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anaplasiamemes2025-02-25 04:05 pm
anaplasiamod) wrote in anaplasiamemes2025-02-25 04:05 pm
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test drive meme 《 1
「INTRO」
【 CW 〗
Prompt 1: mild mouth and teeth trauma, viral zombies, waterlogged skin, risk of infection
Prompt 2: petrification, shatter damage, npc death
Prompt 3: corpses, gore, corpse puppetry, decapitation, spiders (sort of, think spider/crustacean)
Prompt 4: corpses, chest trauma, spider-like dead creatures, implied fatal parasitism
Everyone comes to Uruk the same way. A void-like portal appears and a cage of metallic goo springs forth from it, dragging you through a dark abyss. For the briefest moment, you catch a glimpse of the impossible, the void between worlds, somehow colorless, somehow devoid of light and dark. For a brief moment, you see a strange black spot in the distance. Then, looming up close, a massive dark structure.
Then...darkness. Cold.
You suddenly wake to the sound of blaring klaxons. This area of the city still has warning alarms - not every area does. This particular section of the city looks more like the internal area of a ship or space colony than some other sections of the city do.
A run-down derelict ship, that is. With rusty grates in places, cords dangling from exposed conduits, access panels askew. Only some of the light panels are functioning. Others are flickering ominously - or entirely dead. Some of the hatch-like doors are broken open entirely, smashed inward by something strong. Others are shut solidly - though they can possibly be pried open. Others keep trying to slam shut over and over but can't because of debris in the way.
Smeared handprints in a suspicious red-brown are visible on some walls and doors and there are some places where brown-red stains are smeared along the floors.There is legit a thing called color theory.
Something crawls under your skin. Metal is threaded through your flesh, clamped onto your spine. A strange metallic suit ripples over your skin, alien and almost alive.
The sound of the klaxons turns off, though the ambient red lighting still flashes from the lights that are still functional. In front of you is a strange little alcove, ripped off from a location that was transposed into this place, a covered dugout-type area with benches. They're covered in weapons. You'll have your choice from bladed weapons, blunt weapons, bows and quivers, and projectile small arms.
Better lock and load. You're on an express elevator to hell, going down.
ISHTAR
An AI figure projects from a janky projector, four-armed, her teal skin and eyes glowing. The image flickers and warps occasionally and the sound crackles but stays steady.《Congratulations! You've been chosen as a potential Vesper, a prospective agent of the city of Uruk. I am Ishtar, an artificial intelligence, here to guide you! You've been provided useful augmentations, including a universal translator and an environmental suit called an Enki suit.》Her voice is far too chipper for the situation, more like a summer camp counselor or a customer service agent than a stoic superintelligence.《Your Enki suit will be particularly useful. For now, it will offer full environmental protection when it detects dangerous conditions in your environment. In the future, if you're chosen as an agent of Uruk, you'll have far more conscious control. You'll also find that you've been given a helpful colored jersey.》They're extremely cheap mesh, in either red or blue for each person. She got the idea for the jerseys after finding an entire high school displaced to the city. From now on, any new arrivals to her "tests" will always wear them so everyone will know who's new.《You and other prospective Vespers will all be rated on your performance. The team color that performs best under test conditions will be given a special reward! I've learned from systems I've scraped that in some worlds, it's called a "piz-za party"!》She pronounces it "piz-zuh."《Good news! Right now, while your bodies are in flux from residual dimensional resonance, I'll also be able to revive you from death an unlimited number of times! While this won't be possible in all circumstances in the future, for now, barring unique conditions that I specify in situ, I'll be able to bring you back from the brink of mortal oblivion as many times as you need.》There's a pop noise, and a sound byte of a bunch of excited kids calling out "Yaaaay!" Holographic confetti flies up around her, a random bit of fun she found on a random displaced computer system. It's festive! That makes everything better, right?《To avoid skewing test results, please try your best not to die. The city of Uruk thanks you for your cooperation! I look forward to working with you!》
PROMPTS
1 【 WATER IS PATIENT 〗
The area you're in is strangely wet, the humidity high, water dripping down walls in places. It doesn't seem like it's excessively moldy. It's just moist everywhere; curiously, the water damage seems new.《Urgent! It is critical that you pay attention at this time. You are now approaching a pandemic isolation area. The intruders here are infected with an unfamiliar and highly contagious pathogen, and through unknown methods of fusion, they can issue large amounts of infectious fluids from their bodies. I am currently unable to cure or revive someone who is infected with this virus, so suit integrity must be maintained at all times. Sterilizing suit patches have been provided, but they must cover a perforation in the suits within 5 seconds of a suit breach or you will succumb.》When you turn the corner, there they are. The irises of their eyes are unnaturally light, bright eyes seemingly seeing nothing. Their skin glistens with constant clammy moisture. Their mouths are all wrong; the lips and the skin around their mouths waterlogged and cracked like gator scales. That's probably because of the water constantly spilling over black teeth down their fronts to the floor. The water never ends; it just keeps pouring from their mouths endlessly, like they're forever drowning.
