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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.
Kara "Starbuck" Thrace -- Battlestar Galactica
[ Kara put her head down, muscles straining as she dragged the controls over and sent the Bellerophon spinning on the Y axis. The ship screamed its dismay, energy crackling against the narrow rabbit hole down which they'd found themselves, but the sentinels just kept on coming. She jammed on the gas, and the heavy hulk of a ship roared forward, the sound of displaced air and whirring engines bouncing off every hunk of concrete and broken pipe out there, but they kept moving, and moving meant alive. For now.
As soon as they were out of it, she was the first to throw herself out of the chair and go hunting through the ship, either for the weapons platform operator or whichever poor person got in her way first. Agitation always needed its outlet somewhere, and that had just been too damn close. ]
And where were you?
----
[ Dancing is good though. Dancing in a mass of bodies, nobody really looking beyond themselves to try and identify who the people they were writhing up against were? She could do that. It was a way to detach from reality - a way that wasn't the obvious - and after a long, hard mission that was exactly what he needed, the roll and thrust, the sweat and the rhythm. This was living.
Except sometimes she didn't know what living really was, any more. ]
Yeah. [ She panted under her breath. ] That's it.
[ Man, woman, other--it didn't matter. She wasn't really looking, and didn't care. A warm body could let her forget for a little while what was real and what wasn't, a mystery her life had taken on long before she'd woken from the Dream. ]
----
[ She'd asked for some personal time in the construct. At least, that was what she called it when she went back to her apartment to mope. They all knew she was doing it, but sooner or later someone was going to break her self imposed solitude.
It was funny. So sometimes she laughed. Sometimes she looked out the window at Delphi and thought: this isn't possible, all this is gone, and caught herself thinking it. Then she thought: I'm mourning a city that was never real in the first place. And then she thought: what did we go through that hell for? Had it just been some divine game? Why hadn't everyone come from a matrix where they'd had to suffer just to live, had to question their own humanity? Why was that fair?
She always came back to the same questions, and just like at home, there were never any answers. So she'd lay on her not!bed, and stare at her not!ceiling, and think about her not!life. It was a waste of time, but it was all she had left. ]
no subject
[ When Skye steps into Starbuck's scheduled alone-time, it's as much to get a peek at what the hell she's doing in there as it is to follow orders and pull her out for some of that fancy piloting. She makes no real effort at disguising her interest as she glances around the apartment, surprised to find it so subdued. With as isolated as she made herself, she somehow expected something more …
Dramatic? Elaborate? Whatever it was, it wasn't this. But she's able to do the math quickly enough. Folding her arms over her chest, Skye hunches her shoulders, realizing that she's intruding on the reality that used to be home to the pilot. ]
no subject
I don't know [ She answered truthfully. ] Is it? Were we ever these people?
[ She kicked around the things in the room idly, nudging a box of things in under the bed before flopping down on the edge, then keeling over the rest of the way, arms crossed above her head.. ]
There's my wall, my uh--other wall. My stairs. My painting. My window. It's all just code. It doesn't mean anything.
no subject
[ The safer response, she decides, than to point out that it obviously still does if Kara is coming to visit it. They're all questions that Skye has been struggling with, herself: how much did anything in that world mean if it never really existed? But just because it only existed in their minds doesn't mean it never existed at all. Some of them were machines, true, but some weren't. Those were real people she was trapped in the false reality with, real people making real choices, just like she was. ]
All of it still happened, even if it only happened for us. We remember it: we felt it. [ She gestures around. ] You lived here.
no subject
[ She's talking about the Cylons now. The city doesn't look the way she'd seen it last, ravaged by the nuclear war, ruined, overgrown and empty. It's clean, and beautiful, lit by sunshine, filled with tiny people and imaginary digital life. It makes Kara feel sick to her stomach, which is why she isn't looking any more. The blank ceiling is a much more comforting canvas. ]
Machines persecuting humanity inside machines persecuting humanity. It's some sort of cruel joke.
no subject
[ That seems to surprise her, or at the very least catch her off guard. Sympathy flickers through her eyes, disarms her. ]
They weren't disguised?
no subject
[ All this has happened before and will happen again. The cyclicacity of the Matrixes. The Agents and their perpetual resurrection. To wake up and find herself in the same war that she'd lived and died for had almost been too much, and Kara still hadn't come to terms with it; probably never would. ]
Here. You wanted to see what I do in here. [ Girl has issues. ] Operator? Load up Kara-Two Delta.
