// TEST DRIVE MEME_

[eluviomods]

// TEST DRIVE_ Welcome to Eluvio's Test Drive Meme! Whether you'd like to try out a character in the setting, get some samples for your application, or just mess around and have fun, this is the place to do it. If you're getting samples together, remember that you need at least four comments made by you in the thread for it to count. Pick any of the scenarios below or make up any of your own. This is space! There are infinite worlds and possibilities. If you'd like to thread out hijacking a ship, do it! If you'd like to get stuck on a remote planet with only one other person for company, do it! Take the wheel and guide your own adventure! The most important thing is to have fun! ➣ SCENARIO 001. It's a normal day aboard the Eluvio. Maybe you're on your way to work. Maybe you're hanging out with friends. You can even be up to nefarious misdeeds. Whatever the case, you're having a relatively uneventful day. And then you see it. From a distance, it looks like a ball of fur. Up close, it looks like a ball of fur. If you touch it, it will chitter at you. It will vibrate and purr. Where this is coming from is anyone's guess because even if you turn it over, there's nothing to see but more fur. It's pretty harmless, though. Leave it there. Take it with you. The choice is yours. As you continue about your day, you'll begin to notice more of these little furballs. On the ground. Sitting on tables. Here and there at random intervals. By the end of the day, they're fucking everywhere. Good luck! If you get overwhelmed, maybe go talk to that bald starship captain who showed up last week. He might know something about the furry invaders. ➣ SCENARIO 002. Congratulations! You've been selected to be part of the team being sent down to the planet around which the fleet is currently orbiting. Initial scans of the surface show that oxygen is in abundance, temperatures support carbon-based life-forms, and there aren't any large quantities of poisonous gases that might pose problems. Your mission is to secure a landing site, set up a camp, and locate edible flora and fauna. Stores aboard ship are running a bit low on food and it's projected to be another three weeks before the fleet reaches a station large enough to replenish supplies. Once identified, larger parties will be sent to the surface to help hunt and gather. The good news is, scans show fruits, vegetables, and animals are plentiful. The bad news is that once your ship lands on the planet, everything goes sideways. An unexpected ion storm sweeps through the solar system, shorting out communications between the fleet and the team. It wreaks havoc with the electronics planet-side too, temporarily shorting out the smaller craft's navigational array. Until it passes, about six standard days, you're stuck down there. And the bountiful harvest isn't without its dangers. Even the most docile looking animal will attack. Sampling the fruits and vegetables will cause temporary paralysis, hallucinations, and psychosis. Inhaling pollen will bring out a person's baser instincts. The planet itself is predatory, you see. Everything on it has evolved to entice visitors from nearby systems and kill them. And the fleet's unwittingly taken the bait. ➣ SCENARIO 003. It's been a rough day. Everything's going wrong. Machines are breaking down everywhere. The owner of your favorite business wasn't there today and the store was closed when you stopped by to pick something up. A coworker didn't show up for work, leaving you with an interested workload. And now it feels like you're being watched. It started about ten minutes ago, but whenever you turn to look, there's no one there. The feeling doesn't go away, though. No matter where you are, it feels like eyes are watching. Did you hear something? A quiet, scuffling scratching sound just for a second? Maybe you did. Maybe you didn't. But it came from the misshapen monstrosity that just punched a hole through the bulkhead right beside you. The creature makes a low, wet gargling noises and darts toward you: six to seven feet tall, vaguely humanoid, and covered in strange growths over which is stretched bubbling grayish-brown skin. Maybe you notice tatters of familiar clothing hanging off of it. Or there's enough left of its eyes to recognize the shape and color. Or maybe something about the noises it's making sound familiar. It's your missing coworker and it looks like the unfortunate soul ran afoul of that weird slimy creature the science team brought back from that jungle planet a month ago. The good news: you can kill it. The bad news: it can kill you. It's fast, it's hungry, and it reproduces at an alarming rate. A single bite can transfer the parasites in its bloodstream to you. Then you'll be just like your buddy. And that shop owner you like so much. And all of the people on Level 12. And... ➣ SCENARIO 004. You're welcomed and encouraged to make up your own scenarios. As you can see, there will be a wide variety of the types of things your character will encounter in this game. So feel free to make your starters as horrific, sexy, lighthearted, action-packed, or slice of life as you'd like. Make up a planet, make up a location on the Eluvio, make up a ship in the fleet, fight off a zombie alien invasion, NPC Captain Picard, there's no limit to what you can do on the TDM.

