redmarsshit | test drive meme: november 2019

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!test drive

test drive meme: november 2019

Redshift: Welcome to the v͖͕̺̲̘̱̜͎o̴̦̣̠̦̘̹͞i̯̖d̛̪̬͈̱̦̝͍̕.

▶ Click here to read what characters will experience when arriving in Anchor.

▶ All TDM threads can be considered game canon, and current players are welcome to either top-level on the TDM so prospective players can tag them, or use the prompts for logs or network posts on the communities. All threads on the TDM can be used for Activity Check.

a. the truth hurts.

As though everything happening in the past month wasn't enough, there's been a minor explosion in one of the labs. No one hurt, if you don't count the hapless maintenance bot that caused the explosion in the first place.

But there are gases drifting through the laboratories, some of them making their way into the air vents, invisible to the purifiers in the system thanks to the explosion. And those gases are leaking into the air around Anchor, little pockets of danger waiting to be breathed in.

Those who breathe the gasses in might be the unluckiest Anchorites of all.

They're stuck telling the whole truth and nothing but the truth for the next five hours, give or take. Good luck with that!

b. retromedia.

Oblivious to what's going on inside Anchor, the shift rages outside, bringing shadows of things and places from other worlds, those things flickering into existence and out of it again.

The bad news is that the Whole Foods is gone.

The good news is the shift left something behind in its place.

A long, squat building, with cement walls painted over with stucco and punctuated by big windows. A flat roof with slanted sides, painted a deep blue. In bold yellow letters bolted to the roof, a sign:

BLOCKBUSTER
The sliding doors are broken, bouncing open and shut steadily, but the inside is clean and well-stocked with rack upon rack upon row upon row of VHS tapes, all of them neatly packaged in plastic boxes. Some of them have the movie covers on them, but most bear the Blockbuster logo and tiny labels running down the back, declaring the box's contents. There's a giant, somewhat busted up standee of Tim Allen as The Santa Clause, flickering holiday lights strung unevenly from the ceiling, and symbols of various seasonal holidays stuck up along the walls and windows.

Any movie you could possibly want lies within, or at least any movie you could possibly want that was released on Earth during or before 1994. And don’t worry if you can't find a VHS player in Anchor! There are whole shelves of VCRs tucked into one of the closets, apparently part of an aborted plan to rent out VCRs along with movies.

Poor Blockbuster. They were innovators. And now they're lost to the sands of the red shift.

c. sweet sweet self-care.

While sickness persists inside Anchor's walls, those in recovery seem to be getting better every day. And while the health bots have been working overtime, some of their processes have gotten a little borked up from all the work they've been doing.

Along with medical care, they're now administering lectures to their captive audiences about the value of diet and exercise, the importance of personal hygiene, and the healing properties of massage. Some of them are forcing massages on people just to prove their point, which, y'know, could be a lot worse. At least they're good at massages?

The spa bots are getting in on the action, nagging the healthy to come for relaxation and decontamination in one gloriously bubbly swoop. They've converted several of their spa pools into sweet-smelling antibacterial baths, so you can make extra-sure you got those visiting-a-sick-friend cooties off!

No, seriously, go with them. Before they drag you there and make you take a bath like an unruly two-year-old.

Believe them, it's worth it. If you complete a circuit of the spa, including the antibacterial baths and the fresh and zesty decontamination shower, you get a shiny sparkly holographic sticker that says "YOU ARE FREE OF DISEASE" in little cheerful bubble-letters. They designed them all by themselves, totally from scratch. Are you proud?

d. the network.

Need to get hold of someone, call for help, ask the city at large a question? Need to ask a friend which 1980s teen movie classic to watch at movie night? Maybe you need to hold your sat phone up to whatever crazy thing you're seeing and send out a recording to double-check if your eyes are deceiving you and what you're looking at is real?

Whatever the reason, the network is going strong, so feel free to include a post to it in your top-levels.

