polymeme | TDM: Mega Throwback Edition!

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! test drive meme

TDM: Mega Throwback Edition!

✖ TEST DRIVE MEME

Ⅰ. ARRIVAL
You can read all about your character's arrival in the game lore.
The island you find yourself on is a tropical paradise. The hair is heavy and humid, and a thick flowering jungle encroaches on the white sandy beach. As far as mysterious islands go, it could be a lot worse! Maybe there’s a bar with some Mai Tais set up here somewhere…

As you walk towards the jungle you become aware that something is moving in the bushes. Some sort of animal, probably - maybe your mind goes to jaguars, or monkeys. What comes running out onto the beach, though, is not remotely mammalian: it’s a dinosaur.

Just a little one - it’s about the size of a small dog, running along on its hind legs. Aww, he’s kinda cute if you ignore the sharp teeth and claws! Lucky for you it’s busy chasing something else and soon darts back into the bush unless you do something to grab its attention.

Listen closely and you’ll find that sometimes you can hear sounds that are distinctly mechanical. Whatever this place is, it at least sounds like it’s inhabited by something possessing intelligence. You could definitely go and find out. Just be careful!

Or maybe you think, hey, I’ve seen this movie, I’m staying on the beach! You could, but unless you’re good at diving for fish you might have a hard time finding food.

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. The people on the island are normal humans unless otherwise indicated. The dinosaurs are animals and can be killed. I mean, good luck with that, but.

4. Have fun!

Ⅱ. CRETACEOUS PARK
CW: Dinosaurs! Violence, possibly against dinosaurs!

The jungle is thick and it takes a lot of effort to move through it. You’ll have to crawl under vines, climb over felled trees, and just generally pay a lot of attention to your surroundings. This is the sort of situation where having someone with you certainly makes things easier. Occasionally you will hear animals calling, and you’re bound to see some of them eventually. Maybe you’ll luck out and spot a herbivore like one of the armoured dinosaurs, just chewing on plants and not likely to attack you unless you piss it off. Maybe you spot something about your size with a decidedly less vegetarian diet and you have to decide between hiding or trying to scare it off.

Eventually in your wanderings you come across an unusual sight: a dirt road. It cuts its way through the trees and ferns, and to the south you can hear what is probably a familiar sound: engines. And shouting.

It’s getting closer.

Suddenly there are cars and motorcycles rushing down the road toward you - try not to get hit! One of the cars slows and a guy with a ragged blonde beard hangs out and tells you to get in the back. At close to the same time a truck slows and another guy tells you to climb aboard and grab a gun.

Why would you need a gun? The answer presents itself almost immediately: big daddy T-Rex is stomping its way down the road towards you.

You can escape with the first car, or pitch in and try to shoot the dinosaur with the second. Or you could try and prevent them from hurting the animal entirely, or just run off into the jungle by yourself. Better decide quickly, though. That T-Rex looks hungry.

Notes:
1. You determine your level of dino encounter! And what kind - nobody is going to get on your ass if you pick one from the Jurassic period instead of the Cretaceous. It’s a magic island for crying out loud.

Ⅲ. SETTLEMENT
CW: Kidnapping.
Whether you throw in with the humans or maybe stumble upon it by accident, you wind up at their encampment . It’s definitely the safest place to be - there are high walls around a series of small buildings mostly cobbled together from wood and tin. But there’s cots, and food. Outside the perimeter wall are tripwires and very basic motion sensors that will alert the settlement if any sizable animals are prowling around.

You’re informed that mostly the dinosaurs leave the camp alone - too much effort for not enough food.

While you’ll be welcomed the first night, as soon as morning rolls around it will be made abundantly clear that you’re going to be expected to pull your weight. Pitch in with the cooking or cleaning, or if you have some mechanical skill you can help fix up some of the rattling vehicles parked around.

From what you can gather, this is just one of a few different settlements on the island. Some of the others have small farms, and if you can drive you will be asked if you’d mind running over a delivery to one of these.

Agree, and you’ll be handed the keys to what sure looks like a 1970s era Cadillac. The mulleted gentleman who has asked this favour of you hands you a piece of paper upon which a small map is drawn, along with written directions. A note at the bottom reads, “don’t look in the tunk.” You think he means ‘trunk.’

“Package is in the trunk,” this gentleman confirms. “Don’t open it, sunlight’ll mess it all up.”

With that he sends you on your merry way. Best to take along a buddy for safety!

Partway through your journey you will come to realise that whatever is in the trunk is making a banging noise. You can ignore it and keep driving, passing the keys off to the people at the farming settlement, or you can pull over and investigate.

If you choose the second option, you’ll find that your ‘package’ is a person. Not a human one - this person has scales and huge, bulging eyes above small nostrils. They’re bound hand and foot and gagged, staring up at you with terror.

Well, jeez. Now what?

Notes:
1. If you open the trunk and discover the Crazy Frog-esque figure within you can continue on to the settlement and deliver him as promised. If you choose the former, the people at both settlements will be angry and turn on you unless you can spin a very convincing lie about your prisoner escaping.

2. If you choose to free your froggy friend, they will indicate that you should follow them through the jungle to their home.

3. If you skip the delivery mission, you can still stay at the camp. It’s very bare bones, but there’s food and cots and bathrooms at least.

Ⅳ. REPTILIANS
Whether it’s because you’re led there, or because you find it by accident, you find yourself in a village - the houses are smooth stone, curving elegantly under sprawling vines and beautiful blooming flowers.

Upon your arrival several humanoid lizard people emerge from their homes and watch you, silent. One of them, stooped and wizened with age, moves to stand directly in front of you. When they speak, you realise that you can’t hear them with your ears; they communicate through telepathy.

You are welcome to stay in our village if you pass our Test of Bravery.

You’re half expecting that they’ll make you fight a velociraptor or something, but no - this village elder leads you and your companion both to the center of the village where there are several large flat stones ringed around one much larger stone. You’re both instructed to sit. More of the reptilian people approach, watching you.

Tell us a story of your bravery, the elder tells you.

You’ll have to dig into your memories to find a moment where you think you acted bravely, and then you’ll have to tell everyone assembled about it. You might be tempted to embellish a little bit, or to outright lie.

But if you do…

The moment you start fudging the truth, a different memory will play out just above the large center stone like a hologram. This memory paints you much more poorly: it's one of your most cowardly moments. Definitely not what you wanted to share with a village full of people.

When either your story or your memory is finished, the village elder will look at you with their strange eyes and pronounce whether or not you’re allowed to stay.

Notes:
1. Whether or not you are allowed to stay is not based entirely on how brave you were - how you react to having to share (willingly or not) these stories also plays a part. For example, if you ran away from a fight but in the present you don’t try to justify it with bullshit reasons, you will still be invited to stay.

2. The Reptilian village is a blend of nature and advanced technology. Frankly, it’s a nicer place to stay than the human settlements. They have a lot more creature comforts, like nice deep baths and soft beds.

Greetings, prospective Travelers! Welcome to the POLYMYTHOS test drive meme and thank you for your interest in our game! 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! Apps are always open!)

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.

Network · Logs · OOC · Memes · Plurk

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There's plenty more where that came from, in the jungle - the small ones, especially, chittering as they dart through the brush, though they mostly mind themselves. Joel's looking for somewhat bigger game, parked behind a makeshift hunting blind made of leafy branches and giant ferns. His interest in working around the settlement being about exactly nil, he's opted to take his odd jobs up outside the walls. The dinosaurs may not pose a big problem for the settlers, but they do occasionally stir up some trouble. Especially the ones small enough to slip in through the cracks in their defenses but still large enough to be a pain once they do.

He's set a few traps, bow propped up beside him and a borrowed gun on his hip, but mostly it's just been waiting, this morning. He knows the sounds to listen for, by now, picking them up quick after only a couple of forays into this new green mire - and he knows right away that those are not the right footsteps headed his way, this time.

