graveyardsmash | TEST DRIVE MEME: SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER

TDM: SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER

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 is making all the cuts and scrapes on your skin 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 of the natives are trying to get on your good side with 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 on the more informative end of the scale. 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 readers saying they're lies, or pointing out good "jokes."

Then there are 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? Feel free to pick any monster type for this prompt, but note that you may not get the same one in game.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

No surprise there, not for Lup. It was never much of a twist for her that the monsters of this place were more welcoming than the resident humans. For the whole of her life, especially those long years on the road as a child, struggling for survival, she'd always known that humans were more unpredictable and violent than any animal she'd meet. She'd grown up to see them in a different light, worked alongside of them, even gone on to marry one, but that doesn't erase a near century of living in fear.

The leaflet gets torn into pieces and her mouth twists into a too-sharp grin, fangs flashing before the woman slips around to Javert's front, hands dropping to rest at where her hips would be if she still had them, resting at her bright scaly side instead.

"Excuse you, thug? I am a woman, thanks, that sure as heck hasn't changed." Losing her legs and gaining a few hundred scales sure hasn't taken that from her. Though Lup more or less gets what the stranger is trying to say.

"But for your info, I never was a human. I was an elf before I went all on snake. The rest of it seems right on point though. You're deffo next."

Was there a reason this serpent-woman spoke in half-words? Nonetheless, she confirmed what the other beasts all attempted to tell him. He spent enough time drying off his clothes and his brains on that beach to notice all the nicks and bites and scratches in his flesh, all of which were inconsistent with a drowned man. A drowned man was bloated, bruised, swollen. A mauled man was one that possessed wounds like those.

That set him to thinking very dark thoughts. Very dark... ones he might have considered impossible, if he had not seen what he had seen and ended up where he had ended up: in an uncharted, unmapped place, with people and technology and creatures he never knew existed, after he had chosen to die in what he thought was an unsinkable method.

"Well," said Javert. "Well, well, well.... say I take that as the truth, you being the fourth to tell me this. Say I have been mauled by a werewolf-or-something. The only thing to be done is to stop the changes from occurring in the first place."

Death is nothing new to the naga woman. Before Ryslig, she was trapped in a century-long cycle of single years. No matter what happened during the year, her body would regenerate to the exact way it had been the first day of the cycle. Even after dying, she'd return fully formed and whole, with the same bruise on her knee she'd gotten nearly a hundred years ago at this point. It's made death a bit of a joke at this point and one that Lup delights in abusing.

It's why in cycle eighty-three she'd had no issue throwing herself off of the deck of their flying ship, just to crash broken and shattered on the ground. Suicide is a valid option Javert, Lup gets it.

Which is exactly why she picks up on the implication of his words, and instead of shrinking away, her grin turns wicked. Naughty naughty, Javert.

"Hate to break it to you, boyo, but folks who kick the bucket here just come right on back. Trust me. Been there, done that. Ain't so pleasant, but it's what it is. There's no avoidin' whatever-the-fuck it is you're turning into. Just gotta man up and take it."

TEST DRIVE MEME: SEPTEMBER/OCTOBER

no subject

CW: suicide....mentions

yum