polymeme | Summer TDM

Entry tags:

! test drive meme

Summer TDM

✖ Test Drive Meme

Ⅰ. ARRIVAL
You can read all about your character's arrival in the game lore.
You land on an island, no surprise there. It’s not particularly large, this island, but what’s really more of note is that the entire thing is a beach. White sand stretches out in every direction, the only greenery being palm trees and impossibly fragrant bushes of flowers that resemble hibiscuses.

Allergic to the sun? Don’t worry, there’s plenty of canopies set up so that you can get some shade. There’s also changerooms with toilets and showers, and also free swimsuits that fit you perfectly! There’s plenty of food stalls - try a corndog, or the fish and chips at “America’s Scrod Basket!” Groovy! Once night falls, you can relax in one of the many hammocks strung up between the palm trees, or catch some Zs on the surprisingly comfortable beach chairs all over the place. All of your basic needs are met, Traveler!

Notes:
1. Please remember to mark threads appropriately with Content Warnings when necessary.

2. These prompts are a jumping off point - how they affect your character and their development is up to you.

3. Have fun!

Ⅱ. BEACH BLANKET BINGO!

All of the residents of this island look like they’ve stepped off the set of a 1960s beach party movie. Catalina Caper, maybe. They’re all extremely friendly, and BOY do they love to dance! Which they do. Frequently.

In fact, did you notice the live band? Because there’s a live band! A few, actually - they rotate through the day and into the evening, although you never actually see them switch. That’s pretty weird.

The island residents will drag you into one of their many, many dance parties whenever they can. Sometimes they’ll just form around you like a horrible flash mob, twisting and shaking like they’ve downed a gallon of redbull.

Maybe you want to get as far away from the water and the parties as possible. Venture further inland and you’ll find yourself still surrounded by sand and a few tropical plants. There’s bound to be a few other Travelers about, but at least it’s quiet.

Wait. What the hell is that, a lawnmower?

Surprise! As you stand there, a dune buggy comes plowing over the hill, spraying sand everywhere. Inside of the buggy is a group of young people, all smiling broadly at you and any other Travelers nearby.

“Hello, friends!” they cry. “Want to take a ride? Charlie’s got a ton of these, you can borrow one!” So if you really feel like careening all over the island, this is a great way to do it!

Notes:
1. These residents of the island are normal humans. Killing them is possible and will affect the colour grading of your Scrywatch depending on the situation.

2. The food is safe to eat, and is consumable by non-human entities.

3. The short creepy guy who has the keys to the dune buggies might be a little pissed if you trash them, but he can be mollified if you listen to his shitty music and tell him it's good.

Ⅲ. SURF'S UP!
CW: drowning, possible death.
As with all of the islands you will visit, you will either see the island as floating either in a horizonless sky, or in the middle of a wine-dark sea. Regardless of which you see, you soon discover that you can go surfing in it.

That’s right - there’s a bunch of boards set up down at one end of the beach. Wander down and you’ll find yourself suddenly embroiled in a surfing contest! That’s right, it’s you versus another Traveler - first one off of their board is the loser! Win and you’ll be the most popular person on the island for the duration of your stay! People will lavish attention and gifts upon you. Lose and you’ll be ridiculed! They’ll probably even make fun of your mom!

Whether or not you care about winning, once you’re in the middle of the contest you and your fellow Traveler will see someone swimming not far away from you. Or they were swimming - now they seem to be going down and popping up, looking terrified. The realisation comes to you suddenly: they’re drowning.

You have a choice here - you can forfeit the win to save this stranger, or you can leave them to their own devices. Your opponent will have the same choice. Be a hero, or be a winner?

Notes:
1. Obviously, the decision to save the swimmer or not will affect the colour of your Scrywatch. Both parties may decide to save the swimmer, or both may decide to continue on with the contest. Your reason for saving them can also make an impact - are you saving them only to be considered a hero by the island residents?

Ⅳ. TERROR AT ROCK-OUT BEACH!
CW: unwanted romantic attention from a monster, optional sexual themes.
You’re just sitting there minding your own business when you suddenly realise that you’re very nearly alone. In fact, it’s just you and another Traveler, maybe a few. Where did everyone go?

Suddenly a shadow falls over you. You turn and are greeted by what looks like a man in a vaguely fish-like costume; it has flat webbed feet, a body covered in what appears to be rubber seaweed, and a triangular head with huge rubber gills sticking out to either side. Its immobile mouth has pointy teeth, and its bug-eyes appear to have pupils merely painted on.

This monster waves its arms threateningly. “Gaaaaah!” it says. Its voice is muffled. “Gaahhhhhhhhh!”

Somehow it is a lot faster than it looks, and the next thing you know it has enfolded you in its embrace.