Still, he grabs his bow, crouched low as he peers through the blind. He only catches a glimpse of her, back toward him, bad angle, but she's moving in the direction of his traps and that definitely isn't good.

Leery of drawing something bigger out of the jungle (or startling her), he whistles rather than shouting, high and sharp.

Tess's grip tightens around her stick. No animal whistles, not like that, and she's not sure running into another person out here is a good thing for a bad thing: not everyone who calls out might be a friend. She turns very slowly, looking intently for the slightest bit of motion, but then she sees it: through the foliage and the underbrush, there's the blind, and the sliver of someone behind it.

She thinks about Joel's stories about hunters, about all the ugly little reminders of life outside the Quarantine Zone's walls.

Fuck.

She takes a hard step left behind a tree, pressing her back to it. Just to be sure.

"Who are you?" she calls back.

Well, looks like there's gonna be some shouting, anyway. So much for trying to keep it down. There's a deliberate pause between her answer and his response, though it's not entirely because he's listening for the sound of something listening for them, out here, too.

No, something about that voice nags at him. He can place it instantly, of course - how couldn't he? But that's impossible, and he's not about to start leaping to insane conclusions over an awkward little run-in out here in the jungle. Not in a place like this, where that sort of shit's always happening.

"Just somebody tryin' to make sure you don't break your damn ankle." He's not trying to be anybody's bad news, today, so Joel's willing enough to step out of cover. Or, close enough to. He stands, holding up an arm - briefly, as he leans against the tree propping up his blind. As quick as she disappeared, she's probably spotted him already, anyway, but he won't put himself any more out in the open until he's a little more sure of this.

"You want to spend your afternoon in a snare, though, keep on goin' the way you're goin'."

She's waiting, listening intently for a response, or any indication at all that she has to get the hell out of here. There's movement, but no indication he's coming after her. She could slip off through the trees, but this place is a damn maze, and he'd know it better than her for sure. Quick way to get trapped.

His voice stops her cold though, frozen against the tree trunk, jaw tense. Couldn't be. But who else in her life sounds like that, that old Southern drawl?

For a beat she considers leaving anyway. They parted already, didn't they? Feels like a good enough send-off, her to her death and him to this great big thing on her request. Better than most could ask for, leaving a partner behind: most have to watch their people die for nothing. A botched smuggling job, an accident, an execution by soldiers. She got a death wish. Who could ask for more? Maybe it's better to leave it that way.

But Tess turns, and she dares lean out. Just a sliver of her face, one brown eye and the scuff on her cheek.

"I think I'm already in one, Texas," she says.

"Christ." He doesn't even hear himself speak, all the air gone out of him as that nagging suspicion blooms into a strange mix of certainty and dread. He's seen plenty of unbelievable shit - is living right in the midst of it, as they speak - but that's all a different animal, another flavor of bizarre that's just a little more palatable than people coming back from the dead.

If that's even what's happening. If she's even real. (A question he's going to have to stop asking, at some point, if this shit keeps rolling downhill.)

Joel steps clear of the blind, bow still in his hand but clearly forgotten. "Tess?"

It's him.

She feels like she's been caught in more than one way: guilty of cutting open old wounds when he hides them better than anyone she's ever known. No matter how long they've been partners, it's hard to know where you stand when the man locks away the people he cares about as tightly as the ones he doesn't.

Did he mourn? Does she need to reassure him of that?

Pull it together, Tess.

She steps out, but she keeps a safe distance. She's not sure if it's for her sake or his.

"Hey, Joel," she replies. What do you even say after that? How's it going? Where's the girl? She settles on: "Miss me?"

He knows it's her, doesn't second-guess a second time, but it's still a gut punch actually seeing her. It's a kind of nostalgia shock that brings up all sorts of other ugly questions with it. Things he's not gonna consider, wounds a lot deeper and older than the one Tess left that really shouldn't be picked at.

It's a lucky thing he's got so much practice at bottling things up, cutting off all those new avenues to what if and just maybe comes natural.

