tushanshu_ooc | Test Drive Meme

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Test Drive Meme | #29

TEST DRIVE MEME - TU SHANSHU EDITION!

Itching to try out writing a character? Then rev up your engines, grab your accounts, and slam your way into this meme! Here is a venue for you to try out whatever character there might be tickling your fancy, from fandom to OC, for as few as one and as many as MANY. Seriously, there's no limit.

How do you partake in this fantastic congregation of character testing? Why, by following these simple steps:

RESERVE

But wait, there's more! For the low, low price of $9,999.99, you can even use one of our handy prompts when you tag someone. You could even pick one with a Random Number Generator to help decide which prompt to go with!

Haggling Over Something in the Marketplace!
Maybe someone else saw the exact same shiny thing you did at the exact same moment! However shall this be resolved? Remember: blood is extremely hard to scrub off of turtle shell!
Dramatic Chase Sequence!
You're running away from something! It could be anything, from a rampaging kirin to a gaggle of overly enthusiastic children! One way or another, you can't stop, and much like a katamari ball, you feel obligated to grab everyone in your path along the way to keep them out of danger! Or perhaps you're more the sort to try and knock them into it as a distraction...?
Where There's A Will, There's A...?
The Life and Dreaming Planes have been merged, and sometimes what start out as wishful thinking becomes lured into reality. That slick new motorcycle or pile of kingly treasure you were just daydreaming about? Surprise! Though it may only stay for a short while before it disappears again, so make it count. Hopefully you're not the type to daydream about terrible things befalling people you don't like...
SECRET UNDERCOVER MODE ACTIVATE!
The three major kedan families all have their own agendas, and you've chosen to entangle yourselves with one (or more!) of them. Are you hoping to shift the balance of power? Gain some favours? Perhaps you're on a mission to bring a criminal to justice, or maybe you just want to get the cream of the crop from the black market.
WILDCARD!
Go nuts. Suddenly your character is fighting dragons! Good God, they've found the Millennium Falcon drifting in the ocean! Do you really feel the need to polish every paving stone in the Earth Sector? Please note, Wildcard options can also be what you can choose to do if you aren't yet comfortable in the Tu Shanshu setting, and would prefer a more 'dear-mun'-esque experience. Please specify in your post!

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A: Water Sector: Fancy a swim?

Daud knew something was wrong even before his head broke the surface of the water. Where before he'd been skimming over the tops of weeds and rocks, his path dogged by a hagfish in close pursuit, he was now sure he could see bright white tiles gleaming underneath him.

The strangest thing, though, was after he swam to the surface and stopped. Nothing nibbled at his heels or streaked with sharp teeth towards his leg.

For a minute, Daud didn't move; he just bobbed in the water, watching the buildings lining the canal. None of them looked familiar. None of them even looked real.

B: Earth Sector: How about a climb?

It's early evening, and Daud is sitting crouched on a rooftop overlooking the street below. He's hard to see from down below, but he makes absolutely no effort to hide from anyone above street level - it's easy to spot him just by standing on a balcony opposite. His red coat almost gleams in the half-light.

He looks like a man watching with purpose, but he's been crouching on this rooftop for hours now, and still hasn't moved. One might almost think he was a statue, if he didn't occasionally shift his weight from one leg to the other.

Someone's peeking over the edge of the canal's wall, her expression both playful and somehow distant. "You're not where you're supposed to be. None of us are. You shouldn't try to be a mermaid. You've got all the wrong parts."

He's not in the Void. Even if Daud could enter it without sleeping, kneeling at an altar, or - more recently - walking through a painting, he knows what the Void looks like. This isn't it.

And the woman looking down at him is a much better sight for sore eyes than the Outsider.

"I'll try to remember that," he says eventually. A better sight, definitely, but she speaks in the same maddening riddles. "Where am I?"