Comments

002

[archivist]

While Ianto doesn't have the biological advantages of his teammate, and his world wasn't always one facing famine and strife, his own work back home meant he is trained in coping with extraordinary circumstances. It's almost expected that things should go bottoms up in his mind. But, that's what resourcefulness and contingency plans are for. Luckily, by fifty some odd hours in, even the more reluctant members of the mission party are willing to divulge details about their own biology, expected reactions, and so forth, after the first forty-eight hours had been nightmarish and the clear uncertainty of a rescue party's timing meant strategy is to be required moving forward.

Everyone would take turns on consuming what they needed, absolute minimums, to keep functioning. Priority will be put on obtaining more of whatever doesn't react with a particular individual's body - since it would appear not all humanoids had the same symptoms after digestion. Rations would be combined and people paired off to watch over the other when they weren't under the influence of whatever they'd consumed.

Ianto Jones, former archivist and field agent for Torchwood, is still feeling sluggish after a night and part of the day paralyzed. That particular fruit is ruled a no-go if only because there's no telling what it could do to someone who weighs less or has an sort of unknown heart condition. As it was, Ianto had struggled to breath for a few hours there and he didn't have more than half the blue, pulpy thing. Forcing another deep breath and sipping some of the half cup of water that's to last the pair of them until that night, Ianto turns his eyes on Re-L.

What has appeared to be harmless scratching, at first, is now causing the pale woman's skin to turn a severe and painful shade of red. She's staring intently into the face of her suit helmet while she goes at it, even talking to her own reflection.

"No, no. This is way to early for effects to kick in," Ianto mutters to himself. She seems smart enough from what he's gathered so he can't imagine she was eating prior to what he saw fifteen minutes earlier. It's a jump to his feet, although they're not being particularly agreeable with his legs yet and he goes right back in the dirt face first. Smooth. Okay, slower this time, with a prim and flat sigh as he dusts himself off and very carefully takes the dozen steps to close the distance between them. His hands come down on either side of the helmet and tug gently, without force yet. "Feeling okay?"

(( ooc: let me know if you want any changes, but I figured taking some liberties and jumping into the thick of it would make for fun! p.s. it brings me great joy to see someone playing re-l :3 ))

[realimperfect]

The kind of rationing that they had decided on wasn't too unlike the system she and Vincent had worked out on the Rabbit. Well, other than the fact that the food they found didn't have adverse effects on most people. Either way, it wasn't hard to abide by, though, she did sort of wish that if they had to eat this way they could've at least brought something like ginger ale with them on the way down. What little sugar existed in the soda often had helped to tide her over a little longer, at least so far as her body was concerned.

Well.. and where her body was concerned, she had hoped that a certain biological perk that she now had every suspicion of might help her out a little, when it came to eating the strange food on this planet. Apparently not so. Or at least not for whatever was lurking the the morsel she'd had.

Ianto, despite his efforts to make sure she was alright, gets a rather nasty, sharp look for his efforts, long, knobby fingers quickly folding in to a line, falling in to the swoop of her dismissive motion, well practiced since her time in Romdeau. The next line, too, is well rehearsed for times like these.

"Mind your own damn business." And it's right back to picking at this seemingly innocuous sight on her skin - which appears near bleeding, if the color is anything to note.

[ OOC: It looks perfect to me!! and ahhhhh! I'm so excited to meet people who know what it is! ]

[archivist]

This won't do. Hallucinations are all well and good, not really, right up until they put his team partner at risk for a blood borne contagion of alien illness. It isn't as though they could keep their hands sterile here, or that the first aid kids - advanced though they may be - will be enough if rains fell that carry who knew what. The mission is already in enough danger if anyone should be bit by any of the wild animals, now that they realize just how ferocious the planet is.

Ianto might be seen as paranoid but containing alien threats was what he did for a living. Regardless of his job back onboard the ship, he considers his Torchwood skill set far more valuable. Especially in times like these.

"Re-L, we talked about this, remember?" His voice is kind but his tone much firmer, heavily accented Welsh voice losing patience. "The work I did back home with aliens didn't just mean men from outer space in flying saucers. It meant parasites, plagues. And the last thing you need here is an open wound prone to infection."

With that he lets the helmet continue to rest in her lap, instead aiming to catch her wrists. Ianto's movements are still slow, no thank you paralyzing blue jerk citrus, but he's hoping he has the advantage of her distraction. As it stands, all he wants to do his stop her long enough to see if she can even be reasoned with. If not. Well she's losing her mirror for one, possibly having it plunked back on her head for two because that neck needs protecting now. First though, one last shot at reasoning with her. If Re-L still has self preservation instincts, perhaps it won't be so bad.

