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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Sort of. My best friend was here for a while, but she got ported back home. [In case he sounds a little too gloomy, he's quick to amend:] Which is a good thing! My home's fine; she's way happier there, anyway.

[Jaime Reyes: from one of the few happy worlds out there. They have problems, but when he thinks about home, he thinks about cozy kitchens and boring classes, about him and Brenda and Paco messing around after school, about wide, deserts, and flying, about coming home to his mother and father and sister, safe and familiar and warm.]

Couple other people from home have turned up, too. So yeah, if you're asking if your friends might show up -- they might. They might even be here already.

( That makes her perk up, a little. )

Yeah?

( Of course, 'cause if the people back home don't know... they if they were here already, she wouldn't know, right? Kinda makes her brain hurt and invites a wave of relief at the same time.

She relaxes a little, and finally indulges in some of that milkshake. ) Jesus Christ. I forgot how good these were.

( Hallelujah, etc. Glancing down at the shake, and to Jaime, and back down: ) Is there a list you can check, or something?

Yeah, actually, there is. [Jaime fishes his communicator out of his pocket with the practiced ease of any 21st century teenager with a cell phone he practically lives on (and yes, he's on it more often than is probably healthy), and clicks on the power button. He takes a sip of his coke with far less relish than Tara does before toggling to the correct page and nodding.]

Just lay the list of names on me, and we'll take a look. [He pauses, staring down at the screen for a second. Zombies, he thinks to himself. Tara's from a world of death. Almost carefully, he looks up and says,] Something else you should know about this place. Sometimes the people who arrive are dead back home, like -- like this is their second chance.

[He slides the communicator across the table for her to look at instead.]

I don't wanna bring your hopes up or anything, but you might want to, um. Broaden your search a little.

Or maybe it's our second chance. ( Quietly, staring at the device and not quite daring to touch it yet. A chance to keep Lilly and Meghan safe, to do all the things she should have done at home and that she failed at. To protect Alisha, to destroy Brian before he destroyed the lives of so many people.

To try and keep peace. If she could have gone back in time, she never would have backed up Brian. But maybe, maybe there could have been a way to join the Prison Group peacefully. To make the family she has now without losing her old one. Slowly, she reaches for the device. )

Does it come with Angry Birds, too?

( Forgive her for being a jackass; Jaime might be able to notice her hands are shaking. )

I'll fill you in on the gaming industry a little later, [Jaime says, and his voice is carefully gentle. Those shaking hands are a sure sign that he had guessed correctly. How could he not have? In situations like hers, where she's all but dying of joy at a simple milkshake, how could she not have lost someone? But he doesn't know who she lost, or how much.

A lot, he guesses.]

Look, Tara, if you wanna look at it in private, I can show you how and you can take a look at it once you're at your place.

[He'd want to, if he were her. Anything less than seeing his loved ones' names on that list would make him cry. Then again, seeing his loved ones' names on that list would be a surefire way of making him cry too.

He cries easy. Good thing he's never had to rough an apocalypse.]

Um.

( Jesus Christ, Tara. Shaking herself, Tara nods, rubbing her hand down her face. Lilly could be alive. And Meghan. Dad, Bob, Hershel, a whole list of people she never met that mattered to all the other people in her life.

And then there could be all the people she never wants to see again. Tara carefully slides the device back to him. She doesn't cry easy, she just has puppy eyes of trauma. )

That'd be good. Thanks. ( A little hoarse: let's try that speaking thing again, shall we? ) Do you wind up showing new kids the ropes often?

Okay. I'll show you after we eat, [he says, tone deceptively light, like he doesn't know perfectly well that she's falling apart inside at the mere idea of it. He hopes he hasn't just given her false hope, but she'll find out sooner or later, and it's better now, when everything's still sinking in, than a cold rush of shock as soon as someone mentions being dead over the network.]

Every now and then. I was pretty freaked my first day here. [He doesn't seem to mind admitting to that too much. Why would he? Anyone would feel a little ill at ease trapped in a new place without any familiar faces in sight. He pockets his communicator.] Might as well help the newbies on their first days, right?

[They're all stuck here together. If they don't make the most of it, then what do they have?]

You got it.

( She's grateful for the reprieve. She's not sure what will be worse: seeing their names, or not seeing them. Either way it'll be a punch to the gut, with a follow up for good measure. The possibility seems too much to hope for, it is too much to hope for, and if she wasn't thinking she could be crazy then that's definitely the territory she's in right now. )

Really? 'Cause I'm totally calm.

