timetrappedooc | Test Drive; December

Test Drive; December

Test Drive

Welcome to the test drive for Time Trapped. This is an open forum to test out your characters to see how they would fit into the game and if you might be interested in apping them here. We want you to feel comfortable and, of course, test drive threads can be used as samples on your application to join.

First, a few housekeeping things before we start:

∞Apps will be open as of Dec 10th at 12 AM, and will reopen on the first of every month. They will remain open until the 10th of each month before closing.

∞Both first and third person prompts are allowed in the test drive. We encourage both. We also encourage making multiple prompt options in your post.

∞Finally, you will be allowed to transfer your test drive threads over into the game canon should you apply and be accepted.

∞If you have any other questions please feel free to refer to the FAQ or contact the mods directly.

Aside from that, happy test driving.

Instructions:
Post with Character you'd like to test drive using Name and canon in the subject line.
Receive comments.
Profit

Prompts

1. Acclimating to the environment
While Gideon has a part of the area sectioned off for now based on her calculations of where the time anomalies are going to occur the area is still large and confusing. It’s easy for a person to get lost or overwhelmed in this big mish-mosh of a world. Perhaps you are lost, or maybe you are just settling in.

2. Reach out and touch someone
Gideon has been kind enough to provide you with a way to communicate. Whether that be a device or a simple SIM card. Why not try it out by sending a public message. Of course, you could also be sending it by accident.

3. Make peace, not war
While LA has become a hodgepodge of different times it has also become a hodgepodge of different areas as well. Exploring the downtown LA brings you to a section of Greenwich Village in New York. Unfortunately what was once a peaceful protest has grown into a fight between Mogul hordes and peace loving hippies who just want to protest. Local enforcement is, of course, trying to sort out this mess but it seems they might need a bit of outside help.

4. What's this strange building?
The 'Hall of Justice' stands in a sorry state as nature is trying to overtake it. Vines are crawling up the walls and there is Dimetrodon sunbathing in the courtyard, or what's left of it. Inside, any technology seems to have been destroyed and there is no sign of life. Still, it is a ruin left to be explored and the local archaeological society is willing to pay good money for relics from inside. Be warned that there may still be some rather nasty traps active inside and around the hall. If you happen to be a from the DC world you might see a few familiar faces among the broken statues that once adorned this building.

5. Let’s dance
The Verdant. A rousing nightclub in 'bad neighborhood' of what was once Starling City circa 2013. There seems to be a wide variety of patrons here tonight, anything from Greek Scholars to some Greasers. What a great place to grab something to drink or maybe cause a little trouble.

6. Dressing in style
Perhaps you arrived in less than ideal clothing. You may have arrived in no clothing at all. It might just be about time to look through some clothing stores and find what is right for you. Of course, it’s never that easy though. There are pickpockets and thieves all over the streets. You may just become their next victim.

7. Home for the Holidays
Little old London town is high in festivities right now. It's Christmas and the area surrounding Big Ben is snowy, though it's a bit melty due to the climate in LA. Festive decor and foods for sale circa 1885 in england and emotions are cheery and positive. Take a horse and buggy or attend a christmas party.

Just hope the mongols don't show up. Or Amazons.

8. Wild Card. Go nuts.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[ Shortly after this ]

Sara isn't a hoverer and if she is a Legend, even when she’s stocking two thousand thread count sheets at a back end bed store in Timbuktu, she’s not time’s mother even then. She has to trust as much as she’s asked other people to, and maybe just hope that the world doesn’t implode. Or just accept the risk. Because it’s not just Thea, or Oliver, or John. It's every single person in this maelstrom now threatening it with each new word.

Which means at a given time, when it seemed right, she’d left Oliver and John to talk. She’d gotten herself another drink, and another after that, and she’d found a spot in the back with a dartboard: that she was currently throwing a trio of short daggers in a clockwise shift of triangle points around the outside of it.

Edited 2017-12-04 02:04 (UTC)

To say it's a lot to take in is a bit of a colossal understatement.
Time travel. Magic. More magic. Star City under threat again and again.
Oliver is going from nightly battles to all out war for the soul of his city and while he can simply nod and accept it, part of him is so very tired because this war will go on for a very long time.

But it's a battle worth fighting, and he'll do it beside both friends and allies every time.

He's more than a little warmed by the whiskey - because you don't have conversations regarding time travel and magic, or conversations with Constantine in general without some form of alcohol. It's just easier that way.

For a moment Oliver simply watches her.
He can't have anyone close to him. Not anyone that he loves. Every time he does it ends in pain or blood and sometimes both.

But oh if he could..

"Hi." He picks up one of the daggers, testing the weight of it before giving his own throw.

It definitely says something that Sara doesn't stop Oliver. Not when he reaches out and takes ones of her knives, and not when he throws, while giving her the most anticlimactic of introductory words. Is that better or worse than the earlier ones?

