phantasmods: (Default)
Phantasmal Rift Mods ([personal profile] phantasmods) wrote in [community profile] phantasmemes2018-03-01 07:08 am
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TEST DRIVE 002

Hello, and welcome to the second test drive for Phantasmal Rift!

Test drive threads are assumed to be game canon for accepted characters unless otherwise noted, so don't feel like you'll have to introduce yourself a second time to everyone you meet! As an added bonus, participation in the test drive comes with the chance to earn up to two items of loot for your trouble! Characters who are accepted can earn one item for having a top level, and one for tagging out to someone else's top level! Your SWEET LOOT will be included with your acceptance notice.

Additionally, characters currently in game can earn themselves a piece of bonus loot for the dungeon by tagging people's top-levels on the test drive! Existing characters get their bonus loot along with the rest of their loot at the conclusion of the dungeon.

This test drive is based in the Fissure nearest to the Station, same as last time! But this time you're coming at the shoreline from a bit of a different angle...

If you really want, though, you can reuse prompts from the first test drive! In particular, there's still landsharks around the new area of beach. Otherwise, here's three new prompts!

OPTION ONE: OCEAN BREEZE

The cavern you find yourself in smells of the sea... And looks like it, too. Large crystal formations, usually in blue or a light yellow-green, glow along the walls and ceiling of the cavern, providing more than enough light to see by. The whole place is damp and a little chilly, and occasional pools of water rise and fall with gentle waves - some outside tide flowing in through underground passages.

More chilling, though, is the wind that flows through the caves, never ever quite going still but varying wildly in intensity. In fact, characters will discover that they have some control over the intensity of the wind - or perhaps some lack of control, depending on their exact response to waking up in an unexpected place. Strong emotions of any sort make the wind stronger in turn; while calm leaves the wind gentle, panic will send it whipping around corners and drive already-distressed characters to take whatever shelter they can, lest they get blown into some cavern wall.

Other than the wind and the crystals, the caverns seem mostly normal for a place that's clearly underwater at least part of the time. The lower reaches of the caverns are full of barnacles, mussels, and other shellfish that await the rising of the tide for their survival, as well as the occasional crab (some of them surprisingly large, up to about the same of a man's head), and bits of seaweed catch on rocky corners.

OPTION TWO: SAY NYA

What's that sound? Is it... a cat?

... No, it's not. It's a meowing seagull, for some reason.

Except for their strange vocalizations (all feline in nature), the seagulls found outside around the cliffs and beaches are all reasonably normal. (Specifically, anyone familiar with the Gulf Coast on Earth will find that they look much like Laughing Gulls in their black-headed plumage.) They're normal-sized and not at all afraid of people...

In fact, they're so unafraid of people, that they'll come right up close to you and nick your stuff! And not just food, mind. Anything they can carry that isn't attached is fair game to be taken and winged up the cliffs to their roosts. Magpies have nothing on these guys.

Good luck chasing them down for whatever it is they've taken, or climbing up the cliffs to get it back. It belongs to the seacats now.

OPTION THREE: ALL THAT GLITTERS

This gravel beach is absolutely splendid in the sunlight, looking like someone shattered a thousand stained glass windows and left the wreckage to sparkle. Protected from the worst of the waves by some rocky outcrops in the distance, the water here is gentle and doesn't disturb the beach much.

Luckily, the glitter does not, in fact, come from glass. Close examination will reveal that the gravel of the beach contains an impressive number of fragments of some kind of hard scale - about a third, if one's going by volume. They vary in size from a large thumb-nail down to nothing, and most transparent in every color imaginable. They're quite hard, and more likely to break into fragments than they are to be ground down by the sand.

But what is it that these scales come from? The answer can be found only at night, when the sun's light disappears. Then, large reptilian-looking creatures - somewhere between snakes and fish - make their way out of the crannies hidden in the rocks around and across from the small beach. In many different colors, they glow beneath the waves, some internal light filtered through their skin and scales to make each appear a different color.

