villagememes | test drive

Entry tags:

!tdm

test drive — autumn

test drive — autumn
nav | logs | ooc | faq

Welcome to the test drive and thank you for your interest in The Village. This test drive is not game canon but will allow players the opportunity to experiment with game mechanics, the setting, and the flexibility of choice allowed by this game. The following prompts are examples of typical situations characters might face in the game. At least one thread from the TDM is required as part of the game's application process.

Since not all setting details have been made available yet, you are welcome to invent your own general locations for this test drive. There are no living souls in Mathias Township beyond the player characters. In fact, there are no signs of life at all... We hope you enjoy your visit.

( Recommended listening: ♫ )

— the fog —

It moves in quickly and without warning, not from the waterfront but the forest, cascading through every street in a thick wave of white. The fog is not a soft blanket enveloping the town, but a heavy weight pressing down, threatening to suffocate the sky is blotted out and you can see no further than your outstretched hand.

Those outside when it rolls in are left wandering blind, stumbling toward shelter as you're unable to even see your feet beneath you, let alone any obstacles in your path. Perhaps you call out for help, hoping for another voice to guide you toward shelter or simply another living soul. Or perhaps you were lucky enough to already be inside when the fog descended, quickly closing doors and windows to keep it from creeping in. Can you hear those voices crying out? You recognize some, but the others... Are they really there at all, or are you alone here and simply beginning to finally lose your mind?

And perhaps the most important question: Do you answer?

— portents —

You wake up with an ache in your head and a cloudiness to your thoughts, your body sprawled on the ground in a location you don't remember going to. As you sit up, the world spins and start to clutch your head — to realize there's something on your hand. A symbol, a word, a streak of wet paint or ink. You don't recognize it or have any memory of how it got there...

Or how the much larger depiction came to be on the wall or the floor around them. You can see it shining wet in the glow of whatever light source is nearest, but something instinctual urges you not to touch it. If you defy that urge, it burns, a searing pain that radiates from the matching mark on your hand.

Did you do this? Or was it done to you? The person approaching may have answers — or accusations.

— past deeds —

The Town Hall stands at the center of Mathias Township, a modest two-story building that would be welcoming if not for the faded sign, chipped paint, and deafening silence. It's a typical government building, with a reception desk at the front and rows of identical offices within, the names half faded from each door. But what catches your attention is a large bulletin board on the main wall, once meant to hold flyers or announcements for the community.

What it holds now is decidedly different. Tacked onto the board is a torn scrap of paper with words scrawled almost illegibly in dark red ink.

why did this happen

Upon close examination, a keen eye will realize that the ink is actually blood, though whether it is human is unknown. And beside that scrap, a symbol has been drawn in dark black marker — it resembles a feather or a branch, but you've never seen anything like it before. It scares you even as you know it is perhaps the most important thing you have ever seen in your life.

On the floor below the bulletin board are more scraps of paper scattered amongst grime and dust, most blank but some with other strange symbols scrawled in a variety of inks, perhaps matching the pens and markers scattered near the baseboard. Some are small enough that they might have once been part of the same page, creating something larger. And to the far side, a pristine stack of crisp white copy paper and an unopened box of ballpoint pens.

What do you do?

code bases by tricklet

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Being the persist ~~snoop~~ spy she was, Daisy ended up spending a good amount of time in the Town Hall. She'd already walked around most of the central part of town, looking for any sign of her team or anything that might explain what the hell was going on. Neither had been achieved out there, and so far the Town Hall was proving no better. Offices were thoroughly searched, desk drawers and filing cabinets rifled through, but aside from the fact that everyone seemed to have just disappeared with seemingly no explanation, everything here seemed normal. There were receipts and permit requests and memo drafts &mdash normal town stuff.

The stuff on the bulletin board, however, was decidedly not.

It was a relief to hear someone down the hall, even more so to peek her head out of the office and actually see a living breathing human being there. Finally. Moving out into the hall, she made sure her steps were heavy enough to signal her approach.

"I think that's a pretty accurate description," she said, trying to hide the exhaustion in her voice as well as her movement. She might have had a rough twenty-four hours but no way was she letting that get in her way.

As soon as she moved out into the hall, Raylan's head was snapping over with a dangerous kind of attention that softened considerably once he realized it was a real person. Standing up and taking a few of the pieces of papers came with him, he glanced at the board again.

"If I didn't know better, I'd call it some voodoo backwoods shit." He didn't know better.

"I take it you're not from around here either?" Folding the bit of paper in half with his other fingers, Raylan tucked them into his back pocket. "Any idea where 'here' is?"

He hated asking these kinds of questions. Knowing where you are is one of the more basic grounding points, and he wasn't used to not having that. Something he never thought he'd have to actually think about.