Still she relaxes from her stance, looking from where the dagger hew threw lands, back over to him. She can't help that she's already appraising how he is at the nearly the same rate that she is how to handle him in all of this. Somethings never changed, no matter the time. "Hey."

To be fair, he's searching for the right words, the right way to frame up how he's still struggling to process everything that John had just told him. And sometimes simple is best, isn't it?

A small, but genuine sort of smile as he laughs a little. "It's.. ah. It's a lot to take in. Time travel." A look that's warm with fondness. "And you captain a time ship." Because of course she does. Sara is the leader of her own team of heroes.

"Didn't start that way." Honest and deprecating, even if she can't say exactly how it happened. Who, and why, and when, and where. The exact circumstances that would prepare him for too much. It's not going to be a fun line to ride with him. But they've had to handle worse together, haven't they?

"Still, it's got its perks." Is easier, her mouth twisting to an all too easy smirk as her head tilts. "Tiny army at my beck and call, a better closet than a thousand catalogs, and the ability to mind wipe really annoying people."

It's not that, and they both know it, but maybe it's easier as a joke of itself.

The laugh that bubbles up is honest and easy and lately, a painfully rare thing. But it comes all the same and Oliver doesn't fight it for an instant. Yes, she's being flip about something huge but that's how they handle the big things, isn't it?

"Yeah. Sounds like you're doing okay." An understatement, but only just so. She's alive. She's got a team and a ship and seems.. she seems good. Oliver doesn't quite understand the details, but what matters is being able to do this with Sara. To stand and talk to her. Share a smile. To just be.

It's good to hear him laugh. To watch him give even that shadow of what a real, at ease, smile looks like on him. It makes her heart hurt a little less for the duration of that sound. The idea of having to keep anything from him for what might be a short or a long duration can't be anything but heavy on her, and it helps. That smile. That laugh.

Even more, that he came to her instead just fading off into the night. Especially, because he could have and because he knows her well enough to know she'd have let him. The same ways she knows him well enough to know if he had, he'd be back some point later.

"I've definitely had worse." There's no call for horror or pity in that.
Sara says this one with a quiet pride that speaks volumes comparison couldn't.

For better or worse, in both the living and the dying of it, Sara's loves the life she has, and the people at her side, fiercely.
She doesn't want to be anywhere else, doing anything else than being Captain of the Legends and the Waverider.

Oliver might have ghosted someone else, might have retreated to a quiet and dark space to collect his thoughts.
But this is Sara.

He couldn't run from her any faster than he could run from himself. Another smile as he tips back a drink in salute to the pride in her voice. He can set aside the pain and the confusion, he can set everything aside in favor of the pride in her voice and the smile on her face.

"It looks good on you Sara." Being a leader. Being everything that Oliver had always seen in her.

At least he's not saying 'I told you so'?

"I like it."

He totally is though. He absolutely totally is.
Absolutely, totally, is saying I told you so, Sara.
With that stupid smile of his and that toast raised up.

Which maybe if the the him-that-he-wasn't-yet hadn't already done just the same thing as the whole thing was going on, in stages, in the few times they got to run into each other now, she might have a different reaction. But they're here, and there aren't aliens to fight or goodbyes to say, and they're just, even if just here, is like three feet and three years apart, what he gets is:

"Shut up, Ollie." He's not saying it, just like she's shaking her head, and walking away to get her daggers back out of the wall, because it might be utterly impossible for her to stop the smile pressed into her cheeks, or her cheeks from getting warm. Jackass. Only Oliver Queen.

Sara pried all three of her deep-sunk daggers out with ease. Two of them held flat to the palm of her hand by her last three fingers, while she tapped the flat of the third blade on the side of her hand, turning back with something of slightly less pleased expression. Because, this was really, all part of it. She thinks she knows the answer already, but the thing is as much as they've done everything, and they started this (more words he's never said yet), they haven't done this. Where they are, here. She is. He isn't. They both are.

"If you need some space, while figuring all of this out--" There's a shift of her head, because she means herself, her death, her existence, again. "--when you aren't need for dinosaurs and time flaw designs--" Having to be there as the Arrow. To help solve this. Work with her and the Legend, and everything that can't be quite handed over. She's using too many words. "--I'll understand."

Okay.
So he's totally saying I told you so.
He also more than expects her to realize it and call him on it, because that's what they did. Truths couched in the occasional tease, the small smiles that say far more than words ever could. The small smiles that make Oliver wonder what could have been so many times before the night when everything changed.

The night when she'd been stolen away from them all. From him.

But he banishes the thought for a moment when she calls him Ollie, tells him to shut up with a smile in her voice and it warms him to his damned core to hear it again.

Sara. Bright and alive.

