souljammed | TEST DRIVE MEME.

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test drive

TEST DRIVE MEME.

Test Drive Meme

Prompts

Arrival: So you've just arrived in Nyoi-Cho. Congratulations! You must be so excited about having your wish granted. Or maybe you're upset that the result wasn't quite what you expected? If that's the case, then that's too bad! There are no take backs and no redoes, so you're stuck with what you have! Maybe you should have been more careful about how you worded that wish...

Oh well. There's no use in dwelling on it. You're a magi now, and that means adjusting to a whole new lifestyle! Maybe one of the townspeople can help you out.

Only... they're acting a bit strangely, aren't they? They're all too happy to show you around, but there's something unsettling about the way they're behaving. Almost cheerfully dissonant. Any questions about the history of the town are met with blank stares and brief silence, before they plaster a smile onto their faces and change the subject. Any attempts to tell them about your duties as a magi or anything else that relates to the magical will get similar reactions.

Isn't there anyone normal here that you can talk to at all?

Home Improvement: The houses that the magi are given access to really are something, aren't they? There's almost no limit to what they can do! Why don't you create the house of your dreams, or maybe recreate and relive your favorite childhood scenes? Invite some spectators over to marvel!

A Corrupted Soul Gem: You neglected to take care of your soul gem, and now you don't feel quite yourself anymore. You feel like you're losing your sense of self - all you seem to be able to focus on is your old regrets and past failures. What's happening to you?

A Day in the Life: Everyday hero by day, magician by night! You've got a busy day ahead of you and no time to waste! Maybe it's school, or maybe it's work, maybe it's both! Being magical doesn't make you exempt from paying those shopping bills!

May Day: Uh-oh. This magical girl stuff looked easier on TV. You're in some serious trouble! Or maybe you see someone else who is! It's time to pull up your socks and show them what you have. Be the hero you've always wanted to be, or give in and be that damsel in distress. There's no shame in needing a little help now and then.

A Successful Mission: Congratulations! You met up with your first Nightmare, and you fought valiantly. You even mastered that tricky power of yours! What sort of power did you get? Is it a useful one, or is it not so useful? Maybe you've mastered it beautifully, and now you're showing off to all of your friends. Maybe you're having a hard time keeping it under wraps, and now you're wreaking havoc across the town without meaning to!

A Dreadful Nightmare: You had an absolutely horrid day. As you drift off to sleep, your mind dwells on all the injustices you've had to endure. In response, your bed swallows you up, and your room shifts into a horrific Nightmarescape. What sort of Nightmare are you? What kind of Nightmarescape do you create? Hopefully your fellow magi can stop you before you cause too much damage!

Wildcard: Feel free to use any information from the FAQ or the World Info page to make your own prompt!

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[His thoughts roll. A month is a lot less for him. Is that how long she's been here? And 'her royal fish bitch' sounds familiar, so could it mean--? He's spent so long thinking that timeline ended then and there, but who's to say she didn't come from the same bad end?]

[He sees the way she's looking at him. His hands curl up at his sides, nails pressed to palms.]

Longer than that. The last I saw you was before Gamzee murdered me.

[And he has to look different. No older despite the time, but his eyes are so tired, and he doesn't have his old outfit anymore. It's still the grey jumpsuit from District 13. He's too new to have replaced it with anything more fitting. It's the kind of thing that says on its own that there's a lot left to be told.]

[But he thinks of Nill still - will be thinking of her for a long time - and how she had been so careful not to tell him about the other places she'd been until she could make sure no one else could observe her part of the conversation. And what about here? He got a wish, and he's been brought to save more people, but he's too jumpy after the Capitol to dump everything blindly.]

[After a too-long pause, he gathers his words and asks her plainly.]

Is it safe here?

[Even if she can't answer straight, he's spent too long learning to read and give signals to get past the cameras. If there were a hint, he wants to think he'd catch it.]

[ Time doesn't really feel as solid as maybe it once did, given how quickly she's changed planets and universes lately. But as far as things go here in this town, it's been about a month for her or so. And yet there are still more questions she has than maybe she did when she first started the game they all played.

