f_o_e | Test Drive Meme 2

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test drive meme

Test Drive Meme 2

☙ Test Drive Meme

☙Gladsheim

You wake up in what looks like a cryogenic pod. There are other pods around you, some of them still sealed shut and others open with people stepping out of them like you did. There’s some technology around you but all of it is overgrown with plants. There are some panels but touching them only causes a sad whirring sound before...nothing happens.

After a moment there’s a pinging sound before a blue panel, like the one that brought you here, that pops up.

New Quest!! Make it out of Gladsheim alive! Fight your way to safety!

Then the door leaving out of this area opens up, draw your weapons and prepare to fight!

Most of the monsters seem to be some kind of small woodland creature but bigger. Be careful! In Gladsheim there are a lot of blocked corridors, locked doors and dead ends...try not to get cornered alone!

Though unlike the previous arrivals, you’re in luck, because as the door keeping the monsters out open, everyone who were brought before suddenly get a ping as a blue menu opens:

New Quest!! Rescue those lost in Gladsheim!

Anyone going into Gladsheim and successfully rescuing a new arrival gains:
1000 gold
ITEM: 10 beeswax candles. Heals status ailment BLINDNESS when lit. Each candle is one use only.
ITEM: 1 potato. HP+5 when eaten.

New arrivals...get nothing! Unless one counts the pinging sound before a blue panel pops up again. Congratulations on making it out of Gladsheim!

...following that is an unskippable tutorial teaching you how to open the menu, access your inventory, read messages and see your status! There is a grayed out selection that says ‘Guildmates’.

☙ More Merchant Caravans Arriving in Etria:

There sure have been a lot of caravans coming through Etria lately, each more well-stocked and colorful than the next, some clearly from countries wealthy enough to edge even their own flags in gold thread. At least it has been livelier and it gives you some variation in terms of NPC dialogue. (Even if these merchant NPCs only ever seem to be complaining about the weather, about how long it takes to get here and about some guy named Alian.)

A. Merchants Giving Out Weird Samples
Come one and come all to look through the wares from far and wide.
Hey you! Yes, you! Can I interest you in this lovely spider's silk robe (DEF+8, BURN RESIST+1)? Guaranteed not to burn until at least the third wear!
How about some hardtack (TP+10, HP-5), dear adventurer? At least a year old but still tasting like it was baked only two months ago!
No, no, come look at these rare golden statues (sells for 10 gold), inscribed with ancient symbols that shift in ways that could drive any sentient being mad! In a good way!

B. Inn
Maybe you haven’t yet found a guild so you’ve been staying at the Lady of the Lake. But today when you return from a hard day of adventuring, Vivian tells you all the rooms are full. There are so many merchants! It’s making so much more work for her!

She complains for a little bit before getting to the point: there is no room for you tonight. To compensate you, she offers to let you pick a piece of yellow candy from a jar as compensation. None of them are labelled but this is what’s in there:

Lemon Candy (LIGHTNING DEFENSE+2)
Banana Candy (LIGHTNING ATTACK+2)

☙ A Suspicious Spring:

A long hot day of adventuring later, the sound of running water is probably music to your ears. Or maybe you've been here long enough to never trust anything, not even the water.

The sight you come upon seems to be a bit too good to be true: a forest grotto with a waterfall splashing into a shallow pool of clean cold water, the shadows deep green and the light dappled as it filters through the trees.

What do you do?

A. Drink!
One sip and you'll feel your armor getting heavy, large and you can see the growing horror in your guildmates eyes as you shrink down to be no larger than a hand.

EFFECTS:
EVASION +10
SPEED -10
ATTACK -10
DEFENSE -10
Of course, a quiet sit of about two hours and you'll begin to grow back but you don't know that yet.

B. Bathe!
Just because you don't see monsters doesn't mean they don't like to congregate near water!

Except when you come out, dripping and trying to dry off? Nothing even remotely dangerous shows up. When it does for some reason, you always manage a critical hit. When you eat suspicious berries? You survive. You trip over something and it's a treasure chest that has actual money in it. If you try to steal from a monster, you always get something good. What gives?!

EFFECTS:
LUCK +100
This effect also only lasts for two hours so take advantage of it while it’s there! Just make sure it doesn’t wear off somewhere dangerous...

