returnjourneymemes | TEST DRIVE 006

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test drive meme

TEST DRIVE 006

RETURN JOURNEY: TEST DRIVE 006

Welcome to the Return Journey's test drive meme! We appreciate your interest. Our TDM features a small sample of events your character might encounter in game, which you're free to embellish or improvise with your own ideas as desired. Don't worry if you haven't read everything yet; while we recommend skimming our FAQ for relevant questions, critical information should be contained or linked within the prompts themselves!

TDM threads can be used as samples for applications. Players can mutually keep threads as game canon after being accepted into the game, though threads featuring non-canon ports or events may need to be adjusted.

We suggest putting your character's name, canon, and potential role (warden or inmate) as the subject. If you're not sure which role you want to choose, feel free to try your hand at both!

If you have any questions about the TDM, please ask here.

1. Welcome Aboard!

Welcome aboard the SFS Peregrine, a ship in the Admiralty's Transformative and Penal Reparation Fleet. It is presently circling the outer perimeter of the Oos Ring Galaxy.

Wardens have been approached personally by the Navarch with a job offer: Come aboard the SFS Peregrine to assist in the redemption of an inmate, and receive a miracle known as a windfall as payment. Even if you don't ask as many questions as you should, every warden will be treated to a short Warden Orientation video explaining their expected duties and conduct.

Inmates have died and been placed aboard the SFS Peregrine as candidates for reformation. You may have come willingly, offered a choice between death or redemption, or you may have been collected against your will. Inmates are also treated to an Inmate Orientation; you'll find you have less privileges than a warden, but more motivation for...latitude. Violence? Chaos? Bribery? Blackmail? Well, no one said the path to redemption was without a few bumps along the way.

Given staff shortages, some wardens may be asked for a favor. Rather than leaving directly for the Peregrine, you've been asked to pick up an inmate from the limbo between death and redemption. During this mission, wardens will have clearance to enter a snapshot of sorts, where the inmate died (so devoid of other living beings). You either have to talk them into willingly coming along...or bring their unconscious, fresh-from-death not-corpse with you in the Avro provided. Better hope they don't wake up on the way!

Inmates, in this case, you'll be presented with the choice of death or redemption from a warden rather than the Navarch. Or possibly not provided with a choice at all, if death has rendered you unconscious. Good luck when you awaken to find yourself in a small ship, with someone you've never met. Try not to cause any trouble.

2. Pairings

Pairings are a critical aspect of the dynamic between warden and inmate. While interactions between wardens and inmates are not restricted to those in pairings, this relationship is a bit more...inescapable. Inmates test the limits of a warden, whether they take a more typical or unusual approach to matters; likewise, wardens learn what makes an inmate tick (and hopefully cooperate). Chances are, your values will clash.

A pairing of any sort is as varied as the individuals involved in them. And today, courtesy of the Navarch's monthly announcement, you and your sorry partner have been paired. Temporary or permanent, with a warden for an inmate or an inmate for a warden, it's your first day together — out of at least a month, so good luck setting some ground rules and figuring out each other's breaking points.

3. Dorm Life

Hey, inmates! Ever gone to summer camp? Had a sibling? If so, you might see where this is going. If not, welcome to your first experience with shared sleeping arrangements!

The dorms are lined with bunks, though maybe they're better described as pods: futuresque capsules stacked two high, with sleek white paneling and cool blue LED lightning. Each bunk can be closed off with a sliding door privacy and boasts a bladeless fan for temperature control. Bedding is adequate. If such modest conditions do not appeal to you: consider not committing crimes against other people.

And just like with siblings or summer camp, you don't get a say in who your bunkmate is. Maybe you'll luck out and get a light sleeper who doesn't toss and turn in the night. Maybe you won't, and you'll end up with someone who will kill you if you snore. Whoever you get is who you're stuck with until further notice!

Wardens get much more hospitable quarters, but they may want to keep an eye out on the inmate dorms. Just in case an inmate does try to kill their bunkmate.

4. The Peregrine

The Peregrine's layout and protocols have been designed with its intended passengers in mind, who are primarily Earth humanoids and inclined towards certain social and cultural practices. If you're wondering why you are on a ship of Earth humanoids despite not being one yourself, please understand that all ships in the Admiralty have a population capacity. At times it may be necessary to assign other species to a ship of this type, based on availability.

As a warden, you have full run of the ship map. Inmates...less so, but that's nothing a little creativity can't fix, right? Just remember, if a warden catches an inmate somewhere that inmate shouldn't be, it falls on the warden to handle the matter. And if the warden turns a blind eye...well, let's hope neither of you get caught. While it won't result in anything as extreme as a demotion, wardens can expect to get a stern dressing down; inmates, meanwhile, will be reprimanded by the warden who found them.

5. Networking

Now that you've powered on your CommLink for the first time and sat through the short tutorial and appropriate orientation, you're ready to explore the wonders of messaging. Video, audio, or text, the world is your oyster and you surely have opinions on it.

There is no anonymous option and IDs must be some variation of your name. (IC, characters will have to try their luck and see what the communicator will or won't accept when they register; OOC, it's up to players to decide what name to use if the character has multiple names or aliases.)

Wardens have access to a group network filter, something that inmates lack, and can track inmates throughout the ship with their CommLink. Inmates, best avoid getting your device confiscated or monitored.

6. Wildcard

If it's in our game pages, you can use it as a prompt! The sky's the limit.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Kim is as polished as inmates come. Her blouse is wrinkle-free from hanging near the showers, and not a single hair strays from her ponytail, even if she hasn't managed to get it into that uniform curl at the bottom. Her expression is tight, unsmiling, but she carries herself and her cup of coffee like she's late for a meeting. Like she's at work. Maybe meeting some teenager at the courthouse, prepping to wrangle a dismissal on a shoplifting charge, or something. It unsettles her, a feeling that just makes her more tightly wound.

Bizarre, to be on this end of things.

She blinks at the statement.

"You think?" she repeats, but she continues past her own bluntness with an offered hand to shake. "Beth. I'm Kim."

She looks like another world completely, like someone's mom from before everything ended. That would be fine. But the way she answers? She sounds like Dawn. Used to getting what she wants, expecting things to be exactly the way she wants them to be, and finding fault in Beth if they aren't.

(Maybe that's not fair. You're just looking for reasons not to trust her. But if Dawn was here, she sure wouldn't be a warden - and neither is this woman.)

"Nice to meet you," she says, clasping Kim's hand with every expectation that Kim's going to be the person controlling the handshake. "Do you wanna talk about stuff, or should we just hang out?"

"Nice to meet you too," she says, and that handshake is firm, efficient. "I don't think hanging out is really the best use of our time. We should talk business."

There's a terse smile, and she decides not to correct herself. It is business, even if it's business she can't really parse the rules of, in a system largely unknown to her. Kim glances over her shoulder at nothing in particular, brow furrowed, and she comes back with:

"You seem pretty young."

"We have forever," Beth points out, shrugging. They're both dead, even if Kim doesn't know that about her - what are they going to do, run out of afterlife before graduation? "And I'm older than I look."

Sometimes she forgets that she's eighteen. (Or was. Do dead people really have ages? It feels kind of pointless to keep track any longer.) Two years among the dead and dying might not have killed her spirit, but they left their mark.

She nods toward one of the tables - meeting in the mess hall had seemed like the best place, in case Kim was weird or violent - and starts heading over to it. And since Kim wants to get down to business... "So where do you wanna start?"

Forever, like that's fine. Just an eternity in this place, floating in the cosmos, searching for some sort of justice. For who, exactly? What did she do that was so wrong? Her jaw tenses for a beat.

"Okay. Forever it is."

Kim shrugs and follows, her heels clicking on the floor with every step. She slides into a seat. There's some habitual impulse to have a pen and paper, something to take notes on, but she has nothing, so she folds her hands on the tabletop.

"So what is this all about for you?" she asks. "What's the motivation, why do this?"

Like she's the warden.

Beth doesn't answer right away, just looks at her. She's done this kind of thing before, hasn't she? The way she starts talking like she's hosting an interview, something sharp in her face.

