said, though he definitely approved.

[girlexmachina]

"It's certainly never boring," she agrees, with the faintest of smiles. "There are none like those here, which strange, sometimes. I still expect to see them, going about their business."

[morganknight]

That had to be difficult to adapt to. This world was a little more modern than what he was accustomed to, but still, not so different in that respect.

"Here we just have the living monsters, outside." He watched her as he said that, curious if hunting living beings would be uncomfortable for her.

[girlexmachina]

She nods, unconcerned. "I understand they're dangerous, too, but I have a hard time taking them seriously. None of the ones I've seen shoot lightning, or as heavily armoured. I did take down some of the reptiles in the underground tunnels, so that way is a little safer."

It's not really said as a way of bragging. It's more along the lines of reassurance that something, at least, has been done about them.

[morganknight]

"And I missed seeing that," Morgan said, pretending to more dismay than he really felt. "There's be worse to come out there, though, I'm sure. A place like this doesn't get easier or saner as time goes on, not without a lot of hard work from people like us."

[girlexmachina]

"Most things worth doing are a lot of hard work," she offers, her head tilted to one side. "At least, it's seemed like that to me."

So says the 19-year-old, but in her life, that's definitely been true.

[morganknight]

Morgan liked that philosophy as well, enough so that he clapped his hands together with a surprisingly boyish grin. "Oh, that's not always true. But hard work is definitely no reason to not do something, that's for sure!"