Edited 2015-07-22 03:24 (UTC)

River laughs a little in response, folding her arms under her chin to regard him bobbing in the canal. He was a mix of emotions that she could read on his face -- and what an interesting face, with stories to tell -- but the question was straightforward and so deserved an equally straightforward answer.

"You're in the water, silly."

She definitely isn't the Outsider. The Outside's idea of humour isn't usually so direct. Daud feels a measure of relief that he isn't dealing with the black-eyed bastard again, but the relief is tempered by the idea that he's stuck in the middle of another damn mystery.

"I noticed that," Daud says. Against all the odds, a hint of a smile is playing on his face. "This isn't the same river I jumped into. How is that possible?"

Klaus was busy getting the lay of the land, and what better way to do that from the rooftops? Klaus liked to be prepared for when things would, inevitably, go tits up. He didn't know how they would go tits up, or when- just that it was something that frequently happened wherever he went. Having a birds eye view of the city, and making note of strategic areas to hold and choke points couldn't hurt.

And then, just a building away he spotted the silhouette of a man, his back to him, crouched like some kind of gargoyle. Klaus could move quietly for a man of seven feet and pushing three-hundred pounds. He kept his footfalls noisy as he approached, however, signaling his proximity with a wave and a greeting.

"Good evening."

It was a good thing he didn't try to stay quiet. The barest whisper of a noise, and Daud would have blinked out of sight and put a knife to the newcomer's throat. But the deliberate noise roused Daud's interest without triggering his self-preservation instincts, and though he didn't turn around until the man waved, he still tracked each footstep over the rooftops.

He nodded back. "Evening." A large man; the sort of man who would have been living high and well in Dunwall, his death worth quite a lot of money to someone somewhere in the city. But this wasn't Dunwall. With each passing hour, that became more and more obvious. In Dunwall, people didn't approach strangers on rooftops. "What are you doing up here?"

"Same as you, I expect." Now that he'd made his presence known, he moved to the edge of the roof, only a few yards from Daud. "Surveying the area. I've picked up on bits and pieces of past occurrences, and I like to make note of areas of importance as well as evacuation routes. That sort of thing."

According to most of the denizens, the trouble had passed. But Klaus was not a stupid man- Idealistic? Yes. Honest? To a fault. But not stupid. He was attentive, and he listened. Hushed whispers promptly cut off and hurried, furtive glances in the markets. Something was amiss.

He lacked contacts. But worse, he lacked a team. Klaus wasn't suited to working alone, but until he got better acquainted with the other residents, he had to make do. He wanted to help. But he needed to get a feel for things before he was much use beyond brute strength.

Klaus wondered if this stranger was of like-mind. Another trying to get their bearings. Or perhaps he'd interrupted something sinister.

"Klaus Reinherz," he introduced himself, and gave a gentlemanly bow. "Have you been here long?"

"Just got here today," Daud replied, returning his gaze to the street below. "I swam up through one of the canals in Water Sector."

Water Sector. Districts, Daud had assumed, and so far he was right; but he'd never seen districts look as different from one another as these did. In Dunwall, districts were divided by purpose, not appearance.

But if he started listing all the differences between Dunwall and Keeliai, they would be here all night.

He didn't ask how long Klaus had been here. The man's previous answer made that obvious enough. Instead, Daud put one gloved hand on the rooftop to steady himself and looked over. "Daud," he said, by way of an introduction. He was an unknown in this city. No one would care what his name was, or how he'd entered it. "What past occurrences did you pick up on?"

Klaus gave a curt bow, ever mindful of his manners.

"A pleasure, Daud." But there were bigger things to discuss. There wasn't room for small talk.

"A number of worrying things. Recent kidnappings and attacks. There was an... incident about a year and a half ago that I don't have much in ways of details on yet. Between that and the rising tension with the locals, I feel like I've walked to the precipice of ...something."

Living in Jerusalem's Lot, you picked up a sense for these sorts of things. This wasn't the first time worlds collided for him. He was starting to develop some theories.

