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: IT WON'T BE LONG NOW... Well, you made a mistake. You spent too long searching around, or you ran outside near the end of the day for just one more thing, and now you've been locked out. You can search around all you want, but the best shelter you can hope for is pressing against the side of a sealed up building. You do still have your tablet, though. Maybe someone on the network can give you some advice, or at least some comfort while you wait for hypothermia to set in.
TWO: CABIN FEVER Maybe you didn't want that mistake of getting caught outside to happen again, but now you've ended up staying too long in one location, and cabin fever has set in. Maybe you're taking to the network to try and ignore the hallucinations. Maybe you want to tell everyone that you've figured out they're all in on your kidnapping. Maybe you ended up wandering off and now you'd really like to know if anyone can check back in the place you were at for your pants.
Action Prompts
THREE: AN UNEXPECTED MEETING You're going about your business searching what seems like it might be an especially promising house--it's fully intact and there's even a working fireplace with some wood! It looks like someone else has the same idea, though, and you've run into them in the middle of your search. Do you share the potential wealth or try to kick them out? On the other hand, maybe you know who this is, or maybe you're just glad to actually see another person for the first time in ages.
FOUR: GOOD MORGUE-NING You've just woken up in a morgue after dying in one unfortunate way or another. You have no idea where you are beyond that, but your tablet is insisting you can't stay here, so you should probably get out of here pretty quickly. Of course, bringing people back from the dead isn't a perfect science, so you're missing something important to you. Maybe you've lost your voice, maybe you can't remember where you're from, maybe you can't remember where you are right now. It looks like someone else is nearby, though. Maybe they can help you out?
The blanket is cold to start with, but she knows her body heat will warm it up eventually. She doubts he'll have any more luck with the windows than she had, so she works instead at drying her face before it starts to freeze. It's easier to be calm with a plan in place, even a vague and unlikely one.
Bard strides over to the nearest window, trying to turn the lock, but as he feared it refuses to yield any more than the doorknob had. That means it's time for Plan B.
He grabs a lamp with a nice, sturdy base--good heft, very solid, but completely useless without a light bulb or electricity--and rams it against the glass. Please hold while he repeats this futile gesture.
Kara can in fact hear the banging, and drags herself to her feet to investigate. Blanket wrapped tight around her, she peers worriedly into the window. Even in the dim reflection she can see her lips are turning blue.
She tries a smile and a shrug, to say that she's grateful for the effort and doesn't expect anything more from him.
Whatever the hell the window is made of, it isn't even chipped by the time the girl comes over. He guessed right earlier: she can't be any older than his Sigrid, which causes the faint edge of desperation that's been building in the back of his mind to flare into something painful and hopeless at the idea that he won't be able to get her inside before morning.
It won't help the girl outside any, though, so Bard puts on a brave face, an "I have everything under control" face, and goes to get her the other blankets. There are only three left, almost certainly not enough to keep her warm through the night, but if anyone is going to be remotely comfortable tonight it should be the one who might not wake up again.
He tries not to look resigned as he heads back to the door in case she's still at the window, but it's not really working.
When he leaves the window she returns to the front door, awaiting the promised blankets. She doesn't see the helpless look on his face. Even if she did, she's probably too cold and tired to give it much thought.
She returned to the door, though she resisted the urge to sit down again. If she was going to stay alive she would need to keep moving.
"I'm here," he answers, dropping the blankets on the floor. He squats to start pushing one of them through the gap under the door and tries his best to focus on the action, rather than the idea of his own children cold and vulnerable somewhere without him.
"I'm sorry I can't do more, but I'll try to keep you company while I can."
"You've done more than enough." She pulls the blankets through while she talks, having a much steadier voice and a much firmer grip on her emotions now that she knows what to do.
"You probably saved my life. If I can just stay awake... I'm Kara. What's your name?"
"Bard," he answers, making sure none of the blankets get stuck. "Is there anything you'd like to talk about to pass the time, or would you rather hear a story?" The only games he can think of wouldn't really work--they rely on the players being in the same area, or on language rules that don't translate well, or on supposedly-common knowledge that doesn't seem to be all that common here.
"A st-story?" She clenches her jaw to hear herself stuttering. Shaking is good, it will increase her body temperature, but she still doesn't like not being in control of herself.
Shivering so hard it impacts your speech is far from the worse Bard's had to take care of, so at the very least Kara won't have to worry about it being remarked upon. (The "on Earth" part is a bit weird, but for now he's just assuming she's an elf or something, since he's heard they do that sort of thing.)