[ The program shivers and changes, the scene outside the window becomes the camps of New Caprica, all gray, canvas tents and barbed wire. There's the sound of a door opening, and then a Leoben model enters, proceeding down the stairs. He freezes when Kara says: ]
Halt simulation.
no subject
Blinking as he freezes, Skye glances at Kara with a furrowed brow. ] Who's he?
no subject
But right now: ]
He's an agent. [ She's convinced herself of this. He has to be, there's no other explanation. ] And he almost ruined my life.
Looks human, right? Bleeds like one too.
no subject
[ The explanation seems convenient. Like maybe she could hold onto it, explain the Ward-9000 robot who'd turned his back on them all and breezed his way right back onto the HYDRA front line when things fell apart. She could believe he's a robot. Wants to, even. The same way she'd entertained for five whole seconds that he might have been brainwashed, and bitten back disappointment at his honesty. ]
I mean, they can't act human. They don't feel anything.
[ Her confidence is an illusion, put on to cover up that she's seeking some confirmation of those facts to dismiss her own questions about whether or not she could write-off parts of her original world (matrix. It was never a real world.) as Agents. ]
1
Where was I? Getting that Sentinel the frak off of you! And that would have been much easier if you didn't keep trying to toss me out of my chair every time you turned a corner!
[He huffs and crosses his arms, his jaw clenching as he makes an admission]
We've been out here too long. I'm out of ammo.
no subject
She sneered, baring her teeth defiantly. ]
If you can't ride the bronco, you'd better stay outta the saddle.
[ And then she was straightening up, startled by the admission--okay, unnerved. No ammo? ]
We can't be out of ammo. We're three days out of Zion.
no subject
Have you seen how many ships Zion's got to equip? Have you seen the state of the factories? Did you see that Sentinel I was shooting while you were doing your best to smash us against the walls? Everything's rationed to bullet and we've just blown our ration up.
[He throws his hands up, stamping away so he can get his full rant on]
What did I tell everyone? This is a stupid route to travel and we're all going to die. Did anyone listen to me? No, because it's same old Charles, complaining like always, but I was right. I was right and now we're going to ripped apart by machines because someone decided we needed to be adventurous.
[The worst part of being a pessimist, he finds, is never being able to properly enjoy saying I Told You So, since being right means he's Doomed]
no subject
She folded her arms, and watched as he stomped about, and finally when there's a pause she raises her voice. ]
Are you done?
[ Daring him to say no. ]
no subject
[Though nowadays that's not so appealing an option. It's one thing to hide amongst fallen rubble, but totally another to hide in a vessel he had a chance of saving. He huffs in frustration and finally drops his arms]
Right, do you know is anything else is damaged, or did you come to yell at me first? If we're going to continue with this idiocy we need to know how fast we're going to limp towards our destination.
no subject
[ She rolled a knot out of her shoulder, one hand braced against the collarbone as she twisted it, then stepped around him. ]
Well considering I used the wall to crush that second to last squid, the hull probably needs machine guts scraped off it to fly right. Then there's the bilateral alignment of the forward pads. The angle's too low, I'm not getting enough spin.
If we're really out of bullets, we're going to have to be able to run faster.
no subject
Oh, ha, ha, ha, why don't I fetch you a target to wear for when the Sentinels come?
[He didn't like anything she was telling him, but at least what she was telling him were things he might be able to resolve]
Since I've just gunned myself out of a position, I'll go throw an extra hand with the engineers.
no subject
[ She was cheerful, though, the thrill of getting out of another scrape alive finally catching up with her. So okay, maybe she'd been a bit rough on him, but the adrenaline could be too much, and not having the trigger in her own hands was something she was still getting used to. ]
You're still going to come and play cards with us, right?
no subject
[That was as good enough as a yes from him, since for all he liked to grumble, he hated sitting about on his lonesome when there was a chance for some easy camaraderie. He'd come, get way too pumped by winning a hand, then drown his sorrows at losing yet again with the horrific moonshine they kept for such occasions]