That reaction to her... it's not missed, but it is not commented on. Not directly anyway. Some part of her has to wonder if he's mad at her though, for some reason. ]

That was the last time I saw you as well. [ She bites her lip a little, thinking deeply. ] If it makes you feel any better I made certain that Gamzee was thoroughly dismembered before I ended up being the victim of the Condesce's lasers myself.

[ At least they are working off the same timeline. Or so Kanaya has to think. It's not been that long for her since that all happened (she still hasn't even spoken to Rose about any of the difficult subjects they really need to discuss in regards to their relationship) but she could have no idea just how much Karkat changed. Aside from the slightly older, more mature look to her.. he still seems to be Karkat.

Though that question catches her off guard, looking around. ] I think so. At the moment at least.

[Karkat's eyes widen 'til the yolk yellow of his sclerae shows all around his irises. She killed him--killed him--and a part of him feels vicious, vindictive satisfaction for it, but another is off-kilter and out of step. He doesn't doubt that she could have done it; he's seen more than once what her chainsaw can do, and he remembers how she was about him in times before. But it's another death, and then she lays hers atop it.]

[Dave, him, now her and Gamzee, and he still counts Terezi as too likely on the list. It doesn't much lift his impression of things as doomed.]

[But she says after that it's safe, or safe enough, and he nods. His breath is shaky.]

God, I need to sit down. Here, come inside. My disaster hive should tell you a little.

[He turns and touches the gem on the door (red as blood, shaped as a drop) and steps in through the open door, making sure to hold it open after for her. He's not really looking at her. Should she follow, though, the inside certainly says something.]

[He hasn't forgotten where he used to live. Alternian style shows through, familiar greys and twelve-paned windows, but it blends and clashes against others things. There's an elevator stuck against one wall, modern and human as anything, while next to it a dull hallway--half like the meteor, half something else but just as simple--leads further into the hive. There are sleek, stylish chairs next to a squashy, trollish couch, settled atop a colorful rug straight out of the meteor. And if she does come inside, Karkat will let the door close and head straight over to sit in one of the chairs.]

[ For a while, Kanaya wanted to do nothing more than kill Gamzee. Or in her own words, "at least wound him somewhat." Then it started to just be a feeling she mostly forgot by the time they reached the end of their journey. But seeing what he had done to Karkat, it made her feel useless all over again, like she had when she watched Feferi die. So Gamzee had to die. She doesn't take pleasure in it though, at least not much. Because she should have killed him a long time ago. ]

I see. [ She falls a little quiet, finding herself a little at a loss for words at the moment, only nodding and following Karkat inside. Of course there's a lot she wants to say, but she's not sure what should even come first. Not to mention she finds herself a little blindsided by the interior.

That's not to say that it's all that different from her own. A mix of the meteor and her hive on Alternia. But the other things, the almost unfamiliar third style, she can't put her claw on. ]

It's nice. [ The words come out flat, obviously she doesn't know what else to say. Nor has she realized she can sit too. ]

...Is there a matter that's bothering you, Karkat? I mean, apart from being some form of not-dead that we both seem to find ourselves in, or the fact that we both made wishes with a strange meowbeast and wound up here? [ If he's here, she knows he must have made a wish too. ]

'Nice'?

[He looks back at her finally. It's not what he'd call it, and not what he expected. It feels like a mess to him, not neat enough, all indecisive. And sure, she sounds flat--he hears that tone just fine--but it's less than he expected, somehow. He's not really sure what the right expectation is.]

[The rest, though... His breath runs out in one deep rush.]

Yeah. Yeah, yes, there is absolutely--

[His arms come up and spread, indicating the place around him.]

Can I just say everything? Everything's bothering me. It's been a year for me, Kanaya, and I'm not--I'm not just from our timeline and that's it. I was--I've been somewhere else. Some other planet, some Earth, for a year and some months with only some of the people I knew and a bunch I never did, and now the little wish weasel has brought me to another, and I am kind of freaking out!