☙Building Traps and Nets:

Everyone is abuzz with talk about how they’ve found shed skins of Star Fireflies in the labyrinth! These rare monsters are said to be able to grant wishes once they pupate! No chrysalis have been found on Floor 1 but everyone is beginning to prepare by making nets and traps.

A. Collection Materials
Shortly after the discovery, Napier’s Firm posted a list of required materials so she can make the tools needed. All these materials can be easily found on Floor 1 of the Yggdrasil Labyrinth. Here are the lists:

Star Net:
Spider Silk
Mandrake Branch

Star Container:
Giant Insect Eye
Sticky Sap

These items can be found as monster drops from Mandrakes and Spiders which suddenly started appearing in Floor 1. The Giant Insect Eye and Sticky Sap are rare drops. So the question now is...how lucky are you feeling?

B. Trapping the Trapper
As time goes on, someone mentions that in a far corner of Floor 1 there is a nest of Golden Spiders that leave behind rare drops more often! Those who haven’t had much luck getting Giant Insect Eyes may want to try their luck there. But beware...these Spiders are much more aggressive and if you get stuck in their web it’s impossible to escape! According to Ceft, the unique chemical properties of the thread means it can only be dissolved with human tears. Even just a drop will do! Maybe you should consider bringing an onion when you go after these creatures. (Fontayne and Vivian both will offer to sell you some onions if asked about them…but at a very inflated price.)

☙ Extra
Got something in mind? Want to play with the setting more? The sky's the limit, so feel free and make up your own prompts to play with!

Welcome to Labyrinthian’s August Test Drive Meme! Please check out the FAQ and rules as you test your characters out. The setting is yours to play with, so be creative and have a good time with it! The TDM will double as the intro log and threads in this TDM can be considered game canon after apping if you wish!

Existing players can make their own logs using TDM prompts!

A important dated to remember are August 1, 2020, 9pm EST when Reserves open and August 8, 2020, 9pm EST when Applications open.

If you have any questions about the TDM, feel free to ask us here. If there are any other questions, you can catch us via PM, the FAQ or the contact page. Thank you for your interest in Labyrinthian!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I. So I get to do this all over again, huh?

[The elevator door rings, and she steps out, only to fall, fall, fall-

She opens her eyes with a sharp gasp as a pain lances through her mind- What?
She's overwhelmed with feelings of disorientation, displacement and... loss? It's all she can do to just keep breathing. That is, until she comes back into her physical body enough to realize that she's in a pod. The spark of panic starts from there, worst case scenarios playing over and over and everything is too bright, too much like an Allegan Construct, too much like the G.R.I.D.

In a surge of desperate power she smashes her fist into the door of the pod, drawing her hand back and about to Punch again as it slides open.

Pinya stumbles out as fast as she can, her legs feeling weak from spending only Fury knows how long in there. As soon as she thinks she's a safe enough distance away she looks around, trying to get a better idea of her surroundings. A dungeon?

She doesn't get to think about it for very long, though, as the pod next to hers opens and-]

"Fenrir?" She asks breathlessly. The large black wolf slumps out of the chamber, clearly conscious but just as groggy as she is. She runs over, helping him out of the contraption and looking around as other chambers start to open.

"Where the fuck have they put us this time, Fen?" She says, but she isn't quite sure what she means. The wolf simply whines and bonks his head into her chest.
"Yeah, me neither."

It's then that the blue screen pops up, telling her to fight her way out. She growls.

"Yeah, no shit." Without further preamble, picks up a serviceable looking bow and a shoddy quiver of arrows from the floor and attempts to make her way out of 'Gladsheim'.

If anyone in the pods looks particularly distressed, she'll go over to assist them.

2. I feel like I'm going in circles...

Pinya has decided to ignore the very obvious 'Quest markers' this new blue interface is clearly trying to get her to go to. The first person she tried to talk to only seemed to know how to say three things over and over, and didn't respond to any sort of other prompting.

She was not into that at all. She'd learn instead by experiencing herself.

Pinya and Fenrir pad around town and the surrounding areas, exploring and being nosy as they can be. There're trees to climb and buildings to scale and reagents to find and-

There's no... For the first time in a long time her head feels... private? She can't remember what had happened. She remembers Hades, remembers the Exarch- and there was something in between, but she can't quite grasp it. It makes her feel uneasy. She tries to push it out of her mind for now. She'll get there eventually, she thinks.

