test drive | 2

[unplug]

test drive

Welcome to our bimonthly Systemwide test drive. Please feel free to use this venue to test out any prospective character you may have, whether they're unplugged or free born. Comment below responding to one of our scenarios, or invent your own, and make sure to tag around. Note that any test drive tag can be used as an in game sample for application. Reserves are open, and applications will open on April 25.

Please put your character name and canon in your subject line, and indicate which prompt you are launching from.

the matrix | the air feels real, but you know it's not because you have been told as much. due to the fractures of the matrix, you could be standing in a landscape familiar to you, or one that's intensely alien. this could be your first time, or your thousandth time. this could be the real deal, or just a simulation. either way, all you are experiencing now is coding.

This is a familiar battle to you, with familiar demons. An extraction mission gone arwy, or simple spying and recon -- either way, Agents -- either of the suit and tie kind, or something more monstrous -- have detected your presence, and you're going to have to fend them off while looking for an escape route (in the form of a pay phone, or an invisible backdoor of your imagination). But this time, you're among friends in the form of your crew.

Alternatively, you're out of your depth, in an alien landscape, but you're better, faster, stronger than you've ever been before. Or at least, maybe someone on your team knows what they're doing. Either way, you are advised to run.

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.

A new recruit has opened their eyes. What was your involvement? Perhaps you're simply staying out of the way, and you're seeing the expanses of the human field towers for the first horrifying time since you were blind and helpless yourself. Perhaps you're acting as guardian angel, holding the unconscious quarry's hand, or tending to their medical charts.

Perhaps you're the new recruit, feeling the metal floor of the hovercraft beneath your feet, stepping out to explore this new world while still aching muscles protest from all this new strain. You almost don't believe that this has happened, but nothing has ever felt so real before now.

wildcard | choose your own adventure.

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 you're just practicing in the simulation stations.

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. Perhaps you're participating in key events, whether it's something to celebrate, or something sad.

There are infinite worlds to explore, but try to remember that only one of them is real.

Comments

lol late whoops story of our lives

[dominus]

"Oh, it's French today?" Ezio returns glibly in French, and leans against the wall beside Arno's closed door. "Wake up on the wrong side of the bed, cabbage?"

Arno amazes him. To be fair, most things in reality still do; the low hum of a ship's engines, how information that would fill the world's largest library can be stored on a slip of metal no bigger than his thumbnail; even the easy access to clean, running water, hot water at that if he so pleased...the list goes on. This young man in particular, so much like his own self...another Assassin, from a completely different Matrix full of Assassins; the mind boggled. And they knew Ezio too! Or at least knew of him, taught his teachings, carried on the legacy that seemed to have crossed any sort of divide between the worlds. It was all very flattering if he could admit that to himself, though he never expected accolades or worshipful praise.

That...had been a little problematic. No, not a little-- hugely so, when it served to cause divides in the Brotherhood, when it meant Assassins killing Assassins out of some misguided interpretation of his work. Pierre Bellec is long dead now, but Ezio would gladly have shaken him until his teeth rattled.

But he's left that behind him. Now he's just another Matrix-born extract in the resistance against the machines, and he's got to get the new kid up and running.