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

Tony Stark | Marvel Cinematic Universe | Simulation & Real

[servomotor]

Wildcard Simulation

Get out.

[He doesn't even turn around to see who it is. He certainly ostensibly busy, here in this sprawling complex of blue lines and translucent geometry, scrolling panes of code that look nearly like the stuff that the Matrix is made of, but. isn't quite. The body render keeps Tony looking like himself, black hair, pruned beardstache, the rudimentary clothing provided to all residents of Zion, simple and organic and familiar to those who've ever met him.

Quite unlike the high-tech sprawl of icy light and sophisticated program structure that he's playing with.] Not taking visitors, [he clarifies, makes a shooing motion over his shoulder.] Private reunion. And you know, who doesn't understand what putting a sock on the adjacent headjack means?

[The more tech-savvy of you might realize that that's AI code he's fooling with.]

---

Jump Program Simulation

My mind is already free, [he says, loudly.] Two thousand miles in a rough-draft repulsor suit trumps a seventy foot long-jump. That repulsor suit came outta here. [He taps his head.

The wind whistles over the rooftops. He looks a little bug-eyed. It's different, without a literal jetstream of singular intellectual genius to ride along.]

---

Wildcard Real

[The brown glop slides off the tip of Tony's spoon. He stares at its downward, gravitational movement, with the fascination that a much younger boy might watch the plump pulsating innards of a translucent caterpillar approaching the final stages of its wingless life.

With obvious resignation, he winds up taking a slice of bread out of the communal plate, slathering brown onto grain with something that certainly isn't gusto.] Bottoms up, [he says, and then the liquid crunch.]

[OOC note: I'm quite RLed at the moment at least until Tuesday, please forgive for slowtags.]

wildcard simulation

[hacker]

[ Rather than allow herself to be shooed out, Skye takes Tony's dismissal as invitation to see herself around. This is the part of the Matrix that she hadn't seen yet, and it feels leaps and bounds more familiar than anything she's been facing so far. It's not just the familiar oversized button-ups and jeans, or the blunt bangs and shoulder-length feathered hair being back. The lack of ports. It's the code, and actually being able to remember the things that she loved in her fake-life.

And it's all around them, better than any hologram SHIELD had to animate its file storage. She reaches up, indiscriminately poking at the coding to try and get an idea for what she's looking at. She hasn't been awake long enough to spot-recognize the Matrix codes yet, not by far, but some of it does reek of familiarity from her old life. Her brow furrows. ]

What is this?

[servomotor]

[Tony turns around his upper-body first, like a puppet catching awkwardly on his strings. His eyes find the young woman pretty easily, considering she's the only other thing in here that isn't comprised of dozens of strings of programming language and holographic representations. In a moment, his foot springs out to start him striding toward her.] Don't change-- [he starts to say, before apparently observing that she isn't in fact trying to change anything. She's only looking.

Moreover, she knows how to only look.] A little something I made before, [he says.] Back in the Old World. You know, the simulation that came before the Rise of the Machines. [He makes a quizzical gesture with both his hands, careless the way he behaves when he's still wary. But genuinely careless in that hE DOESN'T REALLY BElieve that any program he might make could conceivably turn against humankind. That's ridiculous. There would never be a movie about that.]

You're a programmer. [It isn't a question, but it does lack recognition.]

[hacker]

Hacker. [ She tips her head, then corrects readily: ] Hacktivist, really, I—

[ And then her eyes search him out and she stops. Whoa. Tony Stark. If working with SHIELD made her feel like she'd come a long way from cosplay outside Stark Tower (totally a one-time thing), this feels like both a step up and down. Meeting the guy is like meeting an idol, someone who's more idea than individual, but then, he was never really that person, was he? That's what Fitz would say. It wasn't real so it didn't happen, even if they all remembered it. Even if he was talking about summoning up something he'd previously built. ]

Sometimes hacktivist, sometimes SHIELD, sometimes newborn with creepy arm plugs. Sorry, did you say you made it before the Rise of the Machines? You were out of the Matrix then?

