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

[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?

[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.

[neverenstones]

It was a long, hot walk in which Fara and her compatriots seemed to be suffering about as well as a scaled daemon. They kept to the shadows, certainly, but they didn't seem like the foreigners they looked; they didn't ask for water, and they barely even seemed to sweat. Their focus on their surroundings seemed complete, leaving Fara to do all of the talking. Kaitan might notice as they made their progress that all of them possessed items that didn't necessarily seem to be of the base essentials: Fara had a pouch on her sash that clicked as she walked. One kept a staff of dark, gnarled and blasted wood that didn't look like it had come from anywhere near the Erysan. The last sported a pair of heavy-looking metal instruments that must have been heated near to searing in this hot weather: they were compact and ugly, like a crossbow missing most of its crucial elements, but with grips and places to load in bolts.

Fara didn't give Kaitan a lot of time to gawk. By the time that they got into the thick of it, she was bouncing questions back like a practised athlete. Yes, there was definitely more to it than the Goddesses could hope to control, and that was the point of it, wasn't it? Once one started looking for the cracks, one could see them all around... and once one saw the cracks, the world was less real for it. It was an ode to nihilism, of a sort, but Fara didn't seem pessimistic. She seemed frayed out, but there was hope limning her words. It was strange.

They had managed to evade detection for much of their walk, or so it would seem. As they began into pass into the rockiest portions of their journey, however, shadows raced over the dunes behind them.

Fennel placed a hand on Fara's shoulder, pausing their progress. "It's show-time," she told them.

Kaitan would note very familiar figures buoyed by the heavy, hot air. Their lazy wing-strokes belayed the speed at which they were travelling, but every so often, a tilt of the ulna would cause the golden armour and jewellery plastered across their bodies to glitter blindingly, even from a distance. They'd dealt with Askaliden before.

"How much further to the node?" Fara asked, voice terse. Her compatriots were fanning out, and their actions suggested that Fara and Kaitan begin to move quickly. Quickly enough that Fara was securing Kaitan by the elbow with one hand and reaching into her pouch with the other.