(( ooc: her canon was great and *she* was great. so this thread will be great. and yeah, know all about that obscure dead canon feeling. ))

[realimperfect]

Honestly - Re-L is pretty intelligent but has probably never even considered the chances for catching some kind of alien disease. To be fair, she'd managed to catch a disease in the outside world beyond Romdo, as well, being more reckless than she should've been, so it wouldn't have been a surprise to anyone from her side of the universe that she didn't seem to care or think about it. A ferocious planet wasn't entirely what she'd been expecting, though... this was space. Anything was entirely and hellaciously possible.

"Please, plagues." She tosses him off with a bit of a roll of her eyes, just as dismissive as she always was with good ol' Dr. Daedalus Yumeno. "You act like I haven't caught one of those already."

She catches on pretty quickly that he's a little bit slower than most people - and promptly yanks her hands away. She's long, and lanky, but damn fast.

Maybe a little too fast? Either way, she states the next sentence flatly.

"You're aiming to get your ass kicked."

[archivist]

"Plagues, otherworldly bacteria, uninhibited infection that causes an alien pregnancy," Ianto started to rattle off. "And that's just what I actually have experience with. I could start using my imagination next if you prefer."

Ianto's hands slip off the helmet and he curses in Welsh under his breath. Whatever she ate must've activated through the saliva glands, or worse by touch, rather than digestion, if he bothers to think about it. Either way, that one will be another that gets ruled out because it's too fast of an onset. Plus when he finds out how little she ate and how strong an effect it had? Yeah, that's sure to be a big pass for the group at large.

Right now though, his attention is focused on Re-L. He isn't hyping up the concerns he voices, they're quite real and they're quite without treatment if the worse goes on to worst.

"We agreed to watch out for each other. I take that commitment quite seriously," Ianto responds calmly. He's had his own colleagues pull their guns on each other and been the one to pull the trigger when necessary. If distracting her means taking a few blows, so be it. For now though, he is just as happy to keep her talking.

[realimperfect]

"Good luck with pregnancy. That is not medically possible for me." A small pause, and as if she's trying to soothe any misgivings anyone might have that the inability to get pregnant might wound her in any way, shape, or form - "Not that I mind that, mind you." It seems that Re-L's current inhibitions about talking might earn Ianto a little bit of an insight in to what the hell was going on back in her home world, or a little bit more about Re-L in general. Even if.. well.. her reproductive status may be a bit much details wise.

Hopefully, with how fast her body usually metabolizes food, this little episode will pass rather quickly.

Either way, she's not at all, one little bit, amused by any of this. In fact, the regent's granddaughter may be making a little bit of a return, here, her chin jutting back up toward the sky, a little too proud considering she was just picking at her neck and muttering to herself.

"Well, one of us does." Well.. that part may not be a lie, particularly on her part. The callous streak ran deeply in Ms. Mayer. In her mind right now there's still the nagging thought of what that was in her neck, and now, why the hell he was trying not to let her get to it. There's a nagging feeling that the good doctor has, somehow, something to do with all of this. A more sane mind would've said that was entirely impossible, but for the moment she's got the whole hand evasion game going, backing away from the other man. If there's anything wandering in the wastelands had taught Re-L the hard way - it was how to be tenacious in more ways than words.

... It's really a shame that figuring out how to escape might actually kill her this time, though.

[archivist]

"It doesn't have to be medically possible. I'm talking about alien eggs through, say, a bite on your arm or something. Then the parasite feeds off your internal organs," Ianto explained clinically. Later, he'd realize the gravity of what Re-L had shared about herself and he'd even be sensitive to how hard it might be for her. Right now though, it was about being pragmatic and trying to make enough of a point he could get her to keep herself safe if she wouldn't let him help. "The right alien could impregnate a male horse. Gender, species, it doesn't matter. Compatibility doesn't matter."

If he pressed enough, perhaps he could distract her until she came down from her high. Frankly, Ianto wasn't particular so long as she wasn't clawing at herself. He moved slowly while they talked, never letting the space between them grow too big lest he need to try and stop Re-L's picking and clawing again. The longer they kept it to words, the more the last of the paralytic toxin's effects faded from when he consumed it hours earlier. Faster movements, faster reflexes... hopefully.

"Only need one of us to care, ma'am," he shrugged. She'd realize that well enough when she wasn't out of her mind. That was the entire point of pairing off.