test drive meme.

[fablemods]

Once upon a time, in a land far, far away... You snap awake with a sudden jolt, the sounds of nature surrounding you. The ground is warm beneath your hands, a press of fabric under your head. Sit up. Look around. This isn't where you fell asleep. Not even close to it. But with no one around you, answers as to how you got there in the first place are a little beyond your reach for now. If you decide to head off, don't forget your bag. You'll want that if you plan on making it out here. If you want to survive. And if you don't want to move, well...good luck. There's a shadow on the prowl. A rustle of leaves, a snap of twigs. Glowing eyes in the distance... -------------------- Characters find themselves waking up on the bare ground (or a bed if they're very lucky), a leather pack beneath their head, and entirely alone. It's not where they fell asleep that night. Isn't even close. The sky is the wrong shade, the ground isn't quite right. The only note of familiarity are the clothes on their back. Searching through their pack, characters will find a change of clothes, a few food rations, and something personal to them. They'll also find a pouch of wooden coins and a shard of mirror. Before they get a real chance to investigate those items though, they'll hear a rustle in the distance. The sounds of something moving around. It's their cue to get moving too. And somehow, all characters find their feet guiding them in the same direction. Off towards the Great Lake, less than ten minutes walk away, no matter where on the island they first woke up. Welcome to the island of Leutheria. Welcome to the Fablelands test drive. Above is an arrival prompt that players are welcome to use to introduce or test out any characters they are interested in bringing to the game. Below is an on-going event that takes place throughout the first two weeks of a character's arrival.(Though the wolf will still remain a constant presence on the island for the months to come). And of course, you are free to use this post for any other prompts you wish to use, or mirrorshard conversations too. All threads are able to be used as game canon, providing both players agree to it, and can ultimately be used for bonus AC if you wish to. If you have any questions, please direct them to the FAQ. And without further adieu, let's get on with the show! premise | faq | locations | wishing well | taken | reserves | applications | hiatus/drop | bonus ac

Once upon a time, in a land not so far away... You wake to the feeling of being watched. Of a set of unfamiliar eyes, of warm breath on the back of your neck. A jolt back to the land of the living, and it's gone. No matter how quick you are, how sneaky, the source of the disruption has long since disappeared, so you have no choice but to try and ignore it. To continue on with your day and try to set that moment of strangeness aside. You eat, drink, speak with others. Perhaps you explore a little. Whatever it is you choose to do for the day, that feeling from the morning won't return. And by the time the sun sets and the moon glows brightly above, you've likely set those moments of strangeness aside. It's not like it's anything new, after all. It's the same again for the next few days. No better, no worse. Something best ignored, right? A speck of blood on the doorframe. That wasn't there before, was it? A snap of twigs in the distance. A crunch of leaves. Claw marks gouged deeply into the door. Into the wall above your bed. Scraps of red fabric, turned darker with blood. Pieces of fur. Of flesh. Do you run and hide? Do you fight? Whatever you choose, it's definitely time to make sure your body parts aren't scattered next... ...what a horribly big mouth you have. -------------------- Since first waking up on the island, characters have been stuck with that feeling of being watched. It isn't a constant. Isn't more than a few seconds at a time, dotted throughout the day. Investigation has never turned up much, and there's never been any sightings of the cause of it all. Until now. Throughout the first half of the week, characters will find themselves suffering from that feeling of being watched on a far more constant basis. Rather than it being a one-off, few seconds occurrence each day, that feeling will last for minutes at a time, and on multiple occasions. However, it isn't until the fifth day that they'll start stumbling across physical signs of their monitoring. There are claw marks on doors. Spots of blood on the paths outside. A crack of twigs in the forests, or the imprint of bloodied paws in the snow. Ten days in and those signs start finding their way indoors. Wet footprints, tinged with red. Claw marks in the walls, the floor. Torn sheets and the smell of wet...something. Whatever it is that's been watching you, its finally decided to come and say hello. Two weeks in and characters will begin to have sightings of the creature, its fur dark and its eyes a glowing yellow. At times it looks like a wolf, prowling in the distance. At other times, it's walking on its hind legs, almost human were it not for the muzzle full of gleaming sharp teeth. Get too close, and it slips away like a shadow, gone between one blink and the next. It decides when to reach out to characters, not the other way round. It's after characters finally get a good look at the creature that it starts leaving...gifts. Characters will start to find familiar items from their home worlds amidst the mess. The remains of a childhood pet, perhaps. Photographs of loved ones, faces torn almost beyond recognition. It's only once it delivers its final gift that the creature retreats to the trees again: a blood-splattered item of clothing that clearly belongs to the person the character misses the most at the time, alive or dead. [credit 1 & credit 2]

Comments

[whirlrock]

"Howzer--" He stopped himself again, wondering if Sigyn was as right as she sounded. She gave a quick impression of someone experienced in the world, so he didn't press himself too much. The 'knightly' impression he was supposed to give off was something he was always willing to discard for the sake of being casual or, at least, letting others know he was more than just a set of armor and a kingdom behind his tabard. Occasionally, it helped that he could avoid being too structured in his behavior.

"Nice to meet you, miss... And, I guess I agree! I'm really used to knowing my neighborhood and now, of all times, I'm really out of my element..."

There was a little pause between the two before she asked her next question, which caught him somewhat off guard. He hadn't been expecting someone to tell him something that familiar. She had woken up the same way?

"That's... Yeah! Actually, that's how I found myself here, too! I was in the middle of training up with newer soldiers and in the next moment after, I was just lying out in the dirt nearby!"

Despite laying himself out flat, Howzer thought of his dignity only shortly thereafter--

"But, I got my bearings fairly quickly! North, South, East, West--I have a good grasp of it but this is completely new territory... So, I take it that you're not familiar to these parts, Miss Sigyn?"

[aworldanew]

She's a little relieved that somebody else had the same experience, and its hows; there's still a little bit of wariness to her, the knowledge that anybody could be part of how she got her, but for the moment, she's going to take him at face value. She could hardly imagine that she would be the only person to suddenly wake up on the ground somewhere that just seems a little... off for the planet she was on, after all. Somehow that seems really unlikely.

"Just Sigyn's fine," she says quickly, and then shakes her head in answer. "No, I've never seen any of this before in my life. I was in a bed, indoors, and then -- here I am, with somebody else's bag and absolutely no idea how I got here. How does it look from up there?" she asks, tilting her head back to glance at the sky and then looking back at Howzer thoughtfully. "Any sign of, I don't know, populated areas?"

[whirlrock]

Howzer wouldn't have noticed he and Sigyn had arrived in a totally identical way had she not mentioned the bag, though he didn't bother pulling it off his back for comparison. What was more important was what he actually saw when he left the ground. Flight above the treelines didn't really give him much--or, at least, anything comforting.

"No, I--When I went up for a bit, the only few cabins I found were all torn to shreds. It looked like storms went through them and..." He trailed off, frowning hard. It was a little discouraging to think that he was worrying the whole time that he might have been alone in foreign territory. After seeing the state of the cabins--

"Everywhere was ripped up, like a wild animal went through them. They looked like regular animal claws but... Well, much bigger. I think we might be in dire wolf territory and quite a few people must have gotten killed after settling here."

sorry about the delay, life picked up for a bit

[aworldanew]

Dire wolf specifically isn't a familiar term, but Sigyn gets the picture well enough. She frowns, fingers wrapping around the strap of the bag like she's getting ready to run. People are bad enough, but at least there's ways to reason, strategy to beat -- wild animals are a little more unnerving.

"I haven't seen anything, but I haven't been walking long, either." Hopefully whatever it is has moved on, or at least is resting. And if not, well, there's not much she can do about it right now. She's in the woods no matter what. "Do you know which direction the cabins were in from here? Though, I'm not sure whether it'd be better to go towards them or away from them, honestly," she admits -- at least cabins might mean supplies, but on the other hand, who knows what else might be there?