[servomotor]

[There's something a little bright in Tony's stare, the way he's rendered here in this simulation, watching Skye. Dare I say

curious. He stalls in contemplation for only a fraction of a second, and then abruptly knocks his palms together, a single resounding clap of applause.] Minimize, [he says. Obligingly, the simulation implodes. Sucks into a remote vanishing point in the darkness, leaving a disorienting vacuum that nonetheless swims with enough ambient light that she can make out the little flecks of grey in his hair when he comes to stop at a conversational distance.]

Tell me about your work, [he says. Clarifies,] Not SHIELD. Something impressive. [No offense, emotional secret memory of Phil Coulson; this is Tony checking she's smart in the way that he needs people to be smart, when he considers disclosure.]

[hacker]

Ever heard of the Rising Tide? We were chasing HYDRA's Centipede program way before SHIELD got their hands on it, before any of us knew who was really behind CyberTech.

[ Without thinking, she steps closer, fervor increasing as she gets the chance to talk herself up to Tony freaking Stark of all people. Nervous tension builds in her chest, but she does a good job of flattening her expression all the same to something confident. She's come a long way from sweaty cosplay outside Stark Tower. ]

HYDRA had all SHIELD's top agents, and they still couldn't crack the hard drive I backed up all my team's research on because of the encryptions I developed. And when we lost everything? I put the Trojan in their systems that let us track every HYDRA base still running.

That's my work.

[ And she gains momentum as she goes, evidently proud of it. It matters. This helps her feel like it matters, like it was real. She didn't lose everything because the person that she was in that reality? Was right here. She'd still done it all, fake world or not. ]

[servomotor]

[There's a long, Thoughtful pause following the gradual progress of Skye crossing the floor and screwing up her courage and recounting the highlights of her rather colorful career as a hacker. Tony watches the whole thing from where he's standing at the end of the obsidian-black pulpit, the shrunken code barely glittering reflections around his feet.]

No, [he says.] I haven't heard of. that.

[There's a deliberate touch of caustic humor to that statement. Sometimes Tony Stark isn't very nice, even when he doesn't mean to be particularly mean.] But I have heard of HYDRA, and they definitely set the bar-- somewhere. [:)] All right, let's skip preschool and see if you can read. [A gesture of his hand, and the code maximizes again. It's like watching (a self-appointed) God gesture, unfurl the full-depth luminosity of the universe like shaking out a tarp.

Hundreds of lines of code propagate into view, hundreds of feet deep and high at full magnification. Tony gestures at the nearest glassy column of slow-rotating text.] It isn't written in kanji.

[It isn't. It is of course, a programming language of Earth as she knows it. More advanced than anything HYDRA wrote, but it wasn't impossible for Coulson to override once or twice upon an elevator; it won't be impossible for her to decipher it now. Innumerable layers of security, protocols of conduct, voice activation, a vocabulary more complex than the vast majority of humans to have ever lived; the ability to think, albeit in a carefully, rigidly limited way.

She can see why he didn't want just anyone to know what he was playing at.]

[hacker]

[ There's a narrow, almost reproachful look that, months ago, she'd never have even thought of shooting at Iron Man. He's freaking Iron Man. But as novel as it is, she's more business-minded, so he gets the treatment anyone would get when sassing her about coding.

Stepping forward with some nonchalance, Skye glances around the code like she's—well, doing exactly as he'd said. Reading. She seems to examine the code like she's seeing the big picture of how it actually presents, not getting caught up in the details of trying to interpret small details.

Coulson had an entire SHIELD team at his disposal to help him hack into JARVIS' systems when he'd needed it. Skye was better than most of them (leagues better than Coulson himself), and used to working with little to no resources. A laptop won in a bet. Diner wifi. A busted plane and five agents acting under the assumption that the rest of SHIELD was dark-side. It takes her a minute, but she picks up on it readily. ]

AI. [ And it'd be impossible to miss the articles about Stark Industries' advancements in the field—especially when Romanoff had leaked SHIELD's files onto the internet. She looks up, glancing at him with creases lining her forehead. ] JARVIS, right?

