etcelsior | dancing moms

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dancing moms

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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Joker pushed himself up a little, less leaning over his drink on his elbows and more, y'know, sitting properly like a civilized person. It was a relief to see a familiar face around here, because the only thing that sucked worse than being dragged out of your own universe-- during that whole pesky galaxy-wide war thing, no less-- and into superhero land was being stuck there by himself.

"Jacob! Hey. Glad I'm not the only one out of the crew to wind up here."

Former crew, technically, but whatever. Once Normandy crew, always Normandy crew.

"You're not." Jacob took a seat next to Joker, pulling up a stool. He was wearing shorts and a t-shirt instead of his usual space clothes. Only his dimly-visible tattoo and the biotic port on the back of his neck suggested that he wasn't just another local. "Miranda's around too. And Kaidan Alenko. It's..." He paused for a moment, stretching his neck. "Kind of a complicated situation." If 'supposed to be dead on Virmire' was something that could be summed up with one word like 'complicated.'

"Glad I found you here," he continued. "I could use a drink. This town always turns into a zoo whenever the Porter grabs new people."

While Jacob sat there in his shorts and t-shirt looking fairly comfortable, Joker was quietly stewing in his standard Alliance uniform; on a normal day, he didn't have any problems with it, but when he was stuck in eighty-plus degree, ten-thousand percent humidity Florida? Just walking over to the bar had gotten him uncomfortably gross. He'd been out there for like twenty minutes and he already hated weather. Not just this weather-- all weather. Fuck it, fuck being groundside, and especially fuck Florida.

"Lawson's here?"

Kaidan's existence didn't surprise him, but Miranda's threw him for a bit more of a loop. It had to do with this whole thing where he'd heard she got stabbed by Kai Leng on Sanctuary, and he'd been pretty sure it wasn't the kind of stabbing that you healed up from.

But that was one of those complicated topics that could wait for a second. "So, you've been here a while? You got any idea what's going on with this whole bullshit superpower government-sponsored caped crusader thing, because it all sounds like crap to me. And I've been served up enough crap over the years by the Alliance brass that I'm not real eager to start shoveling down more."

And here we go, Jacob thought. He didn't let his feelings about the impending cross-dimensional infodump show on his face, though. Instead, he nodded to the bartender.

"I'll have what he's having," he said. "And his next round's on me."

Important stuff taken care of, Jacob swiveled on his stool to give Joker his full attention- and bad news. "Hate to say it, but 'crap' is pretty much all it is. The government has no idea what they're doing here. The 'superhero' thing is just their attempt at handling a technology that's completely out of their control. Meanwhile, all of us are from different universes, different times..."

Jacob shrugged, then chuckled. "Major Alenko's from a world where Shepard is a man, if you can believe that. Bottom line? There's a lot of confusion, and innocent people get caught in the crossfire too damn often. You made the right call heading straight to a bar."

Awesome. Alternate universes and timelines, people screwing around with technology that was beyond their ken, and a city full of idiots who got bitten by radioactive spiders. This sounded like a bad sci-fi B movie, except that it was real and that meant that it was going to be a lot less funny when someone gets hurt. Because Joker hadn't had to deal with quite enough shit in the past few years, apparently.

"Okay," he said, looking sidelong at Jacob, "I'm just gonna skip over the part where I say this whole thing sounds insane and assume you're not fucking with me right now. Alternate universes, awesome, a little Robert Heinlein for my tastes, but whatever. Just for the record, though, I'm having a real hard time picturing Shepard as a woman."

"Aw, hell! Not you too." Jacob made a disgusted face, then took a deep, quick drink as soon as the glass was in front of him. He had really been hoping that what he thought of as 'Jane's World' was the cosmic norm, and that most of his compatriots besides Alenko would be from the same default as his own. Joker had just made it clear things weren't going to be so easy.

Jacob set his glass down, and suppressed a sigh. He would just have to deal with it. "Okay, look. The Shepard I know is named Jane. She's a redheaded woman, hero of the Citadel, savior of Elysium, and all the rest. The last time I saw her was just after we took down the Collector Base together. Does any of that sound familiar?" He was really hoping Joker wasn't from a timeline where the Collector Base hadn't happened, because if he was Jacob was not going to explain that whole nightmare without a lot more alcohol to work with.

"Yeah, I remember all that, but it was over a year ago."

Oh, the good old days, before the reapers gate crashed the galaxy and their biggest problem was how to survive a suicide mission. Those were a simpler time. He almost missed those days, because the casualty rate had been lower and it had been real depressing to watch their All Our Friends Are Dead Wall fill up with names.

"So... you're not up-to-date on anything that went down after Shepard gave the Illusive Man the finger? Because you're missing out on a lot, and I'm not real sure what I can tell you without causing a time paradox or some shit."

"Yeah. That's where I was at. Left the Normandy, took some time on Earth. Last I heard, the Commander was facing court-martial for saving humanity. Go figure, right?" Jacob frowned, shrugged again, took another drink. If he had known his friend was going to be grounded and sent through the wringer by the 'good guys' after all she had done, he would not have allowed himself to spend nearly as much time relaxing by the ocean.

"Far as I'm concerned? If the universe hasn't exploded so far after all the crap the Porter has caused, anything you tell me can't make it any worse. So lay it on me, Joker. I can take it." Jacob leaned forward a bit more, resting his elbow on the bar counter, turned sideways to await Joker's tales of the future. He was thoroughly and blissfully ignorant of his imminent crippling depression.

Joker looked at Jacob for a few long moments, face blank as he weighed the clusterfuck that was his universe against how much alcohol they had in front of them at the moment. Then he turned back to the bartender and flagged him down.

"We're gonna need two more of these, and leave the bottle."

Yeah. This is the part where Jacob should probably feel a creeping unease in his gut.

"Did anybody tell you anything about the whole reaper war, or do I have to start at the beginning?"

Oh. It was going to be one of those conversations. This time Jacob did sigh, not bothering with suppression. The unease was absolutely there, present and accounted for and reporting for duty.

"I heard a bit. The Reapers are going to hit- we were already expecting that. What I didn't expect was Cerberus trying to take the Citadel in the middle of everything."

He shook his head. The organization he had joined- that he thought he had joined- would never have done anything that ruthless, or that stupid. "Beyond that, I don't know much. Just that it's gonna be bad- real bad."

"It sure as hell wasn't a picnic," he said, and then threw back what was left in his glass before the next one showed up. Telling this story was going to require a steady stream of liquor so that he didn't have to really sit back and examine what a mess it was.

"Okay, so after the reapers gate crashed Earth, we picked up Liara 'cause she had these blueprints for a prothean weapon that was supposed to be able to take out the bad guys. Mostly after that, Shepard was running his ass back and forth across the galaxy, trying to get people to take their heads out of their asses long enough to get the thing built and gather up an armada."

The new drinks got served up and Joker nursed his between his hands while he talked. "There were a couple of setbacks, like Cerberus and the Citadel-- Cerberus in general, actually, because TIM never stopped being a jackass-- and Shepard had to play freaking diplomatic speed chess at this summit to try to get turian support, and to get that he had to get krogan support for Palaven, which meant that he had to cure the genophage for Wrex. But he kind of tried to play both sides against the middle because the dalatrass offered salarian support if he sabotaged the cure and let the krogan think it was legit."

Just keeping all this bullshit straight was giving him a headache.

"Wrex found out, though. And let me tell you, that was a conversation that ended real poorly."

"Shit."

Jacob had only met Urdnot Wrex once, on a visit to Tuchanka. He'd been impressed by the big krogan, and surprised to see one of the galaxy's deadliest mercenaries greet Shepard as a friend. Definitely not the kind of guy you ever wanted to piss off if you could help it- or betray.

"Sounds like an impossible choice," he mused, then drank. "With Earth in the fire? I don't know what I would have done in the Commander's place." Jacob looked at his glass, then at Joker. "Did Wrex survive? Hell, did Shepard?" Because there was just no way a 'conversation' like that wasn't going to involve violence.

"Shepard walked out, Wrex didn't."

Difficult choices were the staple of the whole damn war; Joker didn't envy Shepard for being the one who had to make all those decisions. But that's why he slept in the crew quarters and Shepard had the swag pad.

"Shepard made a lot of hard calls to get as many people on board as he could. I mean, there was this whole thing with the quarians and the geth, because right in the middle of a reaper invasion is a great time to start another damn war."

There were a lot of things about the reaper war that were nightmare-inducing, but the outcome of the quarian-geth conflict? Yeah, that gave him some bad ones. He downed another glass of whiskey and poured another, because he was going to need it.

"It came down to a standoff between the geth and the quarians. Legion was trying to upload coding into the geth that would give them a tactical advantage to defend against the quarians, the quarian admirals wanted to blast the geth out of existence while they were vulnerable, and nobody would get their heads out of their asses and listen to Tali and Shepard. He had to make a choice, and... he chose the geth. He let Legion finish the upload."

That next glass of whiskey was looking real tempting right about now, but he also didn't want to drink himself stupid in front of Jacob. "The quarian fleet was annihilated."

"The quarians get wiped out... for the sake of the geth?" There weren't a lot of things in the Galaxy that could threaten Jacob Taylor's faith in Commander Shepard. His own views on synthetics had come around some once he had gotten used to Legion as a part of the Normandy crew. But the fact remained: no veteran of Eden Prime was ever going to be free of bad feelings when it came to the geth. And to lose the quarians...

Jacob drank. When he set his glass down again, his hand was tight around it. He faced forward, not looking at Joker, face and voice carefully even, tension in his shoulders. "And Tali?"

He knew the answer even as he asked the question. Tali's people were everything to her. Jacob could hardly imagine what she would do if they were wiped out.

"The quarians got wiped out because they wouldn't stop shooting."

If you stick cannons on your kids' school bus and go picking a fight, what do you expect? He didn't like the decision and he didn't like the outcome, but what he didn't like more was that everyone involved had taken their heads and shoved them firmly up their asses. The geth would have backed off if the quarians hadn't opened fire.

"Her entire race was gone. What the hell do you think she did?"

He'd always liked Tali; she'd been a good crew member and a great engineer and, dammit, she deserved better than that.

"Yeah." Jacob grunted, then pushed his empty glass away. "That's what I thought." He was already at the Done With This Shit stage where his stomach was starting to knot up. Besides, Jacob had always preferred to face bad things head-on with a clear view rather than trying to hide- even if it was behind alcohol.

Jacob had liked Tali too. He had known she didn't care much for him, at least at first- the quarians had beef with Cerberus, and he had to respect that. But he also respected the engineer's skill, dedication, and resilience. Thinking she had an end like that ahead of her...

"What about me?" Even expression, even voice, don't let it get to you- don't show that it's getting to you. Jacob kept staring ahead, speaking slowly. "Any idea on where I fit into this nightmare? Am I dead? Indoctrinated? A husk?" At this point none of those things would have surprised him. Jacob didn't care that much about his own fate- he'd accepted long ago that he might have to lay it all down to stop the Reapers, and he was all right with it. But a certain morbid curiosity drove him to ask, if only so he could face whatever might be coming.

"Last I heard about you, you were still alive."

If Jacob thought this was a nightmare, he hadn't even heard all of it, and, lucky for him, he hadn't lived it. Hell, maybe if Joker told him about everything that went wrong, than he would be able to keep it from happening in his universe, if he ever made it back. Somehow.

"It's been a while, though. Communication's sort of spotty across what's left of the fleets and resistance movements."

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dancing moms

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