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Phantasmal Rift Mods ([personal profile] phantasmods) wrote in [community profile] phantasmemes2018-07-12 11:56 pm
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TEST DRIVE 005

Hello and welcome to the fifth 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 time, the Test Drive takes place in Incendia - a less-ruined-than-expected city that has been abandoned for over a century, due to the magical effects of the Fissure (unstable reality region) that have made it impossible to live in. What effects are these, you ask?

Well...

BY DAY

By day, the city is lovely, if oddly empty. The sun shines down, and magical lights along the sidewalk - the equivalent of power lines - flow energy throughout the city. It's possible to think that the little sparks you sometimes see at the corner of your vision are related. After all, there's a great deal of magic in the air...

But in spite of this, the city lies abandoned, for no immediately apparent reason. You might have found yourself in a wide-open shipping yard, where large metal containers levitate about, moving without any help or oversight from human hands. Be careful; these containers changing positions make it easy to get lost for quite a long time, since few of them have much in the way of identifying traits over than color. Didn't you already pass that arrangement of two red ones on top of a blue one before...?

Or perhaps you're in the massive park in the center of town, with its blatantly magical fountain (a half-dome of water just hanging in the air) and the tents of an abandoned festival. Two stages and a long line of street food booths stand empty - surely no one will mind if you use them for something, right?

Or perhaps you're just suddenly on the streets, among stalled-out taxis and cars that go nowhere and lack the familiar smell of gasoline. There's apartments and shops all around, with little gardens spilling out over balconies... Maybe if you go knock on some doors, you'll find people.

Wherever it is you are, surely there's got to be someone around who can tell you what's going on, right...?

BY DUSK

As night falls, rather than dropping the way you might expect, the temperature begins to rise. And then the sparks in the edges of your vision are very much more than simply at the edges of your vision. They catch first on the plants, the papers stuck to the now-lit magical streetlights, the trash cans... And then, increasingly so, on the buildings proper, the shops, the skyscrapers, the cars in the street.

Within half an hour, an inferno is starting to build, and it's clear that there's not going to be anywhere above ground safe from it. But fortunately, there's safety beneath the level of the streets - if you can make your way fast enough to an underground station.

BY NIGHT

In the remains of these subway tunnels, lit mostly by the dim glow of magical energy lines, you're at least safe from the inferno above. Unlike the aboveground parts of the city, however, the tunnels are in an obvious state of disrepair, with broken concrete, rot, and mildew. The stations might have once been clean, but they quite transparently are not now, and the tunnels themselves are as bad or worse.

Thankfully, no trains run anymore, so you're not at risk of being run down on the broken tracks. There's also not any full-on collapses blocking the way, and the tunnels seem well-enough made that there's probably not risk of a cave-in.

Less pleasantly, you aren't the only thing taking shelter in the tunnels from the firestorm above. And the magic of that flame has touched the feral dogs that rove the tunnels, turning them into barking, howling creatures of as much flame as flesh themselves. And then there's the occasional patch of mold, mildew, and slime in the darkest parts of the tunnels, where even the magical circuits have gone out, that moves to douse any light that comes near it...
shensational: (Default)

Raqiin sh'Hruvek | Star Trek OC

[personal profile] shensational 2018-07-14 11:40 pm (UTC)(link)
[[Raqiin's an empath! She's gonna have a pretty good read on the emotional states of those around her except for those who have psychic defenses or other such mental blocks. She can't influence emotions, though, just feel 'em.]]

Day
"No, no, no, no, no..."

A pale (pale pale pale) blue girl with antenna runs around the city, more than a little frantic. If she stops for a second, you can see how exhausted she looks. In the park, she stops at several of the booths, leaning across the counters or climbing in. "Hello? Hello?"

Or in the streets, peeking into car windows. Or may, instead of looting the stores, you find her on one of the apartment balconies, rooting among plants or just looking out across the city. The moment she finds someone, though, she's in no small hurry to get to them. Keeps a safe enough distance, but bends over to catch her breath.

"Hey--whew--hey, what--sorry--I'm...a little lost, can you...tell me where I am? How I got here?"

Dusk
She's suddenly glad she didn't try lighting anything on fire to signal for help. The city seems to be doing that all by itself. At first, she looks for fire extinguishers, but...soon enough, it's way more out of control. She stumbles out of a storefront that's filling with smoke, and warning anyone she finds. "Get out! Move away! Evacuate the city!"

Night
She paces around in the tunnels for a while, every now and then fiddling with the badge on her chest. "sh'Hruvek to Chiron, or anyone, come on..."