He had quick reflexes, she'd give him that. All opinions about his choice of hats aside, he held himself like someone ready for a fight, even if he might not necessarily be looking for one. It was kind of comforting to see, actually; his questions gave away that they're both the same kind of lost, but at least he seemed to have a level of competence to him.

Shaking her head at his first question, she crossed her arms as she came to a stop beside the board. She leaned against it in a way that looked completely casual but was really an attempt at keeping herself upright while stationary. "I'd say we're probably in the northeastern United States — we're definitely northern hemisphere, and the way English is written is pretty blatantly American. Anything more specific than that, your guess is as good as mine."

"So not much further than I got," he said with a nod as he looked around and over the floor, one hand finding his crookedly set hips. "Fantastic."

He believed her. Her tone and the way she relayed it all didn't suggest otherwise. Hazel eyes came back up to look at her after a long moment.

"Been here long? Seen anyone else?" He couldn't help the questions; Marshal's training went deep and long after twenty plus years. He didn't even think to introduce himself just yet, though his brain would get around to remembering that that matters sometimes.

Getting straight to business didn't bother Daisy one bit. It was familiar, working the problem the way she would have with her team. Figure out what you know, then try to get answers for everything you don't. Nevermind that one pile was a whole lot bigger than the other, she was still pretty certain she'd been in far worse situations than this.

"I woke up a couple hours ago, no idea how I got here. You're the first person I've seen." She didn't specify that she'd heard others, the creepy not really there voices another thing she couldn't explain and wasn't quite ready to tackle. Studying him a bit more closely, she decided to toss her own question back at him. "Where were you before this?"

One bite at a time to get through a pie. He nodded again as he started chewing on his bottom lip. "Yeah, me too."

His eyes had wandered up, curious as to what was upstairs, but they came back down at the question.

"Lexington, Kentucky," he replied, shifting to pull his wallet badge out of his suit jacket that contrasted with the well fitting jeans that his button up was tucked into. He opened it and held it out to her. "Deputy US Marshal Raylan Givens."

He kind of naturally expected her to give her own in return so he didn't ask for it specifically.

Definitely not from the same place, then. And since his clothes didn't scream at her in 1980s, she was pretty sure they weren't from the same time, either. That made things complicated but in a normal kind of way for her. This kind of weird was just another day on the job.

She eyed the badge with appreciation. A marshal, that explained things. In his line of work, you kind of had to be ready for a fight at any moment. Offering him a small cordial smile that didn't quite reach her tired eyes, she replied in turn, "Agent Daisy Johnson of SHIELD. No badge to flash, though. Haven't carried one for a few years."

Hopping through time and space, it was easier to not have identification on her person. If she'd stuck around the Lighthouse a little longer, she might have started carrying it again, but with Izel and then the Chronicoms shortly after... It had been a busy couple of weeks since her return to Earth.

"Nice to meet you," he said with a bob. "Agent?" His face scrunched with the question as the badge was flipped and slipped away into its home. "That under FBI?" Before she could answer, he continued, one finger gesturing out to her.

"Where'd you come from?" It was an odd question to be asked once he thought back on it, and he couldn't help but wonder where it came from.

That under FBI? The question left a chill in her veins that she hadn't been expecting. How could he not know SHIELD? He worked for a federal agency, they all knew of each others existence even if they didn't work together much. It set all sorts of wheels turning in her head and she wasn't liking a single one of them.

"My team has a mobile base, last I remember, we were outside New York," she answered easily, like it was a completely normal question with a completely normal answer. Then she took a deep breath, moved her hands to her hips, and just dove straight in with a very uncomfortable expression on her face. "I'm pretty sure I already know the answer to this, but just humor me for a sec. What year was it for you?"

Well, nothing weird about New York as long as you ignore everything about it, especially the City itself. Somehow, he'd expected something stranger for an answer and his head pulled back a little with his obvious confusion. A confusion that only got more pronounced on his face as she continued, eyes narrowing.

Nothing in that last statement made sense.

"Two thousand thirteen. Why?" He highly doubted she knew what year he came from, but people only asked these questions in books when they'd time traveled. It was the only reason he could think of and there was a passing thank you to all the things he'd read over his life. He could ask what year she was from, or what year this was, but he wasn't sure how it fit in, generally speaking.

Okay, the answer she'd expected but not the reaction. Most people who didn't deal with a daily dose of weird would have been a whole lot more skeptical of the question, so either he was absolutely humoring her or he was just one of those people who rolled with the punches. Like Sousa. But even with the pang of fondness that rises in her at the thought of the man out of time, there's no stopping the dread that fills her chest or the headache suddenly building from all the possible repercussions of his answer.

"You're probably going to think I'm crazy, but I don't think we're from the same universe," she said after a long moment, lifting one hand to rub at her eyes. Deke will never let her hear the end of it when he finds out his multiverse theory was right. "But if you're from 2013 and don't know SHIELD... well, there's no way you wouldn't know SHIELD. Especially not if you're a federal marshal. We're all anyone's talked about since the Battle of New York."

