test drive | 1

[unplug]

test drive

Welcome to the first test drive for Systemwide! We are excited to have you. All prospective players are welcome to tag in and test out their characters, be they unplugged or free born. We would like to offer a range of scenarios that can be expected during gameplay, which are also useable prompts for app samples, and of course, if something else about the setting strikes you, feel free to come up with your own!

Please put your character name and canon in your subject line, and indicate which prompt you are launching from.

simulation | maybe this is your first time. perhaps you've been here countless times. it's a room, as confined as a boxing ring, as expansive as a battle field, whatever you need it to be, whatever you're here to train for.

1.

Before you is a city of rooftops, empty of human life. This is a safe place, because while it may hurt you, at least it won't kill you. Perhaps you are practicing your influence over reality, leaping from rooftop to rooftop. Are you successful, or are you failing to free your mind? Perhaps you're helping someone else overcome their fear of heights.

And of course, an operator can always load up some Agent-like training programs to make it interesting.

2.

Congratulations, you know kung-fu, or maybe some other system of combat, like crazy parkour archery, cartwheeling with guns, or sword fighting on horse back. Perhaps you're trying out something even more fantastic, a magical skill or a superpower.

Show me. Or a friend.

mission | whether on board a ship or with your mind sunk deep into a Matrix, you will have to join the battle eventually. sometimes things go terribly wrong. what are you gonna do about it?

3.

Something's gone wrong with this extraction.

There's a lot of information to process. Your target's been extracted, and that's the good news -- your ship, in reality, is heading to their location now -- but the bad news is your team has been scattered. You could be anywhere within this Matrix, deep in the jungle, or lost on a subway train, or staggering out of the crashing waves of a night time beach, and the operator needs a minute to figure out your exact location before they can direct you to a port out of here, or send another operative to collect you.

All you have to do is stay alive for that long. Easy, right?

4.

You were warned of this. You've been prepared in endless simulations, with a dozen cautionary tales, training sessions with the EMP. Still, it's nothing like you imagined, when the operator shouts: "Sentinel closing in at seven o' clock. It's gaining."

And then the shriek of metal.

reality | as much as many Matrixes are designed to be a comfort, you have to face the real world sometime. or maybe this is the world you have only ever known.

5.

Annual celebrations are rare to come by, but the anniversary of Neo's Truce is one that always draws in the crowd. The event takes place in a massive cavern in Zion known as the Temple, and there is music, and there is dancing [a little NSFW].

Everyone is there.

Where are you?

6.

The wind on your face, up here on the desolate surface, tastes bitter, different to what it feels like in a simulated reality. It's freezing cold and always dark, but sometimes, you need a reminder about what it is you're fighting for. Or maybe you're seeing the wasteland of Earth for the first time.

Either way, you shouldn't be out here for too long. The machines might find you.

wildcard | choose your own adventure.

7.

Perhaps you're riding with the Dothraki, or sitting under the Sorting Hat for the first time. Maybe the pleather bodysuit is pinching under your armpits as the traffic of the 90's roars by, or the Nova Empire's sprawling city glitters, towering above you. Maybe you're showing someone around the place you called home for your entire fictional life.

Or perhaps it's nothing as fantastical as that: the Council meeting droned on for two hours, and you're just happy to be home, even if it's a tiny enclosure with rust-edged furniture. Maybe someone's coming over for lunch, and there are real greens in the protein slurry today; maybe you're about to ask to join a crew.

There are infinite worlds to explore, but try to remember that only one of them is real.

Comments

[mrsnippy]

People like the ones down there?

[He'd read about different societies but had never experienced them, trapped as his time had been in the homogenising grip of hyper-capitalism and expertly marketed fashions. Zion still gave him culture shock at times with how radically different people's priorities were from what he expected.]

This place seems quaint, somehow. Three hundred thousand people and it's the largest human settlement on Earth. I grew up in a supercity; my cube alone had more people than this.

[He shifted, turned towards her and held out his hand.]

Charles Snippy.

