rapturefree | baby you can drive my car

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baby you can drive my car

It's anticipated. It's expected. We're all about expectations, aren't we? Sort of? Maybe? Regardless, it's the first official

TEST DRIVE MEME

You probably know the drill by now. If you don't, here's a quick rundown: test drive memes are a game's way of gauging interest and such. It's a way to play around in the environment without the commitment of apping, maybe see how well that character you're considering gels with the setting. This one will be open indefinitely, or at least until further notice. You don't need to be apped to the game to test drive a character, or even reserved, or even want to reserve. However, if your interest is indeed piqued, reserves are thisaway, applications thataway.

As of this writing, we don't consider anything that happens in the TDM canon unless you'd like to transfer any threads that happen here to the main comms (provided they don't interfere with pre-established game events, of course). TDM threads are just a way to get a feel for a game, or in case you need that pesky writing sample for an app in progress. We don't recommend you do a standard intro post, however - save that for the game proper!

We don't have a set entry date for the game proper just yet. Once we accumulate some interest, we'll be sure to let you know!

Some resources we recommend that you check out if interest continues to abound:

Cast | Setting | Rules & FAQ | Locations

PROMPTS:

i. do you hear the people sing?
You've heard the rumors circulating about Atlas and his bandits for months. Even the upper echelons of Rapture's high society were having trouble burying their concern under the careful veneer of professionalism. What you didn't expect was an open attack. You'd just been passing by, but the poor souls who lived and shopped and made their living on this street have just found their entire livelihood set aflame. People are saying it's a bombing, while others protest that it must have been something down in maintenance.

Right now, it doesn't really matter one way or the other. The homes and storefronts have been reduced to sheeting flame as hairline cracks go cobwebbing up the glass, the only thing separating the city from a watery grave. Whether you choose to get the hell out of dodge or help the wailing survivors is up to you, but regardless of what you choose to do, this section of Rapture is rapidly coming apart at the seams.

ii. who's your daddy?
You've no clue whose bright idea it was to tail the Little Sister. It might have been some gang of spliced-up nobodies thirsty for some extra ADAM. It might have been your best friend's idiot plan. Hell, it might have even been yours. All you know is that no matter how appealing the thought seemed at the time, you and yours are in for a world of hurt. The Little Sister just had to shriek once and her armored protector came barreling into the scene, drill humming to life with a sinister whine. Guilty as charged or caught in the crossfire, you're in for the fight of your life with a Big Daddy, one of the most dangerous things in Rapture. Good luck.

iii. a part of the masterpiece

Fort Frolic, they say, is the hub for creative artistry. Sander Cohen is either a wildly inspired artistic genius or a madman depending on who you ask, but the alcohol runs the same no matter how you slice it. For tonight, the Fort is yours to enjoy at your leisure. Take a gander, gamble everything you've got, have a drink, maybe sit in for a show. The only thing Cohen loves more than his exclusivity is rampant attention, and tonight he's on full display. He's even torturing - er, entertaining a lucky pair of dancers in Fleet Hall! Don't mind the wires threaded in and out of their clothing, doubtless unspooled over all those important parts of the nervous system and ready to unleash a burst of fatal electricity at a moment's notice. They've got to be just for show.

One thing is certain about the possibly-deranged Sander Cohen, after all: he certainly keeps you on your toes!

iv. wild card! make up your own scenario

We prefer third-person, present tense prose, but if you're just in it for the fun you can write in whatever floats your pontoon. Have fun!

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OPTION DEUX operation fuck the big daddy

Actually Iman knows exactly whose bright idea tailing the Little Sister was. It was hers.

"This way." She waves an arm - her right arm, the organic one - at her partner in tailing. "Just around this corner."

They are getting awfully close. This wasn't supposed to be a hands-on tail job, but it might have to get that way if she doesn't watch her goddamn step, and she knows it. But she just needs to see if she can make eye contact. Nothing threatening. Just a little glance, to see if there's anything human left in the little girl. Atlas' continued insistence that they're anything but never sat well with her. How unscientific can you get, trusting the word of a man you've never seen, who's provided no empirical evidence?

As it turns out, eye contact is all it takes.

"Get 'em, Mr. Bubbles!" shrieks the child, wild eyes burning bright, and Iman jerks back, catching the arm of her companion.

"Okay," she snaps as the Big Daddy lights up red, locking in on them. "All right. Plan fuckin' B."

She doesn't hae a plan B. She has a literal handful of plasmids, a shotgun, and a pistol. But no plan B.

