Welcome to the Synodiporia Test Drive Meme! Below the cuts there are two new prompts, and here are the prompts from previous test-drives, which you’re still welcome to use in this post. When you comment, be sure you specify what prompt you want to play with, and please put up your own threadstarter—it makes for a much more friendly environment that a forest of bare toplevels! OCs are especially welcome! Please take a quick look at our Directory & familiarize yourself with the concept and setting of the game before you jump in.

Our upcoming app round runs May 24th–June 1st. Our next Jaunt is Showtime!, a 1980s rock-and-roll romp with a light sci-fi element that features, among other things: rival bands with secrets to hide, shadowy government agents in pursuit of an uncanny fugitive, and at least one alien who’s lost their ability to phone home.

Prompt #50 features an explosive liminal space, where getting to close to the flames has consequences.
Prompt #51 takes place in the world from our upcoming Jaunt and features a warm summer night at the Santa Carlita Beach Boardwalk.
Prompt #52 takes place in the world of the Lightning Age: a alternate universe steampunk setting in which the colonial empires that ruled the world in its equivalent of the 19th century are the opposite of the ones from our own.

#50

You and everyone around you are floating in a black… well, it’s a black space. You could almost call it a void, except there are other things than Travelers in it. There are fluffy things that almost look like clouds, although closer inspection will reveal that they are actually constructed out of white-colored steel wool. And then there are the things that sit on the steel wool clouds.

They’re shaped like Grecian ruins, but that’s not what they’re constructed of. No, they’re made of waxed paper, with brightly colored logos that say things like WORLD CLASS and PHANTOM BRAND and BLACK CAT. But you might not want to stay too close to them--they’re prone to exploding at random and taking the steel wool clouds with them.

Granted, when they do explode, they end up exploding into fireworks of heart-breaking beauty and being hit by the flames doesn’t seem to burn people--but that’s not to say that being hit by the fire from the fireworks has no effect. In fact, anyone it touches will suffer a temporary loss of their sense of self-preservation and material attachment--making them much more prone to taking risks for the next minute.

#51

It’s a Tuesday night in early June and the Santa Carlita Beach Boardwalk is a veritable sea of neon, spandex, denim, and leather. Tuesday night is always the busiest of the weeknights at the oceanfront amusement park and it’s all for one simple reason: on Tuesday nights after eight, all rides cost a single ticket. Sure, the carnival food available from the various food trucks and permanent stands is still full price, but it isn’t as if people come to the boardwalk to eat.

No, they’re here for the rides. There’s a ferris wheel, of course, and the miniature gondolas that go from one end of the boardwalk and back. There’s the bumper cars--two different sets of them!--and the kitschy glow-in-the-dark cave train and the whirling long-chained sea swings. There’s a log flume ride, too, although now that the heat of the day is gone, it’s possibly not the best idea to go on it. Perhaps one of the others nearby? There’s one that ride spins you around and pin you to the wall with centrifugal force. In fact, there’s almost any kind of carnival ride you could ask to go on.

And of course there’s the two crowning jewels of the Boardwalk, its landmark historical rides: the wooden roller coaster known as Ursa Majorus, still in good repair after sixty-five years, and the antique carousel of the Hippodrome, where even today you can grab brass rings and throw them at the gaping maw of a clown’s face.

#52

The mountaintop facility wasn’t supposed to exist. Until yesterday, in fact, it didn’t exist at all, officially, and hard questions were currently being asked all around in the Khanate government as to why such an extensive complex wasn’t marked on any official maps. Whoever had constructed it had done well to obscure it from passing zeppelins. From the air you might just think it was part of the mountains.

At least until the explosions had started.

Now, however, the last of the fires have gone out and the ruins have begun to be picked over by scavengers, air pirates, and anyone else who might have seen the explosion last night and wondered. And even with the damage from fire and explosion, there’s more than enough worth salvaging, even if you have to move one of the dozens of corpses to find it. Enough of the delicate scientific equipment from extensive series of laboratories remains to fully outfit two or three home researchers at the very least. And it’s clear, even despite the damage, that the living quarters for the researchers had been lavish indeed. A name is inlaid on the facility walls: VEXATIOR, written in the exotic letters of the Latin alphabet. Another, engraved onto a brass plate outside a room that had suffered a particular amount of destruction, reads MANTIS in the familiar characters used throughout the Golden Khanate.

There’s a surprising number of people rummaging around in the aftermath of the destruction, some of whom seem… well, slightly out of it. Almost like their minds are in another world altogether… but that would be silly, wouldn’t it?