TEST DRIVE 006

[phantasmods]

Hello and welcome to Phantasmal Rift's Test Drive Meme!

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 Telovia Mines, an extremely abandoned magical crystal mine and the town and infrastructure that one supported it. The tunnels are in reasonably good condition and would be reasonably navigable... Except for one thing.

ONE MINOR THING

The magical effects of the Fissure cause those within it to lose something when they arrive - for most people, it's a sense such as touch or hearing, but it's also possible to lose a more esoteric sense (such as your sense of balance or temperature, but NOT things like "sense of morals" or "sense of style"), the ability to speak, or the ability to recognize faces. As a general guideline, whatever characters lose should be non-supernatural in nature, and something they would have taken for granted as a part of their ability to function.

ODDS AND ENDS

Just because the mines are empty of people doesn't mean that they've gone still. While for the most part, the carts full of crystals remain in one place, the huge amount of magic has left more than a few of the miners' abandoned tools still going through their motions. Rusted pickaxes swing at the walls, and dead lanterns swing from the ceiling. Crystals occasionally free themselves from shards of rock to pile into bins, which then empty into already-overflowing mine carts.

As long as you leave them to their jobs, everything will be fine. If you try to stop the tools (and it is the tools themselves, for anyone who might be looking for ghosts) from doing their jobs, they'll chase you down until you leave their general vicinity.

Of course, the eternally working tools don't care much about the structural integrity of the mine tunnels...

THEY ALL PILE UP

...And so, inevitably, there are cave-ins.

Most of them are fairly minor, and you can see them (well, if you can see) enough to just work around them. Some of them are big enough that you're going to have to dig through them first, if you can.

And then there's the handful that block passages entirely. But don't panic! The tunnels are designed around the possibility of this happening - rather than coming to an end, the majority of them loop back around to the main arteries of the mine.

E... ventually...

But you and whoever is stuck with you on this side of the cave-in might be wandering for quite a while before you get there. Hopefully one of you still has a sense of direction, assuming either of you ever had one in the first place.

Comments

3

[fifthreplacement]

[He's not usually in the business of saving people's lives, but hey, circumstances change. So when he hears someone clearly unhappy up ahead, he heads over, one hand on the wall to keep himself upright.

When he finds the rubble and the swearing, he stops, raises an eyebrow, then sighs and sets to working on digging the stranger out. At least being fairly strong helps him here]

How did you miss the very obvious cave in sounds in this place?

[dralchemist]

[Notably, the swearing doesn't stop up until the point when Sync starts to dig into the dirt pile, what with Izzy doing her best to audibly flag him down. She's, uh. Having a little trouble with volume regulation at the moment.]

BY THE GODS THANK YOU I COULDN'T HEAR THE FUCKING CAVE-IN BECAUSE SOMETHING IN THIS PLACE MADE ME GO DEAF. I SWEAR I'M NOT NORMALLY DEAF BUT I COULDN'T HEAR IT BECAUSE NOW I AM. I HATE IT. DO YOU KNOW ABOUT THIS AND CAN YOU HELP. Why am I asking. I wouldn't be able to hear you if you said anything. Fuck. Fuck. Fuck!

[fifthreplacement]

[Oh god his ears. Sync winces and leans back a little (and nearly overbalancing) until the volume decreases some. Okay, so the weird lizard-thing is deaf. That's. Going to be an issue.

Wait, the network things use holograms don't they? After a moment of messing with the headset he's wearing, it starts to display a hologram of what is normally a blank post for the network. Not that he intends to post, instead typing where Izzy can see it]

Fissure effect. Short version, reality is unstable, and this place is apparently making people lose things. My balance is gone when it's normally fine.

[After a second he adds] You don't have to yell [And then he goes back to digging while he waits for a response]

[dralchemist]

[Izzy's eyes open wide as she watches her garishly-colored savior do Some Kind of Illusion Magic to generate text. Gods damn it, some magical aptitude would be really handy right now.]

Why is reality unstable. How does that even happen. [Her speech, now not at top volume, is stilted and awkward because she has to trust her own senses that what she's trying to say is coming out right.] Ow.

[fifthreplacement]

[He pries some more of the rock loose so Izzy can at least start to help with the freeing of her before he starts to type again]

Good question. I have no idea. All I know is it sucks.

It brings people here from multiple worlds too, so things you know from your world probably aren't the same here.

[Back to digging]

[dralchemist]

Many senses of the term, huh. Sucks in the bad sense and sucks people in.

Great. Ok. Cool. Great. I love it. Do I sound sarcastic, I can't tell. [Somehow, her weird affectation is only amplifying her sarcasm levels. She can feel the weight on her legs starting to alleviate, wiggling forward and trying to get a handhold on the ground to pull herself out.]

[fifthreplacement]

Basically. And yes. If it was any thicker and I had a knife, it'd be cuttable.

