TEST DRIVE MEME

[ryslighelpers]

TEST DRIVE MEME: SEPTEMBER

Welcome to the Ryslig Test Drive Meme! Below are a few prompts to get you started, but you may make up any prompt you desire! Please take a look at the navigation page for rules, setting information, and links to reserves and apps. Have fun!

SCENARIO ONE

You wake up on the beach thoroughly drenched with your mouth full of sand. The salt water causes various cuts and scrapes on your skin to sting and the sand isn't helping. The air is slightly humid, ruining any feeling of refreshment you might have gotten from your dip in the ocean. There are lights in the distance but the unfriendly scent of gunpowder fills the air. If you're lucky, you're alone. If not, you might find yourself staring up into a pair of monstrous eyes or down the barrel of a local's shotgun.

SCENARIO TWO

So you've just arrived, and already SOME the natives are trying to get on your good side. Offers of food, shelter and other luxuries in return for hoping you don't eat them. They even have some helpful pamphlets to share with you. "How To Deal With Changes", "Alternatives to Human Flesh", "What to Expect When You're Expecting (to turn into a monster)" are all great pamphlets. There's even some detailing certain monsters, and the changes they go through. Some of these seem to have been passed down from one monster to the next.

Among these however, are some... not so helpful ones. "Bunnyipyips And You", "Axe Thief Axehounds," and "So you're becoming a Fur Bearing Trout" among others. Sometimes they have marks on them from previous people who had them saying they are lies, or pointing out good "jokes." Then there's the people who aren't happy to see you at all. Glares and silent, judging stares if you're lucky. Torches and pitchforks attempting to drive you out of the town if you're not. You may need a friend to help you.

SCENARIO THREE

"Seek us out," the voice whispers in your head, and before you have time to question it you've found yourself in someplace entirely alien. Maybe it's the Fog God's ghostly town of Dyster, where exultant followers dance around bonfires and sing their praises to the skies above. Maybe it's the Fourth God's arcade, with small robots wheeling about amidst the lights and colors of old pinball machines. Only one thing is certain: you are not alone, in this sacred place.

SCENARIO FOUR

The time has come and you've found yourself becoming a monster. Is the change instant, or gradual? Are you familiar enough with monsters to know what's happening, or is it a complete shock? NOTE: Feel free to pick any monster type for this prompt, but note that you may not get the same one in game.

Comments

ehehehe ;)

[shunshinoshishi]

Shisui's used to seeing a lot of grotesque things. Scary, even. But mostly gory, twisted, disgusting, soul crushing things brought about by human failing. Some of those things, loathe as he might be to accept, he'd contributed to.

And sometimes, when he'd go and sit in a corner of his big old empty house after a long mission, he'd hear voices. Voices and screams and pleas for mercy. And thanks to his sharingan, he could always replay every memory he'd wanted to forget, over and over and over again until he nearly went crazy.

But Shisui's never seen a ghost.

He's felt the ominous presence of an enemy, he's felt an opponent's killing intent. He's read fear off of his enemy's eyes and he's gone into situations knowing that he had a 'bad feeling' about something. But....

But Shisui's never seen a ghost...

It wasn't even that he didn't believe in them (he did; he found time to be spiritual) it was just--

It was just instinct kicking in. He instantly reads that something's not quite right, that something is totally off with the dark mass looming right in front of him. The hair on his neck, though still damp, bristles. Every nerve ending goes into high alert, into a sense of hyper vigilance.

...And yet there's an eerie familiarity that he can't quite put his finger on (perhaps the fact that the entity just said his name has something to do with it).

But it seems absurd to think, to hope, that the living would be here among the dead because... because this was the other world, wasn't it? And although it looked so much like him, so much like... Itachi--

What?

No.

That was impossible.

So this must be--

"Shinigami...?"

Shisui scrambles to his knees, sand and salt cutting into already open skin, and looks the being right in the eyes about the same time he realizes that he can feel and hear his heart beat once more.

How painful is death going to be this time around, he wonders. How much punishment did he deserve for the things he'd done, and for the things he'd failed to do? As bizarre as everything sounded in his head just then, whoever it was that was in front of him looked so much like the friend he'd made empty promises to, and the rational part of him immediately tells him that he's only making it up, that it was the guilt talking. But all the same, there's a lump in his throat that threatens to spill, threatens to try and explain himself. But he stops there.

He stops himself because he decides that he doesn't deserve it. There is nothing left to say, nothing left to explain. Was this a shinigami before him, about to take him to the other world? Or was he already there and was this a cruel joke meant to punish him for things he's done, and the things he's failed to do?

Come what may, he has no choice now.

"Are you... a shinigami?" The ragged breath that he takes then makes it harder to ignore the lump in his throat and his lips-- they move before he can stop himself: "You remind me of someone I know..." Knew, he corrects himself. Knew.

And he can't bear to look him in the eye anymore, so he shifts his gaze to the shore and watches the foamy tide eddy around his knees before receding back into the ocean.

