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?
[ 8PM is signaled by an ominous click throughout the house he has taken refuge in. After a prompt, exhaustive investigation, he determines that the front door and every window has been sealed tight. Not even his strength can coax an opening in any of the frameworks. He doesn’t like it; these walls may shelter him from the unforgiving elements, but he’s become effectively trapped. A lifetime of battling Titans—and more monstrous beings still, humans themselves—has instilled within him the instinctive need to have escape routes readily available. Mindful of the temperature rapidly sinking, he performs a second sweep of the house for supplies but is rewarded with little. Someone has already scavenged this building, it seems.
He has few options. Levi locates the smallest enclosed space, a closet, and beds down there in a makeshift nest of tattered, musty sheets found upstairs. Once situated, he pulls out the strange machine from his pack to make a brief note on his current base. No resources, he types slowly, squinting at the artificial light, no fireplace.
By the hour he checks the messages on the machine, it’s far too late for Mikasa. Levi knows it. Understands it in cold, uncompromising certainty—she’s dead. Only a matter of time now. And yet he’s standing, shrugging off clingy sheets, throwing open the closet door to pace the breadth of the building. He's needlessly wasting energy, he thinks, but doesn't try to still himself. Outside, the wind howls like the stuff of his nightmares. ]
Mikasa. [ Forgoing a text response, he tries to set aside the knowledge that the sound of his voice, too harsh in the eerie silence, is all he can offer her now. It’s not enough. It’ll never be enough. ] Mikasa. Report. Where are you?
[ It’s a few minutes before the reply makes it back to her. By now, her tablet’s screen has dimmed and even drawing her fingers along it can’t make it brighten. She’s left squinting in the dingy snowfall in order to reply. Her voice is rusty from disuse, words barely more than a croak. Steel and surety only comes from military discipline - she’s quiet, as ever; assured, as ever. In the face of what she knows is coming, it’s all she can do. Willing her teeth to quit chattering, at least, is as much of a command as anything else. The sound is gone in an instant. ]
Captain.
[ There’s a note of respect there, instinctive. As a resource, she’s no longer useful to him, but - it was never quite like that, was it? Not with Levi. ]
West of the— the gas station, [ an unfamiliar bit of innovation, it takes Mikasa a frustrating beat to remember the name of it, ] and south of the library. Eighteen steps from the front doors. There’s a grey building.
[ And, she can’t get in there, either. She’s tried all these doors, windows, until frost bite threatened to set in and she could no longer risk keeping her hands uncovered. One arm is buried in her coat now, the other haplessly keeping the tablet alive. In the back of her mind, there’s a thought, don’t come out, you’re still useful, as if they were still in a war, recognised and officiated, and not dying off as the world abandoned them. It’s despair keeping her seated, and the possibility of an additional shoulder to bear it that keeps her silent.
Hoping he stays inside, hoping he doesn’t, Mikasa waits. ]
[ The precise directions enable him to pinpoint mentally where she must be, for all the good that it does him. Staring blindly out the nearest window, he runs a dozen different scenarios through his mind. They all end the same: glassy eyes gazing up into nothing, red scarf stiff and frozen to hardened skin, a body buried beneath snowdrifts—lost. When his gaze refocuses, he’s faced with the reflection of his own expression in the window. Levi turns away. ]
Every building is on lockdown, [ he informs her bluntly, tone not unkind. ] I can’t come to you.
[ I’m sorry, but this he doesn’t give voice to. Ackerman is an unusual young woman. Though fleeting, the time she has spent under his command has given him a deeper insight into her psyche. An apology is a kind of inevitability, a death sentence he believes she’ll accept without argument. Without Eren here to provide a trajectory for her, she needs a new goal, new motivation. Authority. ]
Get up. There should be a restroom built in the back of the gas station. You may be able to get in there. Keep talking to me while you move.
[ Levi’s no fool, hoping against hope. Mikasa will not survive the night. And yet he urges her onward, because he knows too intimately what it looks like when a soldier’s spirit dies before their body. ]
[ Her knees shake, quivering as she draws them up - until they aren’t. Until, with a silent, thick bidding, she stills them. A body should not be able to stand tall in this but hers does, almost defiantly straight up against the snow’s threatening bellow. The tablet is held close to her chest, screen facing up at a slant. Her reflection - what she can make of it - is absent warmth, promise. The cold has set deep into her skin, rendering her translucent, halfway to ghostly. Ruddy patches of red break it up, charmless. If Mikasa was the sort of person who worried overly about her appearance—
Well, she isn’t, and there are more important things to concern herself with. Blinking, partly to knock the stray flakes off her eyelashes, Mikasa listens and wills her cloying breath not to overpower the sound of his voice.