And her response is refreshingly familiar, in that same way. He lets out a breath, not quite a scoff, shaking his head.

"How long have you been—" alive "—here?"

"Just today," she replies. "It's been a trip."

Boats, sand, dinosaurs and jungles being seasoning on the dish of being alive again. Tess's smile feels halfway to a grimace. Never her in her life would she expect a warm or relieved welcome; he needs his space. She can just assure him of one thing:

"Haven't turned. Hasn't gotten worse, either."

No need to Old Yeller her.

A trip. Coming back from the dead. Dying, in the first place - that'd be the trip, he'd figure. But he's not going to ask. He's done all the ruminating on death he's ever wanted to and then some, and this doesn't change that. Not at all (he can convince himself of that, maybe, with enough effort).

He doesn't look any less shell-shocked, but he scoffs at her reassurance - unnecessary, to say the least, at this point. "I think dyin's a pretty solid cure for that."

It's easier just to focus on the pertinent things, material, now. So he does, after another lingering pause, nodding to the blind he's built.

"We might want to take this conversation inside. There's bigger things out here than you're gonna be able to handle with that." He gestures to her branch, brows raised briefly.

"You've seen what I can do with a two by four," she replies coyly, but she sets it aside anyway, stepping forward through the underbrush to join him by the blind. If he says it's too big for a branch, then she'll take his word for it.

And, considering the implications of what he said:

"Is that what this place is? Where we go after we die, to earn our redemption or whatever that was?"

Both of them being here would track for that, at least. Shitty people, and all.

"I've seen what you can do with a lot less." Flatly, but a little less shaken. Nothing about this feels normal. It isn't like slipping back into something old, familiar. And that sense of unease only doubles as she steps toward him, more undeniably real by the second. But he can pretend. "Doesn't mean I'd try it out here."

He sets his bow down, tilting a hand vaguely toward the patch of mossy ground between gnarled tree roots where he'd been sitting. His pack is there, too, water and food inside included in that invitation. If the dead still need either.

"Not likely." This place is designed to torture them, not redeem them, if anything. The stubborn red of his scrywatch doesn't disagree with her theory, though. Even if he's pretty sure it's got a flaw or two.

"We'd both have to be dead, for that to make sense." And Joel's fairly sure he isn't, however up in the air it might've been, for a while, there. He didn't survive the fall, the fever, the infection, and whatever cocktail of pills Ellie managed to feed him to stave it all off after dragging his half-conscious ass around for an age - and then everything after - just to conveniently forget his own death in the fallout. And Tess sure seems conscious of hers.

She knows she’s making him uncomfortable. Come-into-my-shelter is sometimes as good as an enthusiastic arms-open greeting, in Joel terms, and she knows she’s as good as a ghost to him, but she finds herself searching the lines of his face for more signs of trouble anyway. So he’s not dead — are those a few more grey hairs she sees? Is he eating enough? Who makes sure he has a med kit, if she’s not around? He’s a survivor, but someone has to look out for him, too.

Tess doesn’t have those answers. She’d never dream of asking them out loud, anyway. This is a man of subtleties, a hand over you when crouched together in hiding, a quick pull of a gun without needing a direction, endless I’ve got it, I’ll get that, are you sure you can handle that. In turn, she minds his lines, and looks out for him in her way, too.

She turns from him, crouching into the blind and finding herself a spot to sit. She helps herself to routing through his pack, too, more to inventory what he’s working with than any real hunger.

“How far did you get out of Boston? How long as it been?”

Easy questions first.

"Winter's been long, but it should be just about over." Months. A small lifetime, by their standards, time he never would've expected to have - let alone to mean anything. One day, one hour, one decision at a time, sometimes even that's optimistic, and Joel is anything but.

He gives her maybe a wider berth than is necessary, as he joins her in the half-shelter of the brush, bow propped over his knees. Like everything else in his bag (including the backpack itself), the bow is new, clean, looks relatively unused. Things that haven't sat in storage for two decades or more. The advantages of traveling around this fucked up place.