Or sometimes peering up one of the stairs going back up, shielding her eyes when she's close enough to see the raging inferno, coming back down again when the heat is too much. "Hopefully it'll burn itself out at some point..."

Oh, and if those fire dogs show up? Yeah, she's running. Or at least, she's not fighting. She doesn't look like she's got anything to fight with, anyway.
fistsofchange: (Talkin')

Day

[personal profile] fistsofchange 2018-07-16 06:43 pm (UTC)(link)
Oh wait, I know this one. You were lost in a fissure of space and time, and now you're in another dimension.

[Emotional reading: Concerned for this poor blue girl, and maybe a little uncertain at if she got her own explanation right.]

It's...not much of an explanation, I'm afraid, but it's the best one I've got.
shensational: (Default)

Re: Day

[personal profile] shensational 2018-07-16 07:53 pm (UTC)(link)
...So this sounds like a phenomenon you're familiar with. [Raqiin gives a sigh, running a hand through her hair and mussing it up.] I don't know whether that's helpful or astonishingly distressing.

Sorry, you don't have any more details than that? I wasn't carrying a scanner on me or anything. Space-time fissures are obviously no joke, and if I can get in touch with my ship, we should be able to figure out the nature of it and how to safely close it.
fistsofchange: (I don't know what that means)

[personal profile] fistsofchange 2018-07-17 08:28 am (UTC)(link)
I'm not much of an expert, I'm afraid. They tried to explain it to me once but I was lost by the time someone said "six dimensional."

Oh, right, that's important. You're not alone. There's a bunch of us stranded here.

Where's your ship?
shensational: (Default)

[personal profile] shensational 2018-07-17 04:01 pm (UTC)(link)
Where is a very good question. We should be docked at a starbase. There isn't a planet for lightyears that's even habitable, much less looks like this. But if we fell through a rift...

[Raqiin paces a little, back and forth.] And other people stranded? Where were you before here, what were you doing? Oh, uh, I guess I should also ask the year you last remember, just in case, the time part of space-time comes into play here...
fistsofchange: (Talkin')

[personal profile] fistsofchange 2018-07-17 04:11 pm (UTC)(link)
I don't think you're going to be able to get back to your ship any time soon. Sorry...

[Lin ticked questions off on her fingers as she answered them.]

There's a little over fifty of us, I was in New Hong Kong helping break up gangs, and it was the year 2157.
shensational: (Default)

[personal profile] shensational 2018-07-17 04:16 pm (UTC)(link)
2157. [She reels a little at that.] All right. Okay. I'm sorry. Is there a year here?
fistsofchange: (I don't know what that means)

[personal profile] fistsofchange 2018-07-17 04:18 pm (UTC)(link)
You know I've never asked? I feel a little silly now, but it's never come up.

I guess this planet used to have a lot more people on it. Then something went wrong, and now it's covered in all these "fissures" that make everything all weird. Like come nightfall, this city's going to go up in flames, only to be reborn shiny and new the next morning.

We've got time, but we'll probably want to get underground before then.
shensational: (Default)

[personal profile] shensational 2018-07-17 05:22 pm (UTC)(link)
A stable temporal loop surrounded by spaciotemporal rifts? I want to say that's unheard of, but I'm sure if I dig in the computers, there'd be precedent... And it's almost always the Enterprise... But that's truly astonishing!

...I just...wish I could be studying this not from the inside...
fistsofchange: (Yang Wei shot someone)

[personal profile] fistsofchange 2018-07-17 05:34 pm (UTC)(link)
I don't really know much about that kind of thing, honestly, but I'm right there with you on wanting to not be stuck in the middle of it.

I do know about surviving, though. We've been scavenging for supplies around her for a few days now. It's rich pickings, what with how everything resets in the morning.

I'm Bai Lin, by the way.
shensational: (Default)

[personal profile] shensational 2018-07-17 08:07 pm (UTC)(link)
Lieutenant Commander Raqiin sh'Hruvek. [She opens her mouth to say more, hesitates, closes it again. Temporal regulations are funky enough as they are without, y'know, something like this happening.] There's no way out of the city? It's just...stuck on a loop and there's nothing to be done about it? I mean, perpetually replenishing supplies are a plus, certainly...
fistsofchange: (I don't know what that means)

[personal profile] fistsofchange 2018-07-18 08:45 pm (UTC)(link)
Oh no. We're here to fix it. The city is just one part of a much bigger problem.