chismosos | test drive meme #1

TDM #1

LA LLEGADA

The Museum of Art and History is the largest and oldest in Llave, and contains a grand collection spanning from the time the first humans landed on its shores to the modern day. The building encircles an open courtyard where an art installation sits amidst many of the plants important to the settlers of Llave. Behind the museum is a wide, shallow field of hard-packed dirt lined by large stones, the petroglyphs on their surface worn by time—the earliest known playing field in all of the Caribbean. And further out are the areas where excavations are ongoing, uncovering the pottery, jewelry and artifacts of the ancestors.

After awakening, things move quickly. The museum is closed, and the characters ushered into the courtyard to wait. Any needing emergency medical attention are kept in one of the air conditioned galleries until the paramedics arrive. A group of women with a military bearing take charge of the situation; identified as the Bajari Bara, they question the healthy and able. They cede authority only to the Prime Minister when she arrives. Two more of their group flank the nation's leader, though they step aside when she begins to walk among the new arrivals to speak with them.

Each side has many questions and few answers. Characters are informed they are in Llave. It's October 2020. And efforts will be made to return them to their homes. But how they came to be here and why remain mysteries…as does how they’ll find their way back.

GFR Media

A hurricane shelter nearby is activated for use by the recent arrivals. There, characters are provided with food and clothing, a cot and other basic supplies. No one is allowed out, but through the windows they can see the lush green of the their surroundings. At night, coquí sing them to sleep. Those taken to a hospital will remain there until they are discharged. Each patient is allowed one visitor to stay with them overnight.

Over the next several days, all characters undergo physical and mental evaluations; are provided with their first immunizations; have the next legal steps explained to them; and are taught about Llave. Every character, regardless of age, has a caseworker who checks in with them daily. None have been arrested, they are assured. But they must also complete the quarantine process. To enforce quarantine, at both the hospital and the shelter, the Bajari Bara guard every entrance and exit.

Welcome to Llave.

EL AREYTO

As luck would have it, around the time quarantine ends, all of Llave is in the midst of celebration. Today is the Day of Heroes, celebrated every last weekend in October, which this year happens to fall on the eve of All Saints’ Day. So when the new arrivals venture out for the first time, Nona, the capital, welcomes them with color and music.

Jorge Arce

The people of Llave have a special love for music and dance, and it shows. All day, groups gather to play, and many more to dance. The songs center around heroes of Llave with the chief of these being Nuna, a beloved figure who is said to have led her people here to freedom. Those performing wear traditional clothes: guayaberas, long circle skirts, palm hats and headwraps, all brightly colored.

From early morning, artisans have set up under tents tables laden with goods. Clothing, jewelry, musical instruments, paintings, and more made from leather and wood, seashells and fish scales, aluminum and copper. Many create right at the table. Most popular are those working on cemís: sculptural objects, said to house the spirits of ancestors. Many carry them as amulets especially on this the eve to the days of the dead.

The food is equally rich and one of the cooks takes an interest in the new arrivals. Those who eat his food find their mood changing depending on what they ate. The tostones he prepared while speaking of his childhood home in Santa Cecilia bring on feelings of joy and contentment. The alcapurrias fried while arguing with a customer about last night’s wrestling match cause those who eat them to feel irritated. And the casabe, a flatbread made of cassava, that he explains he learned to make from his wife who passed, induces a profound nostalgia for lost loves. His wife, recognizable from the photo he keeps on the wall, sits beside those most affected and comforts them until the melancholy passes.

More dead can be found. An old man in a fine guayabera recalls composing the lyrics to a particular song. He points out the man playing the congas and proudly says his great-grandson will soon outplay him. When characters look back to the old man, he’s gone. Those with a sense for it will recognize many dead walking among the living. These next few days honor and celebrate the departed, and the dead have seized the rare opportunity to join the festivities once more.

For those who prefer the sea, the impossibly blue waters of the Caribbean are just a short walk away.

Cobblestone and concrete paths line La Bahía de Nona. On one of the larger rock outcroppings jutting into the bay sits a silver-white dog. If called, he will trot over. Up close, one can see his color is due to the sand and salt that has collected on its coat. Though he allows himself to be petted, he does not step off the rocks. A passerby comments that the dog has been waiting for his master to return. How long? The man shrugs. When he was a boy, the dog was keeping watch; now he’s forty-three, and the dog is still there.

EL TRAVIESO

Or perhaps the characters were more distracted by how clean the water was, how clear. Enough so that the sight of a bottle bobbing in the waves seems offensively out of place. Anyone who chooses to snag it out of the water will find it’s a corked bottle of rum, apparently empty.

From a nearby restaurant, someone yells and waves their hands—too late. By uncorking it, they have freed the bacoo. Immediately, everyone backs away. Two cross themselves.

Only one stays long enough to warn, “You have to trick it back into the bottle. It likes milk and bananas. Don’t ask it for anything.”

Turn around, and the bacoo is there.

Short and rugged with large eyes, long arms and legs, covered in unkempt hair and its fingers and toes ending in claws, the bacoo is a strange little creature. Stranger still, it can grant any wish—so long as it is kept appeased with a steady diet of milk and bananas.

A hungry bacoo will pelt walls with stones, move objects, keep its owner up at night, and otherwise wreak havoc until it is fed. A shapeshifter, they can be difficult to locate, much less trap. And a starving bacoo will turn vicious and its pranks malicious.

Best find a way to trick it into the bottle. Fast.

OOC NOTES

This TDM covers from mid-to-end of October. The first prompt lasts approximately two weeks; the second, a day. For now, all characters are restricted to Nona. Any attempting to leave will be gently, but firmly escorted back.

The TDM will also double as the first IC post of the game. Threads between any two or more characters who were all apped and approved will be considered game canon. As such, actions characters take in this TDM will impact the game once it opens. How characters behave will shape the inhabitants’ first impressions of them. Make it count.

Questions regarding this TDM can be asked below, while questions regarding the game at large should be directed to the FAQ.

Thank you for your interest and we hope to have you join!

NAVIGATION • IC COMM • OOC COMM • MEME COMM

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I lived in America. I don't know if you've ever heard of it. We had a lot of technology there, and someone used that ability to create a superflu. The superflu killed almost everyone, but there were a few of us left. We had to band together. And even then, there were people who wanted to take advantage of it.

[ She pauses and chuckles humorlessly, looking down for a moment. ]

Can you imagine the flu killing almost everyone you know and you decide to take that as an opportunity to take advantage?

[He shakes his head vaguely, looking baffled. He doesn’t understand the majority of the words she’s using.]

Flu, superflu — is that some kind of weapon?

They say the Queen blew up the Great Sept down in King’s Landing with wildfire to take power from her son. I would believe it of her.

Yeah, the flu's only been around for about a hundred years, so.

[ She's assuming he's from some point in Earth's past now. And that means he's never even heard of a germ. ]

It's a sickness. You get a fever, your nose runs and you cough, and you ache all over. And sometimes it kills people. But this one was 100 times worse. I think this flu was meant to be a weapon, but it got released before the meant it to, and in the wrong place.

We’d call it a fever, or a sickness.

[He’s frowning, putting the pieces together.]

How would they have sent it out among the people, and why? Such things are done in sieges, when men are evil, but no one makes the sickness. It’s just a fever, it isn’t magic. And any lord who does such a thing risks killing his own men, not only his enemy’s.

[ Dayna pauses a moment. She was right, he has no idea about germs. ]

You know, there was a writer in my time who said that scientific achievements often look like magic to those who don't know how it works. I don't know if explaining it to you will make much sense to you.

However...well, a sickness is made by a tiny little living thing we call a germ. And these scientists figured out how to make the germ pretty much unkillable. Because that's what our bodies do, you know, they kill the germs, eventually. That's why we get better. But this one just...kept living, and making things worse.

[Germ theory: he’ll have to take her word for it, or humor her. But he knows that there are ways to end some infections: with a hot knife, or wine, or honey, or a few of those, and he knows that if you take a fever, you live or you die.

Still, his expression is full of judgment.]

I am no maester, but why would anyone do such a thing? It’s the same: if there’s no way to end the sickness, then you kill your own men just as sure as you kill your enemies, and it may kill you in the end. It’s what you’d deserve, but that doesn’t make it any less of a fool’s game.

And it isn’t an honorable way to fight to begin with. The people of a city or a town or a castle are not soldiers, even if soldiers and guards defend it. Some are cooks and stable boys and maids.

[ She nods; he gets it. ]

It's dishonorable, yeah. And stupid. I don't really know that a person who thinks a superflu germ is a good idea would even care about that, though. They obviously didn't think things through to their conclusion.

It’s only a thing you would do if you didn’t care who died, or if you wanted as many dead as possible.

[A pause. This next question is a little more awkward.]

What happens to the dead? Does someone raise them — control them? Make an army of them?

[He is used to people looking at him as if he’s mad when he speaks on this. It’s the reason for his slight hesitation.]

[ She doesn't flinch at the question, though it's completely silly and backwards to her. But she figures if he's from medieval times, he would have some strange ideas about death. Besides, could she say what has happened to her was all that different, having supernatural dreams that everyone else had too? ]

No, they just died in their homes and stayed there. When we all started settling down in the same city, we had to take them out of their homes and bury them in a mass grave.

[He inclines his head again.

His sympathy is sincere: all those people dead, dead for nothing except that someone wanted to see them dead. Still, it’s better that nothing worse is coming for them.]

I am sorry. That’s the way of things, when a fever takes a city, no matter why it spread or who it spared. We have to burn our dead now. The pyres can be for tens or hundreds after a battle.

The sickness was meant to kill everyone, but some were spared?

[— including her?]

Some. A few. There were three of us in my city altogether, and I lived in a city of thousands.

[ She shrugs. ]

We have our theories about why we were immune, but...well, they sound more spiritual than scientific.

Do they follow the Old Gods in your America? Or the Seven?

[There are other gods that he knows of: the Lord of Light. The Dothraki have their stallion. But for him, it’s the Old Gods, a godswood, a heart tree. It’s what he was raised to revere and fear, with his father’s hand at his back. It’s why his word means something to him.

Apart from that, he knows something of being spared by a god, though the god who raised him from death is not the god of his people.]

In America? Most people are Christian. They say they accept everyone, but in practice it's a lot easier to be Christian there.

[ Dayna picks at the seam of her jeans for a moment, considering. ]

Or at least, that's the way it was before the flu. Maybe it still is, I don't know. I know that Mother Abagail believes in Jesus, though.

[ She glances at him for any spark of recognition. That will gauge for her whether he's from her Earth's past. ]

[He continues to look at least a little baffled when she speaks of these things.]

Never heard of Christian or Jesus.

Down south, they follow the Seven, the new gods. The Father, Mother, Smith, Maiden, Warrior, Crone... and the Stranger, but it’s ill luck to speak of him. They build great stone septs and have a lot of rules. Where I’m from, in the North, most follow the Old Gods. No septs, just the godswood. The Old Gods are said to be in every tree and rock and river, watching the living.

They judge men who do not keep their oaths. Not the only thing, but it’s important.

[if he just made himself sound like a tree-worshipping pagan... well, that’s not exactly right. But close enough for the time being.]

test drive meme #1

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