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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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Lucky for Karkat, Wildcat had been on the prowl (or, well, as much as you could when you were grocery shopping) when the vortex tore through the sky and emptied the dinosaurs into the streets of downtown LA. It didn't take her long to leap into action, dropping her paper grocery bags and loaf of bread and shifts quickly into one of her larger forms--a smilodon. She figures fight prehistoric with prehistoric, right?

Running down the street at full pelt, claws scraping against the tarmac and mask strapped tightly to the head of the large cat, she chases after some of the smaller dinosaurs--the bigger ones are far too large for her to even attempt to fight--and manages to bring down a few with a quick bite around their long necks. They scream as she crunches down and then hang limp in her jaws, blood dripping down the fangs.

And then her ears perk to a familiar sound. She drops the dinosaur, mentally hoping it'll be there when she gets back because she'd love to try and make some jerky out of it, and roars at another small pack that are circling some cars before she finds what she's looking for.

Without much warning, she's almost ontop of him, swatting and roaring angrily at a deinonychus that has gotten far too close for comfort. From a distance, she'd look like a mother tiger, protecting a cub, but from Karkat's point of view? A bloodied maw and suddenly a weight ontop of him? Maybe she didn't think this through well enough.

Edited 2014-01-16 18:42 (UTC)

She absolutely didn't – Karkat screams, a high pitched trilling sound like something halfway between a mammal and an insect, before he realises this is, in fact, a beast he knows.

"Fuck! Don't do that!"

Her ears pull back at the sheer pitch of his scream and she gives a small growl in his direction. The dinosaur in front hisses at the pair of them and goes in for another attempt at Nessa's throat. It misses, narrowly, and clamps down on her shoulder instead because she doesn't move completely out of the way. If she moved Karkat would be attacked, and right now she can take more blows than him. She yowls at the bite and swings one of mighty paws around to smack it clean in the side, trying to dislodge it, her mouth trying to reach it to yank it off. Thankfully she manages to stab one of her long canines into it's neck and tosses her head, sending it, and a strip of flesh from her shoulder, flying.

She's panting by now, giving herself a second to manage to compose herself enough before she quickly finishes the job with a well aimed swipe of her razor sharp claws. Then she drops to her haunches next to Karkat, making sure that there aren't any immediate threats before giving a small grumble and moving to inspect and lick her wound.

Karkat slowly straightens up once she's off him, brushing himself down and wrinkling his nose at the dinosaur corpse.

"Fucking hell," he says, looking over at his feline teammate, "at least give a guy a fucking warning before you pull a shit like that, geez."

She glances over, midway through tending the wound, her tongue still sticking out over her bloodied maw and teeth, and makes a grumbling growl noise before her body looks like it's melting away. Once she's more solid around the edges again, the prehistoric cat is replaced with a girl dressed in the same mask, blood all down the front of her and her costume, and the sleeve torn up and bleeding. She touches it lightly with a finger to make sure it's starting to get a little less oozy, before looking at him with a frown.

"So what was I supposed to do, huh? Let you become dino-chow? Don't think so, Karkitty."

She pushes up off the balls of her feet from her crouch so she's standing upright again, looking around at the overgrown lizards roaming the streets. Her pupils almost dilate at the sight of a herd of iguanadon running past, a hand running up to swipe some of the dripping blood off of her face. She turns to look back at Karkat, vaguely concerned.

"So, what's it gonna be. Am I taking you back to the den, or we going back out there as a pack? Where're your claws?"

"I don't know, make a roar or something so I know it's you. Fuck." He frowns, and growls nonspecifically at the dinosaurs. Or possibly at himself for being unarmed. "Don't have costume or weapons, can't do shit at these things."

She puts her hands on her hips and half rolls her eyes with a smile.

"A roar, with dinosaurs runnin' around probably won't warn you, Karkat," she sighs, pulling some viscera out of her wild hair, nodding as he continued. She doesn't know what he's exactly doing without his suit or weapons stashed somewhere on his person (even though she's currently dressed in a hooded cardigan and jeans with leg warmers) with the fact he's quite obviously him.

"Retreat, then," she offers, before quickly shifting again and standing next to him, obviously waiting for him to do something. Her ears twitch at roars that she couldn't source, and she glances at him with a little bit of urgency.

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