[ Not to sound totally stalker-y or anything by knowing the designation of his home AI. She steps up, pointing out a specific grouping of coding lines, skipping straight past the security (she's seen that a thousand times before—could probably help him figure out a way to strengthen it, given a few all-nighters and some team-work) protocols, the flashy activation and sound mechanics, and into the actual framework. ]

It's adaptive. Half of this isn't even original code—Look, there. [ She points it out, leaning in. ] It's grown on its own. Created schema based on previous applications. [ She draws her eyes away from JARVIS" figurative underwear and looks back at Tony. ] This is amazing.

[servomotor]

First of his kind, [says Tony, whose full knowledge of the Hydra leak is fuzzy and circumstantial because I feel like Coulson's resurrection would be a cool thing to find out about onscreen?? But maybe he should know a little about Zolabot so he will adjust, gracefully,] maybe the second. [Man canon points are confusing Tifa. OK. Moving on.]

Or that's what I thought until the latest Skynet-themed apocalypse party.

[By which he refers to the reality of the Matrix-- and worse, the Real. Tony's face is a little cloudy with complex and uncomfortable emotions as he looks at the inside of JARVIS' brain again. It's easier than looking at her. She may still think of him as Tony Stark, but Stark is the name he inherited from his father, who may not have existed for centuries, the original genetic material harvested or composed out of a protein stew and run on a separate machine entirely. If he had existed as a human at all. There are no Industries. There is no tower. There are neither billions of dollars nor suits of mobile armor. He doesn't know how many people he killed, or how many he saved, either.

So maybe he's just a programmer. And that's easy enough to talk about, after a moment, when he refocuses. Glances at her again. Well, she hasn't thrown him to the Council yet.] He passed the Turing test when he was a bouncing burping three weeks old. Give or take a couple mornings I took off programming. You ever make one?

fear not! coulson's rez is deliberately kept secret from avengers; tony shouldn't know anything AOS

[hacker]

Never had the resources.

[ Her gaze leaves him while he starts explaining, and never looks back. Instead, she's exploring different parts of JARVIS' coding, trying to pick up whatever she can from it and teach herself, the same way she's always taught herself. Nothing like an example. ]

I was with SHIELD for like one day before it all just — [ Raising her hands in front of her, she gestures wide with a boom. A rumbling noise from the back of her throat accompanies the move. ] I can crack systems and develop viruses until the cows come home, but this is …

[ Above her pay grade. She blows a slow trickle of air through puckered lips, shaking her head and blinking. ]

Next level.

#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.]

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.

[ex_spins462]

[ Natasha has to prop herself up on the wall, since her legs still go out from under her sometimes, wobbly as a newborn colt, and Tony Stark is the last man she wants seeing that. She considered waiting a while longer before saying hi, getting her strength back, but she badly needs familiarity right now. Something to stand as a benchmarker for the difference between real and not real.

But unlike Steve, Tony doesn't look that different, and he sure isn't acting that different, so score one for the theory that this is all done big hallucination. Natasha runs a hand over her scalp, a nervous gesture she's picked up and is trying to phase out before it turns into a tell. But she doesn't catch herself this time, hair prickling soothingly over her palm. ]

JARVIS?

[ She guesses shrewdly, shifting her weight to her hip, quietly judgemental. ]

Have you picked up a history book yet?

[ Or listened to one, since Zion seems pretty big on the oral traditions. ]

jump simulation

[paragon]

I didn't say anything about freeing your mind.

[ Steve's not a big fan of aphorisms himself, and there are plenty unique to Zion, bandied about often to make some sense out of this reality. he suspects neither is Tony, unless he's the one to come up with them. the truth is usually more complicated, and after all, Tony's right. he doesn't say it though, because it won't help to talk himself out of it. ]

That just means you can do this, too.