Get up, he tells her, the command and his voice lighting her blood like fire, move. ]
Okay.
[ Snow crunches audibly beneath her boots. Ice water from melted snow that’s clung to her soles laps up now, almost past her toes. They were not very sturdily made or, if they were, that resilience wore off after years of use. ]
I don’t see it yet.
[ It’s such an unnecessary thing observation to make, but he instructed her to keep talking and Mikasa doesn’t know what else to say. ]
If I had my 3DMG— [ Implication, the sort of burnt hope borne only by imagination and regret, goes unsaid. If she did have it, she wouldn’t be failing him right now. She’d be warm, maybe they would even be able to melt some snow for tea, and she could close her eyes and imagine Carla’s cooking, the ginger she’d put into her baked cookies for a special treat.
Anything but the static-filled, snowy pitch of bleakness in front of Mikasa Ackerman. ]
No, [ he interjects brusquely, and he walks silently from room to room of the house, mirroring every arduous step he has ordered her to take. ] If you had your gear, you’d get yourself killed trying to maneuver. Between these temperatures and the wind, the 3DMG would be a hindrance. So it’s better for you that you don’t have it, that it isn’t weighing you down.
[ Yet he recognizes why she mentions it. The equipment that has enabled them to engage an otherwise impossible enemy, the Titans—surely the 3DMG could create some kind of miracle for Mikasa in this bleak, hopeless moment. Maybe it’s cruel of him to disavow such a fantasy, but he does nothing to soften the blow of his words. After all, he isn’t like the others: Hange, capable of scattering the shadows of hardship with a grin and easy camaraderie; Erwin, capable of reshaping humanity’s poisonous fear into a weapon through inspiring sincerity. ]
Mikasa, I—
[ A pause, and he frowns at himself before changing tack. ]
Switch it over. Show me.
[ Levi is asking, awkwardly, for a video feed. He demonstrates as much on his side of the transmission, staring at the camera with a tight, thin-lipped expression. Only the light from the tablet illuminates his face; empty darkness yawns hungrily behind him. ]
[ The heat born by that disagreement is enough to ignite her, her steps becoming heavier and more assured. A spark, nothing more, and a shade of her usual - but there’s steel in her voice where there wasn’t before. A determination, both to prove herself and prove him wrong. She’d use the howling winds to her advantage, move with them and not against them. Exertion would heat her once her blood began pumping, a bout of energy too fast for the cold to catch up to.
This may be the worst time for a bout of adolescent-flavoured you know nothing, old man, but there’s a bite to her tone, replacing resignation.
It continues, emphasis almost sour, ]
Sir.
[ But, when he asks for a video feed, she acquiesces immediately. Well, the immediacy is in the intent; actual execution takes a few moments longer. She has to tug the fingers of her glove down again to hit the right buttons, and those few moments are a risk of frostbite. Eventually, Mikasa appears in his video. Her lips are pale, almost discoloured, and the edges of her eyelids nearly match. The scarf has been tugged down for the time being, snug against her chin without protecting the full lower half of her face. It’s for ease of talking, and although ill-advised - it won’t matter soon anyway.
She only has one hand to curl over her heart, a singular fist available to her, so the gesture is done by halves. ]
[ Ackerman’s response takes him aback. A myriad of subtle emotions ripple rapidly across his expression, and the smile widowed in their wake is a small, strained thing—there and gone. If only the fire blazing in her heart was enough to save her. Maybe it will, he realizes. Not tonight, no. But on the morrow, when she stirs in a makeshift, metal coffin beneath the morgue… She’ll need that spirit. ]
Noted.
[ There’s no attempt made to argue with her; he refuses to be baited into debating the limitations and possibilities of equipment he knows better than any other. Mikasa is without a doubt as stubborn as her “brother.” ]
Are you an idiot? [ Scowling faintly, he shakes his head. ] Cover up your face, brat. I can hear you just fine through the scarf.
[ Harsh rebuke delivered, he then shifts his weight and acknowledges her salute with one of his own. Approval darkens his gaze. ]
[ The moment he grants permission, the scarf is tugged back up over her mouth and nose. It doesn’t make much difference, however. By now, the scarf is hardened with the cold, moisture from the snow having melted from her breath and then frozen over anew as the temperature dropped further and further. Much difference is, however infinitesimally, not the same as no difference. It’s a comfort, as much as anything, memories of home and warmth and Eren soothing her.
And the salute, well. Something in her lifts, rising from recognition. ]
I see it.
[ He was right. The gas station does have a public toilet attached to the back, although long abandoned. The tablet is flipped around to show him the darkened area, high pine trees blotting out whatever little evening light was left. The mortar of the building is weakened, almost rotted, and graffiti colours the brick walls on and on. Kicking out toward the door, wood splinters under her heel but doesn’t give. A second attempt, a third - all nothing.
Mikasa’s breath has grown heavier now, the chill turning every small bit of exertion into a marathon. Panting, she resumes looking at the video, her eyes slowly losing their burn of disagreement from mere moments before. ]
[ The video on Levi’s end drops away from his face for several moments; he does not wish her to see the look twisting it. Either way, it seems Mikasa will not be spared. It was a gamble, the gas station—and gambles have always been more Erwin’s specialty. A surge of hot fury suddenly courses through him, igniting his blood like wildfire. In the past, he has been able to redirect guilt and hatred toward the eradication of the Titans. Here, there’s only the careless, barking laughter of the wind. ]
Enough, [ he tells her, words shoved out between clenched teeth. ] Don’t work up a sweat.
[ Once the perspiration cools, she’ll… ]
You’ve done well. [ The praise comes unexpected even to him, but he doesn’t hesitate to continue. ] Tomorrow, you’re with me. Got it?
[ There’ll be a tomorrow for her. He’ll come for her. This won’t happen again. ]
The thought of it gets lodged within her, like her tongue wedged to the roof of her mouth. The impossibility of it is cloying. Under her half-frozen hands, the chill biting sharp and angry in her cheeks, Mikasa draws a steady breath; even that is half ice, however.
Against the wall, she sits down. Her legs are folded neatly beneath her, the precision inarguably military.
Quietly: ] Yes sir.
[ Lifting her head to the sky, she takes in what few stars have begun to glow. Someone more prone to whimsy might see laughter in their bright lights, the way it fades and sharpens in turn - but that’s not Mikasa. Never has been. She focuses solely on what is, eschewing dreams and delights for practicality, for survival. Tonight, she failed. But, there’s tomorrow, and Levi’s guiding hand. He would never say anything he didn’t mean. Knowing that, his faded words of praise ring warm and, for the moment, enough.
There's no regret in her tone, no sadness or ill will, when she adds, ]
I left a pile of wood out by that old diner, the one with the broken metal rods on the roof. [ Those are antenna, Mikasa. ] It should still be there in the morning.
[ Once more, he mirrors her. Without releasing the tablet in order to support himself against the wall, he neatly folds his body into a seated position on the floor. Across the transmission, she lifts her chin and he watches, gaze severe in its intensity. There is nothing more he can offer her; he will bear witness to her death, a sacrifice he will never allow to be rendered meaningless. ]
Good. [ His chest aches, but his steady voice betrays nothing. ] You’ll help me bring it to base then.
[ Tomorrow, when her arms and feet can move once more, when her lungs pulse for air. He’ll give an order and she’ll be able bodied to obey it. Freezing to death and waking up seems as shapeless as any miracle, well beyond her comprehension, but she’ll damn well take it if it’s offered.
His expression is muted, what little she catches of it. Mute, mint-sharp contemplation and it sits so oddly on him. A moment doesn’t pass that Mikasa is unaware of it.
Her fingers are numb, too steady with it, nail beds blackening as her skin stretches, bloating with frostbite. ]
- captain?
[ One more thing, while she still has air to give her words on. ]
[ By now, her trembling has long since ceased. If Mikasa knew more about what freezing to death entails, she’d know that it’s a very bad sign; finality, marked by her blood chilling below livable levels.
Drawing in a breath, her words come out in a faraway croak, dimmed down to smallness. ]
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snowblindmemes2015-05-12 07:10 am
no subject
He has few options. Levi locates the smallest enclosed space, a closet, and beds down there in a makeshift nest of tattered, musty sheets found upstairs. Once situated, he pulls out the strange machine from his pack to make a brief note on his current base. No resources, he types slowly, squinting at the artificial light, no fireplace.