The serpents aren't violent, at least for now, but given that the largest of them is at least twenty feet long... Perhaps it's best not to hassle them.
dubiouslychthonic: (go on)

3

[personal profile] dubiouslychthonic 2018-03-04 02:13 am (UTC)(link)
I haven't seen any sign that any of the creatures endemic to the rift are capable of language. Probably not a bad thing? It'd be a terrible sort of place for a thinking being to have to live.

[Here's someone else improbably wearing tinted lenses in the dark, although Jetshard's green-lensed glasses are just dark enough to render her eye color ambiguous without actually hiding her eyes. She's also quite obviously nonhuman, without being a close match for any of the odder sorts of people Letitia would be familiar with in the Neath; dark grey skin, teeth just a little more pointed than a human's, horns that shade from dark orange to golden yellow at the forked tips.]
newlawtolight: (your acquaintance)

[personal profile] newlawtolight 2018-03-04 03:13 am (UTC)(link)
[well this is new for her and that is saying something]

There are far worse places to live. Like a church.

The creatures in those places talk.

[Still, a twist in your tale! You have Surprised the Deviless.]
Edited 2018-03-04 03:14 (UTC)
dubiouslychthonic: (Laugh)

[personal profile] dubiouslychthonic 2018-03-04 03:45 am (UTC)(link)
[A grin.]

I doubt we're familiar with the same sorts of churches - the things in ours juggle.

[It's said with a laugh, but also with more than a little antipathy. If she never encounters another circus cultist, it'll be too soon, honestly.

She's keeping a wary eye on the sea serpent, but as it's not acting aggressively, it's not holding nearly as much of her interest as the woman is.]
newlawtolight: (buzz in the air)

[personal profile] newlawtolight 2018-03-04 04:07 am (UTC)(link)
So your clergy are clowns?

[She is joking. Clowns in the metaphorical sense, of course. And one candle-eater, but...]

So are those in Fallen London, and they can be so amusing.
Edited 2018-03-04 04:08 (UTC)
dubiouslychthonic: (you did not just say that)

[personal profile] dubiouslychthonic 2018-03-04 04:55 am (UTC)(link)
Ah, well. I suspect the Cult of the Mirthful Messiahs would be much more entertaining if their chief priest wasn't also the Empress's personal enforcer.

[She, on the other hand, is not joking.]

At any rate, we're well clear of their influence here. Has anyone explained the situation yet?

newlawtolight: (Default)

[personal profile] newlawtolight 2018-03-04 06:01 pm (UTC)(link)
...Oh, you mean clowns in a literal sense.

[....well then.]

Rifts have appeared here, and the world is not quite what it should be. Dear young Prompto explained it to me.
Edited 2018-03-04 18:01 (UTC)
dubiouslychthonic: (Smile)

[personal profile] dubiouslychthonic 2018-03-04 10:33 pm (UTC)(link)
That's about the shape of it.

[And Prompto might be excitable and more than a little impulsive, but in Jetshard's estimation he's got a pretty good head on his shoulders most of the time; she trusts his explanation was probably sufficient for the time being. No reason to endlessly dump the same information on the woman.]

The name's Jetshard, by the way.
newlawtolight: (operatic sights)

[personal profile] newlawtolight 2018-03-04 10:37 pm (UTC)(link)
Letitia Genesister.

[She holds her hand out, and naturally, her grip is like a vice if it is shaken.]
dubiouslychthonic: (go on)

[personal profile] dubiouslychthonic 2018-03-06 12:06 am (UTC)(link)
[Jetshard's handshake is firm, if not so aggressively so as Letitia's; her nails are carefully trimmed and the same orange-yellow gradation as her horns.] A pleasure.

Where is it you said you've come from? Fallen London?
newlawtolight: (buzz in the air)

[personal profile] newlawtolight 2018-03-07 08:05 pm (UTC)(link)
That's right, Fallen London. Formerly of Great Britain. It's quite the tale!
dubiouslychthonic: (Skeptical)

[personal profile] dubiouslychthonic 2018-03-08 05:34 am (UTC)(link)
I'm sure it is. I'm afraid I haven't heard of it. We're all rather far from home, here. Some of us... [She gestures vaguely at her own horns.] Some of us from a different heading, I suppose.