TEST DRIVE 003

[phantasmods]

Hello, and welcome to the third 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 takes place in the Fissure known as Amesta Forest - a forest filled with silver mist and shrouded in eternal twilight, where your dreams become real! For a certain limited definition of real. This is significantly less awesome than it sounds. On the bright side, anyone within the mists will find themselves with no need to sleep, as though trapped in the same spring evening as the rest of the forest.

OPTION ONE: DREAM A LITTLE DREAM

This first option might happen to you just about anywhere. From the swirls of silver mist comes a shape - or perhaps more than one shape? Who knows, it's your dream -

Well, probably. It could also be someone else's.

Those who stay too long in any one part of the mist will find their subconscious minds influencing it into shapes - the exact sort of things that appear in their dreams. As with their real dreams, the details are sometimes strange - too much detail, or not enough, depending on where your focus is. The character who 'created' the dream specter will instantly understand what it's supposed to be, but other viewers might have some difficulty with it.

Fortunately for those of you prone to violent nightmares, these dream figures are incapable of doing harm - any blows struck by them simply leave behind the dampness of walking through thick mist. A hard enough blow will similarly disperse them - or, in most cases, you can simply move quickly and leave them behind.

OPTION TWO: THE MOVEMENTS OF THE TREES

A forest filled with mist is honestly a kind of spooky place, isn't it?

Well, it's about to get spookier, when you notice that there's a tree... somewhere there wasn't a tree, before. Or maybe it's that you were looking around and realized that a tree wasn't there here there was one before, instead leaving behind only a round, torn-up patch of earth from where the roots were buried.

Either way, there's only one conclusion to be drawn - the trees are moving.

Those who pay close attention will soon realize that it's only one kind of tree that moves - an absolutely unfamiliar kind, with mist-silver bark and thin, almost translucent leaves in large handlike shapes. They aren't very tall, and their branches split low to the ground, the structure something like a less crooked Japanese maple. The Wanderwoods seem prone to following specific people, usually only moving when out of sight, though you might catch them shuffling along if you have quick reflexes for looking over your shoulder.

What do they want? Well, nothing, really. They're just attracted to sapient beings and, especially, the way the mist forms into their dreams. So while they won't do anything in particular to the characters themselves, anyone with a dream-form hanging around them might find that manifestation suddenly papered in thin, grabbing leaves... and swallowed up.

OPTION THREE: WHAT NOW IS FOUND?

Not all of the forest is trapped in eternal spring. One part of it is held in exactly the opposite - a brilliantly colored autumn morning, just before dawn, with the trees overhead colored in brilliant reds and oranges. Leaves drift down in a slow breeze, and pile up in random places among the trees (which never seem to run out of leaves to drop), and silver pools of water gather at the bases of the trees and in any other depressions, their surfaces perfectly still mirrors.

The mist is quite a bit thinner here, too, which allows you to see... What is that familiar shape in the distance, between the trees?

While dream manifestations are uncommon in the region of Fall's Heart, it's not only dreams that manifest here. Instead, characters will see the figures of those they've lost - instantly recognizable, but unreachable and nearly impossible to catch, running through the trees heedless of how you call after them. It's impossible to catch up to them by mundane means, and those who use supernatural means to do so -

- will find that, at their touch, the vision crumbles into silvery mist-water, forming another of those perfect, reflective pools at their feet.

Comments

Kawasumi Mai | Kanon | CRAU (Airlocked)

[nojohnyouare]

[1]

[The forest is still all around, but the mist is moving into a clearing, taking shape as some kind of grain field. Barley, maybe, or wheat, it's hard to tell in a dream. Mai stands in the field, staring straight ahead.]

What...?

[She'll turn around and step back as soon as she hears you.]

Be careful.

[3]

[Mai's lost too many people, but time has kept on moving, bodies kept rising up either by her own tears or someone else's miracle. So even as she'll briefly see a woman limping in a red jacket, a younger one around her own age with a hair bow, or any number of faces (many of whom might be wandering the forest themselves), those ones disappear in a flash. It follows that the only one that stays suspended further in the forest, tumbling out of range as Mai follows it, is the one that's been permanently lost.

Which is why you get to see a huge plush anteater, the size of a person and stained with blood someone's tried and failed to wash off, rolling through the woods.]

3

[misanthropicprinciple]

Wha...

[There fucking goes an anteater, he guesses! Junpei stares after it, bewildered, before the nagging familiarity catches up. Hasn't he seen that nightmare-inducing thing before? Maybe something Church got--

--out of the dumbwaiter?