( Totally deadpan is the same thing as calm, right? Oh, child. Tara nods a little, the sheepishness a dead giveaway to all the tangled up, sheepish, confused, what the fuck emotions bubbling away. )

Might as well. ( And she huffs, laughing quietly. Incredulously: ) Somehow the good guys always swoop in.

[He feels bad for her. He had at least been a little prepared for this eventuality. He's no stranger to the existence of alternate universes - had collided with an unsavory one quite a while ago - and all of this, the superheroes and the intrigue? It sucks, but it's part of the job. People like Tara don't exactly have the frame of reference he does.

He's not entirely sure what she means by the good guys swooping in, and his eyes dart towards the window, as if expecting someone in a bright suit stopping a robbery of some sort. It's not an uncommon sight around here.]

Sorry, what?

I, um. Back home, some shit went down. The worst kinda stuff.

( Is that guilt Jaime might be able to hear? Guilt and regret and all sorts of things stirred up.

Tara's eyes are fixed on her milkshake as she stirs it with her straw. )

But afterwards, Glenn found me. He coulda left me-- I mean, he should've, probably. Most would've. But I got found by a good guy then, and I got found by a good guy this time.

( Her smile is a bit embarrassed. ) It's dumb.

Oh.

[That's actually pretty flattering, but at least in this case, he's not an altruistic soul taking in a woman in the middle of an apocalypse. He's just a guy who felt uneasy about the lady swinging around her rifle in the middle of a very ordinary day.]

Nah, I don't think that's dumb. I wouldn't call this - [he spreads his fingers out in front of him, gesturing at the absurdly normal diner] - swooping in, exactly, but I'm glad I could help. [He smiles.]

Not saying that we don't have our fair share of psychos, 'cause we do, but we've definitely got more good people here than bad.

[He had gotten to Tara first, but he knows for a fact that many of his friends would have done the same. It's just the way they are. That's why he likes them.]

( Glenn wasn't entirely altruistic, he needed the help and she had a gun full of bullets, but he didn't have to forgive her or keep her around, either. Glenn was good people. )

Hey, you got me a milkshake. It brings me to the yard, dude. I'm counting it as swooping.

( And she snorts, the accompanying eyeroll just of course you do. )

Nice. ( A beat. ) Are there stats on the good-to-shitstorm ratio, or... do we just have to wing it and hope we don't wind up hanging with the wrong crowd?

If I had exact stats for you, I think I'd probably fall on the bad side of things. I mean, I pay attention to the news and stuff, but I'm not psycho about it.

[He keeps closer track than he lets on, but he's no Batman. He's seen firsthand how horribly wrong that can go. Besides Batman, anyone who would present Tara with a graph of imPorts good and bad and where they fell on that scale would be pretty creepy.]

We get to wing it, and trust our gut. Hopefully it'll be right at least 90% of the time.

( Okay, that makes her mouth twinge before she breaks out into a full grin. )

Cool. You should never trust anyone that good at math, anyhow.

( There's a whole unravelling that could happen here, about instincts and trust and all the rest. Thank Christ, though, 'cause here is their food. Nothing better to distract you from destructive introspection than food, right?
Excuse Tara as she just sort of stares at it for a second. She mumbled a quiet thank you to the waitress, sort of stunned by the food pile, before she fishes out a curly fry and dunks it in her shake. )

My sister used to get so mad at me for doing stuff like this. "Tara, you weren't raised in a barn." Like cows could dunk fries in their milkshake or something.

( Nostalgia, much? Back on track: ) Right now my gut's telling me to trust this burger, so... I'm not sure how reliable a source it is.

Older sister, right? It's our jobs to get mad about stuff like that. My little sister used to try and stuff candy into tortillas. [He fishes a fry out and chews on it pensively.] It wasn't actually that bad with chocolate, but mixing licorice with anything's playing with fire.

[Licorice is gross. He remembers old Halloweens of threatening to steal Milagro's candy, which he didn't do, but he sure tried convincing her to trade her chocolate for his licorice, only for it to be used in horrible culinary experiments. It's a perk of babysitting.]

The burgers here are good, so go ahead and trust your gut. You might wanna eat slow, though. I got a friend who's from a place without a lot of food, and I'm pretty sure he spent the first month here sick.

[Ugh, he's encouraging healthy eating habits. He's so boring... but the last thing he wants is for Tara to keel over half an hour from now.]

Yeah. Lilly. ( Tara's smile widens into a grin. ) Your sister sounded like some kinda genius, right until you got to liquorice.

