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TEST DRIVE MEME #0

A TIME VORTEX has opened in downtown LA! Some magic folks have been contacted to close it, but they haven't gotten here fast enough for the vortex not to spill out a HECK TON OF DINOSAURS – all kinds of dinosaurs of all kinds of sizes. There are theoretically gentle herbivores among the fierce predators, but they are all pretty pissed off about their sudden, startling relocation, and a lot of them have spikes.

(The vortex is both temporally and spatially unstable, which is why the dinosaurs emerging onto the streets of LA are constrained neither by specific prehistorical era nor geographical location.)

What you do is up to you. Here are some suggestions, though:

Fight some dinosaurs. You might be trying to herd them back to the vortex, or just trying to stop them by any means possible.

Flee or hide. If you're lucky the dinosaurs won't work out how to open doors and you can spend your entire thread hiding behind the bar in a Starbucks with some other hapless civilians without having to confront any of them.

Try to capture the dinosaurs on camera. If you can get some really good photos you might be able to sell them to the local paper in order to supplement your elderly aunt's meagre income. Or just use them to get a bunch of notes on Tumblr, either way.

Take advantage of the chaos to do crime. The forces of law enforcement are preoccupied with all these prehistoric reptiles.

Or pretty much anything else you think your character might be doing. Any location in LA is game, although there's no real need to meticulously look them up – you can just assume a generic street, rooftop, store, etc. (You don't have to look up the dinosaurs, either.)

If you have a character who you'd like to assume is part of a team, but that team hasn't been named or brainstormed OOC yet or anything, feel free to indicate in your opening post that you're assuming your character is operating alongside others and encourage others to tag in as if they are part of the same team! Or just handwave it and assume they got caught without their usual teammates or separated from them. Whatever way works best for you.

Events from this test drive are not automatically assumed game canon, but individual threads can be if you and the people who you thread with end up mutually wanting to keep them.

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[Kit isn't one for heroism, but nobody else looks like they're paying attention at all, and that's Vanessa Goldpaw. She dashes out from the alley she'd been hiding in, waving her arms above her head and yelling.]

Dr. Goldpaw! Look out!

Yuuya spots that and wings closer. "You may wish to back away- all right, get down!"

The plated dinosaur pivots and turns on its back legs, bringing the thagomizer at the end of its tail close enough to get in range. But before it could hit her Yuuya does, activating his ICPSS module so that the creature that knocks her out of the way is not a pigeon the size of a large condor but a compact young man. Spikes graze his back and he winces but does not relent. "Come on, come on, away from here!"

He may look and feel human but he smells more like a healthy pigeon, dinosaurlike, with an odd note like freshly baked bread. This is not the time for a bird to regret trying to rescue a giant cat, is it?

Yuuya came to this timeline or reality as part of a group from a future where uplifted birds like himself rule society. They'd been hoping to reach somewhen else, but time travel is difficult! While the scientists try to figure things out, Yuuya likes to use his skills and ICPSS solid-state hologram generator to be a hero.

...well, he's much better at the small scale, sneaking into places where he shouldn't be, maybe beating up unpowered humans. So a dinosaur invasion is a little beyond his expertise. But that doesn't mean he can't try!

Just now that means clinging to the quill-bristly back of a maddened Triceratops, wings half spread to keep his balance, busily steering it back towards the portal with delicate applications of a bullet her and there. Part of a car decorates one of its brow-horns.

"It's funny how humans think 'herbivore' means 'harmless and gentle'!" he muses, loud enough to be heard over it. "They even think doves are peaceful creatures." Yuuya fires into its flank. His pistol is too low caliber to really hurt the beast, but it certainly stings, and the Triceratops wheels in that direction to try and attack whatever hurt it.

Sorry.

[jon looks down momentarily, embarrassed to be caught spacing out on a mission.]

You need cover?

[he immediately regrets this as he is still searching for a suitable weapon, but at the very least he makes a good meat shield.]

Nice to meet you.

[jon nods.]

Do you know where to find a hardware store?

[he looks around at all the designer boutiques and. mostly designer boutiques.]

"A ghost? No, it's very different. I'm Space Ghost." A slight ripple across the surface of his cowl gives the impression that he just winked. "I'm from space."

He stands back, and poses - right hand chop, left hand block, then a finger on the wrist, so everyone knows you're ready to blast them. "Now tell me, citizen Poste: what did you have to report?"

It's for science. I can't believe you're all wasting perfectly good data.

"Science" is a pretty broad field. What kind of science, mysterious anonymous twitter user?

THE BOULDER stands in the middle of the street, a wall of immovable muscle amidst the chaos. "THE BOULDER is perturbed by these unsettling developments. THE BOULDER wishes to see the landmass of the world expanded for the use of humanity, not these transtemporal interlopers!" THE BOULDER strokes their chin. "... THE BOULDER has also always wondered whether THE BOULDER could punch out a dinosaur."

I think Science is good enough for my fellow mysterious anonymous twitter user.

[GLaDOS starts poking around Kit's twitter account for telltale signs of human carelessness - it's always a good idea to keep track of people who might object to her... projects.]

An adult woman with fire-red hair and a shield with a lioness rampant wheels her horse over from a retreating line of refugees.
"I'm not such a fan of punching these beasts, but would you like help?"
She brandishes a sword and quickly surveys the battlefield.

Ah. But how do I know you aren't creating some kind of Mesozoic Park? We wouldn't want cell phone shots of these dinosaurs to fall into the wrong hands. [Kit isn't very good at jokes.]

[There's definitely no sloppiness - if GLaDOS tries to trace Kit's IP more than once she'll realize that it leads back to a different country every time. But there are other traces, something a regular human wouldn't be able to pick up, almost like technopathic fingerprints.]

She gives him a little shrug, turning her head to look at the skyline.

"Well, It's different from back in my day, I suppose!" she says, pensively.

She slowly rises up to take in the view.

"Those dinosaurs seem to be getting closer. Would you be okay with a manikin arm or two? There's a couple of streets ahead that might be a little rough."

She pinches the air to gesture an understatement.

Please. As if I would want live dinosaurs running around.

[Well, that's certainly something GLaDOS has never seen around the internet before.]

[private:] What I'd like to know is how you managed to smear your grubby hands directly onto the internet.

[also private:] I'm sorry, I'm afraid I have no idea what you're talking about.

[she really doesn't, nobody's ever pointed it out to her. Kit doesn't know many other technopaths. But she will be trying to figure out who and where GLaDOS is right about now.]

Of course not. Don't worry about it, by the way. Go ahead and keep putting your fingers all over every bit [har har] you touch, I'm sure no one minds.

[There's a couple of proxies on top of GLaDOS's real IP, but even that just directs back to good old rural Michigan. It doesn't have any other identifying information, either - it's all been visibly removed.]

[he frowns. that seems a little close to a wiffle ball bat.]

If you can find one with any weight to it.

THE BOULDER smirks. "How do you expect to assist THE BOULDER against these triassic titans with your puny metal stick?"

Edited 2014-01-16 04:30 (UTC)

[She must have been sloppy, somewhere. But a quick retrace of her steps confirms that everything here is airtight, which means...]

What are you.

[Kit isn't easily freaked out, but she sure as hell is on edge now.]

[Neku is grumpy on the best of days, but this is a little too much for him. Dinosaurs stomping around, civilians screaming everywhere... the noise is enough to give anyone a headache. He'd REALLY rather not get involved, but a pack of velociraptors aggressing a group of tourists is kind of a situation that even he can't turn his back on. He's doing his best to keep them at bay, flinging them around and slashing at them with a psy-shock here and there, but there's a lot and he's getting a bit overwhelmed. Some backup might be nice.]

(This kid is an antisocial loner that isn't currently committed to any team, but you're welcome to try your hand at getting on his good side, if you're up for that challenge.)

A concerned citizen of the internet.
Wash your hands, for all of our sakes.

[GLaDOS goes back to downloading pictures of dinosaurs. She's not overly concerned for her identity, but she's not about to go handing it out.]

[the next time GLaDOS refreshes twitter, the whole page will just be white, with "WHAT ARE YOU" in small neat black type, in the upper right hand corner. In fact, every page of twitter is like that, except the page to send a new private tweet. Only to Kit, of course. If GLaDOS tries to send something to any other user it just refuses to send.

Kit is taking advantage of the distraction to really track down GLaDOS, but it's hard. Harder than anything she's done in a while, actually. Whoever this is has better security than most corporations, certainly better than most governments. Closing her eyes and taking a deep breath, Kit reaches into the net. Somewhere out there, lurking just beyond her reach, she can feel something. Something big.]

[hdu]

That's incredibly rude.
So is what you're doing now. Stop that, you're getting my network all grubby now too.

[aaaand up go the big walls.]

Starscream is also out and about, in a sense of the word anyway. He's really just taking advantage of the ensuing chaos to scrounge about for useful supplies using the holo-matter projector, currently wholly focused on removing some potentially useful scrap parts from an expensive looking ferrari. Then out of nowhere, he senses movement and a sudden presence to his left.

He quickly turns to look, prepared to bully off whatever human interloper has stuck its nose into his business... and ends up letting out an undignified startled sounding squawk and falling on his ass, holoform flickering as he comes face to face with a panicked looking-- ......what IS that??? It's not one of the earth based meat bags, that's for sure, or if it is, it's certainly not a NORMAL one.... distantly he recalls seeing other similar individuals in the past, though he's not quite sure; the Decepticons have seen a lot of aliens in this large scale galactic war of theirs, but he's far to preoccupied with metaphorically pising himself at the moment to search his memory banks properly. He tries to recover with a quick retort to scare the creature off, but ends up just spluttering angrily.

Edited 2014-01-16 05:18 (UTC)

[The defenses catch Kit off guard, like a nasty shock of static electricity. She looks for a way through, but everything looks pretty impenetrable. Twitter, however, doesn't really have much in the way of protection at all.

WHAT ARE YOU is replaced with a much more polite, normally capitalized "Answer my question and I'll stop."]

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