"Alright then. A very long time ago, in a place not very far from where I grew up--" for he can't say "not very far from here" when he still doesn't know where they are "--there was once a city called Dale. Now, Dale had been founded on the side of a mountain called Erebor, in which there lived a whole kingdom of dwarves." Here he pauses, because it's the part where he's always been prompted to go on a tangent explaining dwarves.
Unfortunately, Kara is familiar with the term. Just not in the way he means.
"A wh-wh-ole kingdom? I thought th-th-the condition had a reces-es-essive lethal allele." That would cut down the population drastically, if a community of individuals all possessing the allele for achondroplasia reproduced with each other there was a 1 in 4 chance of death and a 1 in 4 chance of greater size.
She gets points for originality, even if Bard has no idea what an "allele" even is.
"A whole kingdom, and they may lead lives easily three times those of men besides." Because "lethal" he does understand, at least on its own. "They're the best builders and crafters in the world, and even their women have fuller beards than many young human men, or so I've always been told." Which is all just completely related to the genetics of humans on Earth, so good luck figuring that one out.
Ah, such a sweet and innocent child. Or, you know, from somewhere with a really boring population, same as just about everyone else here, but it's rare Bard gets to feel like the knowledgeable one about something around here so he'll take it.
"Not at all. They're one of the free peoples of Arda, as are humans, and the elves who live in the forests to the west of my home, and the hobbits who live under the hills farther west than that. But they have little to do with this story, so we'll come back to them later." Now where was he? Right.
"The dwarves of Erebor were all of them great craftsmen, and so the city of Dale grew up outside the mountain as cities eventually do. Both prospered for generations, but nothing wonderful can last forever." And another pause in the rhythm of the story, traditionally for Bard to take this opportunity to look much grimmer than usual but in this instance to get used to letting Kara prove she's still with him.
A very boring sentient population. Which is why she listens so intently as he explains, making sure that she understands to at least some small extent. She thinks she pretty much gets it, though all of the other names are foreign to her.
It takes her a moment to realize he's stopped talking. She clutches the blankets around her and curls up a little tighter.
"Just as there are good people and beasts in the world, so too are there wicked ones, and a particularly terrible one of these was a great dragon called Smaug. He heard of the vast wealth of Erebor, and because dragons are greedy for gold and treasure above all things in this world, he decided he would come down from the north and take it all for his own.
"Dale, being so very close to Erebor and not hidden under a mountain, was the first to face his wrath. Smaug flew in, a red fire-drake so immense that each of his scales was as big as a dinner plate. But Dale was not defenseless. On the highest watchtower there was a dwarvish wind-lance, a great four-armed crossbow as big as a man that could fire the specially-forged black arrows which were sharp and strong enough to pierce even a dragon's impenetrable hide.
"The Lord of Dale, a man called Girion, took to the tower and used the wind-lance to try and shoot Smaug out of the sky, even as fire rained down on the city. Thus he died, but not before one of his arrows struck Smaug's chest and knocked loose a scale, and not before his wife and child could escape. Erebor fell to Smaug that day, and the dwarves were driven out, but there was one black arrow left, and that arrow was passed down along the line of his descendants, each generation keeping it safe for the day when Smaug would crawl back out of the mountain."
This is the part where, traditionally, they would all look at the spot where he kept the black arrow and the story would be over. Now, however, there's an end that isn't completely depressing, so the silence sounds the same as all his previous pauses.
The story is interesting and exciting enough that she stays alert through the whole thing. She's still shivering almost violently, but she knows that that's a good thing - her body producing the heat it desperately needs.
"Not for a very long time," Bard admits, "but that doesn't mean they weren't thinking about it. Smaug was very dangerous, after all, and with no dwarves nearby, there was no one to make new black arrows, so anyone who sought to kill him would only have the one chance. In the meantime, Girion's wife and child settled in Esgaroth, which was called Lake-town because it was built in the middle of the Long Lake, within sight of the mountain. They couldn't live the life of a lord's family there, but they were safe and happy enough. The black arrow and the tale of Smaug's attack were passed down in their family from parent to child for generations, always wary but comfortable enough that there seemed no need to risk waking the dragon, who hadn't come out of Erebor except to add Dale's gold to his great hoard."
How is he supposed to tell the next part? It's still fresh in his mind, memory rather than story, but it wouldn't be right to tell the story as it used to be and not address how it finally ended. So, just when the pause starts to seem like another prompt for Kara to say something, he says a little more.
