TEST DRIVE 005

[phantasmods]

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...

Comments

Day

[meowna]

[It's way, way too early for the city to go up in flames yet. Not to mention, that massive pillar of light doesn't look like anything he's ever seen here before now. Did one of the mana lines still running through the city explode? Morgana is running to see what the trouble is, since (once the initial explosion faded) the danger seems to be past.]

Hey..... you okay, Green?

[Someone is definitely talking to him..... but nobody else is around, right? Sync is all alone, except for a small tuxedo cat in a gorgeous, bejeweled yellow collar, who's cautiously making an appearance to investigate the blast damage.]

[fifthreplacement]

[The question registers, and he considers it without looking around just yet]

Apparently, I am.

[It's said in a way where he'd expected very much not to be. Sync glances up, but then blinks at not seeing anything. He scans the area, then focuses on the cat. Monsters and animals can't speak though...but it's the only thing around]

[meowna]

Is it really that surprising?

[He's not liking the looks of these scorch marks, or the damage to the ground and surrounding buildings..... Sync looks fine, but Morgana pads closer just to be sure, whiskers twitching as he sniffs to check for the telltale scents of injury. Blood, burned flesh, pain, fear, adrenaline.....]

[fifthreplacement]

Considering the last thing I remember was dying, just a bit.

[The sarcasm is heavy, even as he watches the cat. Maybe he is dead, if he's ended up somewhere where he's talking to a cat. He half expects Arietta to walk around the corner any moment now, really.

All the typical scents of someone who should probably be more injured than most is there, but Sync himself isn't actually hurt]

[meowna]

You don't look very dead to me.....

[He smells like he should probably be maimed, but not dead. Have a little white-socked paw batting at your ankle to see if it'll pass through it like a ~spooky ghost~.]

[fifthreplacement]

[Sorry kitty, he is very much solid]

I don't feel very dead either.

[He is mildly upset about this fact]

But then here I am, alive when I shouldn't be, talking to a cat. So for all I know I could be and this is some weird after life nonsense.

[He backs a little away from the cat, and then kind of flops into sitting down, because leaning down to look at the cat is getting annoying]

[meowna]

I'm not a cat!

[Priorities, he has them.]

Besides, this place can't be an afterlife. I'm alive, and so're most of my friends.

[Most, but not all.]

[fifthreplacement]

You look like one to me, so if you aren't, blame the place I came here from for not having whatever you are.

[It's not really an apology, because Sync in truth really doesn't care]

Eh, one theory gone. Not like it was a good one anyway. I can't explain whatever happened or what this place is then.

[meowna]

I'm a human! I just..... got turned into a cat. It's a long story.

[Have a frustrated sigh; Morgana gives himself a little full-bodied shake, as though physically shaking that line of thought off. It's not like it's Sync's fault, right?]

A-anyway. I may not know what happened to you, but I can at least tell you a little about this place.

[fifthreplacement]

...huh. That's a new one.

[He's mildly interested despite himself, but the information is more important right now, focusing more on Morgana]

Information on this place'll be helpful, if I'm going to be here for any length of time.

[meowna]

Okay, so. This place--I don't know the name--is an entirely different world than the one you live..... used to live on? I guess?

[Sorry, he's kind of stumbling over the wording uncertainly. How do you talk about someone who's pretty sure they're dead?]

It's kind of..... broken, though. Literally, I mean. There are a bunch of cracks in reality, and bits and pieces from a whole lot of other worlds are falling through them. Including people like us, and the city we're in right now. That's not supposed to be here, either.

[fifthreplacement]

[Sync listens, and while part of him wants to scoff, his own situation makes him not. He's still alive, after all. Who's to say this isn't another world?]

How do you break reality itself? [It's an idle question he doesn't expect an answer to, pondering over this information. Thinking on it, if reality itself is apparently broken...]

Is it only pulling people and things here?

[meowna]

I dunno, I've never tried. And whoever or whatever did it is probably long gone by now; I'm told this happened a while ago.

[Morgana scratches at his ear with a hind leg, peering at him curiously. Is he asking about magic or something?]

What else are you thinking might be here?

[fifthreplacement]

Figures. Information is never easy to find when you want it.

[Siiiigh. Sync is someone who wants to have as much information as he can get, so not being able to get it bothers him some]

I have no idea. But if reality itself is broken, it seems odd that the only thing that would be happening is that things are being moved around. I would've imagined much more extreme things occuring, that can't be explained by logic.

[That and just moving things and people around seems kind of boring, if he's honest. But then he's not a people person]

[meowna]

Well..... that happens, too. Reality doesn't seem to like being broken, y'know? It kind of makes things weird in the spots where it is--unstable, and sometimes dangerous, because all the magic and natural laws of two different worlds interacting gets volatile. That's why we go into those Fissures--that's what places like these are called--and try to stabilize the area's magic enough to make them safe.

