now don't be rude

[maskormods]

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.

Comments

[starbuckaroobanzai]

[Scully raises her eyebrows, pressing her lips together, and nods. It's alright, but she can't quite bring herself to pretend she's glad of the company. Still, she's not unsympathetic; it's only taken a glance to notice his body language and to infer, between that and his words, that he's as lost as she is. Then there's the question about the pen, the fixation on needing one, on writing, which might have to do with an unwillingness or inability to process the shock of transition, or it might be indicative of a compulsion -- or maybe something else entirely. She reads as much as she can out of habit.]

Sure. Let's see.

[Her tone is light. She's not particularly feeling up to being too polite to impose her bad mood on anyone else, but if this man is to be believed and he's as new as she is, he doesn't exactly fit the desired profile. There's no sense in kicking someone who's in the same mess she is.

And so she fishes in her jacket for her notepad, finding secreted away with it a pen, which she considers for a few seconds. It's difficult to bring herself to hand over one of the handful of things tying her to home, an irrational impulse she can't quite quash. It's nothing, it's just an object, just a thing with no inherent meaning of its own. A tool. But it carries her fingerprints, and some quantum of history, some trace evidence too small to see of the places it's travelled with her and the things she's experienced with it.

With a small, sympathetic smile, Scully offers the pen to the stranger. She can't afford that kind of regret.]

Here you go.

[She pauses.]

Are you planning on writing about all of this?

[Write about what happened to you, a therapist had told her once, but she had, in notes and reports, collated and referenced. It was all in the case files.]

[abdiction]

[ Barry accepts the pen with a grateful smile in return, sitting down and opening his own notebook across his lap. He flips past pages filled top to bottom with uneven script and odd sketches to reach one that's filled a third of the way with words before it descends into frustrated scribbles from a dying -- then dead -- pen. ]

Thanks miss, I-I appreciate it. A-and I'll give it back. Usually I'm never caught without a working pen, but this whole -- the relocation thing, you know, I always thought I'd be more prepared but it's just when you're down to your last pen and no chance to pack any more th-that they get you. No notice, right? Unless maybe you got some, I don't know, but then I'd have to write that down. Who knows, any differences m-might be important.

[ He finally pauses, though not for a breath -- rather to burst into a few moments of energetic writing, pouring forth onto the page whatever he was unable to get down before when his other pen ran out of ink.

Finally he stops, exhaling in relief and passing her the pen back with a nod. ]

I write down everything that happens to me, or that I think happens to me, that way I always got a record to refer back to in case I forget something. You should give it a try, it's real calming.

[starbuckaroobanzai]

[Scully, feeling as though she was intruding on something private, had averted her eyes once he'd begun to write in earnest, thinking over what he'd said as she returned to examining her new tattoo. She takes her pen back with a thin smile once offered. Compulsion seems right. Elements of compulsion, anyway, and a familiar paranoia. She feels a pang of loss as she's reminded of Mulder. If he'd been more neurotic, possessed of an even faultier filter...]

That's a good idea.

[She seems to consider leaving it at that, but hesitates, giving him a brief, searching look.]

You said you thought you'd be more prepared. Were you expecting this?

[The manner of the questioning, and the fact that she's prying at all, probably says plenty about her. Plenty unflattering, if he's the sort of paranoid as to distrust law enforcement, for which she honestly couldn't blame him. After what she's seen, what's been done to her, she can't say she blames anyone for distrusting anyone else with a certain quantum of power anymore. They should. There's every reason.

Maybe she's just searching. Maybe she's not really talking to him, but through him to someone else who isn't here. Maybe she needs the counterpoint to her reasoning and her assumptions to jog her onto the right path, and maybe she feels a brief stab of guilt at the idea that she might be using this man. It's probably all true, but there's another habit ingrained in her that surfaces now: she does want to know, and a part of her wants to believe him.]

[abdiction]

[ If Barry's offended, it doesn't show at all in his expression; if anything he seems to light up at the chance to explain himself, eyebrows raising right up his forehead. ]

All my life. I just, I though it'd be different, you know? You think abductions and you expect aliens, b-but I think they just like to follow me around and watch and never do anything, because what the heck kind of aliens take a bunch of people down to Florida? Florida's nothin' special, unless we're actually on some other planet right now that just resembles Florida a whole lot and... everyone here looks just like humans...

[ His eyebrows burrow like he's thinking that possibility over and finds it deeply upsetting; lacking a pen to purge whatever thoughts are building up now, he pauses in his diatribe to fish into his bag and withdraws a bag of skittles. ]

I don't think that's right, though, but then I've got no idea. People can't do this sorta thing.

[starbuckaroobanzai]

[In spite of herself, Scully smiles. Some things are universal constants. It's a relief, really, hearing this sort of thing, though it absolutely shouldn't be. Some hint of the familiar is appreciated.]

