spacehorses | Test Drive Meme

Entry tags:

test drive

Test Drive Meme

Did you want to test your characters? Do you want something that you can use for an RP sample without digging up an old thread? Well, here you have it. Pick one or multiple prompts below or, if you want, make a prompt of your own. Just be sure to tag around so that everyone gets plenty of exposure.

1: Explosions in space! Space Bandits attacked the space colony everyone was visiting! Dozens of fighters and mobile armors fly through space, locked in deadly combat. Are you among those battling to save lives? Or are you watching from the windows, praying everything will be safe?

2: Explosions underground! You were part of a trading party, exchanging supplies with an underground penal colony when alien animals burrowed through the walls and started assaulting convict and Confederation member alike! What are you going to do?

3: Explosions over the city! The Colosseum is shooting off fireworks as part of a concert or a sporting event! Are you watching in the crowd, a main attraction, or watching the bright colors from the city?

4: Explosions on an asteroid! You're either observing, guarding, or mining an asteroid! It's rather dull, save for the explosions that rock the ground under your feet. It looks like it'll continue to be just as slow, but... was that something moving in the shadows there?

5: Explosions on a space station! As you approached a research station, you receive a distress signal! Fire's broken out and their systems aren't up to spec! Can you do anything? Are you a part of a scouting crew or out for a joyride in your new yacht? And is this an accident, or something more sinister?

6: Explosions at the gym! Explosive competition! Swimming, weightlifting, running, boxing, someone has just challenged you! Whether they know it or not, you're going to do your best to show them up.

7: Explosions in the past! A star has died! The Fleet is flying through the nebula it left behind, with swirls of beauty as far as the eye can see. If you're the type, you can watch it all you like.

8: Explosions on the road! Most of the traffic on the Teuberg is computer controlled, but some young showoff took his off the grid and promptly caused a wreck! Traffic has been backed up for almost half an hour now, with no way out for you and the people in your vehicle. Are you close enough to see if anyone needs help? Or are you just stuck with people who are as late for their appointments as you are?

9: Explosions in the marketplace! Explosive bargains! You're in a trading hub, surrounded by stalls of all kinds selling every type of merchandise you can imagine! Luckily, you've got enough money to handle a few purchases here. Will you buy one of those daggers on display? An incense burner? Some alien fruit? Or maybe you're on the run from the corrupt guards? Or perhaps you're the one doing the chasing, did someone just steal your wallet?

10: Explosions in your mind! The explosive inspiration that drives this world! Make up your own prompt!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Meditating among the crowd wasn't easy, but all he needed was a brief recollection of peace to find focus on it. The surface of the tea was predictable, peaceful, undisturbed despite the oohing of the crowd and the crackling of the fireworks.

As Jim sits down in the seat opposite him, he lowers his hands down from their steeple to cradle the cup, judging its temperature with the pads of his thumbs.

"You knew where to find me when you did not."

It spoke a great deal, he thought, about the relationship that had built between his counterpart and the man before him. Finding himself among the crowds, he had sought a quiet place of focus, and Kirk - discovering that - had come here. The next question was why, to which there was only one possible answer. Well, two, but the probability of one greatly outweighed the other.

"You have something on your mind."

The fireworks are still going off; without looking, they sound almost like gun shots, bullets firing inside echoing halls and bouncing the sound back at you. He doesn't glance up to watch the display when another peel of fire spreads across the sky, it lights up on the glass holding Spock's tea and illuminates the silver of his hair.

Jim flashes him a smile as his elbows rest on the table top; there's still a substantial amount of space between them, even though Kirk seems to try and take up most of it. He doesn't speak at first. Of course he knew where to find him. If Spock hadn't been up here, he probably would have left, but Kirk has a deep well of respect for this man and for some reason can't bring himself to be a smart ass about it.

"A guy needs to have something on his mind to spend time with you?" He asks, his voice jumping playfully; it's pretense, but even now he isn't good at being all that straightforward.

He raises the tea to chin height, regarding Jim over the top of it, and after a moment he raises both grey eyebrows a half an inch, and allows himself to take a sip. When he lowers the glass he speaks.

"While you are correct, it is simply an unavoidable truth; I have been privy to that particular look more often than I can count, I have not forgotten what it means."

There's a sparkle in his eyes, still sharp despite the wear and pain in the years that have aged him. It isn't just the fireworks flickering overhead.