[He's started shaking around the shoulders, but he pays it no mind.]

[ With a shrug, she takes another look around her. ] It seemed gentler to say that than the truth which is that this place is a mess, but not referring to the usual mess of piles that seem to be found our hives, but architecturally instead.

[ Her's is only slightly better, but at least she recognizes the different styles inside of her own magical home, as opposed ot here where she finds herself stumped.

But clearly there's something bothering Karkat. Clearly, because he goes off on a short tirade that she knows is short because he could have easily gone much longer than that if he really wanted to. Still, she doesn't miss that shaking in his shoulders, and unlike him, she does pay it mind. Without thinking about it she takes a few steps to plop down in a chair next to Karkat's, putting her hand on the shoulder. Presumably as some kind of reassurance? At least it's not a pap. ]

That sounds like something that makes sense to freak out about.

You think?

[Her hand on his shoulder should feel the shaking even better, for it doesn't stop under her touch. Letting it stay makes for a good medium between the impulse to run or latch on. Every part of the life he knew has just been ripped up and away from him, and he hasn't seen her in so long, but who's to say he couldn't lose her, too?]

[His hands cup his face as he tries to control his breathing. Don't panic, don't panic, she doesn't deserve to deal with that.]

Everyone's gone--or not gone, but not here, and no one knows anything about what happened there. And I knew this could happen, but I stupidly thought that somehow fate would spare me having to get whisked away a second time when I am possibly the only person my friend even told about this. And of course you don't know the first thing of what I'm saying! I would make more sense if I had put my sponge through a meat grinder, but here I am babbling away in my knit together shitshow of a hive that can't decide between two worlds when I'm not in either of them anymore, and I can't go back because now I have to save this place too.

[ Sure what they had gone through together was pretty bad, and maybe there's still a little part of her that wishes Karkat would have taken her warnings in the past more seriously in regards to the whole frog situation, but never has she felt like he wasn't someone she needed to worry about. Now it seems all the worse, because whatever happened to him while he was gone clearly affected her friend.

Only she's not good at helping people in this kind of situation, the one where she knows nothing about what happened and can only try her best to be understanding and kind. She thinks about the kind of person that Porrim would be, trying to emulate her, not even realizing that she's found a familial-like role model. ]

I can do my best to remove any and all meat grinding appliances from your hive if that will help. [ She really doesn't know what to say here.. but she knows it isn't that. So Kanaya tries again. ]

It sounds as if you went through a particularly difficult period that I can't say I understand, but I am here. If you know. You want to talk about it.

[Kanaya's efforts are awkward but so well-meaning he can't hold the stilted tone against her. He even laughs once, the not actually funny but stressed enough to take the joke anyway kind.]

[But talking about it... Talking. How does he really do that? He doesn't have the multiple world experience Nill had been through to get used to it, and right now everything is still so heavy and fresh. It hasn't sunk in fully that he's away from it - truly away, not just the not-the-Capitol away that came when he was brought to District 13. It probably won't for a long time, and he wonders distantly how much he can trust this hive, if he won't fall asleep in one block and wake in a panic because some mismatched aspect made him think even for a moment that he might be in the Capitol again.]

[It would be hard, though, to hide how much everything affected him. He takes in a deep breath then lets it out slowly.]

I was in a place called Panem. There were a bunch of us, not just trolls or even the humans from the Earth we made, but people from all different worlds. And they--there was this game, the Hunger Games they called it--they put us in that. And all of us, we had to survive for weeks against... traps, animals, monsters, environmental hazards, but--but also other tributes. That's what they called us, tributes. They made us fight each other, and whoever was the last one alive won, and got out--and then they revived us all and made us do it again, and again, for everyone watching in Panem, until the rebels finally got enough traction to start a war against the Capitol.

[By the end his arms are crossed tightly over his chest, and again his gaze is off somewhere besides her.]