[lostsoldier]

[ This time, he wakes still as water. That much he's learned over the years, coming into consciousness defensively nonexistent, not a muscle moved, buying a few more moments of solitude by letting the subtle quickening of breath and pulse be the only signs he's awake.

Not that he expects, when he opens his eyes and sees who's watching, that she missed either. His gaze is sharp and bright, following the sound of her voice, scrutinizing the new lines of her face and exposed limbs. No weapons. From the metal ports on her skin, his attention skitters to his own, peeking out from a forearm. The IV. The needle within. It isn't much.

He remembers straight red hair and a confident quirk her mouth, camera flashes against well-shellacked courtroom doors on a television behind the counter, but when he speaks, it's in Russian. ]

Is this what freedom looks like?

[ It could be an accusation, as his eyes roll over the rusted metal walls and closed door, but it sounds more like he just— doesn't know. Maybe she does. ]

SHIELD? [ he guesses, trying to piece anything together again. ]

Grant Ward | Agents of SHIELD

[ochroma]

Simulation | 1

[ Jump, they said. Just jump. He walked to the edge of the skyscraper again, looking down. Toes on the very brink. Jump. Those were the orders of the simulation. Jump or stay in virtual no-man's land until the geeks got bored and pulled him. It was taking the 'I say jump, you say how high' thing to a bit of an extreme, in his opinion. He didn't know this people. He knew what they said, but words were cheap. Easy. He couldn't see the advantage of this little mind-screw, of telling him the life he'd known, the life he'd survived was just make believe. Couldn't tell why they'd go that far, what particular edge this gained SHIELD or Hydra or whatever new contender had cropped up while he'd been in a cage. Other than throwing him off balance? But there were less expensive ways than this...

Still. No other way off the roof. He stood on the ledge again, looked down. Slow inhale. Look up at the other roof. Jump from here to there.

Right.]

Reality | 5

[Hail the conquering heroes. Ward offered up a mock toast to no one in particular with his glass of...hell, whatever it was they made down here. Not real wine, or beer, or whiskey. But something heavy and saved for special occasions, another weak imitation of the Earth these people had managed to lose. He'd gotten one glass exactly, replacing each sip with a liquid of the same color over the course of the night. The illusion gave a better impression than that of a sober man sitting alone above the masses. Instead it was the drunk, watching the crowd from on high, legs dangling over the edge of the rough rock he was currently seated on. Not much better, but enough he was generally left alone.]

Should old acquaintance be forgot, and never thought upon...

[He took another sip from the mostly water and juice cup, frowning down at the crowd below. What did the losing side have to celebrate, exactly? What did one more year survived beyond the 'Truce' signify but that they'd managed another one without progress?

They'd been better off asleep.]

Wildcard

[Bump into him in any of the situations or anything else you can think of. Extraction mission gone wrong, riding Dragons? Whatever works.]

[lostsoldier]

[ He listens, standing with boots settled and gaze silently attentive. He's good at that, listening, paying attention to details, constructing a picture in his mind, and this one is familiar, but with strange, subtle differences that make him wonder, not for the first time, how they know it wasn't real, or how they know any of this is. ]

Maybe I am. [ A skeleton. His voice is rough, but his delivery is smooth, the ghost of long-dead charm. He shakes his head.

But whether he's nothing more than Charles Snippy's fever dream doesn't seem to concern him so much as, ] What sort of mutants?

[ So maybe he's more a threat assessment than a small talk kind of guy. ]

reality

[lostsoldier]

[ Ward isn't alone. Not entirely. He isn't the only one who prefers a high perch to a crowded room, either. That the Soldier had recovered enough strength to climb up here one-armed was a small accomplishment in itself; he hadn't bothered trying to bring up a drink, or blend in, except to the extent that dark, drab clothes and uncanny stillness help anyone blend into a shadow.

When Ward starts singing, he doesn't say anything. He doesn't even move, apart from the turn of his head to chase the tail of that fragment of a tune.

