flawedmemes | TEST DRIVE MEME

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TEST DRIVE MEME

01. ARRIVING IN PELEA
A cold wind singing down from the white-capped mountains which hang blue-black in the distance stirs your cheek, the tall grass all around you. A bough creaks as the wind makes it tremble, and the dappled shadows drift over you, leaves rustling. As you blink awake, you hear the quiet hiss of water over stones. You are not where you once were!

You and a large group of strangers are blinking awake, pulling yourselves up off the dirt, grass, and rubble near a small wooded stream. There is no evidence of civilization in sight, and as you exchange stories you realize that you must decide what to do.

Will you head past the trees and towards the mountains? Deeper into the forest? Stay put and wait for help to arrive? You might even try to meet everyone else, and either convince them to band together... or head their separate ways.

02. CITY SLICKER
There are many cities throughout the world of Pelea, and in most player characters, the Flaws, are welcomed as curiosities. From the lively, bustling markets of colorful Vairaya to the grimly efficient and stately mountain strongholds of Draichurith, your characters will find a wide variety of cultures and races to interact with and investigate. They could be seeking empoyment, answers to the mystery of their arrival, or a quiet place to drink away their worries.

03. WILDCARD!

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Arrival

"Well... this definitely isn't Kansas," Lark murmurs to herself, pulling her sunglasses low over her nose as she stares out at the rest of the world around her. On second though, maybe touching the mysterious objects that appear in your workshop from nowhere wasn't the best idea. In her defense, nothing ever got solved by pretending it didn't exist. And there were really few defenses against mysteries artifacts.

At first she thinks the artifact is fairy related, but the winged fae are still locked away. And tailed fae would deposit her in their natural element - water. She doubts it's fae.

She surveys the land around her, wishing she had a weapon of some sort to defend herself with as she expects attack. When she finds another person nearby, she stands casually despite her wariness.

"Did you do this?" Her voice is calm, flat almost. A straight question she expects an answer to.

wildcard

The place reminds her almost of home. Nearly militant and so structured. It's a country built on force and power. Rafa wouldn't have hated this place.

So she comes to Draichurith most often. Only when she starts to feel homesick, which isn't a frequent occurrence but it happens enough.

Or she can be found traveling the forest. Maybe even the mountains. She's lost her magic since arriving, which means her body is suddenly very mortal once again. It doesn't deter her from seeking magic out, though. She's not the type to give up so easily. She had magic once, she'll find it again here.

Sometimes, work sucks.

Kara takes whatever jobs she can, from whoever will give them, only occasionally turning things down if her morals disagree with them. The problem is that the dangerous jobs pay well, and she needs the money.

Today, she's stalked a Manticore halfway up a mountain, after tales from the local villagers suggested it's cave was up there (they were right). Someone is paying her very highly for the poison that can be extracted. If she manages to get back alive.

It's not looking so great for her right now.

Manticore that she's used to are nothing like the one chasing after her now, and she's incredibly grateful that she waited until regaining the use of her wings before taking on this task. They're the only thing keeping her from ending up as a corpse on the ground.

Right now, the manticore is trying to chase her away from the mountain, knowing it has the upper hand in the open air, so Kara is doing her best to stick close to the rock face.

What she doesn't expect is to nearly knock into a traveller as she rounds a corner. Kara pulls herself up fast, wings snapping against air.

"You'll wanna run."

In case the manticore speeding through the air didn't give that away.

Edited 2016-06-17 01:37 (UTC)

What Lark is doing so far up the mountain, alone, god only knows.

Okay, actually, she does know why she's up here. Rumors of magic have her travelling this world far and wide, chasing down anything she can learn about how this world operates. Especially how the magic here works. Centuries of knowledge of her own world turn out to be useless, but she'll be damned if she doesn't try to know the place she's know stuck in. Maybe she can even find a way home...

If she wants to go home. She's not completely decided one way or the other about that fact.

What she does know is that she hates mountain climbing. She's become accustomed to the modern way of living, which was essentially that nearly anywhere you wanted to get to could be reached by some technological mode of transportation. Anywhere that couldn't be reached that way, usually someone else was sent beyond her. Her life was far from easy, but she didn't miss the days of climbing mountains and traversing forests.

As heels knock rocks free, she reaches a small plateau. The path ahead is easy, making her wonder at who formed the paths and why, but she stops when she hears sounds.

As she strains to make sense of the sounds, someone comes darting around the corner snapping so fast that Lark pushes herself back against the cliff just to avoid colliding with the woman.

The winged woman.

Lark tries to piece together what she's witnessing, but before she can the woman speaks. Stranger or not, Lark doesn't take her words lightly. The manticore helps solidify the warning, too.

Without hesitation Lark turns and runs. She draws the sword she purchased while here, grateful to not be unarmed. "You couldn't have pissed the beast off somewhere else." Despite her accusations, she doesn't sound angered. Just annoyed.