Edited 2015-09-16 20:03 (UTC)

option one

It's like a wave breaking over him, if he'd ever really had any experience with waves or beaches or anything of the kind. The first surge of percussive force is enough to topple him, the blast of heat scalding and immediate. He can almost feel his skin crackle as it blisters. He rolls over, blindly, away from the worst of the flames.

Some immeasurable distance away, someone's crying.

He's on his back, watching the Pauper's Drop sign smolder into ash.

He has to get up.

He has to move.

Tim closes his eyes and groans and tries to lever himself to his feet. High above, with a high, splintering sound, the glass has begun to crack.

option two

The drill slams into the patch of floor that had, two seconds ago, been occupied by Tim's head, shrieking as it tears easily into the worn wood floors of Neptune's Bounty. Tim rolls, pitching violently to his feet, staggering unevenly ahead in a single-minded effort to get the fuck away from that thing someone apparently decided was worth pissing off.

The Big Daddy roars, the drill droning in eerie counterpoint to the its owner's low, menacing rumble.

Big Daddy. Someone here has a really sick sense of humor.

Tim picks himself up, eyeing the thing opposite him warily. It'll come at him quick, ramming him into the wall in what will doubtless be a perfectly calculated crushing maneuver. Once it comes at him, he'll have to throw himself to side. He'll have to move quick. He can't move too soon. It'll just adjust for the difference in angle and oh god, fuck, how is this his life right now? He doesn't deal with things like this. Not physical things, nothing as tangible and there as this.

His breath catches in his throat as the Daddy's eyes blink crimson and it charges.

"Did you, perhaps," snarls Rush, his gaze withering and his diction merciless, "actually have a Plan B in mind, or did you simply not think to enumerate it as such?"

He has a policy.

A policy in which he does not get drilled through the chest cavity by something that is most assuredly far less intelligent than himself.

"Fucking excellent," he says, watching the armored hulk's manifold eyes hum vibrant red. Rush sighs and opens a hand with a shrill, electrical snap redolent of engaging circuits. The bright blue bolt of a high-energy, high-velocity, high-voltage electromagnetic current nearly burns his retinas as he sends it arcing for the target in question, which immediately howls its displeasure as it finds itself victim to the disagreeable sensation of being subjected to a continuous electric shock.

"If we die from this little maneuver," says Rush, the picture of indolence, "I will be very displeased."

option one

Ideally, optimally, preferably, this would not be the way in which Rush would spend his day. Possibly night. Such things seem purely fucking relative at the ocean floor which is, he cannot prevent himself from thinking with utter vehemence, a fucking terrible place to choose to construct one's isolationist capitalist refuge with the flawed masquerade of free market preached frequently and intolerably in order to somehow mask how completely and entirely this project qualifies for little more than industrialist onanism.

In short terms, as far as revolution goes, Rush considers himself completely fucking unsurprised.

The collective brisance of whatever chemical work went into the blast has reduced the vast majority of the storefronts to rubble, an outpouring of fire and black smoke being systematically belched into the confining, claustophobic system of magnified tubing that seems to make up the vast majority of Rapture's buildings.

He does not feel right.

Rush braces his palms against the ground, gritting his teeth, and exerts pressure and unidirectional force to press himself to his knees, then to his feet.

He puts a hand to his head. It comes away warm and wet and red.

He drops the hand to his side again.

He marks an unerring line past the tumbled debris, past the muffled cries of whatever unfortunate souls have been trapped beneath, and cuts his way cleanly to the glass itself.

The low, rending sound of two surfaces coming out of alignment is overpowering.

He turns and begins tearing through the rubble. He requires some sort of welding tool, absolutely fucking requires it and he will require it immediately unless they would all like to suffer the absolute misery that is drowning on the ocean floor, an undesirable fate that seems to be looming in their collective possible future.

option three

He's not been drinking. He is wholly uninterested in pursuing any sort of artistic bent for the benefit of others, much less himself. Judging by the way the dancers below subtly tremble with each slow, ponderous step, he's even less likely to offer any services to Mr. Sander Cohen in the near or distant future.

He does not watch. He turns and studies one of the nearest slot machines, running one finger along the elegant grooves and contours of its exterior, and in a fluid, continuous movement, drops to his knees at its base. He taps at it vaguely, almost lazily, in an effort that may seem to the outward observer, rather useless. Andrew Ryan has long since prohibited mechanical tampering of any sort.

Rush smiles faintly.

He's never been one to do as ordered.