[ Kanaya's efforts are always awkward, but she really does care for her friends, something that deep down, she hopes they know. Karkat especially, given just how much she feels like he needs someone in his life. At the same time, she almost wishes she could unload her own one-wheeled hand-propelled load carrying vehicle full of romantic issues on him. But right now doesn't seem to be the time. ]

At first it didn't sound all that different from the game we all played, but I think I can understand the important differences. Sgrub's mechanics appeared to prioritize working together from the very beginning where this Hunger Game did not. I can see how that would be more difficult.

[ Really though, a game where they have to fight monsters, and sometimes came back to life and being involved in a war.. that's not too different. ]

I imagine... that for you it must have been difficult. To leave you this way. Not that you are all that different. But you know. I'm not explaining myself well...

[He shakes his head a bit at the Sgrub comparison, for all she's dismissing it herself, and elaborates.]

Sgrub had other quests and goals. If there were other ones in this, it was always for some better survival tool or weapon. The point was always killing each other for their entertainment. The war was partly because of that, but also other political shit about how the Capitol was treating... these people in the rest of Panem. But I guess it doesn't matter anymore now, does it?

[And he shudders on that thought. He had over a year to get used to that place, and he says the words with no conviction. They're going to keep going without him - a fire stopped is not a war ended - and he wonders, fleetingly, if he could have wished for that if he'd stopped to think longer.]

[He looks at Kanaya properly.]

You've been here longer, right? Tell me the basics.

[ As silly as it is.. Kanaya can't say she has a lot of experience in this kind of situation. Usually as a moirail she was called on to keep her eye on her partner. Only.. it was in an effort to keep someone like Vriska from killing everyone who pissed her off. Or just looked at her the wrong way. It was a tough job but someone had to do it.

Karkat isn't the same way. He's damaged, a lot like how Kanaya later realized Vriska was too, but in a different way. He never had a ton of confidence in himself, even when he wanted to be leader he also tried to give it up just as quickly. But this is different than all that. Things happened that Kanaya can't begin to really understand the pain it left on her friend.

So the best thing she can think to do right now is just put her arm around him, to hug the boy closer to her. ]

I'm relatively certain the Universe you were in must still exist. Therefore, in the grand scheme of things, it still matters. [ Does that help? She can only hope so. ]

That's not as easy to sum up as your story. I think it would be easiest to start at the point of saying we are all "Magi" who have magical powers that we are supposed to use to protect this city from Nightmares. Nightmares in this case being creatures that appear at night inside barrier not unlike dream bubbles.

[He'll take a hug. It's nothing so presumptive as a pap or a shoosh, but friendly, and a comfort besides. He could use one after everything. Better, it's another physical reminder of everything. Strange though everything is here, it's real and happening, and he has no choice but to deal with it.]

[It doesn't make the loss of his friends hurt less, but he never got a choice in coming to Panem, either.]

[Her certainty has his lips pressing flat. It's not a smile, but neither is it a frown, and the faraway look of his eyes is more contemplative than rejecting. He doesn't disbelieve her - he has no reason to think it gone - but he'll wonder still in time to come how it might have gone on without him, whether what he fought for and did might help any now that he's gone.]

[He pushes the thought back down as she goes on.]

That fur noodle was saying something about that before I lost consciousness, but I don't think I heard everything. But magic? I thought he wanted me because I've got training and survival experience. How does it work?

[ More so than others, Kanaya is willing to actually listen to people's problems, even if she can't do much to help. And right now, it doesn't seem like Karkat's problems can be solved by bottling it up, or even just convincing him that he needs to stop worrying like a pap or shoosh would imply. Eventually she lets go though, pulling back from him, not wanting to make things more awkward by holding on. ]

Honestly... I'm not sure. It just sort of does. The humans that I have become acquainted with here consider it all magic, but in the end it doesn't seem all that different from what we're used to. Except for the transformation aspect.

[ Kanaya actually likes it though, her lips curling up into a little smile. ]

[He's never really dealt with magic, save for being the target of some magical fire once. And what Kanaya says is not quite the answer he was looking for, but it bears interest still.]

Transformation?

[His eyebrow lifts. That has to be worth hearing about.]

