phantasmemes | TEST DRIVE 003

Entry tags:

!test drive

TEST DRIVE 003

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.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Is-

[Ardyn broke off and hesitated, approaching the same question from a different angle.]

...Who did you meet apart from Junpei?

Yuuri, and... hells, I didn't even get his name, the attractive young man with convictions who could punch out a bloody zu.

[Technically he's also met Touko but he doesn't know she's one of Ardyn's yet so pretend she's in this list if that thread goes there.]

[For just a split second there was something startled and hopeful on Ardyn's face--Church couldn't exactly punch out a giant bird, but if it was for his king and fiance he'd probably damn well try. Then again...no, that description fit someone else a bit better.]

...that'll be Heart, most likely.

...That would explain the particular expression of loathing I bumblefucked into. Hells, no wonder he was vicious.

Oh, he's wonderfully dangerous.

[If it was possible to sound proud and threatening both at once...well, there you go.]

I chose my glaives wisely, for loyalty as well as willingness to fight.

[The words are likely intended to mean "loyal to me, while you weren't," but all Izunia can hear is "loyal to me, while you have nothing." And something in him flares up, angry, bitter - ]

You've always had a gift for earning people's love. I'm glad you have them.

[And that's not a lie, but it comes out harsher than he means it. Because Ardyn has, and he wants, and Izunia is finally at a place where he has friends of his own, but he doesn't believe for a moment that any of them would choose him, in that way. Not that sort of deep choice that leaves a stain on your soul.

Always, Ardyn does better than him with other people, and this time he isn't capable of shutting it down before the envy shows.]

[Good. Let him be absolutely miserable, said the bitter and cold part of Ardyn that was still mad no matter how justified Izunia might have been. Let him be envious of what Ardyn had finally earned, the family that had grabbed his hand in the darkness and pulled rather than shut him away and be done with it.]

There's still one Glaive missing. If he's here, I have to find him.

If anyone else I don't know comes swinging at me with no explanation, I'll be sure to point them in your direction.

Oh, he'll probably do quite a lot of shouting first. You'll be able to hear him coming a mile away.

If you say it is so, then I am without doubt.

[And the bitterness leeches out of him, because he can't stay angry at Ardyn. Not for anything.]

...It's still the best day of my life. A miracle I didn't dare see even in dreams.

If you expect to win me over with sycophancy and flattery, I've no regret in informing you how easily that will fail.

I'm not your brother anymore, Izunia Lucis Caelum.

I am only speaking my own truth, Ardyn. You were my brother even when I was too much a blind, distraught fool to see you. And it was in not seeing you within the monster that I caused you so much suffering.

I will never permit that to happen again. However it is you see me, I will always look upon you with love.

[Ardyn bit back a snarl; so that's what you call love, is it?]

[He understood, logically, that the Accursed needed to be put down. That a monster rampaging through Lucis in its infancy would have wrought the kingdom to ashes before it began. In that regard, Izunia had been right.]

[But it hurt. It hurt to have his own brother kill what remained of Ardyn Lucis Caelum in a monster's shell. It had been his fault, his fault Ardyn suffered through execution after execution and generations locked away on Angelgard. If Izunia hadn't acted rashly, if he and Gilgamesh had sought some other way, would the world have fallen to darkness millennia later? Would 'Ardyn Izunia' have existed as the shreds of a healer driven to madness?]

[He understood why it had to happen, on the surface. But Ardyn hated it, and hated the brother who had wrought his elder twin's suffering and insanity.]

You don't even know me anymore. You know nothing of what this past year has been, or the person I am now.

...Not nothing. I know that you have come through that darkness and found something on the other side, something of yourself that still inspires loyalty in others. Something that in spite of everything is still capable of trust, and love.

[Yuuri pulled a Royal Arm on him. She and Ardyn might not realize what that means, the peerless, complete trust it represents, but Izunia does.

And - ]

And I know that even as much as you may hate me, you're still wearing my gift at your throat.

[He reaches up, slowly, and takes hold of his own scarf, almost clutching it.]

It's enough.

[Ardyn reached up to grip his own scarf; he felt wrong without it, and perhaps always had. It registered as important to him, for reasons distant and lost to time until an incentive had shown him a picture of twin brothers with matching but opposite accessories. Red and blue, just like their magic.]

...We were family once. That does not mean we ever can be again, after what you've done.

I cannot ever fix the past. But to me you will always be family. No matter how far apart we are or how divergent the paths we have walked, the sun and the stars are just the same thing seen from different places.

[He exhales, slowly. Too many thoughts, and he can't make them fix upon one track.

But he loves the man in front of him, like gravity, like sunlight, wants to curl up against his brother and never go anywhere again. He wants to go home, for the first time in so long, because now he knows where home is.

But he's still angry. Angry that Ardyn is putting up this wall, that he knows he can't tear it down without making things worse between them. Angry that Ardyn didn't trust him in the first place, angry about the Wall -

It's too much, and he doesn't know what to do, except that leaving this alone will surely drive him mad once more.]

So what is it you want?! Would you have me just drop all that I feel about this? For perhaps you were right in what you did, but I've every fucking right in the world to be furious over how you went about it!

Do you have any idea how much it hurts, to be drowned or burned to death? Crucified? I have a list, you know, of my least favorite ways to die. And that's your fault.

I know. I don't need you to tell me what I did, Ardyn, I was there. It's seared into my nightmares just the same.

[Funny how it is that he's had more nightmares about you this test drive than you've had about him, in fact, not that he knows that.]

Just - a chance. Give me a chance to show you that it was a mistake. That my words now are the truth. I won't be so foolish as to claim I can make amends for it. But... please. One chance, without gods or prophecies or kingdoms involved to complicate everything.

[One chance to make or break everything.]

...

[Ardyn's jaw was set into a hard, tense line as he struggled not to grind his teeth together hard enough for them to crack.]

[He thought of Choromatsu, who killed for his brothers' sake even as he'd regretted every second of it. Of Nari who had committed a terrible betrayal so she wouldn't be forgotten. Queenie, who killed out of love to save her own world...even Kip, who had lied all this time even if it was out of fear.]

[...What made this so different, past the two thousand years of trauma and nightmares?]

One chance. I'll tell my family to leave you alone, and in turn I expect you to say the same to Noctis and Prompto.

...Fair enough. I can't make any promises that I'll run into them before you do, they're both out and about in this forest somewhere.

[He does, however... whip out a phone and apparently compose a text on the spot, with all the speed of any millennial with a touch screen and a decade of texting experience. Who knows if those two will check their messages in any kind of a timely fashion, though.

Then he shoves his phone back in his coat pocket.]

...Yours each get one punch. I promised Junpei and Heart, may as well make it blanket policy. ...Heart doesn't get his without a medical standby, though.

...hm. [That was a half-formed laugh, bitter but proud smile coming to Ardyn's face.] He really scared the hell out of you, didn't he?

I think only Ignis has ever frightened me more. Thank fuck the doctors here like me even if Strange will probably call me an idiot for allowing such a thing in the first place.

Oh, he's not even the one you have to worry about.

I'll let you figure out which of them is the most dangerous all on your own.

Junpei refused to hit me because I was crying and Yuuri attempted to frighten me off with a sword with a twisted ankle, I think I can guess. I've never even seen someone pull a Royal Arm on their own that easily before, did you know? Usually they need at least a little help from the true owner.

[That got a real smile from Ardyn, the bright and dangerous sort with only a little malice behind it.]

I could not be less surprised. I've already seen her pull one out once with only a little guidance.

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cw: execution talk

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