"Just give me a damn second," she snaps back as he hits the hulking abomination with a burst of blue. Her hand goes immediately to her pistol, armor-piercing bullets loaded (she'd had an inkling she might need them), and she fires as many shots as she can before it recovers from its paralysis and jerks forward again.

"Fuck!" She darts aside, narrowly missing the heavy drill, the point of it just barely catching her arm, shearing easily through every layer of fabric she has, nicking the skin. That's gonna get in infected if she doesn't deal with it, which she will, later. When they make it out of this alive.

She rolls and lands between the creature and the still-shrieking child. Probably not the best place to be, but she's nimble and the time it takes the Big Daddy to turn around is enough for her to raise her left arm and slam it with a wave of frost.

The smart thing to do now would be fire her shotgun as many times as she can, but her trigger arm is burning like a motherfucker and the girl is still crying, and some bullshit instinct has her turning away from the threat and reaching out to the kid.

"It's okay!" she says feverishly. "It's okay!"

Thank fuck Asadi is fast. He separates from her in a streamlined duck to the other side of the brute as it debates, fleetingly, the merits of pursuing him versus pursuing Asadi.

It lurches in Asadi's direction, and she halts it accordingly.

Rush raises the heavy industrial crossbow that rapidly became his weapon of choice and looses a bolt for the thing's thick metal carapace. It shudders beneath the impact, the thick latticework of frost groaning against its sizable bulk.

"Hit 'em, Mr. B!" the child urges, its face screwed up with outrage, skipping nimbly away from Asadi's outstretched fingers. "Get 'em! Hit 'em!"

"Iman," snaps Rush, left with little choice but to fire another bolt at the thing as its frozen shell cracks and it charges for her.

Rush using her first name has always been a neon fucking sign that her shit is about to get wrecked. She turns wildly, unbalancing and landing in a sprawl that would mean death if his instincts weren't on it. She knows she only has a handful of seconds before the electricity wears off, and it is quite close to her now, and she's got nowhere to go.

She drags the shotgun from the sling on her back and pumps four agonizingly slow electric bucks into it. Stuns it every time, but it's still struggling and groaning, ready for more. And she's out of shells.

She hurls another blast of ice at the hulking thing and hauls her ass around the nightmarish sculpture, rejoining Rush at its steadily thawing back.

"I'm out," she grunts, tossing the shotgun and holding up the pistol. "I only got a few left here. I'd straight kill someone for a fucking frag grenade right about now."

He loads a fresh bolt into the firing mechanism, his movements fluid and economical despite the roar of adrenaline flooding every available neuronal pathway.

"As always, your plan was sound and well-reasoned," says Rush. He backs away smoothly from the armored diving suit, firing trap bolts along the wall in a systematic serial loop, each one uncoiling neatly with the bright hum of electricity.

The ground trembles beneath the thing's feet as it turns and whirrs its drill to life in an anticipatory winding back before the inevitable bull-rush, apparently prepared to plow through the equivalent of five consecutive live wires.

Rush loads an incendiary bolt into the curved steel cross. "I'd get ready to move."

Jay doesn't have time to think. He is accustomed to being thoughtless - enough that either he acts on stupidity and impulse or freezes completely. It was thoughtlessness that pushed him forward, to this point, toward the little girl's shriek and the enraged, labored groans. People were scattering around him, probably the assholes who thought to provoke it in the first place, but it only took a moment to spot the person caught in the Big Daddy's glare.

So he doesn't, really does not, think before he opens his hand and releases a swarm of fucking bees from his fingertips. The creature catches itself in the path of its charge, thick arms flailing helplessly as the insects swirl around it.

Jay bolts forward. "Tim!" He reaches out and snatches at Tim's sleeve with sweaty, itchy fingers. "Run!"

He shuts his eyes with a sharp intake of breath as the Daddy's lumbering footsteps stagger into a charge - and then, abruptly, is replaced with the high whine of angry insects.

He didn't expect to see Jay here. Even less did he expect to see him splicing. Jay's palm is rough when he seizes Tim's arm - rough with the cobbled honeycomb skin you only get from a plasmid.

It looks wrong. He feels like he might be sick.

"Are you - " he begins angrily, and aborts the sentence when the drone of the bees dies into a panicked buzz. Fuck. Okay. They can handle this later, clearly. He hadn't gone out with the intent of picking any fights today; he's not carrying weapons, and he'd have to be at the end of his rope to consider splicing as some kind of viable option. The hell is Jay thinking, messing with his biology like that?

Wordlessly, Tim obeys and surges into a run as the Daddy regains enough wherewithal to realize it now has two targets.

[i]

[It took him months to build the Joestar Real Estate Agency up again. Now it was gone. Up in literal flames, and Joseph Joestar himself had just barely escaped. It wouldn't be entirely unbelievable -- he was way too tall and way too muscular for someone who was a real estate tycoon back home -- but he wasn't entirely unscathed either.

Cursing to himself, the old man picked glass out of his arm with a wince. He had to barrel through the glass just before the flames poured in. Damn it. He was pretty sure his back was burned too (it is), but at least his arm was alright (it's not). Wobbly pulling his huge frame up to stand, he backs away from the small building that used to be his and stares.

Joestar Real Estate. Completely engulfed. Joseph had to get several feet back just to get out of the heat. He lowers his arms and stares as bit by bit, it starts to collapse. His heart sank along with it.]

Oh my GOD!

[Joseph never felt like he belonged to Rapture. Especially when his real life was back in the surface, back in New York... but god dammit, he built that! It might not have been nearly as big as the international agency he ran back home, but...

Another explosion rocks somewhere nearby. Another storefront, another bomb. Joseph jumps and whirls around.]

Shit! [Did someone else get hit too? Crap. Well, pity party's over. The old man wastes no time sprinting in the direction of the latest boom. The closest person he sees is gonna catch sight of a hulking old man gunning toward them.] Hey! Are you okay?!

He was lucky to have only been passing by, and not to have been someone who actually lived down this street. Lucky to have been caught in the blast peripherally, and not right in the dead center of it. Lucky to have never cared to do anything more than glance at the headlines in the Rapture Tribune detailing the dangers of trusting Atlas and his 'parasites'.

So lucky, in fact, that the force of the explosion practically catapults him forward and lands him heavily on one arm with a sickening snap.

Pretty much the last thing he expects is a veritable giant of an old guy to be towering over him, wreathed in the blast's flames and debris.

"No," says Tim, completely honestly. He twists onto his back, groaning and hugging his arm to his chest, all the while trying - and failing, miserably - not to look at it hanging from a limp, unnatural angle. "Crap. I, uh." He grimaces. "I think it's broken."

Well, the kid's honest at least. Joseph knelt down and looked over Tim's broken arm.

"That's... that's definitely broken."

He fought back the minor wave of nausea that hit his stomach as he moved to the younger man's other side, offering an arm.

"Here, can you move? We need to get out of here."

Nice to get that confirmation. It pretty much feels broken, judging by the pain and the way it feels like things in there are moving when they shouldn't be and oh god. God. Shit. Tim's just - not going to think about that. Given the fact that he's pretty firmly attached to his arm, that's proving to be more difficult than he'd like.

"Yeah," he says, his voice strained. At least it's not his leg broken this time. It's an absolute pain, in the horribly literal sense, to lever himself upright by leg strength alone but he manages it, leaning against the older guy as much as he dares. "No, yeah, I figured we should probably - yeah."

He darts a look over one shoulder, his brow dark.

"Atlas, huh?" he says, tired and toneless, dull with grim acceptance.

Joseph might as well be a brick wall in comparison to the younger man, but even with the support he knew he wasn't going to stop it from hurting. He hooked his arm around Tim's good shoulder and lifted him up as best he can.

Speaking of broken, his left hand gave an faint, mechanical creak as he moved them. That's his artificial hand. Part of his forearm was prosthetic, the result of a battle from a long time ago, but he normally kept it hidden under gloves and armbands or sleeves. Point being, you're not alone in the hurt department, buddy.

"Probably," the old man answered as he let go of Tim. "Bastard wrecked my business, I barely got out."

Tim hunches his shoulders a bit more securely around himself, pain and sympathy eliciting a sharp wince. He sways faintly on his feet. God, but his head's pounding. The high, angry tone humming in his ears probably means something bad, but he doesn't have the mental capacity to sort out what.

"Shit," he says, not really sure what else one should say to that, or to the fact that he maybe-sorta heard the other guy's arm distinctly creak? "I'm - sorry." He gives his head a quick shake to clear it, and is rewarded by a bright spike of pain to the temples. Fantastic. "Some revolutionary."

Belatedly, it occurs to him that getting your business detonated might have more than a few unfortunate repercussions. Reflexive tears sting his eyes, products of heat and the agony pulsing up the length of his useless arm, and he rubs at them with a soot-stained shoulder. "Uh - you got anywhere to go, or - ?"

Joseph only hummed at Tim's condelences. He appreciated it, really, but it's sort of hard to get in the mood to say thanks when it all just happened. He rubs at his bleeding arm.

"No kidding. What the hell does he think this will...?"

Then the next question came up. Joseph paused. Shit, he didn't think of that. His automatic answer was to say he had his place, but if they could target his agency... oh, god dammit. His apartment.

"Dammit! I need to get home."

"Where're you at?" He blinks at the other man blearily, trying to push past the haze of smoke in his eyes and in his head.

Oh god. Smoke.

The pressure around his chest is like iron, his shoulders quivering with low, ragged coughs. He doesn't remember if he took his pills with him when he left. It was supposed to be some stupid grocery run - the last thing he or anyone else expected was to get an actual bomb going off in the street.

"Don't think it was aimed for anyone in particular," Tim ventures when he can breathe again, which is - okay, not particularly comforting. That's just great.

"Maybe, but I've got family here. I need to make sure they're..."

Then Tim's coughing. Joseph pauses and frowns.

"First thing's first, let's get out of this smoke."

"Come on!" Jay ignores the tone of Tim's voice, because yeah, no, this is not that moment. He bolts, but he's faster, he's always been faster.

"Tim!" He whips back and gets an eyeful of Big Daddy, huge, rusting, angry.

"Fuck," he breathes, and he opens his hand again.

It hurt the first time. The first time he threw up until there was nothing left in him. Now it doesn't feel like anything. Almost.

The Daddy jerks back, and Jay fires again, desperate, stupid. He's running low now, he feels the itch, the drain of EVE. Great. Good. Fucking perfect.

"Come on," he says again, grabbing Tim's arm. "Come on, this way."

There's a vent. He can see it. They can get in there. And it can't follow them. That's what they'll do. The rest comes later.

Please just let this be the fire. Don't make him seize here, not now. The tremble in his limbs could just as easily be fatigue, no guarantee any of it's about to herald the prickle of an incipient convulsion. Christ, fuck - and this is would be the worst time for it.

"We can - get them out, maybe," he mutters, never mind the needling instinct to do just the opposite and get as far away from the rush of flames as possible. "Maybe - call someone. Cops, security - someone's gotta know, right?"

Someone. Yeah, he has no idea how the police force here works. For all he knows they just work for whoever's willing to pay for their time. Actually, that's probably exactly how it works.

The bees go swarming out from the reddened pods of flesh marbled over Jay's palm and Tim has to look away. Again. Again. He can't even think about how badly this must be fucking him up, how much Jay's body is going to make him pay for it. ADAM's addictive. It shreds your physiology, practically overloads it. His stomach lurches.

Jay's cutting a beeline for a vent that opens into some kind of crawlspace and Tim ducks, wrestling the iron grate away.

"Get in, go," he hisses. The Daddy swipes an unwieldy hand at the insects buzzing about its head, for the moment out of their collective hair. The reprieve won't last long, and Jay's fucked himself up enough. Tim shoots him a glare. "Get in."

Jay scrambles in, crawling as deep as he can before turning back and hoisting himself up, reaching out to haul Tim in after him. The Big Daddy recovers and launches after them, clanging hard against the wall, making the walls ring around them. Jay heaves out a cough and ducks his head, covering his ears, the one hand still roughened and itching.

Outside the creature keeps circling, pacing and groaning, slamming on the wall.

"We just have to wait a bit," he whispers, feverish. "We just have to wait and he'll go away."

He barely makes it.

The shrill of the thing's drill slamming into the wall grates across his ears and he grits his teeth, worming as deep into the vent as he can, all the while praying that it doesn't connect to anywhere terribly vital. It'd be just their luck to hide from imminent death, only to roast alive in an air vent that links all the way back to Hephaestus.

"How do you know," hisses Tim, unable to sound anything but coldly furious at everything going on in their lives right now. "These things are relentless, don't you know that?"

"I don't!" he snaps back. "I don't know what else to do!" He looks at his hand, trembling slightly, the skin still faintly abnormal. It slams the wall again, and he looks up with a jolt.

"We'll keep moving," he resolves, his voice audibly unsteady. "We'll, we'll come out somewhere, somewhere far away." He twists to look over his shoulder. This is too familiar, too much like those tunnels where he found Tim's files. "Somone else'll go for the kid and, and we won't be its problem anymore."

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baby you can drive my car

Iman Asadi | original

Tim Wright | Marble Hornets

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Nicholas Rush | Stargate Universe

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let's do two, cause I am unimaginative

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Joseph Joestar | JoJo's Bizarre Adventure

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emetophobia warning

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warning for body horrorrrrrr and insects oh boy

why did I pick this plasmid seriously god

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