Navigation.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

1. Blockbuster
Genji is from 2070+ and has only a vague idea of what a VCR is, the way that most people know what a phonograph is. He's never actually seen one, but if he can hook up original Famicon devices to holocubes he can work some AV wires and component cabling.

With a VCR in his arms and a few movies (all cartoons) stacked up on top he's heading back inside to figure this out, but not to his bedroom, he's going to set this up in one of the common rooms so anyone can join him. Movie nights are better with other people, and he hasn't just sat with anyone else in over a decade.

Time to pretend he's a totally normal guy who just happens to be wearing an entire suit of armor. At least he turned all the lights off so he's not distracting.

He can be found setting up and cursing in Japanese at all the cables and wires required to do this. Or chillaxing on the couch watching Transformers, Rats of NIMH, or The Last Unicorn.

2. Self Care
As a ninja, Genji has killed hundreds of people. He murdered his entire clan (minus Hanzo) after what happened to him. He has no qualms about violence, and he's very much the silent, stoic, killer to be expected of someone raised in what's basically the Yakuza.

However.

Genji is also secretly twelve years old and no amount of training, being nearly murdered, or a life of agony is going to squash down his desire for stupid shiny things.

There is a sticker.

He will be obtaining said sticker.

It's not entirely a pleasant experience because while his armor is so shiny he might blind people in full sunlight, he didn't take it off in all the showers or baths and it's not waterproof. Water resistant sure, but he is basically a soggy mess right now with water pooling in places that he really wished it wouldn't. But! That is far from the point. He has his sticker.

He's currently putting it on the sheath for his wakizashi making sure it's perfectly aligned and flat. Right next to the little Pachimari charm dangling from the handle.

Wildcard
Come at him!

Peter has also run the spa gauntlet and survived, though he isn't quite as enthusiastic about the sticker as Genji is. He's hanging around nearby, drying his hair with a spa towel and watching the robo ninja put a dorky sticker on his super cool ninja weapon and let's be real, Peter would totally do the same thing if he had something like that.

But he doesn't, so his sticker is useless to him.

"Want a matching sticker for your big sword? I don't really have anywhere to put this."

Edited 2019-12-03 03:45 (UTC)

Genji is definitely thirty-five years old. Very much so.

"You are not going to use it? You earned it." A sticker earned is a badge of honor, wear it proudly. Or that's how Genji's thought process works anyway. He smooths the sticker down, making sure it's nice and flat and even and then tilts it to catch the light. Perfect.

So mature, doing taxes, paying bills.

"It's not like taking a bath is that hard." Except Peter had kind of made it that hard. He'd fought the robots the whole way to the spa, maybe he really had literally earned that sticker.

"It is when they want you to take several consecutive ones. And also want to dunk you under the water forgetting about the fact we need to breathe." Though maybe the robots thought he was one of them and didn't need to. But his lungs didn't appreciate it.

"I'm not sure why they are rewarding us for this, but it does indicate that maybe some residents are not much for personal hygiene."

"Okay, you got me there." Peter hadn't had any trouble shoving the robots away when he needed to, but maybe they were making things difficult for everyone else. He wouldn't be surprised, really, the robots were super rude.

"Honestly, if I lived alone I would probably forget to shower sometimes, so you might be onto something there."

"For the good of all of us, please do not. I used to work with someone who was hungover every morning and often forgot to shower. It was not a pleasant time." As much as he liked McCree, and the man might have been the only friend he had, having to stand next to someone who smelled like a distillery was not great.

"If it actually helps with disease that is an added bonus. I was not ill, so I'm unsure, but at least I got a sticker."

Priorities.

"Don't worry, don't worry, I shower regularly." He has a girlfriend that he would very much like to keep, he's not going to let himself get stinky.

But yeah bro, your priorities are a little bit weird.

"I wasn't sick this time, but I was the first time this thing was circulating. Then my girlfriend got super sick, and I've been spending a lot of time with her, so I figured I'd just get this thing over with."

"Maybe it will make you immune. Helpful if you are with someone who is sick. Is she better now?" Happy with his sticker placement he reattaches his scabbard and wakizashi to his waist. Nothing says fearsome ninja like a holographic sticker and a turnip-octopus charm.

"The robots have been very demanding lately. Are they always like that? They forced me into clothes, tried to feed me syrup, and now this."

"Yeah. I think she's been feeling better." She says she is, anyway. She could just be trying to keep him from worrying so much. And dude, nobody's gonna fuck with a ninja that has cute stickers and charms hanging off the things he's going to kill you with, that ninja obviously fears nothing.

"They uh, the robots can be a little weird sometimes. I don't know if it's a glitch in their programming, or if they'd just been without human interaction for so long and they're just overly excited, or what. They don't seem dangerous, at least, but if they get that way I might have to put 'em down. ... Shut 'em down. For-- for repairs, not like, robot murder. That sounded a little dark."

"That is good. And maybe once you have had it you become immune for the future so she won't have it again?" Which doesn't bode well for Genji who didn't get sick either time. He's not even sure he has an immune system anymore.

"They do seem very happy to see us. And yes, that sounded grim, but.." He trails off trying to figure out how to say: you seem so unthreatening, in a way that isn't an insult. Fortunately he hasn't breathed in all the truth gas yet so he's able to finish that off with, "You don't seem the type to go on a murderous rampage against robots."

"Maybe. I'm really hoping that this is the last we'll see of it." There has been some really shitty stuff happening in Anchor, but this incident had by far been the worst, not to mention the most stressful.

Honestly, being called unthreatening wouldn't come across as insulting to Peter. He doesn't want to seem threatening, half because his little nerd ass loves making friends, but also half because it's something that he could totally use to his advantage if he gets into a fight.

But no one time he legit went on a murderous rampage against robots that helped lead to the eradication of their entire robot species but that's a trauma he's trying to leave behind, so.

"Not unless someone brings Skynet online, anyway."

"It is strange that it happened to begin with, we were all forced through decontamination when we arrived." Though maybe a shower isn't enough to eradicate space flu. He's not a doctor, he doesn't know.

The reference is lost on him, but he presumes it's a bad thing from his world that involves robots, "Can you actually reprogram them and fix them? They may appreciate that, some of them seem to be malfunctioning."

"True, but when we first got here, there wasn't a crazy space virus trying to wipe us out." Maybe the robots put some kinda anti-virus goop into the spa water or something, like who even knows with these robots.

"I'm better at fixing the mechanical parts, and I know a guy who's really good at programming. I think we'll be able to get them up and running correctly again, we just need a little time. ...Or a lot of time. It's a lot of robots."

"It had to have come from somewhere." Right? He's pretty sure that's how diseases work.

"That is good then, since we have so many robots and they are all .. slightly odd." He shakes his head, "They do not seem to really be sentient, not the way that I am used to back home. They do seem to have autonomy, but they do not really seem to be alive."

"Yeah, well. Everything comes from somewhere," which sounds cryptic as all hell, but it's the best Peter's got. Had it come from outside? The redshift? The animals up in the agricultural area? He had no goddamn idea. He really hated not knowing.

"Nah, these guys are pretty basic, their AI isn't very advanced. They can follow their programming and other basic functions, but that's about it. I knew some robot guys in the last place I was stuck who were like, aside from their appearance, indistinguishable from talking to a human. I can kind of understand how this might be jarring."

"That is how they are where I am from. Most are more human than some people I've met." You know, like himself. He shakes his head, "It is quite strange to see these ones, I have attempted to talk to them but they do not seem to understand me. And last time they kept trying to get me to eat syrup."

Not that he didn't want the goop, because it seemed like pure sugar and he's all about that life, but he's not taking his mask off for that.

"I am simply thankful they still function. We would all be fighting to not have to do basic chores." He'd be the whiniest ninja about taking the trash out.

Genji Shimada | Overwatch | In Game

Self care

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