"I welcome your company, Jim, whether or not you are present only for the sake of watching me drink my tea." He'd been alone for far too long; any company was fine company, but he found particular pleasure in present company in particular. Kirk might never be aware quite how much Spock appreciated it, but it didn't change the fact that he did.

Jim's fingers come together on the table where his hands rest, picking at a jagged cuticle. He hadn't brought a drink with him, and there was little on the round top to keep his hands occupied, now that it came down to it. There's a way the Ambassador looks at him, like there's some kind of deep resevoir in him that can't run empty. It doesn't make him nervous, but it's foreign enough that Jim feels himself treading lightly, even when he doesn't mean to.

The brilliant blue of his eyes linger on the old man's face, the flickers in his expression that his own Spock doesn't give away. Jim can't fathom what the Ambassador has been through in his long life, can't imagine what his own part had played in it, save that it had been huge; universe moving. That it had been something to urge him to ask how did you find me?, even though he'd probably outlived him by a good hundred years. To suggest a meld when the younger first officer constantly danced around the subject like it was taboo. It was hard, sometimes, not to compare himself to that. Not to be embittered by it. There are stretches where he'll steadfastly avoid the elder Vulcan, because he can't handle the affection on his face.

Silence stretches long enough after Spock's statement for it to be obvious Jim's mind is well at work, but instead of voicing them he finally squints, lifts one hand and points at the Ambassador. The sober look on his face quirks, accusatory. "That's cheating. You do that a lot."

A telltale quirk, just in the corner of the line of his mouth, betrays him. It's the tiniest thing, but he doesn't try to hide it.

The amusement doesn't fade remotely. He allows himself a certain flexibility with his feelings concerning James T. Kirk. These moments were too transient; nobody lived forever, and they both had different paths, Kirk his own friendships to forge, Spock the destiny of his people. His own James T. Kirk wouldn't have been intimidated by it, but nobody had ever informed him of the scale of his destiny. It constantly surprised him just how young this man was.

"A Vulcan cannot lie; it stands to reason, therefore, that I also cannot cheat."

But he was definitely cheating at least in this sense of the word, just as he cheats by steepling his fingers on the table in front of himself and leaning forward like a Starfleet counselor.

"Would you care for some tea?" Almost as he says it a young woman who smiles politely at Spock, arrives to set a cup down in front of Kirk. He had noticed his arrival.

He's part way through a wry Uh huh, a sound that overlaps the Vulcan's words when he sits forward, his cup of tea encircled in the diamond of his arms, when the woman comes to their table. Jim doesn't jump back, but he retreats from the would-be stalemate swift enough that his movement draws the woman's gaze. The smile he gives her is partly distracted, catches up with itself only after it's found his mouth, as though the reflex suddenly recognizes how attractive she is as an after thought.

Things changed, up there, lost in space. His kneejerk habit for leaping on any pretty thing that sauntered by had been forcefully tampered by close quarters— he'd have to live with any of the one-night stands he'd normally forget about a week later.

His gaze jumps from her retreating form to Spock, then drops to the fresh cup of tea on the table. The thing was, Kirk wasn't even that large of a fan of tea. But these days he'd take anything that wasn't the jet-black tar they'd convinced themselves was a sorry excuse for coffee. He cocks his head and leans back: "What if I don't like tea?" He challenges, but his palms are around the warm mug even before the sentence is out of his mouth. His gaze sweeps the elder Vulcan's expression. "Did the other me drink tea?"

A curious question from anyone else; telling of what's been on Kirk's mind, for anyone who knew him.

Edited 2014-01-16 02:28 (UTC)

The reaction and the question really go hand in hand. The uncertain distracted smile, the query about tea which wasn't remotely related to tea at all. He watches him carefully, but not with the piercing unblinking focus that he might unleash if he were to wield the full power of his stare on some other poor soul.

They'd avoided a great number of these questions before, simply by avoiding each other, but for one reason or another Kirk hadn't been able to let it lie - he had never been able to do that - and now here they were face to face over tea, with the question hanging unspoken, open like the maw of a planet-eater before them. It couldn't be ignored, nor avoided, any longer.

"To answer your question," he began, making it clear that he wasn't speaking about tea by the very fact that he was suddenly looking at it, rather than straight at Jim. "There must come a moment in every lifetime when a man must decide for himself whether or not he likes tea. Not by making inquiries of others, but by tasting it for himself. If you want to know for certain what kind of man you are, it is the only logical course of action."

He blinks, owlishly, tilting his head up again.

