outofalpha | July/August Test Drive Meme

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July/August Test Drive Meme

Alpha Complex Test Drive Meme

Alpha Complex opened Sunday, July 31st. Please feel free to take a Test Drive to see if the environment would suit your character! All potential players are welcome.

It may be your first day in Alpha Complex or your hundredth, either way, you are in serious trouble.

In a bid to win sympathy and new recruits, the Frankenstein Destroyers - a secret society within Alpha who sees all bots as enemies, has uploaded a virus that is affecting all bots within the complex.

For the next twenty four hours, every bot you see will be the enemy. Your assigned Personal Digital Companion(PDC), a personal communication device, has turned on you and is intentionally misfiring your texts, phone calls and videos. The Bouncy Bubble Beverage machine in the cafeteria is shooting out bottles at passers by at high speeds. The high tech vacuum cleaner used to vacuum your clearance level's common room is attempting to suck up everything in sight. Elevators are trying to coerce people to climb out, so they can behead them. That adorable Petbot you purchased last week is trying to tear your throat out. That Guardbot from the Armed Services Sector is attempting to take out citizens, one by one. Autocars are driving themselves, right onto sidewalks and through windows...

Will you fight for your right to exist or hole up somewhere safe until the chaos passes?

Do not fear, citizen! The Computer and it's high advisors are working to restore order.

In the meantime, be safe and beware of bots and traitors!

Please post your character name and fandom in the subject line.
Mingle Together. Explore Together. Adventure Together.
Premise | Setting Information | New Arrival Introduction

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If there is a nightmare scenario for Elliot, it's a place like this. Tech is his best friend. Tech is his crutch. Tech keeps him at an arm's length from most people in his life. That's for the best, for all involved, he thinks. After actually succeeding in fsociety's plan, after everything going to sh*t, he though going away would be good. Would be ...

Somehow, he's not surprised that he ends up in the worst place he possibly could. He listened to the "welcome" video, see. He replays it in his head, but he doesn't argue.

He keeps his ME card stored away after doing all he can to demagnetize it. (He won't be traced, especially when things start going haywire.) If he can't deactivate it, he'll do his best to reprogram it; it will keep him up at night. It isn't as if he sleeps. The drugs?

The drugs he keeps nearby. He doesn't take them, but he wants to, even if he isn't sure what they do.

He wants to.

Sometimes, he expects to see Mr. Robot. It's only a matter of time, isn't it?

He tries to take the PDC apart; If he can take it apart, he will try to hack it, noticing the misfires, noticing that something is f*cked up, noticing the freakazoid robot-pets are f*cking up, too. He keeps his head down and he dismantles his cleaner-bot too. He walks around with his head down, shoulders pulled up by his ears. He listens, he watches, but he rarely interacts unless someone comes up to him first. Anxiety, introversion, failing tech.

It looks like fsociety has already reached this place and Elliot didn't have anything to do with it.

On some screen (there are way too many of them, honestly) in Elliot's immediate view, appears the text:

> naughty, naughty...
> what, couldn't you find any flies to pull the wings off of?

What?

Is that geared toward him? Elliot goes still, watching.

He's not a psychopath. He's just crazy.

He looks around; there's no one here. He's alone, so he speaks aloud. Can they hear him too? F*ck.

"What do you want," he asks, though his tone is far from a question.

If there is no answer, then he'll type it, using his PCD, though what he expects to learn, who knows.

Two days of watching an educational video on Alpha Complex was more than enough.

Perhaps he is a clone. Perhaps he's nothing more than the chemically manufactured offspring of a boy who had too many bad memories to carry around with him, and if Isaac is honest with himself, it's easy to believe, more he thinks about it. Why would he want to convince himself that he spent his life abused and abandoned, alone and scared? It's easier to project that onto the carrier his genes were taken from. Maybe that's the denial talking, or maybe it was the non-stop droning of Teela that broke him down. Either way, he believes it, even though the memories - glitches - make his chest feel tight and his stomach twist. They said it would pass. So it would pass.