Finding out that his own things were in his inventory was something of a blessing, if you could call being here a blessing. Maybe it was, given he probably was supposed to be dead.

He had perched himself atop a building that was away from the main streets, his legs dangling over the edge. He was in the process of checking over and cleaning his gun. The assholes he paid to watch his stuff, well. They did an adequate job. It was only his obsessive tendency that caused him to go through this right now.

Leon stopped as he heard someone else step foot on the rooftop and he turned just enough to see who it was. Just a glimpse: he needed nothing more once he saw the wolf and blonde hair.

"You were there too. In Gladsheim."

"Aye, that I was," She nods, having been blocked from her clean shot of running off this roof and onto the next one.

She looks at the man handling the long firearm in scruffy, old clothes and- huh. No right arm.

Pinya hadn't spent much time in the chamber room, not wanting to stay close to those damned things for any longer than necessary, but she did see a figure similar to his as she rushed out to leave Gladsheim.

"You aren't a local, then?"

"I remember you. You had the bow." It was easy to remember who was who when you let everyone charge ahead of you. He focused more on sharp shooting from the back, disabling creatures under the cover of others. He seemed to move from cleaning to putting things back together. His back remained to her and her wolf.

"No, not local." And thankful for that. The people here were not much one for conversation. Not that he was either. "Brought here much the same as you were." There was a pause as he looked at something, but he resumed in the same disinterested tone. "Have you found anything interesting?"

Pinya's had enough training with the Skysteel firearms that she knows that this man knows his weapon. It tells her two things, at least; that he's used to using it, and that he takes good care of it.

Hmn.

She saunters over and joins him sitting down a few feet away, hugging a knee to her chest as Fenrir pads over and flumps downward, evidently happy to just sunbathe. Pinya just grins.

Silly boy.

His response is to hang his pink tongue out the side of his mouth and grin, before ignoring her some more.

"I hated those tanks," she grouses. "Not a whole load of good association with those." His tone irked something in her, but she supposed that she was a stranger after all, and he was concentrating on his gun.

"Nothing even remotely. Not yet, at least. Everything here feels. I don't know. Off?"

He continued what he was doing as he heard her footsteps against the roof, the fwump of the wolf as he plopped down to soak in the sun's rays. He still didn't look to her as she took a place beside him, but - if she was perceptive - she would notice that his movement faltered for a moment, a brief second, when she mentioned the tanks. If she tried to look at his expression it was the same tired, methodical gloom, but the falter gave away his true feeling. He didn't comment on them after she finished speaking. He finished putting his gun back together as he spoke, carefully setting it to rest next to him, within reach.

"The people don't talk enough, or they talk too much. They always say the same thing." His gaze shifted to examine her face. He noticed the pointed ears, but made sure not to stare at them. If she didn't return his gaze he would look out towards the other buildings.

"Unless you mean something else." It was a question, but it sounded like a statement the way he said it.

She caught the flinch, it's hard not to when the man only seemed to make only the most necessary of movements. Seem's she's not the only one with a not great memory associated with those.

She wonders if the... Those gods... She scowls as she can't remember their names, are still in charge here, plucking more broken people from their worlds.

"I've met Allegan Autonomous nodes with more personality," she sighs, watching the townsfolk going about their business. "It's not just their speech, either. There's nothing behind their eyes. They aren't..." Real? Can she even explain that she can't feel their Aether here? She can sense her own, and Fenrir's, and even the man next to her even though it's frustratingly hard to do so. She wonders just who the fuck could cut her senses off like that.

She wants a strong word.

"They don't know that they're repeating the same thing," She wonders, fleetingly, if she can change that.

She figures it's probably a bit too early for that kind of talk for now.

He didn't know what Allagan autonomous nodes were, but he could extrapolate with the context. Probably something to do with something adjacent to computers from wherever she came from. With her skill at the bow... probably not somewhere with high levels of technology. Idle thoughts as she continued on.

"Like robots with crudely programmed dialogue." He blinked down at the bustle of the day. Leon idly wondered if they could be killed. The idiot, hollow people here. It would be easy to just pick up his gun, take aim, pull the trigger...