( Oh, child. You had so much potential. Tara continues with her great fry adventure, getting cosy with some ketchup which is getting generous piled on her plate. And into the burger. Jesus Christ, this place is a miracle. A crazy food coma miracle.

Tara's gaze drops to the food, and she slowly looks back to Jaime, a fry held between her teeth before she gulps it in. )

That sounds like a good idea. ( And clearly that has a lot of opportunity for objection. She dunks another fry into the milkshake. ) Man, logic blows sometimes.

( Seriously, bro. Healthy eating habits. ) Pretty sure you're younger than me, too, Jaime. You don't haveta do the whole lecture thing.

( Teasing, she is definitely teasing, as she defiantly stares him down and takes a dramatically huge bite of her burger. Challenge accepted. )

Doesn't matter that you're older than me. I can lecture anyone. It's my secret superpower, [he says with a grin, raising a finger to his lips.] Don't tell anybody.

[He takes another healthy bite out of his own. He doesn't have the reference to enjoy it as much as she seems to be, but hey, he can appreciate a good burger as well as the rest of them.]

Still working on the getting people to listen part. It'll happen.

Oh, gotcha.

( FINGER GUNS. And a clicky gun sound. Also, a wink. It's a winning combo, dudebro. )

That in your file, huh?

( Tara just grins. Obnoxious brat. )

Oh, totally. Right there in black and white, but hey, I was already aware of my unique talent, [he says, and it's clear that he's joking, but some of the power descriptions some people get... whoo, he wouldn't be surprised if some poor sap got saddled with that.]

( Tara is laughing a little as she goes to take a bite of her burger. It's overall a huge success, except for the glob of ketchup that drops and splatters onto her shirt. )

Oh, Christ. ( Hmm. Excuse her just grabbing that there paper towel and casually just... making it worse. ) Man, this is my best shirt.

( Considering that general "please burn it" state of the shirt... ) You think anyone has "It's got to be clean, it's got to be Tide" as a power? 'Cause, damn.

( Also ha ha ha ha ha yeah she hasn't looked at her file. That shit is fucked. )

Maybe. One lady's got the power to turn clothes leopard print.

[Once, he felt guilty gossiping about Freddie's crappy power. Now, he doesn't mind so much. He's already carved dicks in the lady's car; what's a little gossip going to do?

He nods over at Tara's file.]

You read your file yet? They're kinda creepy.

["Kinda".]

No way.

( That is amazing/horrifying. ) If my power ends up being band t-shirts, she's gonna be my arch nemesis.

( Tara probably would be a bit hopeless with an archnemesis, let's be real. )

Uh.

( Hmm. She holds it up, and sets it back down on the table. ) Yeah, no. After seeing a couple dudes' faces back there, I'm not in a rush. ( A beat, and she grins. ) Unless I got sweet gaydar skills.

[Well, if he had wasted any time wondering about what Tara's into (he hadn't been; she's a little old for him, and no offense Tara, but he's got the hottest girlfriend ever), now he knows.

Lucky for Tara, there's plenty of age-appropriate hotties around. ImPorts? Full of supermodels. It'd be enough to make a guy feel a little inadequate if not for the aforementioned hot girlfriend.]

Not a bad plan. [Opening the file up in private, he means.] And unless you've magically sensed it by now, that's a no on the amazing gaydar front. Better luck next time.

( Excuse you, Jaime, but Tara also had the hottest girlfriend ever. You know, before she... got shot in the head by a ten year old. Hmm. You know what, never mind. Tara's love life sucks.

BUT HOW MANY OF THEM ARE ALSO INTO GOOFY IDIOTS WHO PRETEND TO BE HELLA BADASS, JAIME? HOW MANY. She needs charts, or something. )

Damn.

( She looks so crushed as she reaches for her milkshake. Morose milkshake times. )

Back to the drawing board, I guess. ( She glances down at her drink. ) Is it a bad idea to ask what you got?

( 'Cause she's curious and all, but. Superheroes. Powers. The whole nine yards. )

You can ask, [he says, but it sounds like he's just joking about having something to hide. Which he does, obviously, but he's gotten good about lying about it these days.

Well. Not lying so much as fibbing. He has the power he claims he has - he would be a fool not to - but it's not the only power he has, is all. That's not exactly the same as lying, is it?]

It's, like, this body-scanner thing? I can tell if someone's pregnant, or if they need to fix up their diet before they get diabetes, stuff like that.

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