Approaching a bend in the trail, Lark takes off for the edge, sliding down on her back until her feet connect with a lower part of the path. It gives her some much needed distance as she takes up an offensive stance. "Are you planning to run or help?" She calls, keeping her eyes on the manticore chasing after them.

Look, okay, Kara has a very strategic plan that right now just happens to involve running the fuck away until she’s got time to actually formulate a strategic plan. Another person in the vicinity throws an unfortunate spanner in the works, because Kara isn’t quite mean enough to let a random bystander become manticore lunch.

(She does consider it briefly, but decides she’d end up feeling too guilty).

“Keep it busy!” The woman is armed, which will hopefully be enough that she doesn’t end up dead within the next thirty seconds, while Kara flies a little higher into the air, eyeing off the boulders along the side of the cliff. Without her full powers, she can’t get close enough to the manticore to land a blow (not without getting her ass poisoned) but she can always use the environment to her advantage.

Her new best friend just has to not die until Kara can get a boulder lined up with the manticore.

There's a brief second where Lark wonders if "keep it busy" is code for "distract it while I run away." It wouldn't be the first time.

It doesn't matter either way. Either she'll keep it busy until the other woman can set up whatever she's up to, or she'll find a way to end the manticore herself. With a few simple words, fire flashes onto her blade. The only spell she's managed for only so much time. "Don't take too long," she calls back as the distraction proves effective. The thing rounds on her, looking none too happy.

As it's tail whips out at her, Lark is quick to step sideways and run forward. Too close in for the tail to snatch at her. However, close enough for the teeth to snap. It tries to pin her and clearly tries to devour her before her blade can get close. The closeness only gives her enough time to shove her blade horizontally between the teeth, stopping the manticore from closing it's mouth on her. The beast lets out a terrible sound as the fire burns it, she takes advantage of the distraction to wedge herself against the cliffside and raise her boot to the beast's chest. She shoves, using the cliff as leverage, and the thing stumbles back enough to give her breathing room again.

"Any day now," she calls to wherever the winged woman is, holding her blade in front of her to keep the threat of fire present in the manticore's mind.

It's the opportunity that Kara was waiting for, as she watched the fight. As Lark shoves the manticore back, Kara braces herself against the cliff in just the same way, pushing loose boulder down the mountain.

The manticore doesn't quite recover in time, trying to fly away only to have one of its wings pinned by the boulder. Kara isn't wasting any time, having thrown herself off the cliff right after the boulder, pulling up with her wings at just the last second and driving her sword into the manticore's chest.

Unsurprisingly, it's not a huge fan of that, and starts thrashing around trying to a) break free from the boulder and b) throw Kara off. Luckily she's not that easily dislodged.

Though the tail is going to cause her a bit of trouble if something isn't done about it.

"Gimme a hand, will you?" How exactly is totally up to Lark.

A boulder. She dropped a boulder on it.

It almost makes Lark smile. That's creative. And effective enough. It didn't kill the creature, but it had it down enough for them to be able to make their move on it without being cornered for once.

Taking advantage of the opportunity, Lark moved for the end closest to her: the tail. The head would have given her a better advantage to finish the beast, but that tail was lashing back and forth. It caused her to have to duck and jump out of it's way. And if they weren't careful, it'd take Kyra out too. Kyra had the best advantage on the beast currently, though, and Lark wasn't going to let them lose it.

She catches the bare end of the tail with her boot, pinning it to the ground. She only has seconds before it whips out from under her, but with those seconds she steps over the rest of the tail, digging her boot into the tip as she pushes off of it. She brings her blade down in a sweeping arch, fire and blade meeting flesh and fur. There's a loud hiss as the fire burns the flesh while the blade cuts it clear in two. Then there's screeching as the thing thrashes more.

"Kill the damn thing, already!" She yells to Kyra, turning to drive her blade into one leg, trying to pin it to the ground. She doesn't have the strength to keep it for very long.

Ford took a very deep breath, looked around at the breathtakingly beautiful scenery of a planet that looked remarkably a lot like the rather unfashionable backwater planet known as Earth and wondered if maybe he would finally get to replace those very nice shoes he lost before. The question was still on his mind and he was giving it some very deep consideration. He placed his hands on his hips, huffed, and sucked back in some more air in order to prove that he was going to be thinking very hard about this.

"Yes," he concluded at last. He unfurled his towel, took out his wrapped up Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, tapped it impatiently when it refused to light up, stamped his one shoeless foot into the mud into his own footprint again, and then shook his head. "Or not. Define this."

"If I have to define it, you probably didn't do it." There's an air of dismissal in her voice. Nothing like condescension, and more like she's stated a fact and is moving on from it. She doesn't recognize the man. Not that she's the best with faces, but she's far from being bad with them.

Although, maybe there is some judgement on her part as she takes in the towel and the shoeless feet.

"By this I mean bringing me to where ever this is abruptly," she finally answers. She doubts he did it, but that doesn't mean he doesn't know anything.

Again, she has so many doubts. She's certain she's dealing with an enemy, after all, and fae are so easy to spot. They're bound to be hiding about somewhere.

"Is it possible," he said and he began to speak very slowly in a way that most Earthlings might have a chance of being able to follow, "that you were traveling by hyperspace. Because - and please follow me on this - that is probably why you ended up here. It's a very, very common problem. Everyone knows that."

Ford Prefect knew this piece of information almost intimately since a similar accident had left him stranded on a prehistoric Earth for five years. Wherever he was seemed an incredibly great deal better, though he was fairly distressed by the fact that the ring on his thumb was not picking up any chatting on the Sub-Etha network or indeed seemed to be displaying any king of signs of activity that would indicate it was even working. This was a problem.

Lark deliberately chose not to be a vampire, preferring magic to the physicality of being a vampire. Currently, she wishes she had chosen vampire. At least then she could have crossed the clearing in a second and choked the man for talking to her in such a tone.

Instead she just slides her sunglasses off and stares him down. Her look certainly conveying a sense of impending doom if he continued like that.

"I was not travelling in space of any kind. I was at home in Prague and working in my workshop." Her voice may be dripping with a little more venom this time. "If it were that simple, I think I'd know it."

She sighs heavily, pinching the bridge of her nose between forefinger and thumb. "It was likely a trick of fairies that brought me here. And you are clearly not one of them."

Ford knew fairies. Or rather, he knew the more technical term for them, which was that they were simply teasers. It was an old sport for rich kids to play on primitive planets, which tended to result in a lot of folksy superstition popping up. He'd read quite a lot of it on Earth and found it on the whole to be a very embarrassing thing for humanity in general. He also knew Prague as well. It was nice.

He smiled in that unnerving way he often did and seemed incredibly nonplussed about any sort of impending doom given that he'd already been through that sort of thing before and it was tedious to get all worked up about it again. Simple, he thought, was among the very last words he would use to describe traveling in space. He humored her. "A snatch and grab, is what you're saying. Possible. Though it is possible I was very, very drunk last night. I only suggest this because I often am."

The fairies explanation he was dismissing, not because he didn't believe in fairies, but because the only fairies he had ever met were the sort of people who got caught up partying for so long and so tirelessly that it was usually them that needed to be abducted and set to rights on how to get their life back in order.

"Do you often wake up in strange forests after binging?" She dismisses his next excuse easily. She may not have an answer, but she knows what she can rule out. She wasn't prone to vices ( anymore ), so no drink. And she'd never been to space. So neither applied currently. "Those explanations may explain you, but not me."

Then again, faeries didn't really apply here either. At least, as far as she was aware. She knew why she was a target. And this man didn't seem to buy into her talk of faeries. So that didn't explain how he came to be here.

She pinches the bridge of her nose. Any longer on this and her headache will turn into a full migraine.

"I don't think we're going to find any answers between the two of us," she finally says. "It's clear neither of us know how we got here, or even where here is." She raises her head finally, looking around her. She gently taps her pockets, realizing she had no phone on her. No. It would have been on her desk, out so she could see it if it rang.

"We'll need to find people."

"Pretty sure I didn't." But things have been pretty damn weird in Mia's life for a while, so she can't say she's 100% certain this isn't some side-effect of making contracts with Old Gods. "I mean, a minute ago I would't sworn I was tripping like never before, but everything's too eerily normal for that."

Which makes it all worse, actually. A bad trip she can deal with, cross-universal kidnapping? Mia's already way over her head back home, she can't deal with this shit.

"Did you do this?" Asked with a smirk, because she obviously didn't... unless she did. This is too crazy.

At least she has something useful to offer. It was too normal for that sort of thing. It was too normal in general. This could be any day in the forest outside of Messina. Or any forest in general.

It just feels wrong. She feels it to her core. Something's off and she can't quite place what else it is that gives her such a bad feeling.

Then the girl questions her. That catches Lark's attention fully. She looks to her, almost offering a smile. No one's asked her that question yet. "No," she answers truthfully. "If I had this would be a lot easier.

Accustomed to magic like this?" Or she assumes magic. There's no technology around them, and she has a soft spot for magic anyway.

Easier? She doesn't comment further on, but that's enough to give her an idea of what kind of person she's dealing with. Someone with magic, probably a Blessed or whatever analogue they used wherever she came from.

Mia shrugs nonchalantly, reaching for her lighter and a pack of cigarettes. "It's a thing back home, in a way. You get a Favor, you do magic." As long as you kept on serving your deity of choice, or honored whatever pact you and a supernatural had going. "Nothing as annoyingly disconcerting as this particular fuck up, though."

