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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.

[personal profile] part_time_person 2018-03-04 03:24 pm (UTC)(link)
[He's not terribly intimidating on the best days, but having arrived here with nothing on him but the clothes on his back and the contents of his pants pockets, Julian looks positively plain and forgettable compared to her. He blinks at her explanation, clearly not having expected that.]

I was in my dorm room at college, in Seattle. [Hopefully that name sparks some recognition in her, because he doesn't know what the C.H. Postal Company is, and it shows on his face.] I don't know how anyone would even get into my room to bring me here. The door was locked and I lived on the fourteenth floor, so it isn't like someone could come in through the window.

[He sounds confused, but more than that, there's an undercurrent of what he really wants to say: he wouldn't be worth kidnapping. He's a botany major, not... whatever she is that allows for her to dress that nicely on a daily basis.]
shiritai: (vi2034)

[personal profile] shiritai 2018-03-08 08:31 pm (UTC)(link)
[ There's absolutely no recognition in her eyes at the word Seattle -- in fact, all she does her purse her lips just a little tighter and narrow her eyes a touch. It sounds for all the world like he's talking nonsense but maybe there's a clue in all of it somewhere. ]

I'm not sure how anyone would have been able to take myself and Miss Iris directly from the train without great risk. The vehicle was moving and I would not have come quietly.

[ Surely it can't be very hard to throw a kidnapper out of a moving train. ]

Do you have any memory at all to speak of between home and waking up here?

[personal profile] part_time_person 2018-03-08 09:18 pm (UTC)(link)
So someone got into a moving train and kidnapped you, who was also able to get into one of the most crowded dorm buildings on my campus and get to me fourteen floors up. Without either of us remembering how those things happened.

[He'd like to think he had a high threshold for weirdness, but this was beyond anything Julian had encountered in years. He flexes his hands thoughtfully, a nervous habit that he can't help. Straining, he tries to think of what happened between there and here.]

Not really. I think I remember some kind of light, and feeling like I was falling. But that could have just been a dream, right?
shiritai: (vi03035)

[personal profile] shiritai 2018-03-11 11:48 am (UTC)(link)
It's possible. However, I doubt that I was dreaming or even asleep at the point I was taken.

[ It may have been a long train ride, but there's no situation Violet can imagine in which she'd feel comfortable being so vulnerable in such an obvious and easily accessible place. Iris was the only other occupant of their car, yes, but that wouldn't be much trouble should a passenger walk by, see Violet vulnerable and take it upon themselves to slit her throat while they had the chance. ]

Our first and foremost priority should be to contact whoever brought us here and find out how this was done, so we might reverse it.

[personal profile] part_time_person 2018-03-11 09:20 pm (UTC)(link)
If they could get to us in those kind of places, knocking us out doesn't seem like a stretch, [he pointed out, much as he disliked the implications of that. He's oddly alright, relatively speaking, with the idea of himself being taken - being not fully human, he was always the sort of non-person that ended up being experimented on in horror movies and the like. On the other hand, being the son of a college professor means he could only view someone knocking a woman out and taking her through a much more unsettling lens.]

Agreed. We should try to find a road or a house, some sign of life - I don't really know how to navigate beaches or wilderness in general anymore.