[servomotor]

[Tony's face looks very quizzical still, not exactly raring to go. He glares out over the ledge.] If you're looking for an excuse to princess carry me across the urban void, that's.

A pretty good line. How many lives have you saved jumping roofs so far, Cap? [He doesn't exactly look scared, except that this is more or less what Tony looks like when he's scared. Another aphorism common to Zion: The body cannot survive without the mind.]

[paragon]

Not gonna get out of it that easy.

[ His voice stays light, though there's a cast to his smile, a line where his lips press together as he looks across to the other rooftop. That particular adage may strike something of a chord: who has he always been if not more mind than body?

Not that it does much good to think about it, at least in his case. ]

You tellin' me you can't think your way through this one?

steve what is that face >8{

[servomotor]

[Tony's eyes cut toward CAPTAIN sidelong, his eyebrows lifting.]

Parenting handbooks eschew the use of sarcasm with teenagers, [says he who has often had trouble with the mind-body conundrum, and also who doesn't like to be very obvious about it when a taunt is working on him.

He waits for the first two, maybe three syllables of Steve's retort, reply, whatever, before showing Steve how unimportant Steve's retort/reply/etc. is by turning around and running off the edge of the building bye

It can only end well.



Or not at all, but that's what this place is for.]

/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?

[servomotor]

[Tony looks up, reflexively, and then looks down again, annoyed inside the simulation. Annoyed at himself, specifically. Although it doesn't take much for most people to inspire ire in him (at least the facetious k now I'm going to be a dingus to you now way), he weirdly makes a point not to be that way around the erstwhile green ragemonster for whatever reason.]

On the contrary.

[The simulated environment around Tony is dim and spare on detail, but it isn't the bare-code dark room he likes to use (because 'turning' is still passe) (even in the age post-Skynet). He's walking through an illustration of something boring. The science of concrete, specifically.] I hear people are born and die in video games all the time. And I don't mean one unfortunate Korean can't quit Starcraft, either.

[polyphemus]

More like a really elaborate game of Sims.

[ But do not ask him to extrapolate on this reference; we have encountered the limits of Bruce Banner's casual gaming knowledge.

In the real world, his open perusal of the code is with a novice's uncertainty. Helpfully, there isn't a heck of a lot to have to read -- no remote beach in Bermuda with AI ladies in sarongs, no Iron Man suit rebuilt and reuploaded. ]

What're you doing?

[servomotor]

[Tony waves his hand, sends a paragraph of text flashing by in favor of a graph. To Bruce, it's evident that he changed the data being perused to something with less words and more pictures.] Learning about curing concrete, [he responds easily.] So they'll give me stuff that I can use to make and break concrete.

['Stuff' isn't very well explicated, but Bruce can probably guess as to the nature of these equipments that Tony would like to get his paws on as well as who they are.] It's boring. But, [he gestures expressively, causing a spurt of bright code across Bruce's monitor.] When I asked for the materials to build an arc reactor, they gave me a five-minute lecture about resource scarcity that probably could've been condensed into a rude noise.

[polyphemus]

Because it's not like we had our own issues surrounding resource use and preservation that could only be mitigated by viable energy solutions.

[ His sarcasm is this; droll, unassuming. ]

Maybe you should ask nicer.

[servomotor]

[Tony doesn't waste time on mock airs of being put-upon.

He does actually think about that for a long moment.]

That usually doesn't go well for me. I nearly sent Pepper into anaphylactic shock, this one time.

[polyphemus]

Allergic to manners. Sounds like a prerequisite.

[ There's a pause, the sound of mentally navigating a subject like, you know, loved ones still ostensibly playing human better in a pod of goo. ]

So this is you.

[servomotor]

[Tony pulls a face, indicated by a semi-decipherable burst of brighter green kanji in the downward stream across the monitor. It would be even more facey if he could see that icon. Bro do u not know there are more buttons on the top-quarter of that shirt you're wearing.]

Who else would it be? [he asks.] I could look into PR staff. I'm thinking about hiring lately. Last couple months, I've had bread and greens go bad on me.