If you'd like to apply to Snowblind and would like to test the waters first or get a sample set up for your application, this meme is for you! We've even provided some prompts for you to use if you want (but feel free to make up your own). Here's how it works.
✭ Reply to this entry with a character you're considering apping into the game. You can include the name of your character and the fandom in your subject line.
✭ Comment around to others on the meme, whether you're in the game already or not.
✭ Now you have a sample ready for your application!
✭ So go reserve and apply when reservations and applications are open.
✭ Seriously, do it.
Network Prompts
ONE: PLEASE CONSULT YOUR PRIMARY PHYSICIAN
What a lucky day it is that you've found another application to install onto your tablet. These things are really a mixed bag, aren't they? At first, this definitely seems like you got the better end of a deal. The app is titled "DIAGNOSTICS.EXE" and when you run it, it seems to be some kind of body-scan program. However, when you run it, the only thing it tells you is that PARASITES ARE DETECTED. EXTRACTION REQUIRED BEFORE STAGE THREE TRANSITION BEGINS. Whatever that means. Maybe someone on the network can help, or maybe you can just panic about the parasites apparently eating away at your insides.
TWO: SOMETHING THERE THAT WASN'T THERE BEFORE
It's obvious pretty quickly that something's wrong with the Network, though it's hard to say exactly what. The Admin hasn't raised any kind of alert as to any known errors. Still, you can see fluttering behind the screen, like gnats moving and squirming. Wait--maybe it isn't the Network at all. Maybe it's your tablet. When you listen hard enough, you swear you can hear the scrabbling of little paper-thin legs. There has to be something you can do. Maybe someone on the Network will give you some kind of clue.
Action Prompts
THREE: OUT VILE SPOT
You and your traveling companion have made it to one of the food-stocked buildings for a sorely needed refill of your rations. There's plenty of time before lockdown, too, so it can't hurt to stop and eat what you can't carry. Things are going well for the most part, though you do notice that where you were most frequently handling the food, whether somewhere on a piece of clothing or on your skin directly appears to have developed what looks like a blue-black spot. Scrubbing it does nothing. Maybe it's nothing, a trick of the light or a bruise or stain you hadn't noticed sooner, but maybe you should let your traveling companion know, just to be entirely sure.
FOUR: MIND THE WALLS
This house is alive. At first, you and your traveling companion were sure that you were imagining things--it's a large house, after all, and in the dark after lockdown the shadows created by the light of you tablet can play tricks. It's easy to get turned around. You're tired. But after a long while of searching, you're sure of it. The walls are changing position. Doors lead to places they didn't a moment ago. When you touch your hand to the wallpaper you feel the faint, hot pulse of a heart beating. The two of you separated to cover the place faster, but now you're not sure how to navigate your way back to the front of the house to meet back up again. Good thing you both have your tablets to communicate between. A live video chat could help pass the time, at least.
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snowblindmods) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
snowblindmemes2017-11-14 11:01 pm
oh you too huh welcome to my life
[It's gotten easier since, in ways, but the username has stuck.]
Doubt he'll buy it. Not unless you've embraced the xeno lifestyle that hard over the years. I hear you've got a girlfriend now...?
[Which is a gateway to a hell of a conversation, if they just go through it. Rose can't know all the questioning Davesprite's gone through over Karkat, from pale to red and how many no homos can he fit in over accidental innuendos that would make Freud raise his eyebrows. By contrast, he hasn't the faintest clue what Other Dave got up to in that timeline, and the subject is still complicated at the best of times.]
[Rose, though—Rose is his sister, and he couldn't love her any less for it, no matter his own issues.]
[For now he pauses where he is. With both of them searching, that's just more ways for the house to change on them.]
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It has indeed been thoroughly embraced. A side effect of dating a troll.
[aka she is so up in that alien junk it has bypassed funny straight into "rose please shut up about your hot alien vampire girlfriend".]
I don't know if you ever had a chance to talk to her. Kanaya. The one with the jade green text. You would like her.
[Other Dave does, at least.