"Favor from who?" Lark can't help herself. She's been driven in her own world to understand magic, hearing of magic that differs so greatly only sparks more curiosity in how much is different. How that would affect magic there. How it might even apply to magic in her own world.

Then Mia takes out cigarettes, and politely Lark looks away. Not out of judgement, but she's been prone to vices in the past. No need to cause further temptation.

"Who ever did it doesn't seem to have wanted to stay," she finally adds. "If it was just a singular person. It would have been nice if whoever it was had stuck around to at least explain." She sighs. "It might be best we move before we become the stars of a B-list horror film."

Mia doesn't answer until after she's puffing some smoke clouds. Seeing how Lark looks away, she decides against offering a cancer stick. Maybe later. "Gods, mainly, but there's some that strike deals with supernatural creatures, too. Kind of a bad idea if you don't trust them completely, though." And you should never trust a thing that's asking a piece of your soul in exchange of some of its own, but alas.

"You think it was just one person? As far as I can tell, we're not from the same neighborhood. Pulling that kind of shtick isn't something your everyday shit stirrer would be able to do." Which bothers her a good deal, since that means they're being used by someone or something way above their level.

Gods giving gifts. That was interesting. In her world the gods weren't real, just beings of power who fashioned themselves as gods. And you didn't want their gifts anyway. They always came with prices too high for anyone to have to pay. So maybe her "gods" weren't so different from Mia's own.

"Never rule anything out without evidence. You'll miss something that way," she gives a shrug. "But no, I doubt one person could have done this. I'm still trying to sort out what this is necessarily." A whole other world. Not Fae, not even Hell. That was interesting to her. And other worlds with other people and other magic.

Too much, too fast.

"Maybe locals will have some stories to tell?" She suggests. Local stories, even if they didn't find them true, always had a grain of truth somewhere in them.

If Fiore is looking for magic in the forests, she might be in luck.

It didn't take Lannistia long to realize she'd been lucky to still have her magic when she arrived here. She was a little sorry others were now missing what she could only assume felt like a chunk of themselves, but there was nothing to be done about it. For both those who might be saddened by the sight and also for protection of herself and her twin -who knew if there were crazy magic-haters here as there were at home- she kept her casting limited. A spell here or there wouldn't go awry. Out here in the forest, however, she was largely alone, who would notice something a little more flashy being cast?

Lannisita flourishes her staff in wide arcs and the blade on the end sinks into the soft dirt, sending ice crystals sprawling out from the end and crawling up the bark of a nearby tree.

At home, it'd been easier to do widespread research without having to leave the mansion often. Which suited her, she had battles to fight still when she wasn't researching. She had no end of people at her disposal to bring her what she needed or investigate for her and send her details. She wasn't fond of modern weaponry in her world, but phones and cameras had simplified her life a great deal.

So it kind of sucked to be back in a world with no technology and no resources. At least she had her grimoire still. Even if the old magic was useless, she could record things in it for the future in this world.

Without her vast resources, Lark was left with travelling, mostly on foot, to find any instances of magic to investigate. To collect information and date and try to understand this world better.

Recently, she'd heard stories of someone living in the forest here with magic of her own. When Lark finally came upon the woman, she stood at the edge of the clearing and watched her work, raising an eyebrow at the display of power.

"Are you native?" She calls, not bothering with introductions.

This was why it was bad to go off and practice magic alone. How many times had her Keeper warned her not to, a templar could come along or simply a foolish human too scared to ask questions before striking a blow? By all rights, she should have at least had Gianni with her, but she didn't wish to trouble her twin with something frivolous like a passing fancy.

And now she was alone with a human in the forest who'd just seen her magic, for better or worse. At least she'd asked questions.

Lannistia jolted a bit in surprise and whipped the staff up from the ground to hold out between them on instinct. An instinct she quickly quelled when she saw no threat from her 'visitor.' "No, I'm from Thedas. Are you? From here, I mean."

Lark didn't flinch at the threat. She'd move if she needed to, but she respected the threat on it's own. There was a reason this woman was keeping to herself in the wilderness, and Lark related to that reason on a deeper level. Even if she still mingled among people more often than not, but she couldn't learn about the magic in this world if she were isolated herself.

"I've not heard of Thedas." But Lark was beginning to understand that there were many worlds she'd would never have heard of. She shakes her head at the question.

"I'm from Earth. Or a version of it, from what I've learning," she sighed heavily. "I was hoping to find a native who performed magic. I'm trying to learn more about the magic of this world."

As a courtesy, she added, "The locals have been talking about you some."

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TEST DRIVE MEME

Larkin Fiore | original character

whoops forgot this bit: wildcard!

happens all the time!

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Arrival

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Wildcard! Let's go forests

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