[Too bad you can't sarcasm with text that well, or Sync would be just as sarcastic back at her, because really, this place deserves it. He shoves one last rock out of the way before moving to see if Izzy can get out yet]

[dralchemist]

I've got one of those in my pack, I'll get it out for you. [With a little more wiggling and a liberal use of her mediocre STR stat, she's able to pull herself out, unceremoniously flopping on her belly a few feet in front of the rubble pile.]

... That could have gone a whole lot worse. Uh. Thanks. [Don't mind Izzy as she stays on the ground to catch her breath.]

[fifthreplacement]

[He's amused as he watches, snickering softly. Sync...well, he's going to sit here and watch her for now, because his balance is still gone, and it's going to be a pain trying to stand up without falling over]

I'll pass on the knife. And you don't have to thank me. This place sucks. Being stuck here isn't something I think I'd wish on anyone.

[A couple of people he would willing drag down here for the sole purpose of laughing at them, but. Sync is a wind person. This cramped, closed in place would be hell to be stuck in forever]

[dralchemist]

[It takes her a few more minutes of catching her breath before she pulls herself up to her feet using the cave wall, dusting her back off as best as she can.]

Thanks again for the save. I don't suppose you know something approximathing a way out? [That is... a hard word to say when you have no audio feedback.]

[fifthreplacement]

[Seeing her get up, Sync also gets up, leaning heavily on the wall to do so and keeping a hand on it]

I can lead you back to the base camp. The Fissure effect won't be active there.

[He nods in the direction it is, carefully moving around the rocks towards that path]

[dralchemist]

Oh shit, there's actually a base camp? None of the paths I mapped around here seemed to lead anywhere but around in circles.

... hold on, hold on. [Izzy is small, to be fair, only standing at 5'2" on a good day. But she at least has her sense of balance, and she easily sees that she needs to help Sync out with his, so... without any warning, she just shimmies under the space between his body and the rock wall, lifting herself up so that now he can use her as an armrest.]

No point having you fall, right?

[fifthreplacement]

What... [The nice thing about Izzy being small is the fact that Sync is actually also really short. He's maybe 5'1" at the most. So it works, making Sync blink in surprise. He's not used to people helping him.

It takes him a bit to respond, but at least he only needs one hand to type] There's a base camp. It's something that gets set up every time people decide to go to a Fissure. This place is confusing so it doesn't surprise me that you hadn't found it yet.

And thanks. [It's somehow less awkward to thank a person when it's done over text]

[dralchemist]

You keep-- [She pokes her finger forward towards the word "Fissure", as if moving to underline it with a claw, but blinks as she just passes through the hologram.]

... uh. You keep capitalazing that word, "Fissure". It's that important a term? You know what caused this?

[One step at a time, she starts moving forward, keeping Sync's weight on herself while allowing him to navigate.]

[fifthreplacement]

[He heads for the path back to the base camp. Hopefully none of the paths back have been blocked]

What caused this isn't known, aside from "this world's reality is unstable". It causes localised random effects, which is called a Fissure.

[dralchemist]

[That gets her to pause.]

"Reality is unstable".




What the fuck. [please stop swearing, izzy] That's wild.

So the Fissure in this case is the, uh... loss of senses, and it's localized only to this mine that's full of wildly arcane-reactive crystals?

[fifthreplacement]

[He can handle the swearing. Sync's heard worse. Military barracks are great places to pick up swears]

Basically, yeah. There's androids who research these things that'll hopefully set up stabilisers sometime soon so that the loss of senses thing stops.

[dralchemist]

[Pointing at "androids".] What.

Ahndroids? The fuck are those?

[fifthreplacement]

Do you know what machines and/or robots are?

[Technology differences are a pain, so luckily Sync is kind of prepared for it, since he had no idea what they were either initially]

[dralchemist]

Yes and yes. Uhh... automatoes exist, but they're called "forgeborn" where I'm from. Usually and mostly clockwark humanoid shells powered by an arcanomatrix battery core.

Close enough?

[fifthreplacement]

Pretty much. Difference being that the androids are very much sentient, with their own personalities and such. They're a lot more advanced than many things I'm used to.

[dralchemist]

[Izzy shakes her head, careful not to whack Sync in the side of the face with one of her horns.]

Nothing new. Forgeborn are sentient on their own as well. Just a different term for the same thing, huh?

[fifthreplacement]

Well, you're more used to the idea than I was. Auldrant was fairly behind, in comparison to this place. Best it has is the giant landships. Machines were very uncommon.

[dralchemist]

Yeah? And yet, you've got this fancy text-caster enchanted... thing going on. That's way more advanced than anything I've seen.

[fifthreplacement]

The androids gave it to me, they give everyone some form of it so you can talk to other people over a network without having to have someone be physically present.

[He temporarily closes the blank post and scrolls through the old posts on the network to show what he means]