Well, I wasn't expecting it.

[She hadn't the last time, either, and as much as she keeps reminding herself that that's different, and that it certainly wasn't what Mulder would like to believe it was (maybe, probably), it isn't as though she really remembers. Just pieces, here and there. Men. But then she's seen men who weren't, men who could change their shape with a thought. It's all too difficult to piece together, and frankly she doesn't honestly want to try. It was always easier to approach it empirically, without delving into her own foggy, treacherous memory.]

You know, I've read cases on reported abductions. I've talked to people. There are certain elements that are almost universally reported. Memories of tests, of experimentation. Reports of implants being placed somewhere in the body, often claimed to be tracking devices.

[And none of them read REGISTERED through the skin. She refrains from touching the back of her neck or rolling her shoulders in discomfort.]

Lost time. By the look of it we've lost a lot more than that.

[Scully gives a helpless glance at the hovering cars passing in the street. If nothing else, all of that is going to take a lot of accounting for.]

What if it is people? There are mathematical models predicting the possibility of parallel universes; what if somebody found out how to manipulate them?

[And now she sounds like Mulder, but this is at least one area with which she has some passing familiarity. Maybe more than passing. It's been over a decade since she wrote her senior thesis on the subject, but some things aren't so easily forgotten.]

[abdiction]

[ Barry nods at her correction, bobbing his head forward and back quickly and brushing his hand anxiously back through his hair. ]

R-right, most people don't. A lotta people, they think I'm pretty weird, you know? Because I dream about aliens all the time. Maybe it is weird, but I-I can't exactly help it, either. Honestly I'd much rather they just leave me alone. I don't even got the constitution for space travel, just flying in an airplane's enough to get me queasy. But, uh--

[ He bites the corner of his lip, looking at his own REGISTERED tattoo when she mentions the implants and curling his fingers into his clammy palm. ]

Lost time I have some experience with. I sleepwalk plenty, a-and my memory isn't too good anyway, but I don't think I've ever been in a spaceship. Or even seen an alien in person, but for all I know... [ Could be what the dreams are, he reminds himself to write down -- repressed memories -- even if he's written this thought down before. He sounds interested and a little awed as he asks: ] Do you really think that's possible?

[starbuckaroobanzai]

I don't know.

[There's the edge of an old frustration in her voice and in the helpless gesture she sketches in the air, a simple parting of the hands. She knows what she'd rather believe and she knows what she's seen and she knows what she's managed to gather hard evidence to support and the three don't always align as neatly as she'd like.]

I don't know what to believe, but there's got to be something I can find evidence to support.

[The possibility of the rest isn't something she necessarily wants to touch. She certainly doesn't want to feed his paranoia by mentioning that she's encountered men she was told were aliens, men who could look at any moment like anyone they wanted, nigh unto unkillable bounty hunters who'd nearly killed her and Mulder more than once. He doesn't need to know about the black oil, or the crashed vessel she'd found on the African coast with the Bible and the Qur'an etched on its surface in ancient Navajo, which had brought the dead back to life and made the sea run red like blood. He doesn't know that she's fallen to her knees in front of seraphim or met a little boy who could read the thoughts of those around him. Mulder's conviction has always been that the truth should be known, that what they do should be accessible to the public, to the world. That proof belongs to the people.

Scully, on the other hand, has seen what the pursuit of it has done to him. To the both of them. To their families, and what scant handful of friends they might once have had. People die for this sort of thing, and they die senselessly.

It isn't, ultimately, that she thinks him crazy. She doesn't think he's right, and she'd put her money on delusion, but it doesn't sound any less rational in a way than anything Mulder puts in his reports or posits on a case, and she sees the value in him. That is in a way her purpose these past seven years: to see value. To believe as earnestly as she can bring herself to believe that Mulder — and by extension this man — are worth no less for what they believe and whatever has made them believe it. Years ago she might have scoffed, but more recently she's sat at the bedside of dying women who believed they were paying the price of what they believed to be their abductions and she could find no evidence to tell them no, even if she had been able to find the heart.

Maybe that, ultimately, is why she says it, looking down at her own hands.]

Five years ago I went missing. Nobody could find me. Not the police, not the FBI. I was taken... by a man, I remember that much. To a mountain. I was gone for four weeks before someone deposited me in the ICU of a hospital in D.C. in a comatose state. We still don't know how I got there or who brought me.

My partner thinks...

[He can work it out on his own, no doubt. Do you believe in the existence of extraterrestrials?

Logically, I'd have to say no.

That was a long time ago. Now she is, in spite of herself, less sure.]

Never mind what my partner thinks. I don't remember much, and the only evidence I've ever found implicates the US government, not visitors from another planet. So I don't know, I have no idea what to believe but I can tell you with certainty that people with enough power and motivation to do terrible things to other people will do those things. That's somewhere to start.