"And then, one day late in the autumn more than a century after Dale and Erebor fell, a company of dwarves arrived."
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snowblindmemes2015-05-12 07:10 am
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He grabs a lamp with a nice, sturdy base--good heft, very solid, but completely useless without a light bulb or electricity--and rams it against the glass. Please hold while he repeats this futile gesture.
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She tries a smile and a shrug, to say that she's grateful for the effort and doesn't expect anything more from him.
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It won't help the girl outside any, though, so Bard puts on a brave face, an "I have everything under control" face, and goes to get her the other blankets. There are only three left, almost certainly not enough to keep her warm through the night, but if anyone is going to be remotely comfortable tonight it should be the one who might not wake up again.
He tries not to look resigned as he heads back to the door in case she's still at the window, but it's not really working.
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She returned to the door, though she resisted the urge to sit down again. If she was going to stay alive she would need to keep moving.
"Are you there?"
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"I'm sorry I can't do more, but I'll try to keep you company while I can."
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"You probably saved my life. If I can just stay awake... I'm Kara. What's your name?"
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"I've only b-b-been on Earth a f-few weeks."
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"Alright then. A very long time ago, in a place not very far from where I grew up--" for he can't say "not very far from here" when he still doesn't know where they are "--there was once a city called Dale. Now, Dale had been founded on the side of a mountain called Erebor, in which there lived a whole kingdom of dwarves." Here he pauses, because it's the part where he's always been prompted to go on a tangent explaining dwarves.
no subject
"A wh-wh-ole kingdom? I thought th-th-the condition had a reces-es-essive lethal allele." That would cut down the population drastically, if a community of individuals all possessing the allele for achondroplasia reproduced with each other there was a 1 in 4 chance of death and a 1 in 4 chance of greater size.
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"A whole kingdom, and they may lead lives easily three times those of men besides." Because "lethal" he does understand, at least on its own. "They're the best builders and crafters in the world, and even their women have fuller beards than many young human men, or so I've always been told." Which is all just completely related to the genetics of humans on Earth, so good luck figuring that one out.
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"Are th-th-they not human?"
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"Not at all. They're one of the free peoples of Arda, as are humans, and the elves who live in the forests to the west of my home, and the hobbits who live under the hills farther west than that. But they have little to do with this story, so we'll come back to them later." Now where was he? Right.
"The dwarves of Erebor were all of them great craftsmen, and so the city of Dale grew up outside the mountain as cities eventually do. Both prospered for generations, but nothing wonderful can last forever." And another pause in the rhythm of the story, traditionally for Bard to take this opportunity to look much grimmer than usual but in this instance to get used to letting Kara prove she's still with him.
no subject
It takes her a moment to realize he's stopped talking. She clutches the blankets around her and curls up a little tighter.
"What happened?"
no subject
"Just as there are good people and beasts in the world, so too are there wicked ones, and a particularly terrible one of these was a great dragon called Smaug. He heard of the vast wealth of Erebor, and because dragons are greedy for gold and treasure above all things in this world, he decided he would come down from the north and take it all for his own.
"Dale, being so very close to Erebor and not hidden under a mountain, was the first to face his wrath. Smaug flew in, a red fire-drake so immense that each of his scales was as big as a dinner plate. But Dale was not defenseless. On the highest watchtower there was a dwarvish wind-lance, a great four-armed crossbow as big as a man that could fire the specially-forged black arrows which were sharp and strong enough to pierce even a dragon's impenetrable hide.
"The Lord of Dale, a man called Girion, took to the tower and used the wind-lance to try and shoot Smaug out of the sky, even as fire rained down on the city. Thus he died, but not before one of his arrows struck Smaug's chest and knocked loose a scale, and not before his wife and child could escape. Erebor fell to Smaug that day, and the dwarves were driven out, but there was one black arrow left, and that arrow was passed down along the line of his descendants, each generation keeping it safe for the day when Smaug would crawl back out of the mountain."
This is the part where, traditionally, they would all look at the spot where he kept the black arrow and the story would be over. Now, however, there's an end that isn't completely depressing, so the silence sounds the same as all his previous pauses.
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"Hasn't anybody g-g-gone after him?"
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How is he supposed to tell the next part? It's still fresh in his mind, memory rather than story, but it wouldn't be right to tell the story as it used to be and not address how it finally ended. So, just when the pause starts to seem like another prompt for Kara to say something, he says a little more.
"And then, one day late in the autumn more than a century after Dale and Erebor fell, a company of dwarves arrived."