That doesn't fix his mood, though. Two days of being reminded of who he was left Isaac exhausted and starving, which raises another question. If they make clones, why make them exact copies instead of advanced beings who didn't need trivial things like food and water? He quickly pushes the thought to the back of his head; inappropriate. He can't think those things. Thinking those things is dangerous. He can't be dangerous. Clones aren't dangerous.

He's practically dragging his feet as he moves through the cafeteria, having just been released from his 'reeducation', and Isaac is barely aware of the world around him until someone - something - pelts him hard in the side of the head, almost knocking him on his feet.

"Fu- what the hell?" He snaps angrily before turning to see his attacker, the anger in his expression melting away into confusion when no one stood before the Bouncy Bubble Beverage machine. He almost turns to look around before he sees another bottle rocket out of it with speed that would almost be impressive if it wasn't absolutely ridiculous, and it happens so fast that he doesn't have time to dodge before it hits him squarely in the chest. "Fuck!" It slips this time in both shock and irritation, hand moving to his chest as he stares at the vending machine in disbelief. "Hey, is anybody going to fix this thing?" He sure as hell can't, so he yells it at the cafeteria as a whole, turning around to move away before- another bottle hits him in the back of the head. His jaw tightens with indignation. Clones aren't dangerous.

Clones aren't dangerous. But vending machines are assholes.

With a mixture of his already short temper and the exhaustion set in him within the past two days, Isaac spins and bends down to scoop up a discarded bottle on the ground and, without thought or reason, throws it as hard as he can back at the vending machine. It spits out another, as if mocking his effort, and Isaac dodges before picking up another and throwing that one too. If his first fight in the 'free world' is with a vending machine, then he supposes he's already doing better than his predecessor was. Besides. The machine started it.

"I should have taken up cricket." But these trays will do. She smacks another bottle out of the air and blows a rogue curl of hair from her face. This would be much easier if there was an obvious way to turn the machine off, she could move on to tackling a more pressing problem, the annoying exit doors.

Peggy whacks another bottle and it hits the wall with a satisfying thud. At some point this thing has to run out of beverages.

"Not one to enjoy a Bouncy Bubble Beverage?"

The sound of glass shattering against metal, followed by a fizzing sound, can only mean one thing: A few feet away, Steve's fashioned a shield out of an entire four-person table, and the machine's taken notice.

"I'd enjoy them if they were a bit less-" SMASH. "bouncy."

Peggy huffed and readjusted her stance. Either the noise was keeping others away or they were finding trouble of their own.

"I know these are meant to be a convenience, but this is completely unnecessary." She ducks when a bottle comes much to close to her head. "I don't suppose you see a cord we could pull?"

Each line appears and disappears; sometimes overlaid on the existing feed, sometimes against a black background. It takes a lot of attention and concentration-- and even this much can't be categorized as beating the Computer. No one beats the Computer.

> a void is most obvious among an abundance
> so stop being a black freaking hole

Lydia always drags Barry to lunch with her now. Always. She only ever leaves his sight once they get to the cafeteria, because the last time she went to lunch without him, she was dragged into a supply closet and nearly beaten to death. It isn't an experience she wants to re-live and opening the door to it is a bad idea. Once they actually get to the cafeteria, though, they tend to separate to get their (awful) food before meeting up again. She's noticed that the bots seem to be on the rampage today and she's largely been able to avoid too much fall out from it, but when she heads over to get a Bounce Bubble Beverage, she can't help noticing that maybe that's not such a good idea today.

If it isn't bad enough that the stupid machine is spitting out bottles at passersby, one of the other Alphas is picking a damn fight with it. It isn't until she's a little closer — because, really, how can she not watch someone having a bitch fight with a vending machine? Reasons for a good laugh are few and far between in this hell hole, after all — that she actually recognizes him.

The words leave her mouth before she has a chance to bite them back and she's immediately regretful for having asked at all, because she's one for two right now after Ronan — not Jackson — and Allison. "Isaac? Isaac Lahey...?"

