Summer TDM

[polymods]

✖ 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

Comments

[necrosaint]

"Fried ... some shit that carries other tastes, yes," Harrow confirms as if she knows what the food is. She's seen it before, but she doesn't actually. "You go ahead and eat whatever is in that. Apparently I will stand here and be the line mascot," she's learned what one of those is! "And wait and see if you're actually served. As well as clear out your arteries later."

She wants very much to believe Gideon's real, but it didn't work out for either cav being real the first time. Might've been a different island, but it was also a learning experience. Even if she sort of made a friend(?) from it.

She's also got a lot of experience clearing out arteries. A lot more than one would expect from someone her age or expertise.

[necrosavior]

Gideon raises an eyebrow. "You can have a bite of my grain wrapped protein on a stick if you want," she offers. It isn't fried like the food she is in line for, but it's easy to eat while in line. "It's free food, Harrow. You never know how long that will last." She doesn't plan to touch her supplies until she needs to.

Neither of them has been back to the Ninth House since they left it. Despite what most penitents thought, no necromancers remain in the house. Perhaps the great aunts will keel over, finally dead, and go off to a separate afterlife (that's key, Gideon has had enough of their judgment). Aiglamene's the fittest fiddle in the house, leg issue and all. She better still be. "How much build up does one or three meals really do?" Gideon asks. Does it happen when they're dead? Or do they just have their body as is, preserved as similarly as a lyctor's. Unchanging.

[necrosaint]

"Oh, no, I'm fine, I ate already," is both habitual wording and true: Harrow does eat every day, she just goes for the blandest thing she can possibly get the temple to give her. "It's lasted ... a few months, by local reckoning? Or. Local-ish. Imagine the quotes around 'local.'" She doesn't have Mercymorn's talent, quite, of speaking punctuation, but it would've been useful there.

"Not this local, but the same sort of," Encompassing hand gesture out into the air, "Local. Because, as usual, if you are actually you," and she does still look skeptical but eventually she's going to snap on that, "you're late. For actually asking that question, though, you get the answer to it: any at all. Fried food is very complex to break down, and artery lining is almost unavoidable, unless you're very quick ... to ... use all of the ... never mind."

If anyone could manage to work off all of that fried food, it's Nav, so Harrow amends, "Just don't sleep until you've done a ridiculous ton of exercise."

[necrosavior]

Gideon's grin nearly eats her face. "It's like you almost forgot what my days are like when I choose them," she teases. This island is a much more happening place than Canaan House. People are dancing, swimming, doing something noisy in the trees (are they cutting them down with axes?), and that's just what she's picked up in what feels like fifteen minutes.

That's all well and good. She doesn't entirely get what Harrow's saying about local. If it's part of the River or something in the River or past the River (not that any of that makes sense to Gideon as terminology, she's parroting here), spoiler alert: shit gets weird. "I'm late?" Gideon asks. "My apologies for not dying sooner. I'd have beat you here if you had eaten me like I told you to. Like you were supposed to. You don't get to shove me down into some deep recess of your mind and blame me. I tried to keep you alive. I don't know how to do that when someone dumps us entirely into the depths of the river." Gideon does know what she should have done. She should have killed the old lady lyctor before she tried to murder... Gideon isn't comfortable with a way to refer to him. Harrow calls him God. So sure, it's her fault. Harrow doesn't have a way to know that though.

[necrosaint]

"No—what—"

Harrow is partially upset by any further references to Gideon dying; that's clearly on her topic No List but keeps coming up despite her ... and partially a bit distracted by the notion of dumping anyone or anything entirely into the River. She must mean the entire Mithraeum, but—

You don't care, says a distant voice that may or may not be inside her head. She doesn't care. Right.

"If I had wholly consumed you, you would not be here at all. You shouldn't be here at all. I gave you that body, I wanted you to have it." Somehow, Harrow keeps her cool, even though she's fighting tears again. She's not yelling. It's not shrill. This is fine. "It wasn't what I had wanted to do, of course, it wasn't as Sextus and I had intended, but we—ran out of time. And weren't ... given options."

Suddenly she understands Augustine, just the tiniest little bit. But only a little. She isn't blaming a third party in an attempt to make it seem like she could've fixed it if they hadn't been involved.

[necrosavior]

"You didn't even write a note," Gideon says. Harrow writes notes for everything. At Canaan House, a post-it note was more likely than the reverend daughter in the flesh. "Or done any work to help me fight off space bees." She's being flip because it's easier to joke about push ups and press ups and all the exercises she usually does (when not distracted by ghastly murders). She's avoiding the real point, one she's already said lightly.

She appreciates Harrow can't see her eyes. The headache inducing brightness buys her that much protection. Privacy. "What do you mean, what you and Sextus intended?" Gideon asks. "Why didn't you tell me whatever that is back then? Does Camilla know? I bet Camilla knows. Palamedes actually told her things." They were always on the same page, so much so he didn't even have a message for Gideon to give her.

[necrosaint]

"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."

[necrosavior]

What work, Gideon wonders. She believes Harrow, sure, because that isn't what Harrow would lie about. The evidence is simply lacking. Pointing out Harrow failed at something always goes over as well as a space suit out of oxygen. Gideon can't do that with Harrow crying.

Her arms wrap around Harrow and pull her in close. A tight embrace that means safety and comfort and accidentally leaning her food on a stick against Harrow's hair. With attention that says Gideon's here for Harrow and a casualness that does not draw attention to removing bits of grain from her hair, Gideon brushes the back of Harrow's head. "Serial killers usually don't care to give you the time to finish your side of things," Gideon says. "It's a miracle any of us lived." Especially with how slow on the uptake they had been. Palamedes had been faster than the rest of them, but time had run out by then.