A; any sector;

Introducing: a man perplexed by a coin.

He's exceptionally still, save for his hands, which are turning a juulan over and over, occasionally holding it up to the sun to confirm that yes, it does have a hole through the middle. The first person to get close enough to him, however, is going to receive a sudden snap of focus to them, accompanied by a thoroughly affronted look. "Your coinage has holes in it."

Because that's the thing to focus on when you've just been transported to a new world.

B; water sector;

Hunger's making him bad-tempered. More so than average. Melek knew this was going to happen eventually, when he'd first grasped the odd confines of this situation, but he had forgotten, a little, what it was to be this hungry. A gnawing at the inside of his bones, the staggering awareness of just how much life was in even a tiny city.

Fortunately for him, the first thing he'd learned was control. After a fashion. There would be no ripping of throats and savage rending of breasts, but neither was he trying to be subtle in the way he watched passersby from his fountain-edge perch, always tracking the nearest one with sharp eyes. Anyone with half an observation instinct would notice something off about him, from the too-still posture to the clenched jaw to the ever-flickering eyes; anyone who brushed too close would promptly find themselves hissed at, a distinctly inhuman sound.

The boy--man? no, boy, definitely boy--has the obvious look of a Foreigner, and from the sound of it he's still fresh off the boat, so to speak. It's an odd detail to fixate on, but Ravel knows all too well the strange little things the mind tends to fixate on when it's been thrown so far out of its element.

"Not done much travelling, have you?" he asks blithely, looking back at his shopping list. Anton had kicked him out of the Hotel to get some shopping done. Ravel wasn't really sure if that meant he'd been deposed, given that he'd staged a coup to overtake the Hotel, but at this point he didn't much care anymore. Anton was mending and that meant Ravel was in a good mood.

"Greece, Hungary, Japan, East Africa, India... Spain before they changed over to the Euro." He shot the boy an amused look. "Granted, some of these were a few decades ago, so you wouldn't remember them anyway. And I suppose that's entirely dependent on whether you're from some version of Earth."

Klaus was out doing a bit of shopping and job hunting. He had an armful of groceries and in his other hand, a bag with some essentials he'd forgotten to get on his first day. He'd stopped when what appeared to be a young man had an outburst of hissing. A normal person would have probably ignored it, maybe quickened pace, chalked it up to some minor insanity or performance art. Klaus didn't quite live in the normal world, however. Probably on account of being so damned tall. He could only really look down on it from his upper slopes, curious about the lives of those who couldn't reach the higher shelves of kitchen cabinets.

He took in the young man's appearance. His posture was rigid, and he could see the muscles straining in his throat, like a starved dog trying not to go in for the kill. Red flags were immediately up.

"Are you quite alright, sir?"

Sonja made a habit of observing people. You didn't really have to be when someone made a habit of hissing at people, though. As she passed, she took a gaze at him. Posture was all weird. She walked past him a distance and then took a seat on a bench next to the canal and pulled out her phone. She zoomed in on him, snapping a few pictures.

Was he casing a place for some devious activity? Maybe he was a new foreigner out of his element? If the latter she should probably go talk to him, seeing as how she was an official employee (volunteer?) at the welcome center, but that sounded harder and less fun than just sitting down watching him.

Maybe she'd decide to go over... eventually.

Not done much-- Melek snaps his fingers shut over the coin, a too-quick flicker of movement, and takes a closer look at the new person. His brows rise a little. Pretty. Exceptionally pretty. Maybe they just come like that in his world. "Who calls their world Earth?" he wants to know in the next second. "That's a criminal lack of imagination. As well as name your dog, 'Fur'--"

A pause, the sentence chopped off half-finished. His dark gaze goes, suddenly, distant, like he's thinking of something. "Ah," he says then. "Wrong skein." A tip of his head, and he's rolling the coin across his knuckles, very little attention actually paid to the motion. Every time he moves it's like he's executing the gesture all at once, a destination rather than a process. "This place likes 'Earth' variants."