"We're about halfway across the country, now. Colorado."

Tess has her eyes on the bag, marveling at the feeling of smooth, polished wood under her callused fingers, but her gaze pops up to him when he says that. She comes to the same conclusion: it's not an eternity, but it's no small thing, either, not going cross-country, not in half a year. The distance is hard to wrap her head around, both Boston and Colorado and the mere feet between them in the blind.

She sets down the bag with open disbelief. Joel wouldn't lie to her, but Colorado?

We? He kept the girl?

"That's a long way to go," she says. The barb of time is shallow under her skin; that he's going thousands of miles on her dying wish penetrates deeper. "You didn't find a Firefly to pass the kid off to?"

"No. Plenty of sign of them, though." In the empty places they left behind and the walking fungi wearing their corpses. Joel shakes his head, that furrow in his brow deepening as the corners of his frown draw downward. He knows there are gears turning behind her outward calm just as well as she knows the same is true on his side, but he won't be the one to jump ahead of them.

"Think there are a lot fewer of 'em left than they'd have us believe."

She just watches him, processing. She knows Joel wouldn't ditch a little girl if he couldn't be sure she was in good hands, and she knows he would have fought with her if she let him, even if it meant both of them dying, or him putting her down himself, and then where would he be? Where would Ellie be?

Her lips part, but nothing comes out. There are things she doesn't say to Joel, not when she can't be sure they'll land well. She realizes some seconds later that she's holding her breath.

"So you kept her," she says. Her intention to be neutral fails her; her voice comes out flecked with concern. She knew it was a hard lean. "That's a pretty intense job, Joel. I didn't..."

Didn't what? She meant every bit of what she said back there.

"Didn't have much of a choice." She didn't leave him with much of one. And by the time he thought he had found a way to get out of this suicidal, dead-end job - well, things had changed. More than he'll admit (given he has no intention of even trying).

He turns his attention back to the trees, watching for sign of anything bigger than those little flying lizards flitting around in the canopy. The hunt's likely a bust, at this point, as much noise as they've made, but at least it gives him a point of focus. Something to pretend he can focus on while sitting next to a ghost.

"Kid's a survivor, but she's still just a kid."

Tess's eyes narrow just slightly, looking for a thread to tug on to see if the whole story will unravel, something to explain this subtle change in him: he could barely look at the kid before. She's not sure where to start. That he won't look at her now feels strange. She's dead, but...

"So how far does this go for you?"

As far as it needs to, for her, had been maybe twenty-four hours at most.

He looks at her then, though it may not be with the kindest of sentiments. Joel doesn't begrudge her her dying wish (not anymore, at least), but he isn't interested in dissecting the far more complicated mess it's become. His jaw is set, gaze hard - this is an answer, but it's not an invitation. No questions, no conversation.

"As far as it goes."

The end of the line keeps moving farther on, but even knowing what it is, where this all supposedly goes, he finds himself less and less thinking of it as the end. And growing more comfortable with that assumption, as it takes up root in him.

Turnabout is fair play, she supposes, but there's still the ugly little impulse to be like hey, I was dying. What's your excuse? You're gonna live forever with this kid?

But is that even a bad thing? There are worse ways to be than chasing fairytales. She just never expected Joel to buy that far in.

"Good for you," she says. Maybe it's a touch bitter, too: she died convincing him it was real. She presses that down and adds: "She here? She come here with you?"

He doesn't expect her to ease off that quick, and it doesn't quite convince him. But a moment's reprieve is still better than none.

"Not with me." Joel shakes his head, back to watching the trees, tracking every little rustle and snapped twig.

"She's here, though. Showed up just a litte while before you did." After months of nothing. To say he's feeling suspicious would be an understatement, even by typical Joel standards.

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TDM: Mega Throwback Edition!

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so sorry about the late response, had a wild week!!

no prob, hope things have chilled out o/

getting there! \o/ app this weekend i'm hoping

excited!!