But he stares, the long, unblinking kind of stare even civilians start to notice crawling under their skin eventually. His eyes catch the torchlight, brows minutely flinched, like maybe the song knocked something loose in his head, or maybe it's the singer. ]

[ochroma]

[ He felt it, the eyes like a physical weight against his back. There were enough people here that were no longer his biggest fan that he was getting used to the looks again. No matter if the grudges were really just outright petty at this point. What, with that whole mess being yet another big lie, a fake reality all along. But, hey. He could understand. Being wrong hurt. So he could wait. And be relatively sure that the 'good guys' weren't going to rush in and open fire. Not without at least a tiny speech or two first.

Unless it was May. May would absolutely punch and kick and shoot first.

But it wasn't a familiar profile he catches with the corner of his eye. Not an unknown one, but definitely not one from the bus. More one that had been way above his pay-grade until not that long ago and this...well, now. This had the potential to be complicated. ]

Should I be worried?

[lostsoldier]

[ If he is having an easier time of it, it's only because he's used to turning it off — where it is everything, whatever part of you has a past to miss or a future to mourn or an existence outside of the present moment. Seventy years spent ripping out the wiring to the parts that want anything more than the hell he'd been in, and he's an expert at not wanting anything anything at all. (Or- he used to be.)

He doesn't mind that she knows him as Bucky; she fights him like he's HYDRA, and that's enough. They don't train like HYDRA, though. He watches her hit the ground hard and thinks order through pain is— more effective, in certain ways. But not what's expected of him here. She's making progress. ]

Gravity is a lie, [ he says instead, stepping in to look back down at her through his own tangle of not-real hair. He doesn't offer her a hand up, but his head tilts in unspoken challenge. You gonna let it stop you? ] Again.

[hacker]

[ The welcome mat being laid out like that surprises her. If someone crawled into Skye's personal brooding time, she'd shut it all down, unplug, or cover it up with Friendship is Magic or something. Probably. May and Coulson excepted. But Kara launches whatever self-indulgent program she's been working under, and Skye looks around at it, watching the scenery warp and Leoben descend.

Blinking as he freezes, Skye glances at Kara with a furrowed brow. ] Who's he?

[onyourfeet]

[ Good enough cop, if not so much that he raises objection to the prospect of Quill being liquified in the boiling vat below. For now, Cage stands where he is, working his knuckles to click against the massage of his palm.

His smile skews crooked. ]

That's a good place to start. [ Query, in his voice. Isn't it? ] I'd think something about supply and demand might have a little to do about it too. Wanna educate us further?

simulation

[hacker]

[ It's the end of the world.

All things considered, they can't afford to have infighting between humans. That's the party-line the Zionites like to hold to, and normally, Skye would agree. Normally. She'd agreed right up until Ward got extracted. By the time he shows, her hair's grown back all the way to a blunt-cut bob, signaling months out in the Real, and he's still getting used to the simulations.

There's something poetic (or from her perspective, spiteful) about having her be the one to go in and teach him how it works. Student is now the teacher, or whatever.

Some people would have them believe that nothing in the Matrix was real, none of it mattered because the circumstances were never real. But the people were, and the choices they made were, and Ward was still a freaking traitor. So when he teeters on the edge of the building, lacking the faith to jump, it occurs to her just how easy it'd be to push him off.

He'd be fine, but it might just make her feel better.

At her sides, her hands twitch into clenched fists. Her eyes roll, and she steps up beside him instead. She could give him words of encouragement, or a demonstration of some kind. Instead, she drops her gaze to follow his, eyebrows raising as she speaks dryly. ]

If you want a closer look at the hyperrealistic concrete, all you have to do is say so.

[ The fact that she's not pushing him off a skyscraper is her idea of cooperation. Voicing her willingness—eagerness, even—to do so if he takes much longer? Not part of the bargain. ]

[hacker]

[ Rolling onto her back, she lets out a huff of breath, unsettling some strands of straight dark hair from her face as she stares up at him. From this angle, he's all dark and looming and HYDRA-y. He's doing it on purpose, and they both know it, reminding her of everything she hates because hate is the best motivator out there.

Mine it. Use it.

She counts to three, and at three, she forces herself to push back to her feet. Standing, she shakes dark hair from her face and back over her shoulder, with the exception of short, blunt bangs. ]

Anybody ever tell you that you're not much of a people person? Maybe if I was getting a gold star out of this … [ His methods are different than May's; he's harder. Beneath all of May's hard-to-read steel, there's always something warm and protective. Meanwhile, Bucky's freaking Siberia by comparison.

It's good for her, though. She digs her heels into the dirt, nods. There's an ache in her shoulder, radiating outward, warm from inflammation. Pulled something, or chipped something, or— None of that's any more real than gravity. Biting through the pain, she begins to lift the injured arm, rolling her shoulder to try and stubborn her way through the ache. Fire sparks in her shoulder joint, and the pain overwhelms her, but she bites through it.

Crouches.

Jumps.

This time, when she crashes, she lands on her knees. A step closer to making it onto her feet. But she's shaky on her knees, and she falls back onto her face a moment later. ]

u r my favorite

[lostsoldier]

[ What the hell.

There are a lot of scenarios cycling through his mind when he joins the land of the living again. HYDRA. SHIELD. He'd been searching for something, something he'd thought would lead him to answers, to HYDRA or something bigger behind it, but instead he'd found himself on another cold metal table in another lab, and he knew — didn't he? — knew with that desperate, vain, sinking certainty that they'd dragged him back into the dark again.

But he wakes now still remembering that he'd woken before, to an old mattress and no restraints and— some kind of song coming out of the mouth of the man seated across from him. Maybe it isn't his first live performance since 1944; soldiers sing, even HYDRA agents, but an organization like that attracts certain types, and the types that are comfortable enough around HYDRA's deadliest weapon to strike up a song — well, he may not remember much, but he remembers what sadism sounds like coloring the voice. And this isn't that. This is definitely not that.

His brows knit. Seriously. What the hell. ]

Who the hell— [ —are you, presumably, but that's what he manages, voice dry from, y'know, the fact that he's never used it before. ]

[bloodhorse]

[Hate has a way of separating you from your senses, which can be as helpful as it is sometimes not. Horse doesn't notice the grime going into Metzger's mouth, but he doesn't have to. There is a certain assumption livewire in the air, charged up, voltage that would have his hair standing up if he weren't shaven down to the scalp. Hackling, though.]

Four. [He stands up.

But the bartender says,] You'd better leave, [and he isn't talking to the crew, of course.]

[hellbrokeloose]

[ Peter leans back and Simon straightens, irritation worked out into a restless roll and flex of his shoulders while he considers whether or not their prisoner is deserving of further clarification. He’s not a large man -- no taller than 5’7” -- cropped further by the wide stance he’s wont to keep on slippery metal.

It’s the livewire tension that crackles down through the bones in his hands that makes him dangerous, hot in his eyes and in the way the wires in his neck bite down taut behind the undershoot of his jaw. Not his shiny, Metzger-sized boots, and certainly not the way the black cabling of his sleeves bags a little long around his knuckles.

He could stand to shave; he’s not as precise as Bill behind him.

He’s been here longer. ]

Imagine our surprise, [ he builds on Cage’s hint, left hand touched to his own breast -- our surprise, ] upon responding to a distress beacon and being fired on by an unfamiliar pirate vessel. We don’t know their names, [ he glances to Bill for confirmation, ] we’ve never seen their faces, but they are punching holes in our ship with Zion-issue ordinance.

[ He allows that to settle for a moment, short of any direct accusation. ]

I didn’t sell it to them. [ He opens the hand on his chest out -- half of a shrug. ] I’ve never even seen them. Bill, did you sell it to them?

7, since you asked for it!

[systemwizard]

If it had been any quieter, Snippy might have heard the under-the-breath refrain from 'gentille alouette' being hummed by a particular grey-clad giant that was sauntering around the flight deck. How Captain had managed to get access to this working dock was beyond anyone; shortly after they had filtered into Zion they had been on a cat-and-mouse escape from their designated handler, which meant that they should probably be hanging about with the other off-brand humans that hadn't quite made the jump from matrix to real, watched over by firm but attentive nurses.

Not so. Never so for Captain. They were a governor of their own nation, after all, and being cozened by soft-voiced women and men who wished them to sit and knit had been entertaining for approximately two days before they knit-bombed various potato-grade coppertops into their rocking chairs, claiming that "THEY WERE NOT READY TO PUPATE YET! THEY NEED MORE TIME!"

In any case, Captain had been put on lock-down, which they promptly began to avoid and escape at every opportunity. Now they were up here, on roughly the fourth or fifth refrain of the children's song -- plucking eyeballs and beaks and feathers seemed about their speed -- alternately tapping at a place under the lapel of their throw-rug of a sweater and waving a finger in time with the tune.

Snippy never had a chance.

"HELLO MON FRERE!" came the massive bellow from behind the man who seemed wholly intent to do something zappy with something metal. At the same time, Captain's nimble pasty fingers ducked inside their sweater, pulling a terribly hand-crafted mug from a bulging hidey hole on their chest of their sweater and a straw from roughly the same area. Fwip went the twist of plastic into the jack port of Snippy's skull, bare to the world like the boob that he was. (Captain was clever and covered their noggin, but Snippy needed to learn the lesson of fashion sense~)

Re: 7, since you asked for it!

[mrsnippy]

Snippy had been quite caught up in repairing the section of hovercraft he'd been assigned to, so much so that Captain's bellow outright made him yip then curse as he dropped his soldering iron inside the hovercraft's hull. Had Captain left it at that, Snippy would have spent the next five minutes chewing out the lunatic while trying to scrape out his tool with the tip of his fingers, but the prank just had to go one step too far.

The straw jammed into his port, making him cringe like he'd just chewed aluminium. With a strangled yell he cringed back, first trying to escape the pain and then, with a swift compact turn, trying to knock away his attacker.

He didn't hold back on Captain's behalf as he swing at his face- on the contrary, he tried to swing as hard and as fast as possible, as Captain had always had the habit of dodging everything he tried effortlessly.

[servomotor]

[Tony's face looks very quizzical still, not exactly raring to go. He glares out over the ledge.] If you're looking for an excuse to princess carry me across the urban void, that's.

A pretty good line. How many lives have you saved jumping roofs so far, Cap? [He doesn't exactly look scared, except that this is more or less what Tony looks like when he's scared. Another aphorism common to Zion: The body cannot survive without the mind.]

[systemwizard]

In the ruins of Eureka -- in Captania, rightly named -- Captain would have simply had to pull back a few centimetres or, even more infuriatingly, stand charmingly still, and either Snippy's punch would be brought down by a jealous and vengeful Pilot, or else some fluke of luck would have kept the mischief-maker out of harm's way.

Captain was beginning to learn that Zion's reality didn't always work in their favour.

Exhibit A: grinning brightly even as the short man's fist connected with their sleek jaw, Captain took the entire brunt of Snippy's punch in a way that would make everyone nearby who wasn't engrossed in their work pause to stare. Captain had been standing unbalanced, rocking on their heels, so the force of the blow sent them reeling. They lost contact with reality for a few moments, up and down becoming meaningless alongside a number of other senses. When they hit the ground, the mug they'd lost contact with came smashing into dozens of semi-crumbly pieces in the grate-work next to them. Who knew where the implement of Snippy's awful poke-and-twirl experience had gone.

Captain had probably never fallen in their life. They stared, bemused, at the rig-work of white-hot florescent lights that stripped the dock of any shadow as equally white-hot pain radiated out across their face. What had just happened? "Super effective," they mumbled, blinking owlishly round eyes and trying to regain some sense of their surroundings.

[paragon]

Not gonna get out of it that easy.

[ His voice stays light, though there's a cast to his smile, a line where his lips press together as he looks across to the other rooftop. That particular adage may strike something of a chord: who has he always been if not more mind than body?

Not that it does much good to think about it, at least in his case. ]

You tellin' me you can't think your way through this one?

im everyone's favourite look at this motherfucker

[ironwork]

Chumbawumba, mate.

( his tone is that of someone affably correcting an unfortunate gap in someone else's knowledge, because clearly, bucky is asking after the song. did chumbawumba ever exist or were they only ever a part of the matrix? if lots of different matrixes have chumbawumba, does that mean they did exist, definitely, or that they must be programs? these are questions that seoraj has yet to find someone he is comfortable asking at three in the morning when they are trying to sleep, dude, but we all know it's coming.

his boots slide down from where he'd propped his feet up against the wall, his back to bucky's bed, and the motion of his body is more or less enough to get the chair turning in the right direction. he is big, chair is small, it's this whole thing. his tone softens, although the scottish accent doesn't: )

Seoraj. What're we gonna call you?

[punned]

[ Fighting robot things. It had seemed pretty fucking cool to Ellie at the time. Robots! Ellie fucking loves robots! Or, well, the robots that are in the comic books she likes to read, anyway. Or the pictures of robots she's seen on peeled, faded posters plastered on the walls of abandoned kids' bedrooms scattered throughout America, posters she'd set her eyes on while picking through houses for supplies. She's never actually seen a robot in person, not unless toy robots in looted, rotting toy stores counted. Things like that just don't exist in her world. Would've done once upon a time before the outbreak hit and wiped out the world, but...

Anyway. Fucking robots!

--Except they're nothing like she imagined. They whiz around her like huge bugs, terrifyingly fast, zipping here and there, and a couple of times she ducks only just in the nick of time.

Ellie is a fighter. She's strong, she's brave, she's capable. But this? She's never fought shit like this. She only knows how to outrun Infected, how to shoot a pistol right between a guy's eyes, how to fire a rifle, throw a nail bomb, survive through a post-apocalyptic winter.

This is out of her fucking league. ]

What the fuck--!

[ And before she can yell that she wants off this fucking ride, one of those giant bug things slam into her. Sends her flying backwards, sprawling onto the ground with a hard thud. A winded, choked, "Ugh, fuck!" squeezes out from the back of her throat.

That smirk, smug asshole is telling her she's got to do it again? With a pained struggle, she rolls onto her front, starts climbing to her feet. Jeez, she'd landed on her butt hard. ]

Hey, wait, wait-- [ Too late: he's pressed that goddamn button; the robot bug things are whirling back to life. There's a look of panicked indignation on her small, sweaty face. ] Hey, asshole!

simulation

[punned]

[ Ellie has been trying to work out for a while now whether it's the reality she prefers, or the simulations.

Reality is, at the very least, familiar, with its dirt and its grime and its post-apocalyptic kind of poverty. She spent most of her fourteen years of life living in a quarantine zone, surviving on rations and wearing tattered hand-me-downs while the world outside the military school she was raised in starved, struggled to survive, often met a grisly death at the hands of a soldier shooting them execution-style, a fellow human hunting down others like prey to steal their clothes, or having their throats ripped out by Infected. People in rags, people living in cramped living quarters, the smell of sweat and body odour and mildew permeating the air in a pervasive stench - yeah, reality in this bizarre world is very familiar to Ellie.

Simulations, on the other hand...

Well, they thrilled her and filled with wondrous awe and curiosity as much as they could terrify her. She never knew what she'd be plugged into, whether it would be fucking robots that whizzed around her at a death speed like metallic dragonflies, or whether she'd be plugged into some kind of cityscape that resembled what her world must have looked like before it decayed and fell to apocalyptic ruin.

Today, it seemed, she was in a cityscape. The horizon, a brilliant blue sky intercepted with a seemingly endless expanse of high rises and office buildings, spreads out before her. The wind is fresh and sharp on her cheeks--

She makes the mistake of looking down. Her eyes widen. She's standing right on the fucking edge of a building that has a drop that seems endless. The ground looks miles away; the cars, the people, everything that moves looks as tiny as ants.

Jump, did the guy say? Jump?

A dizzying, nauseating spell of vertigo hits her, causes her sway. Her legs lock up, her arms flail out in desperate effort to catch her balance.

Okay. Okay. Jesus. Fuck. She swallows hard. Jump. She's supposed to fucking jump?! ]

Are you fucking kidding me?

[subjectzero]

Scared? Little girl, I've seen things you couldn't imagine. I've seen the inside of prisons so vicious they'd fry your little brain. I've seen giant sentient squid-robots that wanted to wipe organic life out of existence. I've crashed a space station into a moon. And you're gonna tell me about scared?

[Hint: she is petrified, and she extracts her hand from Chase's to clap her on the back.]

You first.

reality

[punned]

[ Ellie isn't a picky eater. While the food here is kinda gross, she's eaten far worse just to stay alive. This sloppy stuff? Is nothing. It's edible. Edible is good enough for Ellie.

Seated on her own as far away from other people as possible, she's shovelling a forkful of the stuff into her mouth, eyes darting here and there with a subtle kind of nervousness that she's being careful to keep at bay. This place gives her the creeps. It gives her the creeps because Joel isn't here. She feels so fucking lost without him.

She probably doesn't come across as nervous or frankly scared out of her fucking wits, though, not with the way she's eating the food like she hasn't eaten in a year. Ellie is good at pretending she's not scared. It's the only way to survive back where she's from.

Although, she nearly jumps out of her fucking skin when something metallic is suddenly slapped on the table. She instinctively takes hold of the fork in her hand, wields it like a weapon, ready to stab whatever the fuck that's just sneaked up behind her, probably with intent to kill her--

It's just a guy slumping down on the seat next to her. Bitching about the food, comparing it to-- what now? An infection? Puppies? ]

Fuck.

[Ellie lowers the fork, which she was seconds away from stabbing at the guy out of pure instinct to defend herself, but she keeps it held tight in her hand. A burst of nervous anger flares within her. ]

Jeez. A little fucking warning would've been nice.

Anna | Frozen

[actoftruelove]

[ simulation (1) ]

Oh no.

[ Anna crosses her arms defiantly as she purposefully takes a step back and away from the edge. It's been explained to her how it works, the whole "free your mind" thing, and the person teaching her has already demonstrated how it's supposed to go, but Anna's not buying it, not for one second.

And sure, she's done a lot of seemingly reckless things that could be chalked up to boredom or an innate sense of adventure that comes with being cooped up in one very large castle for all of her (not real, imaginary, fake) life, but that does not mean Anna is stupid. And willingly jumping from a very very very extremely tall building is stupid and Anna's beginning to think she needs to cancel her subscription to the Matrix.

After all, she's a princess (not really, not in the real world), not a fighter (no, really, she's not. She defeated Hans with love and a strategic punch in the face into an ocean. She rather doubts this is a solid strategy that would work in the really real reality). And she certainly does not jump off buildings to her death. ]

I'll die if I jump! [ And if injuries that happen in the Matrix happen to your body in real life... well, she's not certain she wants to test the idea of death in the Matrix. ]

[ reality ]

Please, I'm looking for my sister.

[ Anna's walking around the communal dining area, looking (and feeling) very out of place. She doesn't know anyone here, though she's not sure if that's because she's the only one from her part of the Matrix that's been woken up or because she just... doesn't know anyone after living a life of relative isolation.

But that doesn't stop her from looking. Doesn't stop her from holding her head up high like the princess she is (was, is no longer) and going up to the first person she can find. ]

Well, I mean, I guess she's not actually my sister, but... [ But that's not going to stop her from always thinking of Elsa as her sister. They grew up together, they played together... Elsa was the only family Anna had after her parents died, and not being related by blood wasn't about to change that any time soon. ]

Her name is Elsa? [ It's definitely more of a question than a statement, like she's not sure that bit of information would be helpful or not. Her eyes are wide and hopeful, desperate for something familiar in this unfamiliar world. ]