Edited (inappropriate breath reference oops) 2015-07-25 23:26 (UTC)

Of all the useless, pointless, utterly infuriating questions-- wait. People did that when they were being too polite to be straightforward, didn't they? Melek squinted at the man -- up at the man -- juggling loud annoyance with the idle wonder about social mores and the consideration of how difficult it would be to just... take a bite.

Probably prohibitively difficult, mountain of a man that the other was. A quieter, more frustrated hiss of sound had escaped him in a moment, and for now he didn't even care about the giveaway-- wait, no. No, he needed to care, animals and revenants didn't encourage people to share lifeblood. Hell. Shit. Words. Melek dragged his mind away from the nearly all-consuming press of life he stood outside, grasped for something that sounded sapient. "I'm fine."

Blatant lies, especially when paired with the way he'd edged a few inches away. He was stuck here. Couldn't just step away and leave a confused bleeding mess behind him. Had to think about things he hadn't in, what, decades?

He had the manners of high nobility, but the practicality of a soldier. Theoretically, Daud knew that combination must have been possible somewhere, but the dichotomy of it was simultaneously grating and confusing. He'd never known a nobleman not to have a price on his head once you asked the right people. If Klaus had a price on his head, it was only because of his sheer size.

Daud didn't have any sort of sense for worlds colliding, but he did pick up a sense about people. And right now, looking down at the street below, he couldn't have agreed with Klaus's conclusions more.

"What incident?" he asked. Daud wasn't told anything about the place's history - just that they were on the back of a continent-sized turtle, and he still wasn't sure if he believed that or not. He'd seen stranger. "Is it to do with what's bringing us here?"

Klaus internally berated himself for being so suspicious off the bat. It was, perhaps, a side effect of living so long in the city of monsters and miracles. You never knew which was what. And he couldn't make assumptions about people just because one had hissed at him like an angry cat. The young man didn't look rabid after all. Well, probably not rabid. Maybe. He wouldn't rule it out.

When the stranger had practically spat his reply, Klaus's concern grew.

"My apologies. You seemed ill." Klaus kept his tone even and calm. "Do you require assistance?"

"A fight, if I understand correctly," he said, watching a Kedan below haggle the price of some fruit at a market stall. He hesitated, and then corrected himself. "Perhaps more of a battle. My apologies, I wasn't there and haven't gotten much of the details yet. But the creature who so kindly allows us use of its back was ...gravely affected. And the man responsible murdered five of its children."

There was something about the way his jaw tightened and his fist clenched that betrayed the roiling fury under his otherwise controlled and composed demeanor.

"I believe, before, it was bringing people deliberately. Now...? I'm not so sure. Many things are uncertain at the present time, it seems."

A: Any sector

[The buildings and street fade up from white blankness like a staticky connection--at first in black and white, then in colour, then with sound. It's not the place he meant to be. Nowhere near. Wait, what is this? Is this real or some trick of the sorceress?

[No, she's dead, they beat her.]

Sefie!

[Irvine's heart pounds as he scans the area, walking long-legged down the street with his coat flapping behind him and his hat shading his face. Most of the people on the street are humanoid, but some of them have ... things, scales and wings and horns. Monsters? Some new ... junction? Is this the sorceress's endgame, in case she lost, just shoving them into some space filled with monsters crossed with people, as if that would stop them from fighting back?

[One of them comes at him and Irvine's shotgun jerks up, and they back away instead. Yeah, you stay back. He'll damn well shoot if you get too close, mutant freakazoid.]

Quisty! Zell! Squall--Rinoa?

[The crowd's faces blend together as he walks, calling out every now and then, jerking away from anyone who gets too close. His wrist is practically spring-loaded with the way his shotgun keeps jerking up defensively. His knees are shaking. Damn it. How long has he been walking? He can't tell. He managed to heal himself, but he's been on a hair-trigger for days. They all have.