One of the doors fortunately does open up into a stairwell. She wouldn't bother under other circumstances, since an exit from this funhouse is unlikely to be found on the second floor, but finding Dave suddenly takes precedence over escape. She wouldn't leave without him even if she miraculously did find the way out.]
I'm heading upstairs.
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[Namely because apart from Jade, he was the only one here alive from paradox space. He'd had mixed feelings, not especially trusting them after what happened to John, then settling into the hard facts of sacrificing his relevance, and finally unable to talk to them even if he'd wanted to once on the ship for those three years.]
[Stairs, though.]
I'ma hold tight where I am. Less chance for you to get lost again if I don't go wandering off into the fucking twilight zone first.
[He settles down onto the floor here, and Rose may hear the sounds through her tablet as he unloads his various bags and coils his tail up more comfortably beneath himself. He's going to look like shit no matter if he's upright or not, and he tries to distract himself from how she'll react by tackling the other avenue of conversation.]
So like, she's a troll vampire, right? How's that work? Are you living out your own real life Carmilla fantasy, or does she keep her fangs to herself?
[He has never read Carmilla, but there's some kind of lesbian vampire thing in that, right? He thinks there is. He doesn't know.]
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[Her side of the call is similarly messy with background noise, her steps on the stairs and her just slightly heavier breathing from the effort of the climb. Shit, she misses being able to fly.]
A girl has to eat. [She smiles to herself, but refrains from expanding that into more overt innuendo. Someone has to be subtle to counter Dave's endless runaway metaphors.] Good reference, by the way. I'm impressed.
[The door handle under her palm at the top of the stair is as disconcertingly warm with something like body heat as the walls, but she steels herself and powers on through. If she slams the door a little, no matter. Better for Dave to maybe hear her in person.]
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You think I know jack shit about Carmilla save from half-remembered cultural osmosis? I'm years out of date, Lalonde. Even more out of date than you think when we've got people from years, decades, centuries in the future. The local year is at least 2150, and—
[Rose will hear the squawk and see the ruffle of vibrant orange as he nearly jumps out of his plumage at the sudden door slam. The door she came through is right within viewing distance, and decidedly not the door he came through a little bit ago. He doesn't trust that the door he used is even still there behind him right now.]
[If there were a singular term to describe how he looks (aside from startled all to shit), it's worn down. There's an underslept weariness in his face that creeps past the edges of his sunglasses, a thinness to his cheeks, and one could almost see the weight of stress that's pressed down heavier and heavier on his shoulders. His hair is shaggy with about five months' growth; he has scissors, but hasn't asked anyone to cut it yet. He could use a shower. He could almost always use a shower, rare as they are with hot water here. Some of the seriousness may be undercut by the fact that he's dressed like a homeless clown had a baby with a balloon animal.]
[Carefully, he folds his wings back neat behind him and settles the feathers of his ruff. He's staring saucer-eyed at her, but the dark lenses hide that much, and do pretty well to obscure the scars around the sockets, too. He clears his throat.]
'Sup?
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Torange coloring is a surprise. It shouldn't be, because she's seen other sprites, her own (unfortunately) included, and she intellectually knows how the colors turn out. But it didn't really prepare her for her brother all orange. At least she'd kinda been mentally prepared for the wings and feathers. It's all strange as shit, but hey. Strange has been the definition of her life for the last few years.
The corner of her painted lips quirks upward slightly, and she tugs at the orange hood of her godtier garb peeking out from beneath the purple coat she's arrived with.]
I see paradox space saw fit to make sure we matched.
[They are sorta twins, after all.
She nods and unceremoniously drops to sit down next to him. Making a show of adjusting the long ends of her orange tunic under her, she steals a peek at him through her bangs. Just...looking, covertly. He looks like shit and he's kinda dressed like a lunatic, but she can't help but feel like it'd be rude to openly stare. Like he'd think it's because of his sprite parts. Which are unfamiliar and strange, sure, but she's trying to be kind here and it isn't necessarily something that comes easily to her.
When she's settled, she sits back and gives him a more overt once-over, just a quick glance, and arches an eyebrow.]
So. What the fuck are you wearing, exactly?
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[Even with the extra months they spent together, it's still a bigger change to see the effect of the years on her.]
Yeah.
[A quiet little response. Being a sprite didn't actually tell him what a fully realized Seer of Light looks like, not when she wasn't his charge.]
[There's a tightness in his chest for seeing her that only gets worse as she sits down. There's a whole layer of reality to it different than just hearing her voice. She looks fresh and new next to him, the kind of shiny apple you put at the front of the display instead of the lumpy, bruised thing that gets tossed as not store-worthy. She hasn't been here yet in the way he has, with longevity and endurance and too many knocks along the way. He has to swallow just to get more words out.]
It's called hobo chic. You'll pick it up if you give it long enough. I know you hail from the frozen over backwoods of New York, but even you have to admit it's colder than Santa's balls outside.
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He's a bit taller than her, even just slightly more so than Other Dave is, but even sitting right next to him he feels small somehow. Too skinny. Jesus christ, how long had he even been here? She doesn't let her gaze linger on his too-long hair or the edges of scars any more than his bird parts, but every off detail is silently noted, each one a needle stab in her heart.
Still, she adopts a faint smirk. Overt concern and fussing has rarely been their style.]
I see. Is that a Tiara of +1 Cold Resistance, then?
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[But it's getting too hard to look at her, so he turns his torso toward one of his assorted bags to pick through. He hadn't expected her, but he'd thought of her still in his time here, and the purple puts to mind a thing he'd grabbed for someone else who never made it far enough to retrieve it. After a little digging, he manages to pull out three things: a purple graduation gown (nothing thick, but a layer still), a pair of knitting needles (someone surely would have a use for them eventually, right?), and a book that's one part Lovecraftian horror, one part cheesy romance novel. He hands them over in a bundle.]
Strider Claus got you a present. Just don't try the monsters with those needles; you'll die.
[As much a fact as snow being cold. It slips out before he can hold back on it.]
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I should have anticipated it would be Christmas soon, given the weather. Shame on me for not being better prepared. I don't have anything to give you in return.
[It's not exactly a "thank you", but he knows how she works. It'll translate.
She picks through her gifts with a delicate touch, lips twitching as she glances over the back cover of the book. The gown isn't at all the right shade to match even just her coat, a cool violet while the coat has more pink in it, but she doubts she'll care next time she steps out into the cold. Her fingers wrap around the pair of needles, a grip more suited to stabbing things than actually knitting, and she smirks.]
Ye of little faith. I didn't need anything more powerful than an ordinary set of needles to take out ogres at game start.
[There isn't an ounce of doubt in her voice. Of course not. This is Rose "Forever Ready To Wreck Shit" Lalonde. She'd inherited all of Dirk's willingness to take on the whole world without all his depressive tendencices. She'd been waiting on the edge of her seat all her life for a chance to maim things without fear of legal reprecussions, and the game had delivered on that if nothing else. It's been a while since she was working without any magic whatsoever, but she's certainly ready for it.]
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[He reaches over to put a hand to her wrist, if she'll stay still for it, his touch firm but not uncomfortably tight. The set of his face has gone all tense.]
This isn't me trying to question how many underlings you flayed back before you welcomed black magic into your heart. You will die. Ordinary objects go straight through them, and people go unconscious as soon as one touches them. There was a giant version of Lil' Cal that rolled off the roof and swallowed me as soon as I stepped out one morning. There was some monster version of Terezi that snatched up Karkat one evening and came so close that it knocked me out, and I woke up just in time to freeze to death because it was after lockdown. There was one that looked like John that we couldn't even tell was wrong until we got too close for his big fuckin' tooth-filled hood to swallow Karkat.
People come back here, but there's no guarantee, and even if you do you'll be missing something. Maybe just something like speech for a few days, but I've lost my emotional filter before; Karkat lost his emotions themselves once; and I know a guy who wound up having to follow every order he was given until it wore off. When I say you'll die, I'm not kidding around.
[He doesn't look away. She could pull her hand away easily. But that tightness is back in his chest tenfold, and he can't look away from her.]
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Alright.
[She doesn't shake him off. A moment's pause, and she shifts her wrist under her hand to take it in hers.