Then she's offering him space, giving him an out to process the changes, to process all of the things that she can't tell him. She knows that he needs time, that he needs to digest things.
Oliver shakes his head. "No. Right now space is the last thing I need."

Sara nods like she's not surprised in the slightest that's his answer. Or that Oliver, being who he is and how quickly he decides things, especially the too important, too impossible, too unchosen, things he should never have to think about, doesn't. Doesn't wait. Doesn't think. Doesn't say anything less than what she expects.

"Still," she says, as she stops tapping the flat of the blade on her skin and offers him that dagger back. "It's there, if you change your mind later."

Sometimes it happened, and it might. They'd known each other long enough to not owe each other anything like airs. It might seem impossible to need space from her while it was still the first hour, night, day of seeing her alive, again, for him. That didn't mean it'd still be that way once it sunk in, through the shock and the work, that she wasn't the girl he remembered.

That there was space in between, where she'd been, and who she'd become, and even who she ran away into time and became after that. But she can hope, with a steady gaze on those familiar, as her own breath, blue eyes above her, that it might not happen, or that when it does, like all their other rises and falls, it'll be fine on the other side, of it, and this, and time, altogether, too.

There will no doubt come a time when Oliver will have to withdraw from everyone. Not just to process it, but to deal with the emotions that come along with learning that Sara is alive, that the ones he cared about were far further ahead in the timeline. He hadn't allowed himself to grieve the night that Sara had been killed because the others needed him to remain steady and certain and sooner or later that emotional bill is going to come due.

But he could pay for that in his own time.
Alone.

They understand one another, well enough that Oliver doesn't protest when she offers the space again. They both know that one day he will need it. Just not tonight.

"Thanks. I'll remember."

Another smile meant only for her. "For now how about you share those knives?"

If she gives a half-roll of her eyes at his just as nonchalant acceptance, it's fond, too. Well worn and time-tested, both back in the real 2017, and back in the real 2014, and even in the far future of the 'hopefully never real again 2046.' Oliver Queen was Oliver Queen was Oliver Queen.

She gives an overdone sigh, and holds the one out she'd been tapping -- to let him have it, even as she grouses.
"Just because I have short of ten of them on me currently, does not mean I do not need all ten of them back."

Then, came added, a look mocking over patience, as if he were a small child, and not who he was;
"One would think you'd have learned better how to pack for being kidnapped by now."

They can do this.
They can drink and throw knives and pretend that time hasn't fractured apart beneath them and Oliver can drink and try to ignore the gulf between them. The one where Sara has died, lives again and becomes captain of a time ship and he.. he doesn't know what happens to him. To them.
It's not something he can bridge with just a touch, even if he wants to.

So he lets her tease him, accepting the knife with a fond smile of his own. At least weapons were a certainty. Something that he could hold and use and understand.

He'll slip away tonight. He'll find somewhere alone.
But not just yet.

As Sara chides him he just laughs, saluting her with his drink before letting fly with the knife. "You would think."

Sara watches Oliver's fast movement at the side of her vision, even as she's flipping up one of the other two in her hand, and throwing it. His not even lodged into the wall, when she's taken in its trajectory, and she throws hers to land an inch or so above his. She's going to owe someone a wall, but then, this time won't exist, again, soon either.

Remorse for repair isn't something Sara has.

Especially when it's a viscerally rewarding sound to hear them both hit home.

She flips the third up in her hand, head barely tilting, eyes narrowed as she's deciding where for it.
Nothing about that changes in the slightest, even as she says, "You can ask."

"I could," he agrees. Pauses as the next knife flies from her hand. He could ask. Part of him wants to ask and another part of him doesn't want to know. Since the Gambit went down it's been one horror show after another. Struggle and loss. Death. Fear. Solitude.

"Maybe another time I will."

Because right now, Oliver doesn't want to think about her past, his future and how it all tangles together. Or if it doesn't, if they simply follow different paths.

Maybe it's selfish, and it very likely is, but Oliver just wants a few hours without that hanging over his head.

It's something in how he says the second part that makes her pause and look at him. There isn't a maybe. But there's something else, too. They might not be mirror images of each other, but after what they'd been through they understood each other in ways no one else, who hadn't been to or through what they had, did.

Sometimes what they needed was not what people thought they did. Couldn't be asked for or even put into words. He didn't want space (yet). He didn't want any part of the too greater, complicated truth (yet). But he wanted to be here. With her. And there's a harrowed edge to that lingering darkness on him. The one in his eyes that doesn't leave when it's bad. When it's at its worst.

This one she never saw: because she wasn't there to see it. Because he's still looking at her like she's a ghost, a body gone cold and yet somehow up moving, too. She doesn't know what his last two days were like. But she knows him too well to not have to an extremely detailed guess.