By the hour he checks the messages on the machine, it’s far too late for Mikasa. Levi knows it. Understands it in cold, uncompromising certainty—she’s dead. Only a matter of time now. And yet he’s standing, shrugging off clingy sheets, throwing open the closet door to pace the breadth of the building. He's needlessly wasting energy, he thinks, but doesn't try to still himself. Outside, the wind howls like the stuff of his nightmares. ]
Mikasa. [ Forgoing a text response, he tries to set aside the knowledge that the sound of his voice, too harsh in the eerie silence, is all he can offer her now. It’s not enough. It’ll never be enough. ] Mikasa. Report. Where are you?
no subject
Captain.
[ There’s a note of respect there, instinctive. As a resource, she’s no longer useful to him, but - it was never quite like that, was it? Not with Levi. ]
West of the— the gas station, [ an unfamiliar bit of innovation, it takes Mikasa a frustrating beat to remember the name of it, ] and south of the library. Eighteen steps from the front doors. There’s a grey building.
[ And, she can’t get in there, either. She’s tried all these doors, windows, until frost bite threatened to set in and she could no longer risk keeping her hands uncovered. One arm is buried in her coat now, the other haplessly keeping the tablet alive. In the back of her mind, there’s a thought, don’t come out, you’re still useful, as if they were still in a war, recognised and officiated, and not dying off as the world abandoned them. It’s despair keeping her seated, and the possibility of an additional shoulder to bear it that keeps her silent.
Hoping he stays inside, hoping he doesn’t, Mikasa waits. ]
no subject
Every building is on lockdown, [ he informs her bluntly, tone not unkind. ] I can’t come to you.
[ I’m sorry, but this he doesn’t give voice to. Ackerman is an unusual young woman. Though fleeting, the time she has spent under his command has given him a deeper insight into her psyche. An apology is a kind of inevitability, a death sentence he believes she’ll accept without argument. Without Eren here to provide a trajectory for her, she needs a new goal, new motivation. Authority. ]
Get up. There should be a restroom built in the back of the gas station. You may be able to get in there. Keep talking to me while you move.
[ Levi’s no fool, hoping against hope. Mikasa will not survive the night. And yet he urges her onward, because he knows too intimately what it looks like when a soldier’s spirit dies before their body. ]
no subject
Well, she isn’t, and there are more important things to concern herself with. Blinking, partly to knock the stray flakes off her eyelashes, Mikasa listens and wills her cloying breath not to overpower the sound of his voice.
Get up, he tells her, the command and his voice lighting her blood like fire, move. ]
Okay.
[ Snow crunches audibly beneath her boots. Ice water from melted snow that’s clung to her soles laps up now, almost past her toes. They were not very sturdily made or, if they were, that resilience wore off after years of use. ]
I don’t see it yet.
[ It’s such an unnecessary thing observation to make, but he instructed her to keep talking and Mikasa doesn’t know what else to say. ]
If I had my 3DMG— [ Implication, the sort of burnt hope borne only by imagination and regret, goes unsaid. If she did have it, she wouldn’t be failing him right now. She’d be warm, maybe they would even be able to melt some snow for tea, and she could close her eyes and imagine Carla’s cooking, the ginger she’d put into her baked cookies for a special treat.
Anything but the static-filled, snowy pitch of bleakness in front of Mikasa Ackerman. ]
no subject
[ Yet he recognizes why she mentions it. The equipment that has enabled them to engage an otherwise impossible enemy, the Titans—surely the 3DMG could create some kind of miracle for Mikasa in this bleak, hopeless moment. Maybe it’s cruel of him to disavow such a fantasy, but he does nothing to soften the blow of his words. After all, he isn’t like the others: Hange, capable of scattering the shadows of hardship with a grin and easy camaraderie; Erwin, capable of reshaping humanity’s poisonous fear into a weapon through inspiring sincerity. ]
Mikasa, I—
[ A pause, and he frowns at himself before changing tack. ]
Switch it over. Show me.