He straightens immediately, looking back the way Anteater-san came.]

Hello? Who's there?

[nojohnyouare]

Junpei?

[Well, Junpei or Noctis, but Mai recognizes the voice as the right one first. She runs over to where she heard him and stops in front of him.]

Where...

[misanthropicprinciple]

Oh, Mai. Uh, good question. Apparently, an asshole dream forest in another world.

[You know. That's normal.]

[nojohnyouare]

...What.

[This face.]

Psychic thing?

[misanthropicprinciple]

Not any kind of psychic thing I'm familiar with. Everyone I've found so far who acted like they knew anything insinuated it was more of a magic thing, which you know isn't my department.

[nojohnyouare]

[Mai frowns, not in the least because that means it's her department, and she still doesn't have the answers.]

Dreams are important. And sometimes you can use them to see reality. But I haven't heard of something like this yet. There are rumours of people travelling between worlds when they save enough people... But that's on purpose.

[misanthropicprinciple]

Well, we already know plenty about getting to other worlds through no intent of our own. But the people already here unanimously claim it's an accident.

[(x)(x)(x) Doubt.]

[nojohnyouare]

[nod] Strange accident. Something must have caused this. Even if the place is unstable and acting on its own now. Something always starts it.

[misanthropicprinciple]

Yeah. Especially since I'm running into so many of us here.

[It's almost a capital U "Us." The "Us" that went through hell together. Airlocked "Us."]

...So far, it's been a lot of Fantasy Sweet alums, even.

1

[have_hat_will_travel]

[The... Rather provocatively-dressed woman who came into Mai's view scratched the back of her head.]

Funny, I was about to say something similar. This place's mists are doing weird things.

Welcome to a weirder situation than you probably came here from.

[nojohnyouare]

...?

[Mai hesitates and just stands there, looking around in case anything else might come out.]

What weird things.

[have_hat_will_travel]

Basically, you've been pulled through space and time into a series of strange spaces, with the only dimensionally stable place - where mostly things are kinda normal - being Keystone Research Station near here.

People from different worlds, with different abilities or lack thereof, end up here. Those of us who've been here a while are trying to find peopl elike you who've just arrived, to ensure you're safe and as not-uncomfortable as we can manage.

[nojohnyouare]

[At "pulled through space and time," Mai frowns.]

Pulled by whom.

[have_hat_will_travel]

... I hadn't considered the possibility someone was responsible for this yet; as far as I know, we don't know of anyone intentionally doing this?

[nojohnyouare]

No one... You're sure? And just living day-to-day?

[have_hat_will_travel]

Except when we're ready to go into the unstable spaces. Like here and now, for example.

[nojohnyouare]

Missions. Okay. ...So we're here by accident. Not taken for someone.

One more thing. Airlocked! Have you heard that title before.

[have_hat_will_travel]

... Nope. Should I have?

1

[dubiouslychthonic]

[Although in the months since she first arrived through a rift, Jetshard has gotten fewer bad responses out of humans than she might have expected, she's still cautious about approaching new ones. She's not entirely sure whether the girl's words are a warning or a challenge, and she pauses near the edge of the clearing and briefly lifts both hands to shoulder-height in a gesture that's as much a demonstration of nonaggression in trolls as it is in humans - hands that are the same slate-grey as the rest of her visible skin, with carefully trimmed orange nails, but which otherwise are similar enough in appearance to a human's, and empty.]

I didn't mean to startle you.

[nojohnyouare]

[Mai's probably seen an alien like her before, what with all the court and press appearances (not that she ends up speaking at many of them, it's Mai), so she's not too surprised to see a grey person with horns. She looks Jetshard over and nods.]

It's fine. Do you live here.

[dubiouslychthonic]

Not here specifically - there's a research station a few hours travel to the east. It's not much, but it's better than living rough until someone can figure out how to reverse the magic that brought us here.

[nojohnyouare]

Junpei said it was magic, too. I can try with that. Though magic... I think it works differently across worlds. So things people are used to might not apply.

[dubiouslychthonic]

I'm probably not the one to talk theory with, honestly. I'm a doctor, not a wizard. [She shrugs. As far as she knows, the world she comes from doesn't even have magic of its own, but that certainly hadn't prevented her from stumbling into this world.] It'll take us - the team from the station - a couple of days to plant the devices to stabilize this area and keep anyone else from coming through the fissure here. If you want to come back with us when we're done, you should.

[nojohnyouare]

[Mai nods.] So that's where everyone lives. I've heard this was an accident. The only ways I know to move across worlds are intentional.