Because Hydra hadn't been revealed until 2014.

Humouring people moved things along quite nicely and saved Raylan some question asking. Most people, once they're prompted to speak, tended to ramble on and pour out, most of the time. But her answer didn't clear much up.

His eyes stayed narrowed, chin lifting a little as he watched her.

"The Battle of New York," he echoed, head nodding a little with the words. "Somehow I don't think you're talking Revolutionary war history."

Yes Ma'am, there was brains under that hat.

"Alright then. Educate me. What's SHIELD? Why do you expect me to know about them? Secret Government Agency?" He wasn't saying he believed her, but gaining information was kinda something that was trained into him as much as everything else was.

This wasn't something she'd ever had to do before. Explaining that SHIELD still existed? Yeah, frequently. Explaining that they existed at all? Never. Not once. She was in no way prepared for this.

Crossing her arms again, everything about her stance spoke of being utterly worn out, emotionally and physically. She was still standing, though, and that was good enough for a day like this. A week like this, really.

"Yeah, actually, just not really so secret. We've been around since after World War II, formed out of what used to be the Strategic Scientific Reserve," she explained with complete seriousness, mentally pulling up every lesson Coulson had ever drilled into them. "The Strategic Homeland Intervention, Enforcement, and Logistics Division is a counter-terrorism and intelligence agency. SHIELD handles things that the other agencies aren't equipped to deal with. We're based in the US but we also operate globally; a few weeks ago, I was in Mexico at a Mayan temple where someone was trying to unleash a sort of plague that would have killed every person on the planet."

He could see how tired she was and a kinder man might back off from the questioning and go a different, softer route. Frankly, he had too many questions to be able to do that, however sympathetic he was. They all had to suffer that exhaustion sometimes. Eventually, some kind of sleep would come, however broken and paranoid.

"They musta missed that in the training manual." His head shifted to the other side as he tried to process the last part of her sentence. Automatically, he assumed she meant some kind of chemical bio-warfare, but considering what he was standing next to, he couldn't rule out the possibility that she wasn't. But somehow that was less important then the situation that they found themselves in.

"Hellva step down, abandoned towns against world ending plagues." A beat, then he couldn't help himself. "You succeed? In stoppin' it?"

Edited (excuse me self, stopping has TWO 'p's) 2020-09-12 17:35 (UTC)

A kinder man might have gotten told off for trying a softer approach. It didn't matter if she was running on fumes and still recovering from a physically and emotionally traumatic experience. This is the job, pushing through to do what needs to be done, and she wasn't going to let her present state stop her. Until Jemma Simmons showed up to force her to rest, doctor's orders were going to be soundly ignored.

"Yeah, we did," she acknowledged with a nod, her expression grim. "And then we were immediately thrown into an even worse situation, which is what I was dealing with before all this." It was a situation she needed to get back, time was very much not on their side in any sense, but she had no idea where to even start.

"Guess you could look at this as either a break from the bullshit or a bad reassignment." He wouldn't ask her about it, not without whiskey to swallow it down with. Raylan knew better than that; there was a lot of shit in the world.

He let his gaze drift back over the collected rooms.

"How many of these rooms you been through? Find anything that might be helpful? A basement? Records room or somethin'?" Even if the population was whisked away in some Revelations type Rapture, it'd tell them what the normal of here was. Or however much of that normal made it to the local governments papers.

Inconvenient reassignment would be the better way of putting it, but it was neither here nor there. The whole situation sucked and they needed to find their way out of it fast. Both of them had lives to get back to.

"Everything on this floor and the one above are just municipal offices," she said with a shake of her head. "Permits, receipts, ordinances — it all looks weirdly normal."

She paused then, finally leaning away from the support of the wall and putting her full weight back on her own two feet, and gave herself a little pat on the back for managing it without swaying or even flat out falling over. Good job, Agent Johnson.

"So, that's it? You're just okay with the whole parallel universe idea?" Because she was pretty sure most people pre-Chitauri invasion would have lost their shit if someone had proposed even something as tame as multiverses actually existing. Of course, there's always the other option. Squinting at him slightly, she added with a bit of both humor and suspicion, "Or are you just going along with things to keep the crazy woman calm?"

Raylan grunted, eyes still moving. Nothing was really 'normal', there would always be little quirks and idiosyncrasies but however hard his gut pointed him towards that, the rest of him had money on it being a waste of time. Journalists, maybe - if the town had one, maybe one got something down.

Something to think about anyway, but regardless, it didn't much help.

He would have continued his questioning if she hadn't spoken up, but the questions brought his eyes back down to her, lips curling faintly at the edges as she hit the nail on the head. "Well if you were hysterical or defensive, wouldn't help either of us would it?"