They are forever drowning. They will always be forever drowning.
They seem to be messing with what are probably water pipes, recessed into a wall, movements a staccato of clumsiness, yet filled with purpose. With instinct.
They have only one instinct: to spread. To infect.
When they realize they're not alone, they all turn as one. They see people to infect, people that might interfere, and all start to arm themselves with whatever is on hand, as if they have experience with the challenge of bypassing the Enki suits - something that should be no shock when a few of them are wearing torn suits, sometimes with helmets that cause the water from their mouths to pool inside before cascading out through cracks and shattered visors. They know that to break into the suits, they must be gouged open, cut, that helmets must be broken.《They are called the Flood. They have a biological imperative to infect others. There are failsafes, permanent cut offs to the city's water systems, that must be engaged to quarantine the water supply of this section, or they will spread infected water to your prospective habitation area - and to the habitation areas of other survivors.》There are innocent people out there apparently - or might be. An admission she'd prefer to keep closer to the vest, but she needs help and everyone needs to know the stakes.《You have holographic map systems that will guide you to the failsafe cut offs. They must be stopped - at all costs.》Not an easy prospect. Even if you find the rooms on your holographic maps, the water main failsafes have complicated shut off instructions, with lots of handles to turn. The door seals of the rooms also won't last long under a barrage of high pressure water before shorting out.
The infected are also near close to dead so bullets will barely do anything to them. Much greater damage is necessary to take them down. And as more appear around another corner, it's clear this small group isn't alone. There is a swarm in here with you. And while they're uncoordinated, when they break into a run, they're extremely fast.
The ones that don't arm themselves with weapons like crowbars, knives from nearby habitation areas, or jagged broken pipes, turn and hold up their hands, water gushing forth from them as if shooting from a firehose. Your suit's helmet automatically forms just in time. The force of the water is almost enough to knock you off your feet.
It's extremely apparent that if you develop a single tear in your suit, a single crack in your helmet, the water will find its way in and if it does, it takes just a single. Tiny. Drop.
Water is patient, after all. Water just waits. Wears down the cliff tops, the mountains. The whole of the world. Water always wins.
2 【 HEART OF STONE 〗
It's too late to save her. It's already too late, the minute you lay eyes on her. A young woman, dressed in a mix of clothing - an Enki suit, like yours, but also other threadbare clothing over top, like a tattered utility vest, a tool belt with various tools.
She's already dead the second she runs into view up ahead, nearly skidding as she tries to take the corner into the hall you're in.
"Oh gods! Oh gods no!" Something lurches into view, its form roiling with uncertainty, moving like out of control springs tightly coiled together. It looks only like the idea of a human, if the idea were held in the mind of some unearthly being, shifting like water.
The saddest part is it doesn't even catch her body, her vest, or even her wrist. She has a large wrench still held in her hand - a weapon she didn't want to relinquish, not in this section plagued with threats. Perhaps she was even trying to reach the water main shut offs, coming at the problem of the Flood from another direction, sent from some other place in this vast city. The humanoid shape catches hold of the wrench and instantly a strange effect spreads through the wrench up to her arm. First the wrench rusts and dissolves into dust. She drops it as her hand starts to blacken and change, hardening into something rough, hard, and flaky. Her fingers curl up like a dead spider and then freeze in place.
She still staggers away from the being, even though distance won't save her now. It's still reaching towards her, grasping for her, but even if it doesn't touch her again, it's already over.
She screams in agony and terror as her body transforms, in places seemingly doing it from the inside out now, blackening, flaking, as her flesh turns into black carbon. She staggers with stiffening legs.
She sounds young. She looks young. 18 at most.