"Were you a principal, where you're from?" Kim doesn't seem like the kind of person who's going to get pissed off if she gets asked. Maybe if she doesn't get an answer, but picking the wrong career path probably won't turn into a screaming match. "Or, like, a journalist?"

“I’m a criminal defence attorney,” she replies, with careful present tense. She raises her eyebrows — call me on the irony if you want. “I’m specialize in pro bono cases. You didn’t answer my question.”

"Yeah. I know." She says it slow, petulance underpinning it. This conversation has set her teeth on edge for no good reason - they've barely said anything to each other! - and it makes her less than interested in explaining everything she's left behind.

(It's because Kim talks like Dawn. She has her hair pulled back all neat like Dawn. She doesn't really look like her, but she feels like her - like any minute, she might start reminding Beth that she'll owe money for every bite of food she takes from the Automat.)

You don't have to tell her about Judith. You just gotta tell her something. "There's someone at home. I wanna make sure she's okay. Why are you here?"

Kim looks at Beth plain.

“Okay.” Good luck to you, then. There’s a wall there and Kim feels incapable of climbing it in that very moment; she has no balls in her court, no ability to fix either of their situations. She’s not sure it’s her place to.

Her gaze shifts out to the mess hall for a moment as she gathers up an answer.

“I don’t know,” Kim says. She does know: she refuses to believe it’s that simple, that the universe was watching and she’s been caught since day one. “I was trying to do something good.”

Everyone's always trying to do something good. It's easy, really easy, to end up doing terrible things instead. She straightens up in her chair, interested. "What were you trying to do?"

"There's a class-action lawsuit for a chain of retirement homes called Sandpiper Crossing," she says. It's easy to come to life with the case details. "Their management was overcharging their residents for everything –– sixteen dollars for a couple of Q-tips, that kind of thing –– and hiding it in the fine print. They were also colluding with medical supply companies, so on top of issues with commerce across state lines, there was a lot of money being siphoned from the bank accounts of retirees. And this lawsuit has been dragging on for years."

She pauses, eyes on Beth again. Does this young woman know anything about the law? Probably not any more than your average young person.

"Law firms make a lot of money off of class-action lawsuits. The longer they drag it out, the higher the settlement is. That might be an extra hundred or so bucks for each of the plaintiffs, but it could be millions for the firms involved. Meanwhile, you've got elderly people who need their money back, ideally with enough time left to enjoy it. For what? So the rich get richer?"

Her voice dips a little. There's real concern there.

"It'd help a lot of people if it settled now, rather than three or four years down the road."

It's a problem from another life - another universe. Who cares about money? Every single one of those old people is dead, where she's from; she's stabbed more than one wrinkled old walker in the skull, trying all the while not to think about who they used to be.

(This isn't fair of her, either. So life used to be full of stupid problems that didn't matter - so what? She used to care about stupid things. She still does, or she wouldn't have checked her reflection in the mirror before she left her room this morning.)

(Maybe it's the fact that this particular problem is simultaneously stupid and way too close to the hospital she came from.)

"Okay." Dubious, like she's waiting for the other shoe to drop. Probably because she is. "So what'd you do?"

Something about having "okay" lobbed back at her makes Kim do a double-take, sitting up a little straighter.

"I made sure their lead counsel wasn't in a position to negotiate anymore by exposing him as a drug addict. They settled without their million dollar bonus to avoid further investigation and embarrassment."

She feels her gut turn just thinking about where D-Day led, but the situation was never within her complete control. She has to believe that.

Kim leans back in her seat, arms folded.

"I talked with him after. He was upset, obviously, but he said his career would recover."

"That's it?" The scar on her forehead raises along with her brow.

That can't be it. If that's all it takes to be an inmate, then Beth would be one. Murdering people has to be worse than telling people that a lawyer's a drug addict. (Is that even surprising? All she knows about law comes from TV and movies, and every lawyer's either really good and trying to help people or they do coke in bathrooms.) Especially if it didn't even hurt his career.

And someone like Kim probably thinks if she looks professional, then everyone'll take her at her word. She just buries everything behind crisp clothes and a strong handshake. So Beth waits.

