etcelsior | sure, jan

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sure, jan

TEST DRIVE MEME

Considering apping into MASK OR MENACE? Want to dip your toes into the setting and get a feel of whether your character will fit into it? Or maybe you're just cruising and want to play around? Then you've come to the right place!

Pick any of the following scenarios below or feel free to make up your own, but don't be afraid to throw yourself at anyone's thread, either!

And remember to have fun!

01. Your memory is hazy and you might feel increasingly frustrated or anxious, or maybe you're excited as soldiers march past, barely glimpsing you. One second you're somewhere underground, the next you're enveloped in blue light, and suddenly you find yourself directly under Flordia sun's bright and burning glare. A female soldier steps toward you with a wide smile on her face and directs you to a car, ready to debrief you. You realize you are not the only one, surrounded by equally confused or eager faces... and you're all sporting a digital tattoo on your wrist.

02. Welcome to Cape Canaveral, where the smell of the ocean is in the air and locals are more than pleased to see new imPorts roaming their streets. They wave, they cheer, they ask for pictures as politely as they can. The more inhuman you look, or if you're wearing a costume, the more likely locals are to approach. Hey, enjoy the moment! The popular malt shop is offering you a free drink if you need it.

03. The technology in this world is certainly something. The cars are clearly modeled after popular 50s cars, but they hover several feet above the ground as they drive down the street. There are digital jukeboxes in restaurants, motorcycles also hover through traffic, advertisements can be seen on a digital projector on the taller buildings. Even kids on skateboards appear to drift a safe ten feet off the ground while playing!

04. Wherever you are, you can hear the loud revving of an engine, distance at first before you finally see it: a hovercar bursting around the corner, going beyond the maximum speed limit and just barely making its sharp turn. It doesn't appear to be slowing down any time soon, not with two police cars trailing it... and uh oh. Those skateboarding kids don't have much time to get out of the way as the car comes speeding down the road. You've been brought here for a reason Hero — so you better act fast.

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02.

If it wasn't her hair or her eyes catching everyone's attention, it could certainly have been her outfit. No one really seemed to be paying attention to the expression on her face, which would have told anyone else to leave her the hell alone. And autographs? Really? She wasn't some airheaded movie star who thrived on the attention. While she might have appreciated a little credit now and then, she was supposed to be the dirty little secret. The classified ace in the hole when no one else could manage to do their job.

And not to mention this sure as hell wasn't Japan...and even if it was America, the tech was off. Since when did the cars drive in the air?

Something was very, very wrong here.

So instead of shoving people out of her way (which was sorely tempting at the moment), she folded her arms over her chest and shut her eyes. But the diagnostics didn't return any errors.

"It isn't a hack then. Or a virus. The attack barriers should have repelled anything and I would have known about it.

"What the hell is going on?"

((Prose or brackets are both fine!))

A veteran of the 22nd century, Jacob was always on the lookout for new arrivals who could commiserate with him over being trapped in this warped version of Earth's past. When he spotted the Major on the street, he quickly got the idea that she might be from a different time, or at least a world with a different level of technical development. Her clothes had a futuristic edge to them, and she was talking tech.

The purple hair might have meant something too.

Jacob walked up to her, casual and dressed in the same style of clothing as the locals. "Hey, you look like you're new around here. Can I help you with something?"

She was immediately suspicious. After being approached by the horde of autograph-seekers, she really had reason to be, but even she hadn't already been accosted, she would have been. She looked over at the man and narrowed her eyes, sizing him up. It was impossible to tell much except that the man seemed to blend right in with the rest of the crowd. Only he wasn't begging for a signature.

"That depends," she answered, waving a hand around to indicate the dispersing crowd--most of them disappointed that she hadn't even made an effort to sign anything, "How many autographs are you asking for?"

Jacob smiled a bit and shook his head. "Don't worry. I'm not part of the fan club. I'm an ImPort, like you."

He held up his wrist to show her his tattoo, barely visible under the bright Florida sun. The glowing blue words read 'UNSETTLED.'

"You did come through the Porter, right?" He asked, half-joking. "Because if you're just a famous local, I should probably apologize. Most people who get that kind of attention around here are the kind with superpowers."

Edited 2015-01-31 17:53 (UTC)

ImPort? It sounded like more than a euphemism for an outsider, and she made a note of the word choice. She even almost asked about it, and the "UNSETTLED" glowing across his wrist when something else caught her attention.

"Superpowers?" Her tone was, perhaps, a little condescending, but it sounded far too fantastic to be true. At least there were some explanations that made a little bit of sense as to why she was seeing these surroundings instead of Japan. "Superpowers" didn't make any sense, and she couldn't come up with a purpose for that to be part of the fantasy.

"What, exactly, is going on here?"

He tilted his head slightly. "Didn't you get the military briefing when you came in? The Porter, the files?" Jacob had been around this dimension for a while by now, and had gotten the hang of helping out disoriented new ImPorts. Usually he had the basics to build off of, though.

"We've been taken to another world. There's a machine that can do anything, and nobody can get control of it. If you didn't have special abilities before, you do now." Jacob frowned. "That's why the government wants to draft you. They call it 'registration', but I don't see it that way." He had been Unsettled from day one, and planned to stay like that.

"It was mentioned." She just hadn't believed it. There had to be another explanation. There was no such thing as "superpowers." Sure, depending on who you asked, the capabilities of some cyberbodies--particularly military-grade ones like her own--could be considered superpowers in a very liberal interpretation of the word, but people flying through the sky without aid? Invulnerability? Shooting lasers from their eyes? None of that existed.

Someone had gone to some rather extreme and unnecessary trouble for this. Whatever this was.

"I'm more curious as to what you have to say about it.

"You sound kind of skeptical, so- let me put it this way." Jacob closed his eyes for a moment, and then activated his biotics. A faint noise came from his body as a glowing blue energy field sheathed his skin and clothing, shimmering across him.

"It's all real. Including the powers. I could do this before I got here..." Jacob waved a hand in front of him to show the Major a ball of blue biotic energy forming in the palm of his hand. "But lots of people get some extra 'good stuff' from the Porter. You might be one of them."

Even with that display, she was having a hard time believing it. It could still be a hack by someone with skills at least equaling her own, or a virus she had inadvertently downloaded, or a new type that her barriers weren't able to account for yet...but "real" was the least complicated of all the options, and that was likely the correct answer. As much as she didn't want to believe it. At the very least she could play along.

"Fine. But I wasn't told about anything new, and diagnostics aren't showing new or unaccounted for hardware or upgrades. Nothing odd in the software, either."

"Not much phases you, does it?" Jacob observed as he powered down his biotics. She didn't seem impressed at all by the whole 'glowing blue space energy' thing. Some people took stoic to the next level, and it seemed like this was one of them.

"Hold on- are you talking about hardware in your body?" He asked, catching on to the terminology she was using. "Are you augmented?" Implants were fairly common in his own world- he himself required a brain implant to use his powers properly- but internal software was something else.

If by "augmented" he really meant "rebuilt..." Still, after the whole explanation, could she really expect anyone here to recognize a cyberbody when they saw one? But, if she thought about it, it was a better reaction than it could have been. It seemed to at least hint at a lack of cyborg-prejudices. Besides, it could give her some sort of clue as to what the place was like that hadn't already been made overtly obvious.

And she had a feeling that she'd have to take what she could get as far as information went. So far as she could tell, there wasn't anything here remotely compatible with her cyberbrain.

"I suppose that's one way to put it."

"Must be pretty advanced," Jacob said, giving her another look up and down. "I wouldn't have noticed. In my world, even the best cybernetics leave some kind of traces." Usually glowing orange implant scars ~~that look really hardcore.~~

"Anyway, that might be your "superpower" around here," he continued, making finger quotes around the word. "If you were already packing something back home, it usually stays the same once the Porter is done with you."

"In your world" almost made her head hurt, but something told her there was no explanation that would satisfy her. As far as she knew there was only one, but then, this must have been proof of how wrong she had been, didn't it? This place just kept getting better and better.

"There's nothing to leave a trace, unless you know what you're looking for. Haven't you ever seen a prosthetic body before?" His reaction already told her the answer, though. "I suppose there are a few cyborgs around who look it, but that's never really worked for me."

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sure, jan

Motoko Kusanagi | Ghost in the Shell: Stand Alone Complex

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So. Was wondering why I didn't get any tags on this. Then realized I hadn't switched the email >>;

I know this pain, I used Hotmail for notifs until last week...

sob me too ;3; SO MANY JOURNALS TO SWITCH OVER

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