"The waitress' name is Y'etressi, and I am told that she makes excellent coffee."

His answer is about as round-about as anything, and though Jim doesn't roll his eyes at the dodge-that-isn't-a-dodge his mouth still thins. He's not sure why he brings it up, why he lets it bug him so much. Back on Earth, the Ambassador had hardly crossed his mind because of just how much was going on. And up in the farthest reaches of space— he'd had lives to save. He couldn't spare much thought to that other reality.

Maybe it was the Ambassador being here, seeing him with his old hands at parade rest and a twinkle in his eye. Maybe it was because it was a constant reminder of that first rush when he'd laid his hand at the points of Jim's face.

"I don't think Bones will appreciate you supporting my habits," He counters. Kirk thinks Spock's avoiding the topic, but he drops it with a sensation bizarrely like relief. It's probably better that way; though later, Kirk will wonder if in selfishly attempting to drill the Ambassador about a man he'll never be, he'd inadvertently dug his elbow into a wound that's never healed over. He'll think about Sulu out there somewhere. He'll seek out Y'etressi because she'll be an easy distraction from his own head and he won't be able to sleep.

"I tried Vulcan Spice tea once," He says, pulling his cup toward him and breathing in the aroma.

"What the good Doctor doesn't know can't hurt him."

Dropped is enough for now. He knows it isn't entirely over, that Kirk will always wonder because it is the nature of thinking beings to do so; just as Spock wonders what the young version of himself will be like, what kind of man he will become, orphaned from his homeworld, alone in an empty universe. So few Vulcans must have survived; Spock hadn't dared to ask that much either. If he didn't ask, he didn't have to know the truth, how few of them were left. Had T'Pring died among them? What of his mother and father? What would become of his siblings? Would his father remarry a Vulcan now, instead of taking a second human wife?

Spock had lost everything already. Faced with this young Kirk, his life ahead of him, he felt a bittersweet longing, pain and pleasure; saudade. His friendship with this man had ended. Kirk was buried - long past his time - but he, Spock, would live on in a universe where the name blossomed anew, where Klingons on the other side of the quadrant would hesitate upon hearing it. He would perhaps still be alive when they unveiled a statue of him at Starfleet Command.

He would watch it all, but he could no longer be a part of it, and it was a tragedy. But in a way the adventure would also live on; it couldn't have ended if it was happening right now.

The plunging depths of emotions oscillated behind his cool veneer, old hands and twinkling eyes.

"This is very much like Vulcan Spice tea. Eerily similar, in fact."

He doesn't look up at Spock, peering into his reflection cast back at him in the dark of the cup. He wonders if the changes are as clear in his face to everyone else as they are to him; if the flicker of silver at his temples and the slowly disappearing circles under his eyes give away the year of grief he'd lived. He's been told he's putting on weight, which is good, but Jim can't see it. And still he thinks, in the grand scheme of things it was a blink of an eye— the man across from him is over a hundred years in his future.

There are days, like today, he wants to ask. Jim glances up at him and again sees the dark swath of emotion rolling like an ocean under the surface of his expression, and can't bring himself to follow through.

"You think that's on purpose?" He hazards instead; because he's witnessed that before. Then again, this whole Fleet had it's strange similarities to the Federation's technology. Kirk is starting to wonder if it's simply a matter of all human beings evolving in a similar direction.

"I believe it to be...incidental."

This was a variation on a natural progression of the universe. But if that were the case, was there a Vulcan of a slightly different name in this universe, as there was a Federation of a different name? Spiced tea wasn't a concept unique to Vulcan, but Spock...

Spock preferred to think of it as an accident of fate because a false facsimile of Vulcan would still only be a copy. He would never stand on the sandy shores of home again, nor bask in the heat of his own planet's sun - it was gone - and though he had been far from home for the longest time, returning home was still returning home, for any Vulcan that had strayed in search of the universe's mysteries and some greater purpose. The belief that his planet was gone was more comforting than the belief in an alternate, undiscovered but barely familiar. It would be like going back to the Enterprise and finding another man in the Captain's chair.

His own tea is much cooler. He takes a sip of it, and there's the briefest hint of discomfort that someone like Kirk, watching him as he is, might notice: his jaw twitches just slightly, a response to an acrid something to the taste of the tea. It's just off being right. Just like everything else.

Making a thoughtful sound, he sets the tea back down again. He waits. He's curious whether or not Jim likes it.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Test Drive Meme

/gathers them both up together

cries about it tbh

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject