Test Drive 1

[badgernet]

Test Drive 1

Welcome to the beta test of BadgerNet, Multiversal Edition! Settle in and enjoy your posting experiences. Everything in this will be non-canon.

Here're some example prompts to play around with. You can make up your own!

1. An embarrassing moment of yours just got posted to the site. Oops!
2. Post your proudest moment to the site.
3. Hiccup Event: Vampires. Everyone affected is a vampire, your choice of what style of vampire.
4. Hiccup Event: Disney Princess. Animals just won't leave you alone!
5. Hiccup Event: Actor. You believe you're an actor playing the role of yourself as a character and you have the props and everything to prove it. Chill offstage and all that.
6. You're livestreaming a dramatic moment in your life.
7. Asking the people on the site for advice on something.

And so on. Be sure to read the rules and FAQ before posting.

Comments

Neriel | Good Omens OC

[godslantern]

A - video

[The camera turns itself on before anyone appears to be in range, on... quite a lot of white, with just enough variance to suggest it's showing a room of some kind, and not glitching. After a while, footsteps approach wherever it's sitting, stop, and resume, more slowly.]

...This is new. Where did this thing come from?

[The (presumably) woman frowning at the camera is petite, looks twenty-something and East-Asian-ish, and has green eyes. Not like normal green eyes - think emerald green. Glass bottle green. Harry Potter green. She's wearing a pale lavender thing that might be a robe and might be a sundress.]

B - text

[Having established that whatever this network device is, it's not... official issue, Neriel has a question to pose to the mostly-mortal assembly of users. But privacy is hard to come by, and this'll be easier to put away if she's not making a video when she's inevitably interrupted, and all things considered she doesn't want to ask this question out loud, so text it is.]

What do you do if you discover someone may have been lying to you for a very long time?

B

[blastiaobsessieanonymous]

I may not be the best person to ask this given my generally low faith in people's ability to not be stupid, but it sounds to me like they were being particularly stupid if they though the lie would hold up forever.

[godslantern]

All things considered, I suspect they had reason to believe it would work. Insular communities don't lend themselves to fact-checking.

Arguably, at the same time it's their own fault I got evidence to the contrary.

[blastiaobsessieanonymous]

That is definitely. Something, to say the least.

Maybe I'm the weird one out, because in Aspio, fact-checking is literally the core of our jobs as Blastia scientists. As for the person who lied to you, I can see if I can find a way to loan you a Blastia well-suited to setting people on fire, if that would help?

[godslantern]

I appreciate the offer. [...She thinks.] But it's unlikely to be truly effective at anything other than upsetting them further, and violence isn't my first port of call regardless.

I do need confirmation I didn't just imagine things, and I'm going to have to leave to get it.

[blastiaobsessieanonymous]

... Eh. I'm used to applied fire being a good tool for dealing with idiots. You'd be amazed how few knights trying to push someone around know how to dodge a slow-moving fireball.

[godslantern]

It would be a minor inconvenience at best. I'm better off avoiding direct conflict for multiple reasons.

B

[extrasaltypotato]

Define 'lying.'

I hate to have to specify this, but most of the people in my circle of friends concealed aspects of who they were from their work and immediate family because doing otherwise would put their livelihoods, if not their lives, in immediate jeopardy.

Likewise, there are secrets that would put others in jeopardy that I could forgive people for concealing.

[godslantern]

That's not an unreasonable clarification.

It's... kind of a long story. The short version is that I was told my friends wouldn't even think of me after they left, and I just got some very strong evidence to the contrary. I'm not certain the person who told me that made any attempt to find out whether it was true, either.

[So less lying and more flat-out gaslighting.]

[extrasaltypotato]

Ah. Lying with the intention of causing harm.

Bluntly, destroy them. Or at least, know this is grounds for immediately cutting ties with them.

And, for all it's worth, I'm sorry.

[godslantern]

Destruction has never been my strong point.

Immediately cutting ties isn't quite an option either, but I could potentially work toward it. There's one person I trust to give me a straight answer on this, and he's certainly not coming back here either, so I'd have to go to him for that.

But I need to know whether I've been mourning my friends for upward of six millennia when there was no reason to.