He's Dave, but not the Dave she spent the last three years with. He's a brother she hasn't really seen or talked to in three years, and the significance of that doesn't escape her. She'd worried, even if only at the back of her mind, in that part of her that remembered those months in the alternate timeline. She'd missed him.]
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[He could say a lot of things. He could tell her how many times he's died and how, or the times dying would have been kinder, or who's been here and died and not come back from the morgue shelves. It all kind of misses the point.]
I didn't want you to have to be here.
[His voice is quiet.]
You don't deserve the things this place does.
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She smirks faintly even if the amusement doesn't meet her eyes, and shrugs.]
Don't try to turn this into an issue of "deserve". I'm pretty sure succumbing to the powers of dark eldritch gods disqualifies me entirely.
[And besides, Dave had always been a better person than her anyway. He'd always had such selfless motivations, doing whatever possible to keep them all safe. He'd even given up his identity, in a way, ensuring everything went alright for the rest of them. What had she ever done that was anywhere near that good? However much she might have argued that she was also trying to keep things on track for their little group, she knows she'd been driven more by hubris and spite. The best thing she ever did was trying to spare Dave from sacrificing himself with the Tumor, and she hadn't even succeeded at that. It was for the best that she'd failed, really.]
Kellyyyyy how dare you
[He says it again with a weight to it.]
I only heard what went down secondhand, but who the fuck cares? You were thirteen, the session wasn't going right, and you didn't know any better. You didn't bring on the end of the universe anymore than the rest of us did. If you went through half the stuff I went through, I wouldn't say you deserved it, no matter how friendly you got with the eldritch calamari buffet.
[He squeezes at her hand, careful though he is with his claws and scales. He doesn't know what went down with her over the past three years other than bits and pieces, scant in detail, and he's not even sure what timeline he's from. But what does it matter? She's his sister, and was his friend even before that. He can't let her turn Norfinbury into a way to punish herself for whatever's weighing her down.]
i regret nothing
[Christ, she hasn't seen any Dave so serious since it was the Other Dave begging her not to go through the with Tumor mission. That's literally life-or-death levels of serious.
Trying to inject a bit more levity into her tone, she forces her smirk to soften a little and squeezes his scaly hand. If his claws prick her a little, well, she doesn't really care.]
Now, was that meant to be a lead-in for me to ask what you've gone through? I was going to ask either way. Frankly, you look like shit.
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[He looks up then, eyes searching over her face from behind his sunglasses. It says something that she can kid about it. It says something too that he can hear it and think about punishing oneself with everything, and god, he's so tired and his emotions don't know what they're doing with themselves.]
You can call me Davesprite, Rose.
[A tone of I won't get mad at it. His gaze flicks off somewhere beyond her to a door he didn't think was there a moment ago. He takes his hand back.]
I dunno where to start. I haven't been partying here the last five months, but do you want the mundane warnings or do you want the gritty details?
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[She wouldn't inflinct this new, secondary identity on him just because of the sprite thing. Hell, she can't imagine what it would be like to be Rosesprite, being told there's a different her and that one's the more important one and so she doesn't get to be Rose anymore.She never got to really talk with Rosesprite about it either, given how quickly that situation had deteriorated into pure nonsense, and she's rather less concerned with Jasperose's sense of identity.
But it's been a while. Maybe he's embraced it. She shouldn't assume.
He takes his hand back, and she convinces herself that the sudden feeling of cold is just because of the general temperature. Gosh, this building and its shitty insulation.]
General warnings would be helpful, certainly. But I'm not against getting a bit gritty here.
cw: past torture, brainwashing/mind control, death, unreality
I'm not him. [Simply said.] Not really here to get into the why and wherefore of it.
[He's spent enough time feeling like the fake version, the bargain bin version, off-brand and misshapen through factory error, and whatever other metaphors he's seized on in the past. He's had time enough here to live a life removed from whatever the "real" Dave has been through, too, and enough to question how much good it does him to cling to what any Dave is supposed to be.]
[But fuck dumping that on her right now. It's hard to deal with even on his own.]
[His hand lowers.]
Don't trust everything you see. I've seen static in the air, a box of organs that wasn't there, my own body turning into a fucked up puppet monster, things like that. This place is big on messing with what you see, feel, hear—everything. Don't trust that your own mind is going to stay your own, either. I've had paranoia, got obsessed with eggs for a while, thought nobody else was real once, went spilling fears to the network with everyone one night...
[He pauses here, jaw tightening, then forges on.]
People have been brainwashed. Jade was here; she killed me one night, when everyone was running around outside and the snow was stopped in the air, and half of us wanted to kill the other half. Everyone woke up the next morning like it never happened. But if you count that time anyway, I've died five times here. Three to freezing to death. Pay attention when your tablet tells you to get inside.
And—
[He breathes out.]
If you go certain places, you'll see fucked up shit. There's a building with skin for wallpaper. Blood for paint. A house with manacles. Altars to a cult here. People got... We...
[And he pinches the bridge of his nose. He's saying so much already, but he's told people so many times that it's easier to get it out at once, no pulled punches. But what's she going to do if she knows? He still has to, or she'll ask sometime, or hear it from someone else—]
Torture. We got tortured. Some of us woke up in cells. Other people got brainwashed into doing it. Don't trust eye doodles; they're a cult symbol.
[His arms cross tight over his chest.]
no subject
[It has that undertone to it that she's unfortunately prone to, that "I don't really believe you and don't feel like really trying very hard to pretend otherwise but fine, I'll drop it" sort of thing. She's mellowed a little over the years, softened and sweetened and learned a bit more tact, learned that she isn't necessarily always right and that convincing herself that she is is liable to bite her in the ass. But some habits die hard. And she is often right.
(And she used to call him the insufferable one.)
Still, she lets him talk without interrupting, listening patiently to the whole awful hellscape infodump. She kinda badly wants to take his hand back when he stumbles over his words, but she gives him his space. She shouldn't push him. Maybe he doesn't want her to fuss over him.
Up close, sitting right beside him, it's easier to the the scars peeking out from behind the shades he's hiding them with. Rose frowns for a moment before lifting a hand to lightly touch at them, just a fingertip at the corner of his eye socket.]
And what happened here?
cw: implied eye trauma
[He pulls away from her, his own hand gone up again to fend against her light, harmless touch. A moment more and he's shifted on his coils until he's sat more face toward her, better to block off the sight of the scars. It doesn't mean he's actually looking at her. He hates things like this, thinking too hard on it. If he took his shades off she'd see too much, see even the stitch marks at his eyelids, but the attention makes his shades sit uncomfortably against his face.]
I said I got tortured, right? That's part of it. You don't need the details to know it fucking sucked.
no subject
Was that pushing too hard, right after she'd decided to give him a bit of breathing room? Or did he just think she was being nosy? It's not like she's known for being a terribly sympathetic person, she knows that, but. Christ. She isn't sure whether to feel guilty or mildly irritated.
Fuck it. She won't apologize for being concerned.
Rose aims a discontent look at the opposite wall, noting dispassionately that the door she came through is gone, and all at once gets back to her feet.]
Come on. I'm sick of this funhouse crap.
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[He's not sure yet where he stands with her. It's been years, after all, and she still calls him Dave.]
[So Davesprite rises after, taking a moment or two to gather up his bags and haul straps onto his arms or over shoulders. He looks ungainly with the backpack in front, but the wings in back make wearing it the normal way impossible. In the process of it all he locks down tight until his face and voice are even as an undisturbed pond.]
Sure. Stick close.
[Not that he's dealt with it before, but it's easier not to get lost from each other that way.]
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She won't try to take his hand again, but she doesn't trust this place not to suddenly slap a wall up between them. So she catches the end of one of his backpack straps, the excess bit that hangs loose, and twists it tight around her hand.]
Let's head down that way.
[A tilt of her head down the hall, opposite of the direction the now-missing door she'd come up through had been in. There doesn't really seem to be logic in a place like this, but chasing routes that have already disappeared is unlikely to work, so she might as well do the exact opposite.]
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Take it.
[He won't move forward until she does. The path doesn't particularly matter when he's sure this place will lead them in circles before they hit the door out.]
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