Her lips press together and she almost — almost — takes off at that before he can turn around, just in case it isn't him; just in case he's one of the masked assholes from the Anti-Specials, since she wouldn't know the difference anyway if he hadn't been one of the ones talking, but curiosity gets the best of her.

...all right, well. There are worse things than having to dodge a rogue Autocar on the way to his room, right? Cisco's dealt with worse things than that. Zoom, for one. But, on the other hand, he also didn't have a fugly red jumpsuit on. He wasn't stuck with a PDC that was clearly a hater and he wasn't for lack of the tools he needed to fix any of those things. If, you know, those things really happened? Did they? Metahumans? The Flash? Being able to open actual portals to Earth 2...? Those are pretty heavy and specific for glitches in the system if he's a clone. And yo, don't even get him started thinking about the irony in being called a clone.

So yeah, all right, there's worse things, but he really could do without the fact that he almost got hit by a freaking car while walking down the hall to his room. He absolutely could do without that.

"Ay, Dios mío," he mutters, frowning, as he moves into his new quarters — seriously? There's supposed to be five people in this room? Is the Computer high right now? — and drops down onto the nearest bed. He decides to try the PDC again in the hopes that maybe it was a server error, but when he tries again to make a post onto this Specials network to see what's up with that, it posts public. "...for real?" he groans, taking the post down again because he's heard whispers and he's so not down with immediately outing himself as a Special if he's going to be surrounded by people who hate Specials, at least not if he can help it.

Isaac is so wrapped up in his newfound war with the vending machine who decided that his day wasn't shitty enough as it was, that he doesn't noticed someone approaching him. It sounds strange, hearing his voice in a soft, almost meek voice, perhaps because he's spent the past 48 hours convincing himself that his name doesn't really matter because it's not really his name to begin with. Whatever it is, it catches his attention, and his head turns as his hand pauses mid-throw to spot a familiar face that he hadn't seen in years.

No - felt as if he hadn't seen in years. He definitely hadn't seen her before because he didn't exist before. Right.

The sight of Lydia Martin catches him so off guard that Isaac's hand slowly lowers, Bouncy Bubbly Juice whatever still in his grip, and he stares at her with disbelief and vague confusion for a stretched moment of silence. "...Lydia?" He speaks her name quietly as if frightened that he may be overheard, because acknowledging that he knows it is acknowledging that he remembers it, and he doesn't want to get sent back to reconditioning. No - education. He doesn't want to get sent back to be educated.

Because if these were his memories, he hasn't seen her in almost two years. If these were his memories, he didn't leave at the best of times. But they weren't. So it shouldn't matter, and she should admit that she was mistaken and go on her way. He spends so long looking at her that the vending machine managed to get one last good hit in, pegging him with a bottle squarely in the back, and Isaac gives a frustrated grunt before spinning and slinging the bottle in his hand, hitting the machine so hard that it's lights flicker. He winces as if feeling pain for it before quickly stepping away. The last thing he needs is to get reprimanded because of some stupid vending machine.

He turns with a dazed look, as if surprised that she's still there, and his mouth moves as if with something to say while his words fail him. Finally he looks away, unable to keep himself from falling into the habit of avoiding eye contact. "I'm not-" he stops abruptly. He's not Isaac. Or he is, just a different one. Or he's the new Isaac. He doesn't know who he is, and that makes it hard to tell her that she's wrong. "I was just getting a drink..."

It's hard to tell how long Tony had been in that room, watching The History of Alpha Complex until it felt like his ears were going to start bleeding. Not because he had been fascinated, or even trying to remember details - he had memorized them pretty damn quickly, actually - but because it just felt...wrong. What they called a glitch kept coming back, and memories filtered in that made him question literally everything. Ultimately it had been his desire to leave more than the actual act of accepting what he was being told what drove him to just smile and nod when he was questioned again, and he was finally allowed to leave.