[extrasaltypotato]

I expected that it wouldn't be as simple as that; but I wanted to make the urgency and vehemence of my advice abundantly clear.

Find those you can trust and verify your suspicions, absolutely. If they wanted to isolate you, you need to know why.

[godslantern]

Oh, the why is easy. It artificially created and increased the tensions that were meant to boil over into an all-out war yesterday.

Just as well that got called off, really. Nobody won the first one, and piling more needless suffering on top of the old scars would have helped no one. I'd get odd looks at best for admitting I'm relieved it didn't go through, but I don't know what anyone else would expect from a healer.

A

[superstylishsquid]

[Have a video response from someone who looks like the most cliche devil ever, only purple themed instead of red. He even seems to be in a Gothic Victorian mansion of some sort.]

Special delivery, I guess. Kinda rude of them to leave the camera rolling, though.

[godslantern]

...Well, you make it highly unlikely to be official issue.

[Which is good, after the day Neriel's had, but decidedly unusual.]

[superstylishsquid]

Yeah, pretty sure it's not 'official' anything. Not unless someone out there made it their job to connect everyone to magic internet, anyway.

[godslantern]

Definitely not official, then. No one would see the point of such a connection. [As it is, she's wondering why her, but that's probably not something the possibly-demon on the other end of this conversation would know.

In any case, she adjusts the camera so she doesn't have to stand over it, moving the background view from a white ceiling to... white walls and white beds. Despite the monotone, this is clearly an infirmary.]

I suppose it's a good thing everyone else has cleared out for the day.

[superstylishsquid]

What, worried you'd get in trouble for chatting on the clock?

[godslantern]

...Yes and no. An outside communication device would be difficult to explain at the best of times, and since everyone's still on edge from yesterday, this isn't exactly the best of times. [That may be the understatement to end all understatements, but Neriel doesn't elaborate right away, once again glancing away as though she expects to be interrupted.]

Armageddon was meant to be yesterday, but it... rather spectacularly failed to launch at the last minute. I certainly don't mind a lack of needless suffering, but that's not as popular of an opinion as you might think.

A

[turingcompletionist]

[The woman (?) peering back at her is Latina and looks as if she's in some nebulous form of early middle age. Her hair is brightly colored and her eyes are light hazel.]

No clue! [she says cheerfully.] But man, it's kinda nice to find a Dreamwidth clone in this day and age. LJ clone? I mean, technically LJ came first, but this def seems to be more in the style of Dreamwidth. No ads or anything!

[godslantern]

I... don't know what either of those things are.

[turingcompletionist]

Online journaling sites! And dude, don't worry about it. You're like in your twenties, right? LJ as I knew it back in the day was basically kaput when everyone migrated to Tumblr and even Dreamwidth just mostly got used for DWRP in the 2010s and 2020s. You wouldn't have even been born yet when I was spending most of my free time fucking around pretending to be Rose Quartz Unicorn and Princess Kaguya.

[godslantern]

[Basically none of that made sense to Neriel. She's just. Gonna focus on the things that did.]

Is that how young I appear to humans? Is that good or bad?

I believe the prevailing human calendar is... at or near 2020, currently.

[turingcompletionist]

Kinda neutral, really? Like you're at the peak of your physical condition and shit, but people my age--that's, uh, fifty-seven, and yeah I know I look younger but my partner's in the field of nano-biology and we've both been getting regen treatments since before they were publicly available--anyway, people my age are more likely to discount your opinions because you're young and don't know any better. It's kind of bullshit, but that's how it is.




... also that's some crazy time-travel bullshit right there and I am fucking into this. Man, back in 2020 I was still quarantining in Lyon with Alain.

[godslantern]

[Quarantining?! But didn't Pestilence retire, or at least ask for a long enough sabbatical that bringing in a backup Horseperson seemed prudent?

Well, in any case, Neriel isn't sure they've hit 2020 yet, or that a quarantine is something she'll have to worry about. She can deal with that if and when it happens.]

In most cases, it's likely I don't know any better, simply through lack of experience. If someone opts to challenge me on a matter of healing, though, I'd have to object.