[peaceloving]

Even like this, Shisui recognizes him; it's only right, Itachi thinks, because he feels that he would recognize Shisui if their positions were reversed, if it were his older cousin, his idol, who stood before him as nothing more than a shapeless black nothing-ghost.

He kneels, putting himself on a level with Shisui, not looming over him, and shakes his head. "I am someone you know. Not Shinigami, not any sort of kami. Just a..." Failure, he wants to fill in, but no -- he'll not introduce himself to Shisui with that sort of self-pitying vulnerability. "Just a man." A boy, the last Shisui remembers of him. But how swiftly boyhood ends!

He looks just like he did in Itachi's cherished memories, whole and strong (though bedraggled as Itachi has not seen him before). Both eyes where they belong, though Itachi remembers well that Sasuke arrived with the death-wound still piercing his chest, and he himself arrived still coughing deep and wet. Shisui, though -- there appears to be no crush of rocks, and his eyes.

"Trust your instincts," he adds quietly, wanting to simply say it and yet feeling the need to be indirect. Shisui, it's me... a ghost, a memory of me, twisted and yet more evil than I have ever been before. But at the same time... so much more free.

[shunshinoshishi]

The voice isn't the same. Not by a long shot. But the way the words are spoken-- It's familiar. Achingly so. And the worst part? Shisui doesn't want it to be true. Shisui doesn't want to remember his closest, most important person as anything other than the boy who sometimes smiled, sometimes pouted, sometimes laughed along with him when he couldn't do so with the rest of the world. Where everyone else had seen darkness and fed him more of it, pushed a child into becoming a man too soon and dumped the weight of the world on shoulders too young to be carrying such a burden, Shisui had seen the light at the end of the long, long tunnel Konoha found itself in. He'd been the one wanting to fight the rest of the world for him, pave the way for every dream. He'd been the one wanting so bad to see him smile more, to see him be himself-- be free.

And now...?

It still made no sense. It made no sense at all and he sits there there trying to salvage any sort of logic from the situation at hand.

Trust your instincts.

He doesn't want to. And yet he does...

He can't make up his mind between dismissing all of this as impossible, and reaching out to tell him how sorry he was for everything he couldn't do, for everything he left him with that should have been his job, his burden to bear.

"I don't want to," he whispers, fingers curling in wet sand.

But guilt and regret are too strong to ignore and Shisui shakes his head at a desperate attempt to make things go away. It's childish and futile and... looking back up at the whispy mass in front of him lets him know that the 'ghost' was still there.

Like a cruel reminder of everything he should have done. --Everything he should have done so that Itachi wouldn't become this. The darkness didn't suit him.

"I don't want to." And his voice is small, shaking-- like it was on the cliff...

[peaceloving]

It isn't meant as a rejection -- at least, Itachi doesn't think it is, doesn't think Shisui would push him away so clearly. Doesn't want to, maybe. But the fact remains that Shisui doesn't want him to be here, doesn't want him to be Itachi. And it does hurt.

Almost, he stands and walks away, acceeding to Shisui's whispered denial. But he can't turn his back on his beloved cousin, his childhood idol.

(Shisui looks so young now, to Itachi's older eyes.)

"The truth is what it is," he says instead, quietly. "You aren't the type to blind yourself to it. You know me."

[shunshinoshishi]

The truth is what he doesn't want to accept, though there's no changing it. Shisui doesn't even know half of it, but it's just this gut feeling telling him that he'd failed. He'd failed Itachi.

Because...

"You shouldn't be here." Where is here, by the way? "I don't even know where here is, but if I'm here now, then you shouldn't be." He was dead, so why was Itachi here?

"I failed you, didn't I?" Because it wasn't Itachi he was rejecting, it was himself-- his incompetence to see that one thing through to the very end that could have saved them all. "I failed you." And his voice breaks again. Shisui swallows thickly, forcing that lump back down.

It's only fitting that he's on his knees before Itachi, because he ends up bowing his head to the sand, hands clawing in it while he struggled to get words out at all.

"I'm so... I'm so, so sorry. I'm so sorry... Itachi..."

And saying his name now, acknowledging Itachi-- it threatens to burst that dam inside. There's a hitch in his voice that hints at it.

"I'm sorry, Itachio...I'm sorry...I--!"

He cannot say it enough.

[peaceloving]

"No." The word is harsh, hard; for all of the hurt Itachi endured, losing Shisui the way he did, forced to take part in murdering one of the two most precious people in his life (before being equally forced into the slaughter of so many more)... for all of that, he cannot accept Shisui branding himself with the word failure.

It is not Shisui who failed.

"It wasn't you," he said quietly. "None of it was your fault. That's my burden to carry."

He can't answer Shisui's denial, Shisui saying you shouldn't be here. It's too much to take on all at once. Right now, here, with Shisui soaked and bedraggled on the beach, Itachi nothing more than a looming shadow... no.