ateratooc | TD006

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test drive

TD006

Test Drive 006

WELCOME TO ATERAT

Here is our Fifth Test Drive Meme! There are a lot of areas of the city to explore, so please have a look around! In case you need a little help getting started, I've included a few prompts below, or feel free to start your own! Exploration and player initiative are the names of the game here!

Helpful Links to Get Started

Arrival & General Information | Setting & Bestiary | Locales & Businesses | Residences & Housing Info | Rules & FAQ (ask questions here!)

I. Crash Into Me

Not exactly, but close enough. You have just arrived and received a strange satchel from a tiny, strange little man and are left more or less to your own devices (more information on what to expect upon arrival can be found here)! Follow directions to the north and check out the housing, or maybe have a look around the Historium and try to get some information from that giant glowing ball, see what you can waste your meager starter coin on in the Market District, or maybe just meet the neighbors.

II. What Goes Bump in the Night

It looks like Aterat proper has a spirit problem. Maybe you're seeing specters, hearing disembodied voices, your windows rattle when there's no breeze outside. Maybe there are cold spots in your place of business (or your apartment, which is so much worse). Either way, you're 100% convinced you're haunted. Hopefully, someone else believes you, or maybe you're used to feeling crazy.

III. When the Carnival Came to Town?

Take a look at the prompts from our latest event and go to town (or the carnival).

IV. Try the Network

The Tell-Phone allows for text, video, and audio transmissions to everyone else who has one. Give it a whirl!

V. Wildcard

The above prompts are all options, and there's much more to the setting than what they provide. Do your best (or your worst)!

Navigation

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

I: Crash Into Me

Red Blood Cell looked down at her hands. Having just been given a satchel and left on her own, Red Blood Cell could only stare. If there was a world around her, for those few moments, she didn't even know it was there. Was this like what happened before? When the new Red Blood Cells came? Had she been taken to somewhere new? Because this was nothing like the body she was used to. That much, at least, she could tell.

At last, she lifted her head. "Where am I supposed to take this satchel anyway?" she asked, staring at it for a bit more before looking around again. The satchel's contents didn't feel like oxygen or nutrients. And, now that she was really conscious of her surroundings, she found herself searching for familiarity and finding... nothing. No yelling T-cells, no normal cells, no neutrophils running around to find pathogens... But most tellingly, she was the only one she could see wearing red. Her eyes started to go wide.

"Wait," Red Blood Cell blurted to anyone in earshot. "Am I the only red blood cell here?! OH MY GOSH, is that why I'm here?! I need to find the lungs! I've got to get to the deliveries!" This body would die if she didn't get down to work! Red Blood Cell immediately took off running, satchel held in her arms, looking down each crossroad to try to figure out just where the lungs could be. She'd just barely gotten her home world figured out. Now to be in a new one... She'd be starting all over, but she had to do her job!

III: When the Carnival Came to Town

Though she wasn't sure what she'd do with the little reflective thing she'd been given, Red Blood Cell remained extremely curious. As she slipped it into her pocket, she took in what she could see. A carnival? What was that? It might be this place's version of the liver - a place to wind down after some hard work. That ride looked like the lift she'd been on not that long ago with her student when she'd first been made a senpai.

And was that a plush Cedar Pollen at that booth? White Blood Cell had said that it hadn't had to die. Maybe having one of those as a memory would be nice. But what was the thing people were doing to get those?

Full of confusion, she walked along the midway, looking closely at everything until a smell caught her and-- "GLUCOSE!" There was glucose!

Red Blood Cell immediately dashed over and was soon handed a slightly-flimsy stick with practically a cloud of glucose spun around it. Once she had that in hand, she didn't really even pay attention to her surroundings, just followed along with the crowd as she pinched off bite after bite. She was licking some of the glucose off of her glove when she realised she in some kind of display. It reminded her a little of being in the marrow, back when she was just an erythroblast.

"Now what is this," she murmured, looking around. This environment... She wasn't sure about this, but the crowd was moving through, and she was moving with it. While she didn't recognise these things, the whole place had a feel of being dangerous. Red Blood Cell pulled herself in a little tighter. Where was White Blood Cell when she needed him?

She finished her glucose, though, holding the flimsy stick as if it could protect her when she rounded a corner and came face to face with something large, green, blob-shaped, and all too familiar looming at her. Immediately she jumped back. "Pseudomonas! No, no, no, no, no...!" Here's hoping nobody's between her and the exit.

V: Wildcard

A Red Blood Cell suddenly appears...

Ren did his best to make his way by the fountain at least once a day. It'd been where he'd originally arrived in this place, others claimed the same, and it served to reason if any of his friends were pulled here by whatever power it was that actually influenced this place, it would be here it would do it. The lanky young man with the fluffy black hair and the inconspicuous glasses with the messenger bag slung over his shoulder arrived at the fountain square in just enough time to hear her shout and run off, though he didn't really understand what she was talking about.

