▶ TDM .009

[prismods]

Now whip it

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"Devo - Whip It (Video)" (Watch on YouTube)

You awaken amidst the darkness with only a faint light to greet you. Your body is hemmed in by shards of crystals, gently sparkling and possibly pricking your skin. The surrounding landscape is dyed in the pinks and purples of the dusk filled with crystals protruding from the ground, some as large as a skyscraper. Even the few shy moon creatures you find in the wild have strange crystal growths on their hides. This is far from home— perhaps a dream? You pinch your skin and slap your cheeks, yet nothing seems to do the trick. Searching for answers yields nothing but an endless expanse of purple dust as far as the eye can see. You have four options: one, panic; two, soil yourself; three, admire it all then soil yourself; or four, go into survival mode. Eventually, you’ll realize that you’re not alone.

After a day or two of living off the crystal wilderness, a group of people find you worse for wear. They are the gallant Moon Knights from the planet of Prismatica. After the strange phenomenon during the past months when scientists observed the sudden appearance of rainbow crystals in the sky, the government has been feverishly combing through the moon for more Moonblessed to be rescued. You’ll eventually be brought into Iris’s moon government center.

You all may have your usual inquiries — Where are we? Who are you? What's going on? Why did I inhale all those permanent markers in the third grade? — and the Prismals are almost too eager to answer. They tell you about their world and about the first appearance of the Moonblessed as the medical staff give you an examination to make sure you’re not carrying any viruses or biological hazards. If you react violently, you may be restrained and nerfed with a specialized neurotransmitting gun that releases a numbing agent through the top of your spine. Once the examinations are over, you’re informed that you will be provided accommodations on their planet during your stay.

While waiting for transport to be prepared, you may freely roam around the government center. Eventually you’re called back from exploring, escorted to the docks, and led onto a large transport vessel that makes frequent trips back and forth between the moons and the planet. Faces onboard vary from both old and new Moonblessed as well as the local Prismals. The next destination: Prismatica.

▶ Whip It Good
Iris Moon, Government Center (Arrival) and Planet Prismatica, City of Lunatia | top

Welcome to Prismatica’s hub, Lunatia, the city of your dreams! A bustling metropolis lush with bright lights, vibrant colors, luxuriant plant life, and all the conveniences of technology absent from your own world… It seems like paradise to all the uninitiated. After a quick tour of the city, new arrivals can find themselves getting cozy in their new homes.

 A  Settle in your new home at Level 2 to find new roommates and say hello to your neighbors! City officials will give you directions to the designated districts across Level 2 and instruct you to pick out a unit. Each apartment complex has a different aesthetic, some may look cozy, some stylish, and some bizarre. The free accommodations have a basic living space that can only fit two or three people at most in one unit.

Starter Chromaspace furnishings are provided which can be controlled with the touch of a built-in panel. Examples are color-changing curtains, transforming sofa beds, cabinets turning into tables, etc. Customizing your apartment or moving out will have to wait until you earn more chroma. Until then, why don’t you check out your new neighborhood or explore the city levels? Maybe your new roommates or neighbors can give you a “hand” with allowance for dinner.

 B  At the Crystarium Moonports is a new family restaurant called Grapplebears, here to serve your favorite dishes from all around the galaxy at affordable prices! The menu ranges from the atomically hot and spicy Chamakshalan curry rice, delectable dragonsaur steak served with mashed space-tatoes, to the sweet and creamy Lunatian milkshakes that bring all the boys to the yard, all prepared by their handsome and huggable bear crew.

As you might have noticed, the restaurant staff is a ragtag group with members from planets unknown to both Prismals and Moonblessed. The waiters and waitresses in particular are tall, muscular, leather-clad bears who take your order by whipping you with a special riding crop that compels you to bark out your order — but only if you ask to be, of course! They might induce you to reveal other unrelated interests so make sure you’re not thinking about anything embarrassing!

If you chat up the staff or customers, you learn more about the restaurant’s origins. The bears say their planets* were also wiped by the Calamity hundreds of years ago, and life for them has been difficult for them since then…

*Further information about these planets is unavailable at this time.

▶ Night of the Living Dummy
City of Lunatia | top

The last vestiges of Geistnacht have officially passed and the first chilly autumn breeze ushers in the new season. The city is awash in giant piles of browning leaves that decorate every walkway.

 A  To deal with the mass collection of fallen leaves, many buildings across the city have been retrofitted with a new disposal system to help clean up. A sprawling network of automated vacuum tubes around the city will efficiently suck all those pesky leaves right up. While children love playing inside and using them to “teleport” around Lunatia, they have also been known to spontaneously suck up anyone who’s not too careful. You may find yourself falling on some hapless bystander on their afternoon walk, or crammed in a tube with your new neighbors. Lunar Scientia officials warn everyone to be careful of where you walk, else you might need to crawl your way to sweet freedom.