"Help me! I don't want to die!" she sobs when she see you. "I don't want to die! I don't want to -"
But it's too late. Her face is frozen in a rictus of terror as she staggers, trips on frozen legs. Her eyes are unfrozen just long enough to widen in horror at her mistake - at the fact her own momentum has doomed her even faster. She's leaning too far forward, her body weight on a leg that can no longer support her. It snaps above the knee and she goes down. The last thing that changes are her eyes, wild with terror, fixed on the floor that's rapidly coming to meet her.
She shatters when she hits the floor, into dust and pieces that look like charcoal, enough volume to fill the human body. The second she does, the creature that grabbed her suddenly blips out of existence.
But more of them are coming, rounding the corner into the hallway. They don't have eyes but if they did, they'd be locked onto you.
Fighting them isn't impossible but it'll takes a great deal of damage to make them finally break down, and after seeing how even just touching the wrench caused the girl to be consumed, it's perhaps unwise to hit them with any object you're still holding on to.
They don't talk, they simply reach out for you, break into a sprint with legs that never tire.
One of them is yours. One of them is meant to be your shadow. Dragging you into the dark. Together.
They were made for you.
As you move in the hallways around you, you'll find mounds of charcoal and dust, sometimes in the vague shapes of arms and heads. Sometimes there are two broken columns sticking up off the floor with a shattered mess of charcoal in front of them.
Depending on the stances of the victims, it seems that sometimes the lower legs miraculously stayed upright when the attached bodies broke off and shattered.
3 【 BAD TRAVELING 〗
The journey through the halls isn't exactly a fun one when there's so much uncertainty and it's about to get even less fun. A bad journey. A face peeks out from a doorway. An actual person.
But something isn't quite right. His eyes are open but strangely clouded over and his skin is a mottled gray. And the way he's leaning out into the hall seems almost too horizontal, an unnatural angle, head lolling.
"Help." His voice is distorted, granite crunching, echoing. "Help."
Something is wrong.
"Help."
Something is definitely wrong.
What's wrong is the fact his mouth is barely moving - and something is writhing at his neck, the only thing making his jaw move at all. What's wrong is all the splattered blood on his clothes.
The man shakes as if something has jerked his entire body around, as if flailing it to get their attention, but it quickly becomes clear that he's not the one initiating the movement - because his body is already so broken and damaged it can't take the strain.
His head falls off and rolls across the floor.
The body retreats and then a massive chitinous leg steps out into the hallway, followed by more equally massive legs, followed by a hulking shelled body, the size of a small car. The creature looks like some terrible mix of crab, scorpion, and spider, claws large enough to snap someone in half, barbed tail held tense. Its drooling maw is edged with jagged teeth.
The man that was dangling around the corner is not a man. It's half of a man, speared on the creature's claw and infiltrated with tentacles like a deranged puppet. Somehow the creature was speaking through the corpse, using it for its voice. But without its head, the body is useless now - and the jig is up. The Thanapod can't use it as a decoy to lure someone close anymore. The body is flung so hard it slams into the hallway wall and falls down in a crumpled heap, leaving a bloody smear on the metal wall.
And then the beast surges forwards, covering an alarming amount of ground quickly, claws outstretched, teeth snapping, stinger held menacingly, its legs clattering against the metal floor in thundering metallic tapping noises.
Every so often, something lights up under its shell, a phosphorescent glow just barely visible through the thinnest parts of the chitin. Whenever it does that, something strange happens - any implants start to malfunction slightly. The suits glitch out and bare patches open up, weapons sometimes melt away, translation briefly glitches. The creature is doing something, giving out some kind of field affecting the technology.
What's worse is weapons won't affect it easily. While bullets will crack the shell slightly, they won't go all the way through. Its joints may present a better target, however. Or it may be best to avoid a fight altogether - especially since this creature may not be operating alone.
And mind the tail. The stinger's venom is strong enough to kill a grown adult.