"Assuming they are real." A slight shift in his tone implied he felt they were not people. "It feels like a poor approximation of what someone thinks humanity is." He would find it comical, if he had a sense of humor.

She sighs. She had wondered the same thing herself, though she wasn't about to cause a ruckus in the middle of town just to find out.

There are always bandits and miscreants in these kinds of places, though.

"I imagine that they think they're real enough. Parhaps to them we are simply alien.

"I think... I think where I was before, I could have checked, but," she trails off. She remembers where she was. Synodiporia.
She remembers what she had to do, go to other places, sometimes as not herself, and try to solve a problem.

She had friends there.

So why can't she remember anything else?

"I imagine if we followed this 'tutorial' to a tee something might happen, but I'm not entirely sure what."

It's almost too bad that she didn't voice the curiosity: she would peak an interest in him, even if he didn't particularly care about her filters between good and bad. He admittedly was more idly curious to see if the townspeople would respond to one of them getting shot, or what would be the response to it all.

His gaze shifted to her as she groped for her memory, for a hint of where she'd been. Interesting, but not enough to hold his gaze or attention for very long. He waited for her to speak again, but as the silence lengthened he realized that she was done.

"I doubt that the menial tasks will restore your memory, if that is what you are hoping." No sympathy, no attempt at comfort, just a flat statement. He could have been commenting on the weather.

If he fell, would he break his legs? Would it hurt? ...But that's not how he phrased that thought. Not if he were honest.

Finally he asked a direct question: "What are we being taught?"

"You'd be surprised, though I'm not sure The Echo is strong enough here," she huffs. The amount of times she'd been ask to get something from Bumfuck-nowhere Coerthas and whoops, here's five tome's worth of dragon's history.

She would have thought Uila would have warned her to stay away, but no, her party member found it hilarious.

"Thaliak knows, honestly. Something about Inventory and Quests and Markers for people who we should talk to. I miss Hammerspace," she grouches, leaning her chin on her fist.

"Do you think they'd notice if we threw stuff at them from here?" She wonders idly, already toying with a small rock.

He knew what an echo was, but he wasn't sure given the context of the sentence. It must have been some kind of side effect, like those of Chronos, or... Something adjacent to that. Magic isn't real and doesn't exist. Hm, hm, hm. What did it all mean.

"It seems as if it is only teaching the mechanics of where we are. Defining what is normal for here." He doubted they'd get a reward for doing the bare minimum. Aside from living through the tutorial, of course. Another word he didn't know, another...

Hm? His gaze shifted to Pinya's face, then trailed down to her hand, fingering the rock. The listless, tired look on his face shifted a little. His lips quirked into a faint smirk. She had the same idea that he did, though she certainly had quite a bit more in the way of chill. His hand started to search for a small rock of its own he could contribute to the experiment.

"I imagine the worst they could do is lecture us with their redundancies." If they're even able to figure out who did it or catch them.

His hand closed around a rock as he looked down to find a target, but he'd wait for her response or first move.

"Hmmn. Their normal seems very cyclical," she muses. She rolls the stone between her palms as she thinks,

"Oh, most certainly. But that's only a problem for losers that get caught," she smirks.

She draws her arm back almost lazily, but the way her eyes scan the surroundings and the poise with which she holds herself belies years and years of training. That, or a very convincing fluke.

She waits, still, for the perfect opening. Pinya wants to be able to see exactly how the person she hits reacts.

With striking precision she flings the pebble with terrifying accuracy at one of the men walking with almost no twelves-damned expression on his face, right at his chest...

Nothing Happens.

Well, not that nothing happened exactly, but it hit him. She saw it hit him, gentle over the distance, and bounce off him and... There was no reaction whatsoever.

She frowns, picking up a part of the roof shingle that had come loose, sharper than a pebble but about the same size. This time she shoots it at a merchant underneath a stall, closer than her last target as to make sure that at least some momentum translates into force.

The same thing happens. The merchant simply keeps hawking her wares with the same line over and over, as soon as anyone seems to get close enough.

"I- No. You'd definitely feel that."

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One could call her path circuitous

it's like going forward and back... and forward and back and-

It's like she's falling back right into the system, falling back on all that's erased.....

Twenty two seconds tested-

aslkdjasdfj i lub u <3

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Sorry i'm late!

TikTok Dancing meme FRAGMENTS IN ONE DIRECTION