[He seems entirely too comfortable explaining these things, even if he doesn't know much about it himself. Almost like he was born to be some kind of Exposition Fairy. Weird, huh?]

This place seems to be caught in some kind of time loop, for example.

[fifthreplacement]

[Alright, that's a theory confirmed then. These places are more dangerous than they appear. Good to know. Sync listens, not minding at all about the Exposition Fairy. These kinds of people are the ones he likes best, because it's easier to get the information he wants]

A time loop? It's repeating a segment of time over and over?

[Coming from a world with no real science fiction to speak of means these things are entirely new concepts. But at least a time loop seems simple enough to understand]

[meowna]

Something like that, I guess? Something awful must've happened here, before it oozed through the cracks into this world. Every night, the whole place goes up in flames--and every morning, the destruction is all wiped away like it never happened, and everything's as good as new.

From dusk until dawn, though..... nobody could survive that kind of inferno without magical protection. We've been hiding underground at night to stay safe as long as we're here. You'll want to go down there too tonight, as soon as the sun starts setting.

[fifthreplacement]

[The thought of the whole city going up in flames makes Sync wince a little. It can't be that much fire, surely...but it was also bizarre. For a city to just randomly go up in flames every night? Something had to be causing it. But there'd be no way to tell if it was that powerful]

I'll remember that. I'm not fond of large amounts of fire.

[Something else comes to mind then] You said people were stabilising these places?

[meowna]

Oh--yeah! That's us! You'll probably be involved too, unless you don't want to go on the trips.

[Morgana raises his front paws as though he's lifting something; as though materializing from thin air, he pulls out an odd mechanical looking contraption from his inventory, about half the height of a grown human. Morgana peers around it.]

See, most of this world is totally wrecked because of all these Fissures, and the people are gone, too. But there's a research station maintained by a few surviving androids--they want to study the Fissures and learn how to control them, to help us all get back to where we belong. They're letting all of us who've fallen in stay there, in exchange for stabilizing the Fissures with these things to help further their research.

[fifthreplacement]

[Does he want to go on such trips? The danger doesn't bother him, he's just not sure that he actually wants to get involved.

He blinks at the sudden appearance of the device. Sync knows there's a technique that allows people to basically store things as their base fonons, but this certainly wasn't that. So he's a little surprised. Still, he looks at the device curiously]

I have no idea what an android is, but alright. I guess that makes for a fair trade, especially for people who actually want to go back. Can the Fissures really be stabilised though?

[meowna]

It's, um..... it's a person, but they're made of machines? If that makes sense?

[How does a Millenial Catte explain androids to a fantasy character? He doesn't even know how the stabilizers work, more than a surface-level explanation.]

Even if you'd rather stay here instead of go back to your world, or follow someone else to theirs--I'm sure they wouldn't mind the company, especially if you helped out a little around the station. They only had each other before all of us started showing up.

They can be stabilized, though! Once you activate these things, they cancel out the magic inherent to the Fissure and force it to obey this world's reality, I think? we've done it to a couple other places before. Hopefully with enough of these things, we'll be able to stop this place from burning all the time.

[fifthreplacement]

Some kind of advanced machine. That sort of makes sense, I suppose.

[It won't really make full sense until he sees one, but that works for now.

He shrugs a tiny bit] I don't even know what I'm meant to do here. My purpose is gone. And I don't really do people.

[People annoy him, most of the time]

The fissures and the like seem curious at least. It'll be interesting to see how those stabilisers make things be normal again, even if it's not something I'll understand. [Knowing that they work is enough]

[meowna]

Hopefully you'll see once we're done with this place! And if not, then I could always show you one of the other Fissures. The last one we went to turned people into mermaids. It was pretty weird.

As for your purpose.....

[Morgana grabs the machine with his paws again, tugging it towards him; it vanishes back into the hammerspace from whence it came.]

You've got all the time in the world to figure out what you want to replace it with, don't you? A new lifetime is the perfect time to turn over a new leaf! You're free to do and be anything you want here.

[fifthreplacement]

I have no idea what a mermaid is either, but transforming into something else doesn't sound fun.

[Sync would rather be stuck as what he is. It took him long enough to accept that he was a replica, after all.

Morgana's words make him pause though, thinking on them as he glances to one side] Freedom...wanting something... [He shakes his head, unable to stop the uncertainty from showing on his face] I've never wanted anything in my life, aside from my old purpose. But it's impossible here, so...there's no real point to my existence, right now.

[meowna]

Mermaids are people with the lower bodies of fish, and they can breathe underwater, so we got to explore as much as we wanted.

[Morgana pads closer, lifting a paw to put on Sync's leg encouragingly.]

The key word there is "right now" though, right? Just because you can't do what you used to do doesn't mean you can't find something new to be important to you! Something you want to do because you want to do it, not because someone else tells you to.