4 【 DINNER PARTY 〗
You must be so exhausted after fighting, and screaming, and running. So much running.《Good news! I have found a safe location for you to rest! At least for now.》It is actually somewhat safe. There are no current threats there, the doors are lockable to anything human-sized, watertight to keep out the Flood's infected water, and too small for the crab creatures to fit through. It won't stay safe forever, though. Eventually something or the other may break the door down. But for now, it's a place you can find temporary respite - and aren't your muscles burning by now? Don't you need to catch your breath?《While there was a threat here in the past, my internal sensors indicate it is long gone. I also have functional hard light projectors here so I was able to bring in refreshment.》Holographic hard-light tentacles allowed her to move the food and drinks in: little tins with pull tabs that have slices of a fruit vaguely resembling mandarin oranges, and little foil pouches with alien writing on them. The pouches come with little straws that can be used to puncture them; some kind of juice is inside.
Yes, you have in fact been given the Uruk equivalent of orange slices and a Capri sun.
In a room with quite a few dead bodies.
There's a long table here. It doesn't seem to be a dining table, though. Maybe some kind of fancy meeting table. Data pads are scattered around it, and dying holographic projectors show broken and glitching holograms, maps of sections of the city.
Sitting in chairs on both sides of the table are ten dead bodies, five on each side of the table, dried out and nearly mummified. Each of them had their hands bound to their chair behind their backs and their feet bound to the legs. They all seem to have died from some kind of massive chest trauma.
But instead of being caved in by something like a weapon, what's left of their chests and rib cages looks exploded outward.
Next to each of them on the floor is the skeleton of a some kind of insect-like long-tailed creature, curled up like a dead spider. And in front of each, set on the table like a feast, is the dried out husk of a massive leathery egg, the tops of them all cracked open.
A feast fit for a king, clearly.
Enjoy your juice box! You're doing such a good job!
5 【 WILD CARD 〗
Have a scenario idea that doesn't fit under the others? Do you want to combine threats and have your character deal with the suit-sabotaging crabs and the water zombies at the same time? Go crazy! Do whatever you want.
ENVIRONMENT
Combat isn't the only resolution to threats in the scenarios. The environment allows for escape, traps, and other hazards that can be directed at the enemies in the TDM.
For instance, there are hatches, tunnels, and maintenance tubes to escape through, with many interconnected rooms and hallways. Some of them are too small for the Thanapods to fit through or would force the human-sized enemies single file. There are storage spaces to potentially hide in, rooms that can be sealed off, some of which are watertight and/or have heavy enough doors to keep enemies out or at least slow them down before door seals are broken. Some of these rooms need to be hacked open or hacked to be sealed, but the option is there.
Maintenance areas can provide obstacles and platforms to climb up that are difficult or impossible for enemies to navigate. There are engine-like crushing mechanisms from machinery of unknown purpose, hydraulic presses, or compactors to trick them into climbing into, as well as obvious incinerator shafts to knock enemies down to their deaths, heat radiating up from the fires below.
Wall access panels can sometimes house breakable pipes of scalding steam, flammable materials that can be ignited with a spark, or dangerous super-cooled coolant that can instantly freeze enemies. In some places, these pipes are even clearly labeled as such.
Handheld tools left behind by maintenance workers can sometimes provide more damage than normal weapons, like plasma cutters, advanced welding devices, and high-speed saws.
GAME INFO
DETAILS
⌲ Powers and Belongings: All canon powers will be suppressed and characters will no longer have any personal belongings. If apped, they'll receive back the single belonging they're allowed to keep.
⌲ Implants: All characters will have the Base Implant, as it's required to provide the Enki suits, but players can hold off on primary and secondary implants if they're still deciding between them. If using primary or secondary implants, they'll still be janky and a little difficult to use as they need further calibration before characters' intro into the game.
⌲ Weapons: Weapons can be bladed weapons, chain weapons, blunt weapons, projectile small arms, or equivalent non-conventional weaponry like sports equipment. If you're not sure if a weapon would be an option to choose from, feel free to ask under the comment below.
⌲ Flood Infection: Flood infection is incurable and Ishtar can't heal someone with it, even with more flexibility in the revival options during the TDM. It's therefore recommended to not have your character get infected unless you want to kill them off.
⌲ Repair Patches: The repair patches provided can potentially save someone from Flood infection in the case of a suit breach by squirting in suit sealant, as well as a heavy duty disinfectant, sterilizing the skin. If there is an open wound under the breach, this will sting badly but sterilize the wound. A suit patch must be used within 5 seconds of a breach or it will be too late and the virus will spread through the body. Characters will have a chest belt with pouches containing the suit patches, which are in pen-like hypospray-esque pressurized holders. Jamming the end of the device into the breach will release the pressurized, disinfecting seal automatically.
⌲ Deaths: Provided the death isn't by Flood infection, being turned to carbon by the creatures in the second prompt, or total vaporization, characters can temporarily be revived of all deaths, even brain injuries. This entails Ishtar dragging the body off with hard-light tentacles for revival elsewhere, grabbing their weapons with them, and then sliding them back into the situation out of a tank with their thread partner (or another partner) when they're revived, handing them back their belongings. After their first TDM posts, apped characters will forever be locked into the maximum 2 deaths rule and that includes if they participate in future TDMs.
⌲ Invites: The game is invite-only. First round invites are limited to people on the mod's friend list and anyone they want to invite in turn. However, after an initial app deadline for game start, apps will be rolling. If cap hasn't met, invites can be extended out to further players, or players can request a mod invite on the app. So even if you don't know someone that can invite you, you can feel free to play on the TDM.
⌲ Apps: For the very first app rush there will be a deadline and then a brief app closure for the starting events of the game. Apps will open on 3/5 and close on 3/14. This will allow the mods a week to process the initial apps for the game. Game start is on 3/17. Apps will open again on 3/17 and be rolling after that rather than cyclical, only closing if player cap is met, or for situational app closures for large plots.
arrival
You don't have to take one. [She displays her own chosen pistol.] The rest of us are well-armed enough.
Re: arrival
[what's absent in her gaze is not respect, nor appreciation. simply deference. she respects the wiseness one gains in years - but she does not immediately assume a grown woman can know what's best for her, just because she might.]
[it's the kind of look someone who understands what it's like to have parents but never grew up with the expectation of needing them gives to someone obviously mothering her. like the gesture's something slightly alien, even if it's welcome. her reply is soft-spoken, but firm.]
... I appreciate the thought, Miss. But - [and she swallows, her eye tracking back to the pistol] - as much as I don't want to, either, I'm afraid what either of us want me to avoid doing will matter little to the consequences, if I truly let "I shouldn't" become "I can't", before I know if it's even possible, in the moment, to afford to say "I won't".
no subject
Having a weapon you aren't able to use can be more dangerous than not having one at all. Are there any that you're more comfortable with than that one?
no subject
I ... it's - not my ability that's the problem, it's that ...
[her mouth twists. she sighs, shoulders sagging under a seemingly heavy weight.]
I'd be much more comfortable with a reliably non-lethal option, if I had any to choose from ... and, um .. at a glance, our assessor doesn't seem to have provided any.
[she wipes her face with one hand, miserably.]
I don't - like killing.
no subject
[She casts an eye over the weapons and selects a mid-length pole.]
Something blunt is most likely to be non-lethal. A pole will give you some range to fend off threats. Does that sound more comfortable for you?
no subject
[she says that off-handedly, as if needing to know how to hurt other people was commonplace in her childhood - her comparable childhood, anyway. she can't be much older than her teens.]
... I might take the staff, though, if I can't. Just to be on the safe side. [and so she reaches out to take the pole from Holoway, and sets it beside herself, while she searches for an alternative anyway - and eventually, in the weapons pile, she finds an extendable rod-like object with a well-molded grip, about two-thirds the length of her arm at full extension. she nods, hefts it in her hand, rolls it mid-grip at a horizontal level across her flattened palm, wobbles it this way and that, arm extended - raises her arm, drops it, catches it before it hits the ground with her other hand. frowns in thought as she tests how it feels on her grip, her wrist, her whole arm, to bear the weight and momentum of it as it moves through the air. then, with deliberate, pursed-lips thoroughness, she goes through a similar routine with the pole.]
[it seems like that would be that, when she exhales, giving a firm "mmh" aloud, and sets to looking for a way to more easily carry both, possibly, with her later. until, with a sigh, almost as an afterthought, she adds, her tone of voice deeply melancholic:] I'm grateful for the help, and the advice, I really am. I'll probably be happier with something like this than the alternatives. ... It's one of my deeper regrets in life to know that I have very good aim.
no subject
A weapon you're comfortable using is always more effective than one you're reluctant about. If you have more confidence in your unarmed combat skills, then choose something that can be tossed aside easily. Though personally I'd prefer to avoid close-quarters combat.
If we ever find phasers or something similar, I'll make sure you get one. Then you can put your good aim to use with something non-lethal.