[Hours. It could have been hours, and he hasn't even found the other end of this place. And none of the others have answered.]

SEFIE!

Edited 2015-07-27 07:32 (UTC)

[So, an armed young man looking pale and twitchy and calling out names that don't answer. Newcomer is the obvious conclusion. And, predictably, there's no one else even approaching useful in the immediate vicinity.]

[Which means that if she doesn't want someone getting shot in the streets and an inevitable diplomatic incident that someone will have to smooth over, China should likely do something helpful. Ordinarily, that would constitute a magical shove, but she's also on a crowded street and has a fondness for not getting swarmed.]

[Instead she moves into his path, a few feet ahead so he has time to see her coming, and smiles at him.]

There are easier ways than yelling to find someone.

The switch flipped almost in an instant, don't touch me to curiosity. Melek stood in a rush that took him another pace or two away, head cocked, sizing up the stranger all over again. Calm. That wasn't usual. Did calm say confidence or pacifism? Either way, if he'd been perceived as a threat the posture would be different. Weight shifting away or for a weapon. There was something he was missing, but he didn't have the patience to chase those thoughts around in circles right now.

"I haven't eaten in a while," Melek said finally. No great manipulator, he; the sentence was artless and true, if lacking something important. His tongue tripped over his teeth with predictable gracelessness, distracted by the underlying siren song of the living.

Later, he'd consider being vaguely embarrassed.

[The voice makes Irvine spin, his shotgun already half raised, but then he stops when his gaze rests on the most beautiful woman he's ever seen. And he's seen a few. She's gorgeous, and if he were being polite he would take off his hat, give her a bow, hell, lower his gun--

[No. His mental defences slam up and so does the shotgun to his shoulder, barrels loaded. She looks just like Matron.

[Like the sorceress. The only reason he doesn't fire is because she doesn't have the tattoos and ... other stuff, the remnants of previous junctions she's kept to boost her power. And she approached him, on purpose, got in his way. She wouldn't do that if she could just kill him from the crowd. But he snarls:]

Back off.

[She can see, very distinctly, the part where the newcomer decides she's a threat, and really, that's just rude. She hasn't said ten words to him and he certainly hasn't been here long enough to learn her reputation.]

[China eyes him carefully. She doesn't care to bet on her odds of surviving a shotgun blast unprotected at this range, nor on snapping her shield up in time should he happen to fire. He's just upgraded himself to something that needs neutralizing. But she raises her brows anyway, keeps her tone artificially light.]

There are more polite ways to refuse assistance, my dear.

[She shifts her weight back, poised to move if necessary. Laces her fingers together, and watches.]

You were ... offering assistance?

[Yeah, right. Just her lifting her hands makes him tense, even though she doesn't follow up with a spell. Irvine keeps the shotgun levelled and takes a sidling step back. No backup. None of the others are here. How can he take on the sorceress alone? If she is? Maybe she is. Maybe he's in a time before the junctioning turns her into a mutant freak. Long before.

[Damn. That makes way too much sense.]

I'm not usually the type to turn down a pretty lady, but I don't need the help you're offering.

[Another careful step back, trying to keep his awareness on everyone around them too, trying not to stumble or run into an ambush.]

Edited (adding a thing) 2015-07-27 09:29 (UTC)

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Test Drive Meme | #29

Daud | Dishonored | Brand new muse, please be gentle

I'll go rough AND YOU'LL LIKE IT j/k ilu

GET OUT

MAKE ME

... yeah I got nothing I guess you can stay

B

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Melek Angevine | oc | dusting off the vampire

A because B would lead to bad things ;)

B because this can only end well

B

whaddayatalk how could that possibly go wrong

the best

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nothing could possibly go wrong

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Irvine Kinneas; Final Fantasy 8;

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