“You will be Flupper’s bride!” the monster shouts, regardless of your gender identification. It looks at whoever happens to be in your general vicinity. “Who this?”

Struggling, you realise that Flupper is stronger than any creature you’ve ever encountered before. You can’t seem to get it to let go of you, and it's rocking against you in such a way that it makes a sound like the soles of sneakers on a gym floor. On the plus side, it doesn’t have any genitals so at least it’s not as bad as it could be. Still, desperate times call for desperate measures! “That’s my partner!” you claim before you can think about how stupid an idea that is.

“You bride? LIES! Flupper can tell!”

“We can prove it!”

“Oh yeah? Tell something only bride would know!”

Oh shit. Now you’re stuck - you and your fellow Traveler have to admit to something true about love or intimacy, under the guise of it being about the other. Flupper’s lie detecting abilities are good enough to call you out on untruths, but not good enough to know who you’re talking about.

He’s not letting you out of his squeaky embrace until you’ve convinced him that you’re a couple.

Notes:
1. It’s up to you how much of this back and forth it takes to convince Flupper that you are ‘brides.’

2. You can choose to abandon someone in Flupper’s grip - this would be reflected in your Scrywatch colour. Probably negatively, unless you feel strongly about the morality of fishman marriage via kidnapping. The ‘bride’ would then be forced to attend an extremely dull ceremony lasting three days and three nights. For the duration of your stay on the island, you would now be married and expected to bring Flupper its slippers and pipe every evening.

3. You can try to kill Flupper. Unlike the other residents of the island, it is extremely resilient and strong. It is possible, however.

4. You can keep this completely G rated - maybe all you know of love is that time in first grade when you got a Valentine card from the cutest kid in class - but if you DO get saucy, please mark your thread with a Content Warning.

Greetings, prospective Travelers! Welcome to the Summer 2021 POLYMYTHOS test drive meme and thank you for your interest in our game! Our next application round will run from June 25 - July 2, 2021. For the months of June, July, and August, we invite you to use this TDM to explore but one of many, many islands within the Endless Isles; use it as an opportunity to introduce and familiarize yourself with the game, form connections with other characters, and just have some fun. (Perhaps while also getting some solid samples together for your application!)

Use the prompts provided below as-is or feel free to write your own set within the environment detailed in each. You're even welcome to access the network via your character's ScryWatch. While there will be some inevitable changes, TDMs may count as game canon and some islands may be revisited in the future. Be mindful of your surroundings -- you never know how you and your fellow Travelers might affect this place in the long run.

Hang ten, Moon doggy! Seeking those killer jams?

Network · Logs · OOC · Memes · Plurk

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

"That's the way it should be," David points out. "My path isn't exactly he most honest."

Cheating. David had often equated it to cheating when he was a kid. Now, though, he's more practical about it. It's just a change. A difference.

Carter shrugs, "I mean neither is mine in a way if I happen to hear/feel how someone else is feeling and use it for a song."

"Besides, at least you're honest about it and how it won't have that same emotion behind it. Like you aren't using it to become like...the most technically prestigious violin player for fame and fortune."

"I mean, I could totally be the most technically skillful, but the thing is that I'd reproduce the same performance, because my skill would be copying the talent, but not the performance, the heart. The inspiration, the unique twists... I can't do that."

i. arrival & beach blanket bingo;

Oh. Oh, this isn't the other side of the River at all, is it. Nothing about this place is as expected, is it. Nothing is going to go the way Dulcinea expects it to.

And that's absolutely wondrous.

She chooses a simple green bathing suit and a gauzy green cover-up that suits her perfectly—a whispered thank you to the Voice is sent to that green scrywatch around her wrist—and is getting around via her cane with a sand foot. There's a wheelchair back at the Temple for her, but today, she's pretty sure she can handle walking the beach. Or sitting at the shore and dipping her feet in; also a valid place to catch her.

That is, until the buggies.

She rents one of those beach buggies and is riding it around with absolutely unmitigated glee on her face. Catch her before or after—or join her for a ride and compliment her beach buggy driving skills (the compliment is not required).

iii. surf's up;

Okay, let's face it: Dulcinea doesn't know how to swim that well.

She knows how to float, and how to enjoy spa pools, but this is ridiculous.

So she's definitely the drowning stranger in this situation. She's also definitely clinging to her rescuer in appreciation, at least as long as they let her hang on. "I have no idea what I thought I was doing," she admits, "because I definitely do not know how to surf. But it really did seem fun ..."

You shouldn’t be participating in contests for something you don’t know how to do to begin with, not even after a brief lesson. But he had been having a rare good time, something he has not expected to be able to do on a beach, and sometimes, young men having a rare good time are rare fools. It isn’t a surprise when he wipes out in the surf, but at least he isn’t in any danger.

That’s more than he can say for the young woman clinging to him as he tries to paddle them back to shore.

“Can’t say I know how to stand on a board in the water either… but do you know how to swim?”

Edited 2021-07-03 01:28 (UTC)

"Um," Dulcie says, awkwardly ducking her head. She's absolutely blushing, but she's also giving a self-deprecating laugh as she says, "Not really. I can swim a bit, but I didn't expect the water was going to be quite so violent with me!"

She tries to help, at least, using her necromancy to attempt to decrease her weight and drag even more than her frail frame already is; she doesn't have to be a burden on him any more than is absolutely necessary, and that way she's not using any necromancy on him without consent.

There's a little bit of coughing, because that tube in her nose got filled with water, but she politely directs it not on her rescuer.

"I can't thank you enough, by the way. I'm Dulcinea. Dulcie."

The effect of her attempt to aid him is that a woman who already appears frail now seems to weigh almost nothing in his arms, in a way that the buoyancy the water should give her doesn’t really explain. He is a strong man, visibly muscular considering his relatively small frame, but not so strong as that, he thinks.

“It’s nothing.” He would do as much for anyone, but it’s true that doing it for a pretty woman isn’t unpleasant, however much looks can deceive. “I’m Jon Snow.”

He shakes his head, frowning. “Dulcie, you don’t weigh anything. If no one had been here who could pull you out, what would you have done?”

That someone sees her as pretty first and not sickly first would mean the world to her, even if it's not particularly meaningful.

"Oh," is what Dulcie says, "I weigh a little less than normal because I'm trying to make myself less of a hassle to carry, but I suppose I'm barely a hundred pounds anyway, so ... eventually I either would have drowned," and then, since she already remembers dying once, who knows, "or remembered how to float and poorly swim back to shore, and get very tired. Not that I think you couldn't carry me at my normal weight, since you're right it isn't very much, just I didn't want to be much of a hassle!"

Floating is the advantage of hardly weighing anything. Absolutely no strength is the disadvantage.

That causes him to pause in the water. He has to tread; his toes only brush the sand, and only when his shoulders are fully submerged, but the two of them are floating well enough, and she has not struggled in a way that endangers either of them. He pulls his head back to stare at her, still questioning.

“You’re not a hassle. But drowning, that’s not nothing.” Not something to seem so untroubled by, at any rate. “ — How can you make yourself weigh less?”

"So if you were to say use your powers to learn violin could you look at a complicated piece and just play it perfectly, or do you have to find someone who can already play that piece and get that information from them?"

Dulcie is good at being saved. It's the thing she considers herself the best at in the world, at this point. She knows she can write and garden and trim roses and sing, but she is incredibly talented at being saved.

Her smile's still there, but a little shakier.

"Magic," she says, first, not sure how this is a question but also pretty sure that 'magic' is the best answer she can give, "I just thought it would help. If it bothers you ..? I can stop, just you were already doing most of the work."

He takes this in. He is not sure how he feels about magic. Until recently, it had gone out of the world, and since then, it has touched him in ways that are sometimes discomfiting. But he owes his life to it, and that’s discomfiting too.

“No. There is no harm in it.” There isn’t, is there? No one sacrificed to please a god? He catches the way her smile shakes. “I didn’t need you to do it, but it does make it a little easier. Let’s get back to shore, so you’re not spitting up water.”

"Maybe not, but it's as helpful as I can be," she essentially reiterates, relaxing—and now that she relaxes, it's easier to tell that she was a little bit tense. "I will endeavor to not continue coughing water anywhere, including and most especially your face."

A beat, as she processes, and takes a couple of deep breaths. Talking makes swimming harder, and she doesn't speak until he's mostly gotten them the rest of the way there, "And I won't do something quite that stupid ever again. Even if when you've been dying your whole life," it's something she drops so casually into conversation because she is so used to it, she doesn't make it seem like a big deal or a manipulative heartstring-puller, just a fact, "Drowning doesn't seem like much except another potential adventure."

"I could read and play the music from being near a violinist. But unless I work at the skill and grow it, only with the level of skill of the violinist I met. I could play pieces they'd never played too, just like they could, but it would take practice."

THe muscle memory would be there for some things, of course, the ones played so often that you didn't have to think about playing them.'

He takes a few slow, one-handed strokes through the water, to shallower water, before he looks at her again, still troubled, sympathetic.

“Have you? I’m sorry.”

It would explain the frailty, at least. She has a quality that’s hard to compare to anything, but it puts him in mind of something. Now that she says it… it’s Bran, lying senseless in his bed for weeks, looking like the pale pinched ghost of a child. Bran had wanted to be a knight, and he had liked to climb.

Dulcie is more lively than an injured boy who won’t wake up, though: he saw that much in her attempt to surf. What comes after the injury, if the person is still lively? What if they’ve had it all their life?

“Don’t you fear anything?”

Edited 2021-07-03 02:18 (UTC)

"Of course."

It's such a simple question, and she has such a simple answer; it has always been the same, singular thing. Never has she feared death, and not fearing death makes it harder to fear other things.

There is one thing that Dulcinea Septimus will always be afraid of.

"Being alone."

That’s quite something to say to a near-stranger, and it rattles him more than anything else about her so far — anything she’s said or done. She’s not wearing much, and he’s wearing less, but it’s more startlingly intimate than the way he’s been holding her against him in the water. That’s just a matter of keeping her alive.

He gives her a small, apologetic half-smile.

“Not much chance of that on these islands.”

He had never truly been alone as a boy, and he had always been alone. He has grown used to it: as bastard, turncloak, Lord Commander, and king, there had always been a solitary feeling. He misses Ghost, of a sudden: the great wolf would probably be paddling through the sea foam if he was here just now.

“Any of your people come here with you?”

"I did so much work to fight off the heralds, Nav, I—"

Am tired. So tired. Harrow just wants to collapse into a pile of exhausted tears, and this is the first time she's let herself feel this way, or think of these things, in weeks. In what feels like a lifetime at the same time. Because she has been forcing herself to only look forward, and now she's letting herself look back, and all it does is hurt.

Everything hurts and she can't fight off the tears entirely, now.

"The work. He said to me, he asked me did you finish the work, and he looked at me and he saw something I didn't know was there, and everything in my letters, I called it 'the work,' and that's what it was. The work was meant to ... it was finishing the megatheorem. It wasn't done, Nav. There was more. We could've done it if we'd had the time. We should have made the time, somehow. We should have tried harder and—" Harrow swallows, and stops, because there is no and anymore, and it doesn't matter. She is breaking her only rule for her third lifetime, and it is important, and it is terrible.

"I'm sorry," she whispers. "I'm sorry, Gideon, I should have trusted you."

"No, it doesn't seem like it. That's good. I should like to make a new family."

Any sadness in her voice is replaced with brightness yet again; she is remarkably good at bouncing back, most of the time. So long as there's something to cling to. So long as there's space for positivity.

"Not any of my people in a direct fashion—I am Duchess of Rhodes, and no Rhodesians are here, but there's at least one other from my system. I think two. I don't really know them." The whole thing's an awkward stolen identity situation she doesn't want to get into, but she could be friends with Gideon the Ninth, she thinks. Harrowhark, perhaps they'd be better off giving each other space.

Dulcie told her the one thing that mattered, and that's all there is.

The apologetic look has taken up residence on his face. He paddles a few strokes closer to shore. Now he can feel the sand under his feet, but the currents are strong, pulling at his ankles, so he doesn’t yet set her down to fend for herself.

“I’ve never heard of Rhodes. You ever heard of Westeros — the Seven Kingdoms?”

"Huhn..." He muses, thinking over all the skills one could learn just by being near someone. It opens a whole can of worms the more he thinks about it.

"Have you ever like, accidentally picked up a skill from someone you didn't want? Or didn't like?"

"Afraid not, no," Dulcinea says, sounding a little guilty for all that she knows it isn't her fault—or particularly surprising, given the makeup of this place. "I know the Nine Houses, but not Seven Kingdoms. Mine is the Seventh, though—House, that is—so I'm going to be fond of how you've got seven of them by default."

"Of course. I had no control growing up, Carter. None. I picked up everything from everyone tha wasn't actively shielding against it."

And it meant bad things.

"I know how ot kiss like Emma Frost does. That's not fun. I know how to tie my shoes like Scott Summer. I know too many things in too mnay ways."

What Harrow has told him tickles at the edge of his mind, but he lets it go for now. There’s no surety that it’s the same thing.

“We don’t put them in order. And the North — we will not bow to the Iron Throne now. So it might be that there are only six kingdoms, or five. I’m sorry to disappoint.”

Now the water is only to his hips. He gently sets her down, but doesn’t let go of her arm.

“Can you walk? You might be prepared to drown, but I’m not ready to see it.”

Edited 2021-07-03 02:56 (UTC)

Carter's expression softens, "I'm sorry. That's really crappy, I mean...yeah I understand. It's hard being able to pick up everything in like a ten foot radius..."

He's silent for a moment, not wanting to even touch the topic of one of the Summers brothers so instead he moves towards a slightly easier topic.

"When did you first get your powers?"

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

Page 18 of 22

Summer TDM

no subject

no subject

no subject

Dulcinea Septimus | The Locked Tomb

surf’s up

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject