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test drive | 1
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?
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.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.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.
no subject
real, either.] You sound almost like Agent Romanoff, except a little less morbid political assassin drama. A little too earnest.
[Though he does remember the Black Widow laying it on pretty thick once upon a giant air-sea SHIELD base this one time. Gotta love that nationalist fervor.] Fury would be proud. [Tony probably shouldn't be talking about Fury. It's not that he Knows; it's merely that Fury has always been okay to talk about. It's Coulson that he wouldn't. Not for an offhanded backhanded compliment, anyway.]
no subject
Never had the chance to meet the guy before … Well, you know.
[ HYDRA, the six-headed monster that devoured SHIELD from the inside. Skye's gaze drops a little and she shrugs one shoulder. It never occurs to her that he hahahaha might not know. After all, they've been on the same level this long. ]
Anyway, he's dead now, so I guess we'll never know. Fortunately, I think the new Director would agree with you.
[ Because even if she knows who her real father is now, she still has this compulsion to seek paternal approval from Coulson. He's everything. ]
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Some spooks just can't stay dead.
[He means SHIELD. As a whole. But you know.]
Who's looking at JARVIS' brain? [he asks.] The hacktivist who exposed the illegal human experimentation behind 30% of the groundwater contamination in Cox Bazar, or Agent Skye? [Yes. He'd read.]
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Exposed the fake experimentation of a fake groundwater contamination.
[ She points out cheekily; ] For argument's sake.
[ After all, if she's going to get people trying to snap her out of her lingering ties to the Matrix she'd lived in for twenty-five years, she's going to drag that up when it serves her purposes, too. It doesn't mean she'll leave him without a real answer. ]
Agent Skye and the Rising Tide are on the same page with this one. [ Her lips purse together, an amused look winning her over with the ironic third-person-usage. ] I know what you're thinking: Big SHIELD would have wanted to weaponize it, anddddd hacker groups would want to hijack him to leak Stark Industries' dirty—literally dirty—industrial secrets. And the answer to your question is neither.
I'm not looking in service to anybody but me.
sorry for the delay, feel free to disregard if u prefer!
Real minds and real lives, [he says. His voice lacks the heat or register of an argument, but that's probably what it is; Tony has a tendency toward flippancy.] More time for the extraction teams to come. Instead of, you know, dying from the brain down. [His eyebrows loft. It'd be sentimental if he weren't so frank about it. Maybe it's sentimental anyway, but he -- is like that, sometimes.
A beat. But let's defuse the whatever.]
I like that Rising Tide would've gendered him. Very PC.
no i love this
That's kind of our bag.
[ Social justice. At least, she'd thought it was. Most of them still believed in it, even if Miles turned out to be—well. Himself. He sticks in her teeth, even now, one betrayal in a stack of them. With JARVIS packed away, Stark finally gets her full attention. ]
You hear stories, but most of us thought he was a myth. Thanks. For … [ She gestures up and around to where the coding projection had been filling the air before. ] Popping the hood. I didn't mean to crash.
no subject
Anyway, I'm not really sure what they'd do to me if they found out about him. [Tony's arms are half-crossed, one elbow resting on the other, his free hand flitting and shifting and pointing around into the luminous darkness here JARVIS' code had once spun like a constellation around the black heart of the universe.] They have an interesting post-apocalyptic diesel-punk biopunk cyberpunkish but mostly techno something going on in this city. But they could get pretty medieval if they found out, so.
Unless you want to see your celebrity crush get hung, drawn, and quartered. [He raises his eyebrows optimistically. Often this is a look that gets him punched.]
no subject
[ Because that's obviously what she should be focusing on. A smug, lopsided smirk begins to tug at one corner of her mouth as she looks him over, arms folding across her chest to really size him up and consider that fact. It'd figure that by the time she met Tony Stark for real, he wouldn't even be a superhero anymore. No fancy suit of armor. No tell-tale glow in his chest.
She breezes straight past that existential question by prompting him for a perhaps even more uncomfortable one, ] Are you trusting me? Wow. Do they have gold stars here, or did those go the way of actual, solid food? [ She drops her hands to her sides, swinging her arms to clap them together. Beneath the cavalier teasing lies the obvious and deliberate attempt to pretend like she's not honestly giddy and honored. ] I feel like that's gotta earn you one on the behavior chart.
no subject
It's true: that question is rather uncomfortable, and perhaps for that reason as well as any number of others, he casually deflects back into the pragmatic, hiking his eyebrows and flipping a forefinger up from his casual, arms-crossed stance of casualness, as if he's cutting through her words to get back to the original question. Rather than you know, evading, the new one.] Uhh, [he says.]
Hung, drawn, and quartered?
[If he didn't trust her on some level, they probably wouldn't have gotten this far. But sometimes words must be exchanged.]
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Mum's the word. [ Skye assents, dropping her gaze and nodding, lips pulling into what can't quite be called a smile. It dies off quickly enough, and she searches him with a measure of concern. ] I'm all about not letting the Man tell you what to do, and I get it. But you're playing with fire. [ And lest it sound like she's worried or something, she decides to finish that on the note of, ] Don't screw it up. Seems like things are finally getting better.
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[He sounds sad for a split-second before that, too, is automatically winked away and out of sight, like pressing a camera shutter. Maybe he just misses the convenience that JARVIS offered.] Begin exit sequence, [he tells the program.] For Red Tide here, too. Is that your call sign? [he asks suddenly, twisting his head to look at her.]
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I haven't thought about it much. [ The callsign thing. ] There was a lot going on. HYDRA, and Whitehall, and the Diviner, and the earthquake. [ Her dad. Trip. She presses her eyes shut, turns away. Tries to make it look like she's just diverting her attention to the rest of his space. ] Are they still calling you Iron Man?
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I am Iron Man, [he tells her, same way he told national television years ago in a place that no longer exists. He offers her a hand, as if saying hello. and who are you?]
no subject
In this world, she isn't dangerous.
But the answer to his question is another story, one told by the distant darkness in her eyes. When she was born, they called her Daisy. She knows that now, but she doesn't want it. Doesn't want the stain of her father's hand on her. Once, she'd discarded her orphanage's naming choice—Mary Sue Poots—and taken up another, Skye. Something hopeful. Dreaming. An identity she'd chosen for herself, entirely.
It doesn't feel wholly right now. She feels like the spectre of death: gunning down Ward, leading Trip into that temple, bringing it and a good portion of San Juan down. It's always been that way, the ghost of her father haunting behind her, ready to tear out the throats of entire towns.
Except now, she doesn't need the monster to follow in her wake. The monster is her. But she's not the person she always believed she was. That life was a lie, buried under the rubble of San Juan. She could rise out of it, or she could let it crush her.
Bitterly, she answers, ] Well, I'm a natural disaster, but that doesn't come off the tongue quite as easy. [ What do you call something like that? ]
no subject
His eyes are incandescent now, and her skin is shining, like someone ran her through Photoshop. Soft-focus, diffuse glow. There's a small sun radiating out of her chest and the distant motes of JARVIS' code have the slow spin of stars, as if she is the heart of this particular solar system. Somehow it still isn't hard to tell that he's looking at her. One presumes that he can see her well enough; her bitterness and her unhappiness. She can almost feel the couch under her elbows and the patchy fabric seat holding up her legs, at odds with the slow-deconstructing visual of the minimalistic code room, with its walkway, its limitless darkness.]
Typhoon? [he says, pragmatic about his lack of sympathy, if nothing else.] Tsunami? I'm not being racist. Inferno. Plague sounds dicey. [He snaps his fingers.]
Earthquake-- [but that doesn't sound quite right either, does it?]
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"I"m not being racist." Her lips purse, fixing him with a sharp, disapproving look that sincerely doubts that his disclaimer gets him out of the implication. But like most things, it breezes off her back, and she starts to roll her eyes at the rest of the list. Until— ]
Quake.
[ Images come back to her, then. Rocks of the temple coming down around them. The rubble of parts of old San Juan as they surfaced. Trip, stone, falling to pieces. That's where this all started.
It infuriates her. Like a knife twisting in her ribs. And as long as it does, she needs to hold onto that. The same way she'd held onto the rage and betrayal against Ward that carried her through the fight against HYDRA. She'll wear her guilt like a cross. ]
I hate it.
[ But for some reason, that sounds decisive and accepting. Maybe one day, she won't. ]
thx u for the threaddd <333
Tony Stark is a dissipating ghost wrought in digital light, even as he starts to smudge pink into her periphery. He says,] You sound like a friend of mine. Maybe a little less schizophrenic.
I'll tune in next episode to find out more.