Because she's tired of finding things out late, when the shit is hitting the fan and feces are going everywhere, Gideon says, "Trust me now."

[necrosaint]

"I," Harrow started to talk, at one point there. Harrow was going to talk, and then suddenly she was being held. And she isn't even minding that there is food in her hair; a hallucination can't have done that, a hallucination can't hold her like this. Even the Body never feels quite so real.

And Gideon's Gideon. She is not someone else who looks like Gideon, but definitively, and absolutely, Harrow's cavalier.

She stands on her tiptoes and whispers, "I do," as close to Gideon's ear as she can possibly get.

[necrosavior]

Gideon gives up on getting the bits of grain out of Harrow's hair. It requires giving up her precious supply of food because she only has two hands and both arms are busy holding her bird bones light necromancer. They can both wait, Harrow for clean hair and Gideon for the rest of her snack.

Her spine is all tingly, and for half a second Gideon waits for miniature (or full-sized) human skeletons to burst out of each of her vertebrae to pry her loose or threaten her. On one hand Gideon can count the number of times she's gotten away with this (with Harrow conscious and them both up to staying that way). The words tingle in her ear, and Gideon doesn't know what's ahead, what comes after fried protein. It's easier to face with Harrow. "One flesh, one end," Gideon says, not sure what else to say. "Bitch."

[necrosaint]

Does Harrow even know there's stuff in her hair? All signs point to no, because skeletal hands aren't wiping at it, either.

"You have to demean the ritual, don't you," she sniffles, instead of returning the oath, because it is impossible to argue at this point that she's not dealing with Gideon, who she kind of wants to cling to and also cannot let herself do that because it is far too inappropriate, people could see it. Around the sniffling, though, she's smiling weakly. She even pulls her face back to look at Nav, so the cavalier can see her looking a combination of stricken sad and like she's going to laugh. "That makes you real. My mind wouldn't have the audacity to repeat that phrase twice."

It's almost as if she expects say it, loser to come next for some reason.

[necrosavior]

"Then you aren't giving yourself an authentic Nav experience," she says. Gideon cannot imagine a stripped down version of her without all of her sense of humor. It sounds too bleak. Gideon's not imagined Harrow's life without her in it. That was supposed to be the advantage of the one sacrificing themselves. She's never one to catch a break.

"If I'd known that was all it'd take, I'd have gotten sacrilegious sooner," she says. She's never feeling bad for that again (not that she felt bad before).

Her hand splays against Harrow's back, providing the support of an exoskeleton. "We were one flesh, and if you look around, we're now one end. Guess it was right." Gideon watches Harrow's face. This place means a lot of shit, and Gideon only cares, right then, that it's the two of them against the world again.

[necrosaint]

"The islands haven't been too bad," Harrow confesses. It does sound like a confession: tired and emotionally wrung out, as if this is something she's afraid to say, doesn't want to admit. "This one is the oddest, so far? But even it has—"

You.

"—advantages."

[necrosavior]

Gideon snorts. "I've survived more assassination attempts than I've attended dinner parties," she says. Admittedly, the dinner party number is so low that's not as impressive as it sounds. Still. "We both deserve some 'not too bad' as far as I see it." Something lacking the fate of the universe. Sure, Gideon remembers the spiel about becoming her better self. She's choosing not to think too closely on that yet. She refuses to be the one to turn this reunion into a sob fest. Or a navel gazing party.

Gideon looks across at the free beach underwear and food and people dancing and people swimming. Swimming could be it? It doesn't feel like a Harrowhark setting. Too many people. Not enough prayers. "Yeah?" Gideon stares down at her and uses the moment to bite off a large chunk of her protein on a stick.

[necrosaint]

"I liked Carcosa better, because it had so many undead."

Of course she did.

"This one just has you," is added in a mumble. "And I hope you are still with me when we change islands again, but if you are not—at least there was this one. Also," now more loudly, "Watching people fall off those wave-riding board things is a bit entertaining."

[necrosavior]

"Ah, yes, right at home," Gideon nods. "But was the food any good? Because this food is good."

Of course Gideon likes that.

She looks at Harrow, not sure what's normal on these islands. Perhaps people disappear just as often as they appear. She's just gotten here. "However slightly, you beat out the food here, no matter how good this fried protein turns out to be," Gideon nudges her shoulder into Harrow's.

[necrosaint]

Oh, Nav. How could Harrow ever think this was a hallucination? She could never think of these things.

"The food was ... fine. I did not pay close attention to it. It was less of a big deal than the food here, we did not have to stand in lines to pay for it so often, though there was a restaurant where one did have to do exactly that. After eating. I had wondered what happened to the people who tried to leave without paying."

They probably got shot at, because: Carcosa. Harrow had liked the beach and the make-up counter. "Really, me more important than food? Are you all right? Have you been hit in the head recently?" It's only after she says it that she puts a hand over her mouth and silently prays for Gideon not to mention having been impaled on a fence recently.

[necrosavior]

"Hit in your head," Gideon mutters. Despite how weak Harrow's arm muscles and every other kind of muscle (brain isn't actually a muscle, she thinks), they healed impressively quick. Enough to make up for how much worse she'd been at fighting. At first. She doesn't know if Harrow's from before all that. If there's a Harrow after all that.

She steps up and orders as much fried protein as they'll give her, quickly, before she steps to the side to wait for it. That's what others have been doing. "You didn't have to promise your skeleton to perform decades more labor in return?" Gideon pokes fun at the Ninth House that doesn't have the labor any other way. The dead are more productive than most of them were shortly before they died. "Not fully like home then."