[ Kanaya has on occasion likened her own role in Sgrub as that of a kind of witch, and thus a user of magic, but she never really figure out how to make her powers work, or if she ever really had any at all. It's too bad she never made it to God tier. ]

It doesn't involve mouth-to-mouth interactions, if that helps any.

[And at that his eyebrows just scrunch up.]

No, that doesn't help, because I still understand precisely nothing of what it does involve. Just explain it to me straight, Kanaya.

I could explain it or I could just show it to you instead. Actually, I think showing you would make more sense.

[ Because she doesn't really know how to explain it. Magic was never her strong suit. So with a swift touch of the gem on the ring on her finger, a bright light envelops Kanaya, replacing her clothes with an outfit much more suited for the title of magical girl. But of course, showing it off like this makes her uncomfortable, as she was never much of a model despite her love of fashion, making her uncomfortable shift her weight back and forth. ]

Does this explain anything? At all?

[Karkat's eyebrows shoot up at that display. Magic's not something he's seen much of, aside from that time with fire in one of the arenas, and the more destructive sort displayed by Rose and Eridan (his white """science""", anyway).]

[That, though...]

Jegus. Sort of? I see what you meant, but holy shit. How did you trigger it? It's kind of hard to pay attention when all this light suddenly happened around you.

[ Cute or not, it's not her style, and it leave too much exposed. Shoulders and thighs, things she's not used to not being covered by a skirt and t-shirt. There's a reason why she doesn't wear her strapless dresses out often. ]

Um. Magic. By which to say I mean I just thought about it and touched my Soul Gem and made it happen.

[He knows her enough to recognize that it's not her usual in spite of the familiar color scheme, but he's spent so long being put in fancy outfits and seeing others subjected to the same that it's barely worth commenting on in his mind. The long ribbons might be a hazard, but it looks free enough to move in, and that's the important part.]

[He does wonder, however, what he might be stuck with.]

Okay, then color me slow on the uptake, because I haven't gotten around to figuring out whatever my soul gem is yet. I was too busy freaking out about... [He gestures around him.] Everything to really bother looking myself over.

[But on that topic...]

Look, do you want to catch up more later? If there's something else I need to know first then go ahead and tell me, but I need to figure the gem thing out and I could probably use an ablution besides. Maybe next time I can manage to smell halfway decent and have my issues more contained before we talk.

[ Kanaya herself is definitely interested in seeing what Karkat's outfit might be. Because she's pretty sure no matter what it will be funny to see him get angry about it. Because how could he not? ]

Well. This might not help but I think you will figure it out sooner or later. It's not actually super important to figure it out right at this moment. We have time, which almost feels like a silly thing given our usual sort of circumstances, but it appears to be the truth.

[ With a nod, Kanaya returns back to normal, her clothes seeming to explode in another bright light, before ending up right back in her usual black and red. ]

Oh. Um. Sure. Yes. We can catch up later. If you need me you can speak to your mirror and I'll answer.

[It's weird to think of, if not for the usual reason. Time wasn't something he was as pressed for back in Panem, usually. For him, it's a matter of wanting to know what he has to work with. How can he fight if he doesn't take the time to learn it? And he doesn't know when his first battle will be.]

[Her transformation interrupts him from saying so, however, and the next words out of her mouth give him something else to ask.]

You're saying my mirror is a communication device? How does that work?

I am saying that, yes. Again, I hate to sound like I am not giving you the full breadth of my knowledge but my answer is the same as it was before. Magic appears to be the answer. Or a sort of technology that is akin to it, though much of what I have seen here makes be think it's magic than other things.

I am certain you will figure it out. It's really not hard.

[ She'd explain more about it, but she's got some faith in Karkat. Actually, despite how poorly he did as a leader, she actually still would follow him again if she were asked to. ]

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TEST DRIVE MEME.

Karkat's such a jumbled up mess right now

how unsurprising haha. also i totally had to rewatch game over haha

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he'll be less of a disaster eventually (probably), he's just super overwhelmed right now

haha it's so perfecttt

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aaaa that outfit is really cute

i know right?!

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