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

[kaitan]

Nothing about this was coming together into a coherent whole and Kaitan could not puzzle out what Fara meant, despite an urgent thrumming in the back of her mind screaming that she should know, that the secret must be in somewhere in everything they'd shared. That sorrowful look was hard to take. The hardness and urgency in Fara's gaze made Kaitan's heart pound with fear and allegiance and she tried to meet it with equal competence.

This was a side of Fara she had never seen before, and it drove into her a need to know more.

She looked at Tunada who butted her in the shoulder with his big, rectangular head. "Do what you have to do," he told her in a rumble just for her ears. Before she could respond he rose his voice and told her and the rest of them, "I'll do my part."

It wouldn't be the first time she and her companion had been separated at dire moments, and even if Kaitan hated it she was getting used to it, and had already surrendered to the fact that, at times, they were more useful apart than together.

"Do you need an unbroken chain or just fast movers?" Tunada was asking, casting the question to Fara and her companion both. Fennel seemed competent despite her apparent objections to whatever Fara was suggesting, and he hadn't an inkling that her lack of knowledge about the lay of the land extended so deeply that she might not understand the question.

[neverenstones]

Fara let out an explosive sigh. "Both kinds... all kinds. There's information out there that you're not going to recognize the data packets for. That's going to be normal -- there's an analogue appellation that doesn't make sense when you try to parse it; hunt those down, propagate the packet and prioritize messages that unfold into..."

Fara paused for a moment, licked her lip, and stuttered a me that was short and sweet and more dense than a human throat should manage. Unfolded it produced a starkly vivid image of a creature that didn't look like a daemon. It was a white rabbit. It was the symbol that Jorgand had learned when Fara had helped them finally parse Avengaea's 'conversation' that was the matrix, and it would be the symbol attached to any messages their lost captain might try to use to help them locate him...

But first they needed to secure a connection with their Operator, and that meant casting their nets wide, which was why Fara had mentioned the wavering appellation; their Operator would be working hard against the system to get in contact with them and determine which teleportation nodes would allow the humans to disengage from the matrix and back into their bodies.

Could they secure a node for long enough for Fara to bring Kaitan up to speed, and if so what about Jorgand? Could the Meridian haul her tail to pick up their original extractee quickly enough to capture Kaitan's body? There wouldn't be time. Fara might never get to see the Erysan again.

She balled her fists for a moment as Tunada made final arrangements with Fennel and then she took Kaitan aside. "I have the weight of the world on me," she spoke quietly but urgently. "I don't want to put you in danger and I don't want to take you out of here without your permission; and ultimately the decision has to be yours. People get time to dwell and decide, Kaitan, but I might never see you again... and it would be too much to bear."

She was being given a warning look by the man who was standing watch over them, and their last party member who'd come down out of the rubble. It was time to get a move on, wasn't it?

"I came to my choice because the splinter was already wedged in by the Goddesses. How can all this be right and true and real? How can so much loss and so much stupid tragedy be condoned for the petty games of Goddesses?" Fara tried to work out the passion she'd felt behind that grief. She couldn't come right out and tell Kaitan anything, could she?

[hellbrokeloose]

[ Simon already has his mouth halfway open to argue to the contrary when Cage’s hand comes up. He closes it again with some difficulty, teeth shut off behind a sullen clamp, suspicion still hard in the stoop of his brow.

The look he has fastened to that hand lingers like a bad smell.

But it swivels back out to Quill swiftly enough, invested in his answers -- provided that he has any.

And even if he doesn’t: ]

Why did you turn it down.

[ On the tail end of more aggressive interrogation, this one question seems positively reasonable. Passive, even. Almost as if Quill isn't dangling upsidedown over a fiery pit. ]</small

[hellbrokeloose]

Well you can’t kill them while I’m in here.

[ He’s talking to Horse’s belly now, still focused down the end of his own nose. Still reading. Immune to static.

An uptick in the silence between them is scuffed through with the end of his pen half a beat later. ]

What would the council say.

[succinctly]

Someone with something to hide. [Keeping her theories from Skye won't do any good. The young woman had a way of finding out on her own anyway.]

[systemwizard]

Wiggling like a limp noodle, Captain tasted Snippy's long delayed vengeance clearly, though they didn't quite understand the why or how of it. Were they not a good ruler? A benevolent governess to minions who needed guidance and the occasional hard knocks to achieve their true potential?

