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

wanda maximoff | marvel comics; early 616

[chuvihani]

simulation

[ Wanda has been on this rooftop a hundred times before, sometimes alone, more often with company. The first day she took this jump, she fell half-way and then gently sank, like the air was thickening quicksand, moving slower and slower until she'd been kneeling on unreal asphalt. The second time was actually worse, the third time startlingly bad, even if she'd never slammed into the pavement, exactly. It was baffling, that initial session; people didn't usually get worse at this with practice.

The nature of her magic — what she'd believed was magic, anyway, even if now she knows better — had once interfered with her understanding of her new surroundings. Wanda had lived a lot of years at war with her own mind, learning to doubt herself. For her first few months of real freedom, she'd wasted too much time questioning whether extraction wasn't a self-imposed trick, worrying over the instinctual ring of truth she felt in her gut.

Now she was better at trusting herself, and much, much better at the jump, but she'd never forgotten her first failures. Never forgiven them, either. She doesn't look pleased with herself when she clears the space between buildings. Just determined. ]

reality

[ Wanda appreciates the progress of the newly extracted. After a few weeks, once they've adjusted to using their bodies, they often start to push themselves, seeking ways to become stronger, and that is something she understands intimately. She's disinclined to hold anyone's hand unless they really want it, and hardly anyone out here ever does, but she's patient and not judgmental regarding the natural psychological roadblocks that come with discovering real life. She can be a bit matter-of-fact, actually, but it's delivered with a kind of quiet earnestness. ]

You're healing well. [ All of them, excepting the free-born, rose up dotted with those round metal pieces all over their bodies. She'd never felt so conscious of the idea of flesh before she was really awake, and the machine's ports were like old war wounds. She indicates her right arm with a light gesture. ] We have had these our whole lives, and they remind us where we come from. But the other marks will fade.

reality;

[hacker]

Not our whole lives.

[ Stubborn. Skye refuses to accept that the only part of their lives that 'counted' was post-wakeup, or in that pod. No, what she remembers from before, in the Matrix, that has to count, too. If it doesn't count, then who is she? Who are any of them? She reaches up, rubbing the port on the back of her neck. It fits oddly, and the short hairs on her head bristle against her fingers to remind her just how new she still is. ]

[chuvihani]

[ A momentary interval before Wanda responds, or even visibly reacts, and then, a little ruefully, accompanied by a slight nod — ]

No, not exactly.

[ She tries very hard to embrace this new life, as is her fashion; even when she was freshly extracted, she was trying to be positive, even when it was, frankly, a dishonest representation of her feelings. That mentality has actually held her back before, kept her from coping. It should be a relief to no longer be thoroughly on the margins of society, but their individual Matrixes still shape their identities. Wanda is still Romani.

Just not a mutant. It's the humans who are hunted. ]

I think a lot of people share that perspective.

[ At least at first. ]

[hacker]

It's not a perspective: it's a fact, okay? I don't care if it was just a program to you people: I lived in it for twenty-five years. It's more real to me than any of this is.

[ It happened. It mattered. Realizing her vehemence is perhaps out of place in what's supposed to be a session to benchmark her progress and counsel, Skye bites her tongue, swallowing any further argument and dropping her head. She finds herself picking at the ports on her arms, a sheepish, nervous gesture. ]

It was real, too.

reality

[bigfloppyhat]

[A light puff of air escapes his lungs-- less a laugh than a constriction of his chest, as though it leaves of its own accord and takes his sternum down a bit with it. Fade, she says, even though she doesn't know what it means. Where we come from.]

Healing. I didn't know I was broken. [a pause, and his voice is smaller now.] I didn't know.

[chuvihani]

[ This boy is a strange one, with his sad eyes. Where did that hat even come from, she wonders. More than that, Wanda wonders where he came from, what his Matrix was like. ]

I don't think it is the same as being broken. A little bent, but not broken.

[ And then, gentler: ] None of us knew what was really happening. We all go through this together.

[bigfloppyhat]

[Insistently, but not unkindly:]

I should have known! Everyone was trying to make me something, to fit me into the shape of something they thought I was, or could be, but I wasn't... I was this, all along. And so was everyone else.

[A few deep breaths, rushing in and out of his chest like it's unfamiliar, the hurt. Feeling injured himself, instead of it belonging to someone else. It squeezes him, on the inside, and he remembers why he wanted so badly to help. But where are the other spirits to help him now?]

What... am I for, now? How can I help, like this?

reality

[emptychamber]

[Picking the worst thing is absurd. Unhelpful, and impossible regardless. There is no one worst thing to pick. But the thing that makes her uncomfortable, that itches at her, is the metal attached to her body that is as inert and dead to her as everything else. Something so intimate and yet so utterly unresponsive.

It's better to know the truth. She hasn't wavered in that. But harder all the same.]

What do you say to the unlucky bastards healing badly?

[It's mild, for all it's wry. She knows she's going to need allies. The world isn't so different for all that. But Emily's never been one for hand-holding either. Old habits.]