"Fair enough." Sara can say blithely after that moment of consideration, and if her smile crooks at one side, her eyes might have all the rest there her face doesn't. Compassion. Concern. Regret. Acceptance, that couldn't judge, not especially now.

She tips her head to the daggers back in the wall. "Your turn."
"I need another drink. Do you want anything?"

Edited 2017-12-05 17:08 (UTC)

There's absolutely no question in how he says it. A time will come when he will need the space, when he will demand answers and retreat again in order to process it. With Felicity there, with Sara, with Thea and so many others, Oliver will do what he always does. Set aside anything personal in favor of larger and far more complex goals, regardless of the cost.

But it's been a difficult year and a half. Slade Wilson. His company stolen not once but twice out from under him. His mother. Thea. Roy. He has lost so much but just this one time, Oliver was given something back. Something precious.
So he's going to be selfish, just this one time. He's going to sit with Sara, he's going to throw knives for no reason other than because they can.

And she understands. Of course she does. Sara understands him far better than anyone ever had. She won't press. Not tonight.

"Yeah, a drink sounds good."

"Something specific--" Sara let her fingers press together, hands raised in front of her, but still in the swing of movement, even without a dagger in them to put the restless, itch of energy into. "-- or are you just trusting that I won't come back with something purple and terrible, that would put even frat boy jello shots to shame?"

Another laugh slips free, a laugh that tells Oliver that he's indeed made the right choice for the evening. No complicated issues like time travel, death or resurrection. Just a night with a dear friend who would always hold a place in his heart.

"I think I trust you to come back with something that won't permanently damage us."

Oliver is never not beautiful when he's laughing the way he does just now: thrown surprised and delighted by it.

It's an easy thought, a carelsss one, fond and absent, at her own flash bright trite levity and proof of measuring up to his request. Maybe that doesn't get any further inspection, maybe it hasn't in good while now, but there has never been and will never again a day, in any timeline, on any world, where Oliver Queen needs something from her and she won't be there to help him with all she can and all she has.

Still, she doesn't miss a beat, Miss Sara Lance, whose face turns a river of shameless implication to the opposite, posture canted to one side, and smile a tilted twist. "Well, that's definitely your first mistake. Try not to contemplate too hard that you asked for your own demise while you get my knives."

Which is all she says, before her weight shifts on the turn of one foot and she's making her way through the crowd back to the bar he'd originally come from the direction of.

Edited 2017-12-06 06:05 (UTC)

Sara is still one of the few people that can startle a laugh out of Oliver. Perhaps because she knows him so well, or more likely because he can let down his guard when he's around her.

He doesn't regret his decision for an instant because this is what he needs right now. He needs warmth and he needs light and Sara has always been both.

As she melts back into the crowd to pick up whatever death-concoction she's going to come up with that will bring a pounding headache come dawn, Oliver goes to retrieve her knives and smile to himself. He trusts her. Whether it's with drinks, knives, or the history that she can't quite bring herself to share with him yet.

He'll always trust her.

There are some easier and worse jokes, still lingering on the back of her tongue. Things she could say to her crew. Things she could say to the Oliver from her time. But not to him. He isn't really game for jokes about permanent damage and death, not really, not even if he might try to roll with it.

It might be the fourth time he thought he saw her die in front of him, but it was the first one he had a body for and no miracle cure. Not yet.

And not yet ready for the joke of it, that was never quite a joke. How close Sara and dying, or almost dying, were eternally linked. He was nowhere near ready to hear it'd happened again after she left with the Legends. Or that she'd just come back from precariously close to it again, only a short time ago. Not tonight.

"I need--" Sara started once the cute bartender with the long jet black hair freed herself. She looked back at Oliver, narrowing her eyes, because she was nothing if not at least a little predictable in this. "--two 4 Horsemen."

Which is exactly what she has in her hands, when she's headed back. She held out Oliver's glass with a far too telling smirk, "To trust."

And there might be a time in the future when Oliver can appreciate those jokes, both about her own death and almost death and the few times he's managed to just skirt it himself.
But not today. Things are still too raw.

Then Sara is coming back with two shot glasses and a smirk that spells out trouble in bright neon letters. Oliver shakes his head as he takes the glass. "I am going to regret this, aren't I?"

But regret won't stop him tonight. Oliver clinks his glass with hers and knocks it back. Coughs. Oh yeah. He's already regretting it and the liquor hasn't even hit his bloodstream yet. "Yes. Yes I am already regretting it."

Sara just grins, clinking her glass and downing it in an easy swallow. Heat burning down the back of her throat and warming down her chest, sharp and dark, and making her roll her shoulders back and roll her neck slightly, even as she was already opening her eyes, to laugh as Oliver coughed under the assault of all that whiskey.

"Well, you did basically ask for it."

Test Drive; December

Test Drive

Prompts

Oliver; Take Two { i woke up in tears; with you by my side

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