 B  A pop-up shop in Level 1 is attracting much of the locals' attention, run by a peddler who speaks in a low, elongated hiss and wears a hood over his face. He assures you that his face is of no consequence. What is more important is his selection of wares! In contrast to his cloaked, enigmatic appearance, his travel cart is a Barbie pink explosion of frills, hearts, glitter. He will tell all visitors he comes from the Valley of the Crimson Serpents, which Prismals and older Moonblessed arrivals find odd. Wasn’t the Sanguis moon uninhabitable?

Among the peddler’s wares are adorable, wide-eyed and heavily perfumed dolls in all sorts of clothes a child dreaming of rainbows and tea parties could ever ask for. Hug and squeeze a doll, and you will be greeted by a pre-recorded voice telling you how they’re your bestest friend ever. It’s like they were made for lovin’ you! But if you look away for one moment, you can almost swear you hear a snake’s hiss, its long tongue licking the shell of your ear… The next time you see the doll, its body will be in a slightly different position or location. Is it… following you? Fortunately, a minimal amount of moonlacing will make it leave you alone. You can wait it out too, but why would you?

Destroy a doll and it will later reappear wherever you are when you least expect it, good as new, but leaking from their porcelain heads is a strange pink, glitter-covered liquid. The peddler calls it the “love juice” giving the doll an extra dose of affection for you.

▶ Bird is the Word
Level 2, Greatmoon Groves | top

As autumn paints Lunatia with its golden hues, pumpkin decorations and desserts are now in vogue. This is thanks to Chroma-infused pumpkin seeds, which allow them to rapidly grow in all sorts of sizes, shapes, and colors. The Moonblessed are invited to visit one of the largest pumpkin patches in the city housed within the Greatmoon Groves, where they can enjoy the sight of oversized, colorful neon and sparkling semi-phallic pumpkins, expertly carved to greet you with their buck-toothed smiles.

 A  The pumpkin patch is full of toddler-sized creatures called hugbugs. When they are not tending to the pumpkins, they follow the Moonblessed around, requesting hugs and treats in exchange for their obedience.

Reward them and they will do simple errands for you and give you compliments. They will also be your personal hype men, talking up your strengths, talents, and physical assets to all those special someones you’re trying to impress. Once you earn their trust, they will be your friends for life!

Ignore them, hurt them, or bully them, and they will cry and place a curse upon you, reducing your self-esteem to nothing and magically forcing you to cry along with them. The effects of the curse may last for up to a week if you’re not careful! But how could you do such a thing? The hugbugs are sensitive and want somebody to love.

 B  If you manage to survive your encounter with the hugbugs, you are welcome to join in on the Prismal knitting group and enjoy creating your own fanciful scarf made of Galadrian thread, which is known for its bright, golden sheen and aromatic properties. Give it to a friend or wear it yourself, and you will notice a strange ability to attract animals and insects of all kinds. Live out your Disney Princess fantasy! Or a Hitchcockian nightmare. It’s all a matter of perspective as a whole flock of honking birds comes bounding towards you.

▶ Questions
If you have any questions regarding this test drive meme, please ask them in the Questions thread below.

▶ As a reminder, test drive memes are for new characters only. However, current players are more than welcome to use these prompts for their own posts in the IC communities, personal inboxes, catch-all posts, etc.!
▶ As our test drive memes are game canon, feel free to keep any threads that happen here as canon for your character should they be accepted.

Comments

[nipzips]

[ Jotaro catches on really quick. Then again, Josuke already knows he's smart as hell, and seems to be a walking encyclopaedia sometimes. That's how he sees the Jotaro he knows, anyway. It comes as no surprise that he was sharp in his youth as well. ]

I had a fever that lasted for 50 days. My mom had to drive through a blizzard to get me to the hospital, but they still couldn't help me. Was four at that time. [ Though he was four, his memories of that time are strikingly vivid -- slipping in and out of consciousness as the snow smacked against the car window, the face and hairstyle of the mysterious boy who saved him, watching the doctor's puzzled expressions as they checked his charts, his mother's worried expression and the few times he's seen her cry ... ]

We never found out the cause of it, until, well, you came and told me years later.

[starmark]

...It wasn't just me.

[Fifty days. What a terrible, awful, unusually specific number. Fifty days is the exact length of their trip. It's also exactly how long Avdol gave his mother to live.

It's kind of strange to think about, isn't it. Avdol gave her fifty days, and if Josuke is correct, she's still alive. Which means she lived the whole fifty days, right? And he'd said no more than, which means it could've been less. It could've been less than fifty days, except that it turned out to be exactly fifty. Exactly as long as it took him to get to Cairo and kill Dio.

It could have been less, but it wasn't. That means that all that time, his mom was at home fighting, too. Fighting to give him every second of time that she could, to save her. And Josuke, in the hospital, in a blizzard, did, too.

But somehow, it feels wrong to take all of (any of) the credit for that. Not when he wouldn't have been able to do it at all if he hadn't known the secret of Dio's Stand, and he wouldn't have had that without —]

I barely did anything. The guys I was with, they're the ones who saved your life. Not me.

[nipzips]

Pretty sure you all did.

[ He knows the gist of things but not the nitty-gritty, mainly because the Jotaro he knows doesn't seem to open up easily about personal matters, and he just never brought it up in conversation with his old dad. It sounded like an epic journey that ended in both triumph and some tragedy. He does wish he had asked more now. ]

Realising now that I never thanked Mr. Jotar -- you or your friends. [ There was just too much to process at that time that it didn't occur to him. In the span of a few months, his normal life had overturned completely. He went from being a highschooler with a Stand who just going about their daily life, to suddenly having a dad and a nephew, suddenly having other friends with stands, suddenly being thrown into one battle after another, suddenly having to stop a serial killer ... Even in Lunatia, he and the older Jotaro fell into such a routine normalcy that the conversation doesn't come up. ]

Thanks for -- doing all that, even if you weren't doing it for me. I've had a great life so far. [ He's so loved, he has so many people that he loves, and if he had died at 4, he wouldn't have had any of these fantastic experiences. ]

[starmark]

[I've had a great life so far, he says.

If he wanted to do the math, he could probably try to make a guess as to about how old Josuke is right now, though if he was four years old in 1987, then one way or another he's younger by Jotaro's reckoning. So, how old is he, then? Sixteen years, seventeen? A high schooler, certainly. A young man just on the very cusp of adulthood and responsibility, with his whole life ahead of him, and a great one he's had so far.

He wonders if Kakyoin would've said he'd had a great life. Would he have thought it was worth it? They never talked about their lives much, not really. It always felt like their lives before the Cairo trip were just a distant memory, somehow — shadows in the past, while the present was the only thing that was really real.

Did Kakyoin live a great life? He doesn't have a future anymore. He doesn't have anything. It's just gone, because he put their mission above himself. Because he, and everyone else, decided to stake everything on the gamble that when it came down to it, Star Platinum versus The World, that he and Star would win.

Even now, he doesn't know why everyone seemed to think he was the one. Why him? He was never the leader. He's not the heart of the team. He's not anything, he's just himself, so why did everyone think when it came down to it in the end that he would be the last one standing?

Kakyoin died without knowing whether they'd won or not. He must've died hoping. He traded his life away to buy him a chance — and it was the chance he needed, and because of it, Josuke is alive.

Josuke is having a great life so far. And he's got so much more left to live.]

I said don't thank me.

[It feels wrong. His right hand's knuckles ache with phantom pain.]

Did I tell you their names? When I came and told you. Did I tell you what they did?

[nipzips]

You didn't ... But, uh, the Mr. Jotaro I know is pretty much all business. He never talked about personal stuff. In fact, think the longest conversation I ever had with him was about a freakin' rat.

[ And Josuke didn't feel like he could ask or initiate any kind of friendly interaction with the older Jotaro. Nothing felt important enough to discuss -- nothing that wasn't a dangerous stand user they had to take down or a mysterious occurrence they had to investigate. Pressing matters. Some people just don't look open to personal interaction, and Jotaro was one of them. Josuke didn't want to annoy him or bring up a conversation he doesn't want to have. He respects his older nephew a lot and cares about how Jotaro sees him. Even with the permission the older Jotaro had given him here on Lunatia, Josuke only satisfied trivial curiosities such as asking him about his favourite music or movies. He definitely didn't want to risk their relationship by asking him about something painful. ]

My old man told me, though -- And I actually met some of them. Mr. Avdol, Mr. Polnareff and Kakyoin, right?

[starmark]

[It's almost a shame that Josuke mentions the names of the other Crusaders when he does, because the stuff about the rat would probably have made for an interesting conversation, but all thoughts of that go instantly by the wayside in light of this vastly more astonishing information.]

You what.

[Impossible. That has to be a ruse. ...Doesn't it?]

How the fuck did you — they're dead.

[Well, not Polnareff, but you know. Technicalities.]

[nipzips]

[ Really looks like no one's giving him the down-low on exactly how things work here in Lunatia. Josuke does want to break things in slowly so it's not too much to take in at once, but he's also not too terribly elegant in conversation. ]

About that -- The moon has ways around that. Somehow, it's able to draw in people who've ... already passed on, in their own worlds. [ He doesn't know the details about how it works, but he saw Reimi pass on and yet she's right here withe them -- he knows first-hand the phenomenon is real. ]

Guess it can be a good thing or bad thing depending how you look at it. I met Kakyoin a while back, and he said he was your friend. Haven't seen the guy around since, however. Mr. Avdol's still around, I see him on the network sometimes. [ Seeing is believing. He doesn't want Jotaro to think he's punking him for fun when this isn't something Josuke would ever joke about. Josuke pulls out his device and shows him Avdol's latest network post. ]