"That's it. It may not have all been strictly by the letter of the law, but would it make it inside of a courtroom?" She shrugs easily. "I haven't heard a good argument for why it would."

And if it did: couldn't she get out of it?

"There's now a couple hundred seniors who can buy their grandkids a birthday present without breaking the budget," she adds. "I'm not going to regret that."

"Yeah, but..." She glances around them. It's pointed. "You're here. So there's gotta be more than that."

The surface of it sounds fine. But the surface of her looks fine, too, and a fancy suit doesn't mean she didn't do something really messed up to get here.

“I’m not a murderer or bought by powerful people or the cartel, if that’s what you’re implying,” Kim replies. “I just believe in doing what’s right, and if here—“ A gesture around the hall to match her glance “— doesn’t agree, then I don’t know what to tell you.”

Beth falls silent, on the verge of saying something but not quite. And then she decides to just say it and let things happen however they're going to. "I've killed people."

But you can't just leave it like that. Kim will want to talk about her - probably. If only so they can get back to Kim controlling the conversation. "So there's gotta be more than that. No one would send you to jail for being a jerk - no offense."

Edited 2022-06-15 01:21 (UTC)

Kim pauses. Lets the killer in front of her have her beat, looks at this young woman, this kid who has likely never paid rent or done her own groceries. She does not find it hard to imagine a car accident or a house fire or any number of tragedies. It’s plural, right? People? Too many for a self defence plea. Too many for intent. Intent matters most.

Kim rifles through these thoughts like a box of felony PD overflow and then snaps it shut. Case at hand.

“Do you think this place ever takes people for what they could do, rather than what they’ve done?”

"I dunno. I haven't been here that long." Maybe it would - but how would they know? Someone could be a serial killer or a dictator or just a complete asshole in the future, and they couldn't tell. "Do you think you're gonna do something bad, someday?"

There's probably a million ways a lawyer could really earn their way here. Everyone always used to make jokes about how much they sucked. Whether any of it could have to do with some old people getting their lawsuit money, she's not sure.

“I could,” she says, with the barest acknowledgement that this is where it starts, this is where shit gets ugly. She continues: “Anyone can be pushed, anyone can be put in a situation where it’s the answer. Is that what happened to you?”

"I guess so." There weren't any other answers - none that would make a difference. She'd argued with Dawn, and all she got back was condescension. I know better than whatever you think you're doing. "What do you think you're gonna do?"

Even while she's asking, she's trying to think of other ways to ask what she really wants to know. You're not telling me something. Tell me what I'm missing.

Hmm.

Kim looks at her coffee, mulling it over.

“I think,” she says, carefully, “that I’m going to do anything I need to, at almost any cost, to make sure vulnerable people come out of the legal system okay… and I need a lot of money to make it happen.”

"How're you gonna get it?" she asks. It's all imaginary, and the extent to which it's imaginary only really sinks in now that she's spent two years watching people try to rebuild a broken world. Money and laws are only real because people agree that they are, and it's not like everyone actually believes in the law, where Kim's from. If they did, no one would be screwing over people's grandparents.

The only thing Kim's talking about that feels true is the people she wants to help. Everyone's vulnerable somewhere. Beth's caught someplace between suspicion and sympathy, and that reminds her of Dawn, too.

"When class actions settle, there's money in it for the lawyer who originated the case," she says. Jimmy, she could say, but saying his name out loud feels like tempting fate, turning the universe's eye on him next. "Sandpiper's closing at two million."

The conversation feels like a tailspin. It reminds her of shivering on the front step of that lone house, pouring her deepest held feelings only to realize not a shred of it was being taken as genuine sincerity, a rare attempt of being forthcoming. This is what it really is to be looked at as a criminal. Nothing she says will matter.

She adds, voice flecked with frustration:

"What is it you want to hear, exactly? That there was some moment where I just snapped, some cute anecdote about a time where I saw where the line was and crossed it?"

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littlemissfutility - 2022-06-15 14:46 (UTC) - Expand

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saintclaire - 2022-06-15 23:19 (UTC) - Expand

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TEST DRIVE 006

ring ring it's your inmate

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