In any case, their thoughts were preoccupied by their painful jaw at the moment, and on Snippy's knee in their back. Bits of sharp clay were caught between the floor and their sweaters, but more importantly all of the junk that Captain had been filching was caught between the various layers of their sweaters and their babyish skin. The wrenched arm sealed the deal: Captain bugled a note of distress when they didn't see an immediate outcome to this travesty, but only a collection of bruised flesh and, worse, ego.

"Fire!" Captain yowled. Everybody knew that in the case of an assault, one was to shrill the most likely threat to damage nearby property in order to get attention -- of course, the method of shrilling was different between the ANNET-laced matrix of their past and the gloriously uncopyrighted free speech of Zion -- but Captain was very quickly running out of options. It might have been the first time that they ever truly considered options to begin with. "Fire! Fire in the disco!!"

Real party;

[ampelos]

[They didn't do stuff like this back home.

It just wasn't a part of the way society had functioned. Sex wasn't important, there wasn't this kind of dance and music, and people didn't allow themselves to be as close as they all were right now; it was entirely too intimate.

He struggled with the idea that this was reality, and everything back home was not. It was easier for him to just explain it as some kind of traveling. Eben had left his home using a form of travel long since practiced, passed out, and when he'd woken up, he was here. That was over a month ago, and he still believed he'd go home some day.

But, it was too much. He'd been adjusting, but everything happening behind him was a bit hard to understand. Eben's head turns upward sharply when he sees the other, and he stops, hands up and out. He didn't think the other was going to hurt him, but he figured it best to immediately show he wasn't dangerous, just getting some space.]

Sorry. I don't mean to interrupt.

Matt Farrell | Die Hard 4

[hackboy]

1. Simulation.

This was everything he'd ever wanted out of life. A place where he could do anything and he wasn't just the computer guy. Of course his taste in simulations followed a bit of a different scenario, Matt building the images from his memory of the games he'd played when he wasn't coding.

And an empty city wasn't empty anymore, filled with the sounds of movement as he looked down from a rooftop at the people...'infected' on the streets below and then picked up his guns.

So maybe he was one of those guys, but he was damn well going to own it and enjoy himself.

And killing zombies was better than facing down a horde of guys who looked like every Fed he'd ever crossed paths with.

Eat your heart out John McClane.

3.

He's finally able to move freely, the asthma that had plagued him all his life gone with every other vestige of his previous life, everything he'd done apparently nothing more than code in someone's computer.

And now he's waiting for extraction, his footsteps moving along the concrete from rooftop to rooftop heading for the designated extraction point. He can hear footsteps behind him, but he's not stopping.

Outside (let me know if i need to change anything |D)

[pointy_hat]

"I can't advise remaining on the surface longer than strictly necessary."

The voice belongs to a thin young man coming up from below; he has wine-red hair and glasses and is dressed in a cape similar to Dust's, if longer and covering more of his ragged clothing beneath. He also appears to be carrying a thin ledger book under one arm, but is not reading it at the moment.

"The temperatures above ground reach extreme levels of cold; assuming you are not hyperborean I estimate the onset of frostbite within the hour." The young man pauses for a few moments, then speaks again. "You were not at dinner."

[mithrarin]

"That doesn't really matter, does it?"

His fingers tightened on the hilt, knuckles whitening. Yes, he would like some gloves, for more reasons than just warmth... but resources were in short supply as usual, and a pair of gloves for a man who just wanted to hold his weapon with more confidence were so low in priority they might as well not exist.

"So long as everything still works plugged-in, we could fall to pieces out here."

#good

[servomotor]

[Tony is inclined to agree with assessments of his brilliance, even now, when everything is terrible; some truths are at least reliable. And it's nice to have intellectual skills that map onto the Real, when their squishy bodies sure as shit don't remember anything they were taught before. The old bicycle-riding adage no longer applies.] Yep.

But they'll want you to crew up. It'll be just like your one-day stint at SHIELD. Except HYDRA is run by an AI that looks like an elderly woman behind an apron. And the machine-operated mass murder can't happen in broad daylight because we don't have daylight. [A beat.] Also less aliens. But you know, apart from that, you can work for the man all over again. [He taps on JARVIS' brain dismissively, and the part of code she was looking at switches out to the engine for his voice. There are markers for wit and emotion, funnily labelled. JARVIS personalized some of that, himself.]

reality

[servomotor]

If you take a picture, it'll last longer.

[And what is presumably a camera, big and strange and boxy-looking, rust-edged from where it was obviously mashed together from spare parts the same way that hovercraft are rigged, pokes into her periphery. Tony Stark is holding it out to her, from where he's nearby. Like her, he's bundled up pretty thoroughly against the cold, which has already stung a ruddy color into his cheeks. He wasn't sneaking around, really; she might have heard him coming, his regular human footfalls and the grumble of the standard-issue radio on his hip failing to prick her with alarm.]

Also, the Zion Defense Grid always likes to balance our psychological crises with something practical. Like surveilling the enemy. So. [He makes a go on then motion with his other hand, toward the fields of pods.] Surveil away.

[emptychamber]

[Emily curses inwardly - sloppy, to let someone effectively sneak up on her, even if it doesn't seem to have gone too poorly this time. She'd heard him coming, she just hasn't registered it properly. Still, she reaches out to take the offered device.]

Jesus. Thanks, though I wasn't much of a shutterbug. Better make sure I don't forget to take off the lens cap or something.

[She manages a smile that's a bit more like a grimace. Lower:]

Guess I just didn't expect it to hit me so hard.

makes yr life easy peasy

[hacker]

[ She opens her mouth to argue that it wasn't one-day, given that SHIELD got back on its feet in secret, but she gets distracted by the coding swapping. New code in front of her, her eyes dart back to that, and she swallows her defense. It doesn't matter anyway. SHIELD never happened. ]

They weren't the man.

[ There's something resigned and slowly about how she says it, like that's one of many things she could have chosen to stand her ground on. ]

Okay, they were. But they were the good man. The man who, like, swoops in to save people when he's needed and makes people feel like they belong somewhere and —[ She raises her hands, capping off this babble. ] Okay! Yes. SHIELD's the man.

[hacker]

[ It doesn't take a genius (or someone who'd overheard the mission for Coulson's painting) to know that May hates undercover, so Skye steps forward, shaking her shoulders out. ]

Great. I'll get friendly.

[grounderpounder]

I'm Octavia. I... grew up in space. [ that sounds so much lamer than his own introduction, but it's all she's got.

aside from questions, anyway. octavia crosses her arms, tucking her hands into her opposite armpits to fend off the cold in her own right, and asks: ] What's a hobbit?

/backhands away your prompts

[polyphemus]

[ He isn't sure if it's weird, that they don't see each other a lot. Probably not. Whole continents existed between them with patterned frequency, back when continents was a thing, and so maybe that's why it's weird. They lead different lives -- Banner, frequenting the concrete and rocky halls of Zion, administering family medicine, and Stark, brain half in his simulations, away chasing signals, maybe saving the world, but the scale of this world is so much smaller.

Maybe it's weird because they both used to be so much bigger.

These are the thoughts Banner only barely acknowledges when he moves down the cramped corridors of the ship at a patient wander. He'd been taken on in medical capacity, as so often happens, but no one's suffered critical injury yet, so he finds himself in the control room. A look over Tony's prone, semi-conscious form, wired into simulation and strapped down, is flatly inscrutable, before he seeks out the operator, and gestures with his hands. ]

May I?

[ Tinny in Tony's ear, the next thing he hears is Bruce Banner's distinct voice; ]

Aren't you a little old for video games?

[kaitan]

"Fara, what do you mean?" She was leaning in, beseeching -- the Erysan was desperately trying to put together the pieces that Fara was offering her, but they were too disparate and too few. Kaitan was astute enough to know when she didn't have the whole story, at the very least, but that wasn't by itself enough to make the leap.

Furthermore, she was beginning to sense that the urgency, or at least the urgency between Fara and her, had more to do with words than it did with actions. Kaitan's competent front was fracturing and between its edges Fara could see a desperation in the other woman, a hot need to understand. There was truth in what Fara was saying but Kaitan had struggled with those thoughts more than once in her life. How could there be meaning in the absurd, tragic things that were a part of being alive?

The problem was she'd never come to the same conclusions. She had never thought to question the fact of existence itself. Maybe it was a part of who she was, or maybe it was that circumstance had never allowed her to see the truth -- it was impossible to know. "What are you talking about? How can you even be here?!" She was an inch away from grabbing Fara's arms with the frightening urgency of her need to understand. She was being left behind, maybe literally, and she sensed that it all hung on what she said to Fara now. It terrified her.

"I would follow you anywhere," she whispered, voice rough.

[pointy_hat]

"To care for the mind is to care for the body; they cannot exist separately. If you allow your physical form to fall into disrepair, your apperception will follow more swiftly than you anticipate."