[ Levi is asking, awkwardly, for a video feed. He demonstrates as much on his side of the transmission, staring at the camera with a tight, thin-lipped expression. Only the light from the tablet illuminates his face; empty darkness yawns hungrily behind him. ]
no subject
[ The heat born by that disagreement is enough to ignite her, her steps becoming heavier and more assured. A spark, nothing more, and a shade of her usual - but there’s steel in her voice where there wasn’t before. A determination, both to prove herself and prove him wrong. She’d use the howling winds to her advantage, move with them and not against them. Exertion would heat her once her blood began pumping, a bout of energy too fast for the cold to catch up to.
This may be the worst time for a bout of adolescent-flavoured you know nothing, old man, but there’s a bite to her tone, replacing resignation.
It continues, emphasis almost sour, ]
Sir.
[ But, when he asks for a video feed, she acquiesces immediately. Well, the immediacy is in the intent; actual execution takes a few moments longer. She has to tug the fingers of her glove down again to hit the right buttons, and those few moments are a risk of frostbite. Eventually, Mikasa appears in his video. Her lips are pale, almost discoloured, and the edges of her eyelids nearly match. The scarf has been tugged down for the time being, snug against her chin without protecting the full lower half of her face. It’s for ease of talking, and although ill-advised - it won’t matter soon anyway.
She only has one hand to curl over her heart, a singular fist available to her, so the gesture is done by halves. ]
no subject
Noted.
[ There’s no attempt made to argue with her; he refuses to be baited into debating the limitations and possibilities of equipment he knows better than any other. Mikasa is without a doubt as stubborn as her “brother.” ]
Are you an idiot? [ Scowling faintly, he shakes his head. ] Cover up your face, brat. I can hear you just fine through the scarf.
[ Harsh rebuke delivered, he then shifts his weight and acknowledges her salute with one of his own. Approval darkens his gaze. ]
no subject
And the salute, well. Something in her lifts, rising from recognition. ]
I see it.
[ He was right. The gas station does have a public toilet attached to the back, although long abandoned. The tablet is flipped around to show him the darkened area, high pine trees blotting out whatever little evening light was left. The mortar of the building is weakened, almost rotted, and graffiti colours the brick walls on and on. Kicking out toward the door, wood splinters under her heel but doesn’t give. A second attempt, a third - all nothing.
Mikasa’s breath has grown heavier now, the chill turning every small bit of exertion into a marathon. Panting, she resumes looking at the video, her eyes slowly losing their burn of disagreement from mere moments before. ]
no subject
Enough, [ he tells her, words shoved out between clenched teeth. ] Don’t work up a sweat.
[ Once the perspiration cools, she’ll… ]
You’ve done well. [ The praise comes unexpected even to him, but he doesn’t hesitate to continue. ] Tomorrow, you’re with me. Got it?
[ There’ll be a tomorrow for her. He’ll come for her. This won’t happen again. ]
no subject
The thought of it gets lodged within her, like her tongue wedged to the roof of her mouth. The impossibility of it is cloying. Under her half-frozen hands, the chill biting sharp and angry in her cheeks, Mikasa draws a steady breath; even that is half ice, however.
Against the wall, she sits down. Her legs are folded neatly beneath her, the precision inarguably military.
Quietly: ] Yes sir.
[ Lifting her head to the sky, she takes in what few stars have begun to glow. Someone more prone to whimsy might see laughter in their bright lights, the way it fades and sharpens in turn - but that’s not Mikasa. Never has been. She focuses solely on what is, eschewing dreams and delights for practicality, for survival. Tonight, she failed. But, there’s tomorrow, and Levi’s guiding hand. He would never say anything he didn’t mean. Knowing that, his faded words of praise ring warm and, for the moment, enough.
There's no regret in her tone, no sadness or ill will, when she adds, ]
I left a pile of wood out by that old diner, the one with the broken metal rods on the roof. [ Those are antenna, Mikasa. ] It should still be there in the morning.
no subject
Good. [ His chest aches, but his steady voice betrays nothing. ] You’ll help me bring it to base then.
no subject
His expression is muted, what little she catches of it. Mute, mint-sharp contemplation and it sits so oddly on him. A moment doesn’t pass that Mikasa is unaware of it.
Her fingers are numb, too steady with it, nail beds blackening as her skin stretches, bloating with frostbite. ]
- captain?
[ One more thing, while she still has air to give her words on. ]
no subject
no subject
Drawing in a breath, her words come out in a faraway croak, dimmed down to smallness. ]
I’ll be faster next time.