Science? Did she say she was looking for...the lungs? Okay, this was way too interesting not to pursue, and he hoped all the months of training for running he'd done with a friend back home would pay off as he ran off after her. It wasn't long before he realized he was going to head her off if he was going to ask her any questions, and so he used his third sight, an ability that let his see hidden or hard to see locations, to find a short cut, a small cross street near where she was searching, and he came out ahead of her, breathing hard. The training had been worth it, but this girl was fast.

"Hey...take it easy for a moment. You just got here, right?"

"What-- You--"

Wait. Was he? Was he wearing--

Her eyes went wide and the satchel, temporarily forgotten, dropped to the ground as she reached out, gripping his arms in his red jacket. She wasn't the only one. Taking a few quick breaths, she started in, "You have no idea how glad I am to see you; I was so sure I was the only one here! But you're the only other one I've seen! Where are the rest of us?! Is this world okay?? Where are the lungs?! I'll help you all I can with the deliveries!"

She was going to miss White Blood Cell. Absolutely. And the cute little platelets - she'd not seen a single one since she'd shown up here. But if there were only two of them, they had a huge uphill battle ahead of them.

If he was honest, no, this world wasn't okay at all, but it wasn't crumbling around them as they spoke, but instead of breaking her contact, he just rode out her dramatic outburst. She reminded him of a friend of his, actually, and it was usually best to just let him make his scene, and then tell him exactly how much of a scene he was making, which was his intention here, too.

"Okay. Let's calm down for a minute. The rest of us are all around, but you don't have any...lungs to get to?"

He was reminded of shadow people, Cognitions defined by a Palace's ruler, beings who thought they were one thing because something more powerful then them forced that perception on them. He didn't think that was the case here, and his third sight didn't suggest she was wearing a mask that was hiding her true self, but that didn't mean anything. This place was full of surprises.

"My name is Ren Amamiya, and this world, uh...isn't a body. At least I don't think so."

What did a Renamamiya cell do? She'd... she'd never, ever heard of one of those. But he looked more like she did than any of the white blood cells (except maybe Eosinophil, but she wore pink instead of red). All she could do while he spoke was blink, looking at him in now-silent confusion. This world...

That... What?

At least one thing was clear.

"So. So you aren't a red blood cell?

"And this body-- this world, I... guess I mean? There's..."

Her voice trailed off as she looked around for yet another time. Well. It really didn't look like the inside of a body. And there weren't nearly enough cells moving around here for it to really function if it was. But... what did that mean?

"This is really weird," Red Blood Cell murmured eventually, looking a little pale. "I must've taken a really wrong turn to get here."

It was more confusing to learn that she was a red blood cell, or at least that she thought she was. "No. I'm not a red blood cell. I have them."

He looked her over again, just as confused.

"You don't look like a red blood cell. For one, you're a lot bigger than one." And she looked like a multi-celled organism, just like he was.

"We all took a wrong turn, I think. You can call me Ren. What, um, what should I call you?"

He... had red blood cells?

Wait. Was she his red blood cell?

She blinked, looking at him and then, as she'd let go before, she slowly reached out with one white-gloved hand and poked his cheek. He'd said they all took a wrong turn. At this point, she was pretty sure hers had been more wrong than most. "Um. I'm... just a red blood cell. I guess that's what you call me? I have my designation, but everyone just yells Red Blood Cell when they want to get my attention. We all just... know when it means us." As she speaks, her words start to get faster. This, she has confidence in. "It's like, when I want to get White Blood Cell's attention, I just yell White Blood Cell and he knows it's him, even though his designation is 1146. There's also 4989, 2626, 2048-- Oh, and then there's Killer T Cell, even though I think he's changed over, now, to a Memory T Cell, and there's all the Macrophages, and the adorable little platelets--"

Now that had her stop cold, eyes growing wide. "Oh no, I hope Backwards Cap is okay..."

He blinked, eyebrows raised slightly at the contact, and her proceeding ramble. It was tough to follow, not because he didn't know the science, he was good at science, but because she spoke of all those things as though they were people, not just tiny, microscopic pieces of them. It was unnerving as much as it was disorienting. He hadn't been here long enough to realize in some reality, something like this may very well be exactly how things worked and it was just confusing.

"I don't think time passes back in your own world when you come here." Of that much he was certain. A friend of his had arrived here from well before his own point in time but Ren had never missed him back home. "So I'm sure Backwards Cap is fine."

Time doesn't pass. Now that was...

It was oddly comforting, really. When she'd left, everything had been going fine. Normal, at least. There were always a few brave bacteria getting in, but the different white blood cells tended to get the job done very, very well. So if everything was still just like that...

Red Blood Cell took a deep breath and sighed it out. "Oh good. I mean, there's not much I can do to help, but... Thank you. Thank you for telling me."

Red Blood Cell | Cells At Work

I. Crash Into Me

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