Laurent steps closer, digging into a pouch at his hip and pulling out a small metal tin, which he holds out for Dust to take.

"The war we fight is to preserve this reality." Even coming out of his own mouth, the words sound hollow. He's been able to keep mostly sane by performing in the real the duties he's kept up with in Chrom's army, but when he has time alone... it's still hard to accept, even now.

"Eat something. We cannot afford to lose even one of us."

[mithrarin]

"I'll eat eventually. When I'm hungry." Dust never looked over or up. The only people in Zion who had gotten eye contact out of him were the ones who had encountered him before he managed to get his hands on a new hat. "I'll keep this body going long enough to fight in the only place that really matters."

[neverenstones]

"First you're going to have to lead," Fara replied, unable quite to turn her expression into a smile. "We can talk as we move."

At least her compatriots were consistent enough to fall into line with them as they moved along, allowing Fara to do the speaking, even if a couple of them seemed uncertain about the prospect.

It takes time. Fara had grown up trained in the art of posing delicate matters to ears that didn't want to hear them, but that paled in comparison to the veil between Avengaea and the harsh truths of the real... and the risks at stake here were not simply whether Kaitan would choose to accept those truths or reject them: they were surmounted by the fact that somewhere in the huge tunnels lacing the underbellies of tumble-down megacities her ship, the Meridian, was racing through the mire of 01's slurry for someone else. They were surmounted by the fact that Jorgand, their Captain, had been taken and was likely to be held at ransom. There were choices to make and Fara was afraid that doing this meant that the chances of losing Kaitan entirely were far better than managing to pull off this miracle...

On the other hand, she'd been imprisoned on Avengaea for miracles she hadn't even performed yet. She might as well get to committing the crimes whilst she was beyond capture. In any case, she had always listened to their Operator complaining that her job was awfully boring... and though Fara wasn't a betting type, she suspected that after today she wouldn't be complaining any more.

Fara started with the basics: the idea of something beyond the reality of the desert and the Goddesses that lorded over it during this crisis. She wondered if Kaitan had always feared or suspected that the flow of events in her life had been strange and unrealistic... had she ever questioned it? Truly?

[pointy_hat]

"You mean, in the Matrix." Laurent sighs a little, putting the tin back. He can't force someone to eat, at least not physically. "And what, precisely, is your plan when we win?"

[kaitan]

She did not naturally seem to cleave to the ideas Fara was introducing to her. Yes, there had been times where life had felt unreal, but those had been the bad times, and everyone felt like that sometimes, right? The truth was that, physical creature that she was, she had never yearned her way to that massive doubting. Goddesses existed -- and they caused trouble -- and they interfered. It wasn't right, but it was there.

What did bother her was that she knew there to be more to the world than what she saw, and it was that that kept her ears open. It wasn't even a guess, really; there had to be things in the universe that the Powers that Be of Avengaea didn't understand or control, else why would they meddle, and not simply set their toys to play out their pre-determined paths?

It was also clear, blazingly clear that Fara had answers now that she hadn't before. And so every time Fara asked her a leading question, she filed it away as a piece to put together, and every time she had a chance, she pressed back for more answers to her own questions.

'When she had time' at least in part because they had begun to move. The hideout to which Kaitan was leading them was a long ways over rocky dunes on foot, though she did her best when she could to keep them out of open view from the air. Tunada parted ways with them there, following a route that suggested more daemons in concentration among whom he could begun to hunt for the telling package. Beyond that small hideout was an even longer trot, and it was lucky they were where they were -- on the grid map of where teleportation nodes sat in the desert, they were reasonably close to one of the northwesterly ones. But it was still a long, hot walk.

simulation

[lostsoldier]

The guy on his left looks like he could have stepped out of one of those games himself. Black tac suit and combat books, knee pads, more straps than can really be necessary and definitely more knives and guns strapped to him than any one person, strictly speaking, needs. Not to mention, of course, the metal arm catching sunlight, fingerless gloves curled around an assault rifle fitted with a grenade launcher.

He's looking down at the teeming horde, chin cocked like a dog watching a squirrel dance the can-can across its front porch.

They're people. But they aren't people. He knows how people move, how a crowd bends and bows and smells, and this isn't it.

"What are they?" he manages when Matt runs through his first clip.

[mithrarin]

"And what do you call winning? There's only one end I'll be happy with. And I'll never achieve it."

Too much stood in the way, starting with the brokered truce that too many people still clung to. And the reality of the overwhelming forces that would come against humanity if not for that truce.