A reasonably posed question and he smirked a little with it. "Look, I'm not sayin' that what you're sayin', you don't believe to be true. I'm just sayin' I need a little more to go on and frankly, takin' that apart is somethin' we ain't got time for. This," he said, gesturing with an index finger lazily at the building that surrounded them. "Is a little more important. Hell, maybe I hit my head or somethin', I don't know. You checked out any of the town? I found the tavern 'for I got here, met a guy in it who knows what the place is called.. Ever heard of Mathias?"

Part of her acknowledged that smirk looked damn good on him, but the rest of her squished it back down where it belonged. She could appreciate his good looks and questionable hat choice later, when they got to the other side of this mess. For now, focus.

"Before seeing it on nearly every document in this place? Nope." Hands on her hips, she shook her head and looked down at all the scraps of paper littering the floor, already having spent far too long studying the note pinned to the bulletin board. "I checked out some homes earlier but— Nothing's missing. It looks like the people who lived here just left everything. Valuables, photos, clothing, there aren't gaps anywhere like they had to pack up quick. They just left. Or were taken. Or... disappeared."

"If this is a rapture, it's a damned weird one," he quipped, pleased that the name information checked out. That was always a nice feeling and a little less work for him. Asking people was so much easier than being the unfortunate soul going through all the paperwork. He guessed that was Daisy, today.

He was honestly surprised that she didn't push back against his view of the whole suggestion she'd put out. It was telling. She was level headed and prioritized, as far as he could tell in the few minutes they'd be talking.

"There any mines mentioned in those papers? Caves? Anything like that? If they're used to natural disasters, runnin' might be an option, but I don't see any damage that would suggest that kind of event." He didn't like having no clue what was going on.

"If there's no one here, except for a handful of people like us, we're gonna have to start thinkin' real quick about provisions."

A rapture. Huh. She'd worked hard to block out all her memories of St. Agnes and the she'd spent there between foster homes over the years, but now that he mentioned it... Yeah, no. She didn't buy it. Aliens and science disguised as magic and guys with flaming skull heads? Easy. Biblical end times? No way in hell.

She shook her head at the question about caves and mines, nothing she'd seen so far having mentioned anything like that. But then, she also hadn't been able to find any sort of maps anywhere...

"That... may be a whole lot more interesting to deal with than you think," she commented after a moment of consideration, before turning to head down the hall. "Come on, there's something you should see."

At the end of the hall is a little kitchenette, the kind usually found in office buildings. A sink, some cabinets, a fridge. Some tins of generic coffee, a few boxes of basic tea. Completely normal, and covered in the same thin layer of dust as everything else in the building. Daisy opens the fridge door and moves to the side, the little light bulb illuminating the contents within: a few apples, a homemade sandwich, a carton of milk, all of them as fresh as if they'd been placed there that day.

"Notice anything weird?"

Well, it was worth the ask, anyway. Mines seemed natural in the mountains, but maybe the North did it differently. Maybe they just imported from the south, he didn't know.

Curious, he ambled along with her, eyes darting into and taking in as much of each room that he could as he passed. It sort of felt like the Town Hall building was larger than such a size town needed, but Raylan didn't discount the possibility of it being more sprawling then he was aware. Considering how short a time he'd been here.

He followed her into the kitchenette, glancing over the dusty echoes of what he was sure was a perfectly serviceable coffee spot and towards the fridge with a confused little pinch of his brow. One that only got deeper as she asked her question.

Squinting, he reached in and picked up the sandwich with a careful set of fingers, frowning even more as he turned it this way and that in it's bag. He looked at the dust around them, back to the sandwich and back to Daisy.

"Why isn't it moldy." The sandwich was put back in so he could grab the milk out instead and open the cardboard throat at the top, just as carefully sniffing it. "This isn't sour either." He looked at the fridge for a long moment before looking back to Daisy like she might have an answer.

Well, at least it wasn't just her. With everything else going on, she wouldn't be the least bit surprised if she were just going crazy, completely losing her mind and seeing things in this weird place. But she isn't, so yay.

"Don't look at me, I don't know what's going on," she protested, letting go of the door so it could swing closed. She holds up her hands in an innocent gesture before giving him a rather pointed look. "But I think this place is a lot weirder than you're giving it credit for."

Sure you don't want to hear more about her crazy theories?

Raylan caught the door so he could open it enough to set the opened milk carton back onto a shelf before letting it close again.

"Maybe." But What kind of Weird? Raylan's world view was well grounded in a reality that didn't have any room for 'magic' or superpowers or anything like that. It was a lot darker, that way.

"But I gotta be honest, I'm runnin' outta places to start." He took a deep breath.

Yeah, hit him with your theories Daisy because he's drawing blanks.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

test drive — autumn

past deeds;

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject