etcelsior | get ya butt over here

T E S T D R I V E M E M E

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 someone else's thread, either!

And remember there's only one rule in Test Drive Meme Club: HAVE FUN ON THE TEST DRIVE MEME!

01.The city of Heropa is what one might expect from a small, bright and cheery place, where locals are friendly enough and local shop owners might offer a free drink to welcome you to their fair city.

As you walk around, you'll notice that all of the printed words on sign shops, newspapers, etc., are all backwards. That's thanks to a powered individual's idea of a joke -- inconvenience everyone by switching letters around. Every street sign, every storefront lettering ... it's rather strange.

The effects will only last a day, but will you try to figure out what's going on? Ignore it? Or maybe catch the individual in the act again and stop them?

02. De Chima, Virginia, is a large city with a healthy economy, with large numbers of citizens waiting to be awed by your very presence. Look at you! Organic wonder! Synthetic wonder! Whatever you might be, those words have meaning here. Science and technology are the lifeblood of this city, so you're likely to come across a good many locals taking your picture with the newest of devices or recently published PLoS papers. The imPort craze remains high here, and you may find yourself cornered by overzealous imPort fans, media wannabes and opportunists alike, shoving cameras in your face.

Want to try out one of the newest wonders of technology? Put on a pair of AirWalker boots, manufactured by CloudCo Engineering! These pieces of footwear are clunky, but they do exactly as they're named. Put them on, and you can climb up into the sky like you're stepping on invisible stairs! Of course, climbing down again isn't so easy, and there have been reports of people panicking as they find themselves stepping higher and farther away from the sidewalk demo kiosk! Will you help them, hero, or are you the one in need?

03. Maurtia Falls, Pennsylvania has carried a reputation for ups and downs ever since imPorts began reappearing again, just those few years prior. Several imPort heroes have put focused efforts into cleaning up the streets of this somewhat infamous city, while a handful of others had swooped in to help the criminal industry thrive. More so here than the streets of any other imPort city, the battle between good and evil looks more like a war of escalation than a heroic tale. Everything from the classic bank heist to brutal bloodbaths can happen around the corner. You have to keep your eyes open and your mind sharp when you live in Maurtia Falls, and hostility against imPorts can spike. The emergence of locals with superpowers is hardly helping...

Enter THE BOOGIE WOOGIE MAN, an apparent Starkian metahuman who will boogie woogie bugle boy you down to company nine. Trumpet in hand, lips blue with determination and maybe a little power amping, he's directing his apocalyptic sound waves at Maurtia Falls First National Bank. A thunderous boom explodes, an earthquake of a noise, and the bricked storefront of that bank crumbles. The facade is obliterated, the bank interior exposed. It's not hard to put this one together, hero: bad guy and a bank, and the innocent civilians he doesn't seem to notice before the path of his sound and fury.

But you notice. You notice the screaming little boy who got separated from his father, you notice the little dog who was walking with its owner along the outside of the street now fleeing without human accompaniment. You noticed some of the brick debris blown off the building facade is now tumbling back to earth -- and right at you.

Boogie Woogie Man takes another breath.

04. Nonah, North Carolina, is the liveliest of all cities; loud, busy and there's always some kind of energy in the air that gets everyone buzzing with excitement.

Today, in a downtown park, a huge crowd is attempting to set a Guinness record for the largest number of people playing a game of Truth or Dare at once. If you're just passing by and aren't interested in games, better walk fast, because you're likely to get pulled in to join. But there's one catch—a local metahuman is using their power of compulsion to make it extremely difficult to say no to answering a truth or performing a dare! But maybe you'll get lucky and won't receive one you don't want to do?

05. Jeopardy, Nevada by all rights shouldn't exist. A glowing neon city smack in the middle of the desert, the only reason it's still here is that the central nuclear power plant has tapped half a mile down into a subterranean lake for its water supply. So though the desert around it may be barren, the occupants of this small city are happily self sufficient. Those weird figures you see out of the corner of your eyes? Don't worry too much. Probably just weird radiation after effects. Jeopardy has a lot of those.

Despite the weird constant hum and the creepy cultish bingo, Jeopardy is usually a pretty calm place. A safe place. But not today. Today, someone has released a couple hundred tiny praying-mantis-like robots into the city, and the place is in chaos. Shops are closed up early because though these little destructive creatures don't have bullets, they do have some weird arm appendages that like to just crunch everything in existence. Like a locus swarm of cockatoos, anything made of wood or plastic is being crunched up and left for scrap. But at less than six inches high apiece, rounding them up is proving extremely difficult. Luckily, the mayor in her wisdom is giving out titanium nets to any imPort who wants to help round up the trouble makers. And, in the spirit of the city, she's offering the imPort that catches the most robots a free meal for two in the swanky Radiation Galley - Jeopardy's top tier, five star restaurant.

Get catchin', imPorts!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Riptide is the only other Cybertronian here at the moment, but recently Rodimus and Tailgate were pulled in for a very short time just recently.

Prior to that, Ratchet, Getaway, and the majority of the DJD. That's not something I'm sorry to have missed.

[ Drift's name had also come up as a previous imPort, as Knock Out's himself had, but he'll gloss over that for now. ]

[Well, those are... Those are good names (and he might notice Drift's attention perk at a few of them in particular)—except for Getaway's, and there's a notable frown in response to it, and certainly something dark passes over his features at the mention of the DJD, but...]

You say "a short time" and "prior". I'm assuming that means they've since gone.

[However that works.]

Indeed they have. Perhaps the Porter changed its mind.

[ He's not exactly sorry not to be outnumbered by Autobots on a 3-1 ratio anymore. At least he's gotten to know Riptide and can more or less predict what's needed to keep him on Knock Out's good side and vice versa. ]

If you think of anything else, one of us will no doubt be around to answer.

Well, at least one of them would've hated it here, so there's that.

[Drift's smile is a bit crooked.]

Thanks. Hopefully reviewing what I've got will answer most things, but help is always appreciated.

[Drift shifts and bends some at the waist where he kneels, palms resting on his thighs and elbows turned out.]

The planet does grow on you, for a mudball.

[ Having the humans be fans of imPorts in general and Cybertronians in particular, certainly helps. ]

You're welcome.

"Mudball", huh?

[It's a good word for a planet with this kind of composition.]

I'll take your word for it that it does. No good roads I've seen so far, though.

Said with all due affection, I assure you.

[ Not even close. ]

Now you're speaking my frequency.

[ Knock Out will ping over a quick list of favourable highways within range of all the Porter cities. ]

get ya butt over here

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