Phantasmal Rift Mods (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
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phantasmemes2018-07-12 11:56 pm
phantasmods) wrote in phantasmemes2018-07-12 11:56 pm
Entry tags:
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...
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...
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"I gotta ask you one thing, before we get any further."
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"Ask away," Harriet says in a neutral tone.
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"What am I," Harriet muses. "Hmm. I guess I'm human, now. Would've given you a different answer this morning--"
A hellhound shows its muzzle around the corner and is obliterated before it can approach.
"Sorry. Uh, Harriet Miller, AEGIS registered superhero 948063719, working name Nirvahara but if I ever get home I need to file new paperwork. Call me Harriet. And I'm human."
After a moment's consideration, she lets her sheath of non-light dissipate, revealing an ordinary teenage girl clad in a black cap-sleeve T-shirt, blue jeans and low sandals, with not much jewelry or makeup. Her complexion and facial structure reflect her native Peruvian ancestry, but her speech is pure California.
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But she looks again, curious, to find out that this is no longer the case. "Or....I guess you do."
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"Costume. I don't need it to get my burn on, it's just a habit. Gonna throw power around? Put on the costume so the civvies know to stay out of the way." Harriet shrugs. "I promise I won't bite. Please come out from behind that wall now?"
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"Hi. What WAS that...stuff, all around you?"
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"Uh…I think of it as 'non-light'? It's the physical manifestation of vacuum energy bleeding into shinma Nirguna. I don't remember the math, I'm afraid, but I've met people who can understand how it actually works. I just know the lingo."
Harriet approaches the other woman. Her posture doesn't show any signs of combat training, though she doesn't slouch.
She offers her hand to shake. "Pleased to meet you. You're…?"
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She seems safe enough for now, though. Lin took the offered hand and shook. Her hands were strong and calloused. “Bai Lin, formerly of Yuxi Valley.”
She flashed Harriet a friendly smile.
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"I take it that's somewhere in China? I'm from California myself. Halcyon City. No surprise, right?" Harriet smiles back. "Is there somewhere we can get away from the puppies for a while? You said you had information but it was complicated. I'd rather not be distracted. That is, assuming you're willing to share."
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"Come on, this way." She resumed her walk back towards the base camp. "So how long has it been since anything made sense for you?"
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Harriet follows Lin. At the question about making sense, she laughs. "Nothing's made sense so far in my life, why should it start now? But in the sense you mean, I dropped in a bit after noon today, I think. Mohana punted me out of my universe as a parting strike, and I fetched up against whatever the hell is wrong with shinma Nirvikalpa around here and slid into this place. Arrived up by the big fountain. I assume there's only one of those, anyway. I take it you've been here longer?"
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One step at a time, let her absorb it all before she keeps going.
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Harriet nods. "FIssures. Good to have a name for it—something has really torn up the fabric of Nirvikalpa here. So I fell through a fissure. You did too?"
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Harriet sighs. "If Nirvahara were here, it could fix them. I'm pretty sure. But I'm only human, I don't have that kind of power or understanding… What leads so far?"
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She peered at Harriet in confusion. "But I thought you said Nirvahara was the fabric of something. Is it also a person?"
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Harriet sighed. "OK, I was never able to really explain this even to my teammates but I'll give it a shot… Do you happen to know what the shinma are? That would save hella time."
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"Kinda, yeah. Except there are seven major shinma, each of which defines a noteworthy aspect of reality by being totally lacking in it. Nirguna doesn't exist, That which does not suffer itself to be named has no identity. Dharma is perfectly pure and incorruptible. Nishkriya is perfectly peaceful and at rest. Nirvikalpa is unified and cannot be separated from itself. Nirupadhika has neither duration nor extent, and Nirakara has no form." Harriet pauses. "There are arbitrarily many others but those are the biggies. So…I used to be possessed by an aspect of Nirguna. Nirvahara, the Completion of Things. Never mind why. But earlier today, Nirvahara achieved its mission and went home. So to speak. Leaving me, its former host, with memories and traces of its power. Its enemy, Mohana, kicked me out of the universe in the moment we banished it back to where it came from. I think I wound up here because I hit one of the fissures and rattled down into the universe again like a pachinko ball; otherwise I might have been trapped in Nirvikalpa forever." She grimaces. "Not that I would have known it."
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"Lucky for you, then, that we have all this mess here. That sounds like a dull way to spend eternity."
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Harriet grimaces. "Yeah. I'm trying not to freak about that near-miss, about the pyro-puppies, about the spooky empty city, about how my girlfriend must be feeling right now—lots of things not to think about. So can you tell me some good news? Or, anyway, neutral news? News that doesn't completely suck?"
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A moment's thought.
"How about that the city rebuilds itself from the fire every morning. No one lives here anymore, so we've just been scavenging supplies of all kinds for a few days now. When we get back to the station we're going to be living a life of luxury for a while."
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