He doesn't make it far, though. As he walks, the sound of someone screaming stops him, and he's quick to look back in that direction. There's not a lot of time to think before he's moving forward, almost by instinct, and he runs into a Guardbot that is about to shoot at a pair of horrified citizens. His hand reaches for the laser pistol that he had been given before he remembers that the damn thing is empty, but whatever. It doesn't matter. Even if it's just the body of the pistol, he still grabs it and uses it to hit its back. To distract it, hopefully, and--

Yep. The Guardbot is distracted, alright, as it whips around to him now.

Crap. What was step two?

"Run," he yells at the people that had been about to get shot, before he turns his attention back to the bot. His eyes scan the damn thing as he tries to dodge it, and he mainly thinks it's just to make sure he's not going to get hit or shot, but the 'glitch' is making him look for weaknesses. He just wants to find a way to power it down and stop it once and for all.

Elliot is used to beating the computer, see. He will figure this out.

He will.

To that comment, though, he smiles, just a little.

He likes the idea of being a black hole. So, he writes back, fingers flying,

>screw you.

> sorry, you're not my type :)

It should be easy for Elliott to see that a new piece of programming is trying to worm its way onto his PDC-- something that doesn't match the usual look of code in the Complex, but is more similar to what he'd have been used to seeing back home in the early 2000's.

It's a lightweight module that upon further inspection prior to installation should point him to one last piece of tracking left. The remnant of an old virus that matches the style of the code he just received. If he wants to disappear, Root's happy to risk her place in Nameless to gain even a modicum of his trust by pointing out what's recognizably her module on his device.

> go ahead. keep being a black hole.
> but just remember, nothing is still trackable in a sea of everything.

A soft smile pulls at the corners of Lydia's mouth and she gives a subtle nod to let him know that he's right, while not vocalizing it because she can tell by his mannerisms and the quiet tone she can't remember hearing after he took the bite that he's fresh out of orientation; scared. She opens her mouth to undo all Teela’s hard work on Isaac the way she'd done with Allison, but she closes it again, thinking better of it. Allison had a good life, for the most part. One worth remembering. Isaac...well. Lydia doesn't want to be the one to tell him that the “glitches” of his dad beating the crap out of him aren't glitches at all.

The way he stumbles over his words almost reminds Lydia of the way he'd been when she'd thought he was too insignificant to pay attention to and she feels bad thinking that. She's forgotten about the machine in her distraction and when it spits out another bottle she hears hitting him in the back with a dull thump, she winces for him and looks apologetic before he turns to throw the bottle in his hand at the machine, at which point, she has to press her lips together and cover her mouth to keep from letting inappropriately-timed laughter bubble up.

“Yeah, I can see that,” she comments with a smirk, nodding at the vending machine and looking amused. It's been a while. They've never been close, but all the same, the sentiment slips and she finds that she means it once it's been said. “...it's good to see you again, Isaac.”

Ah.

Really, Elliot feels like an idiot not realizing that before.

Of course.

He tries a few coding changes, seeing if they'll take, not trying, as he had before, to remove all sign of him, but to point to a different someone. No longer a black hole but a mirror reflecting back at a different face.

So, he'll test that coding by replying

> who are you?

Maybe the source of his message looks different now, maybe it doesn't.

His metal table top was now dented in quite a few places.

When Peggy asks about cords, he shakes his head and takes a peek over his shield at the machine. The Bouncy Bubble Beverage dispenser was entirely built into the wall. There might have been some type of cord behind it, but they'd never be able to pull the dispenser free without getting hit in the face.

Steve looks back at Peggy, a little smile on his face. "We could put an end to this the old fashioned way." Nothing like a good beating to take a machine out of commission.

Just as Steve takes down one Guardbot, he hears two citizens scream. They're running straight towards him, yelling and screaming about how some brave man saved them, but whoever it was needed help and needed it now.

He grabs his makeshift shield — the metal plate normally attached to the chest of Guardbots — and runs in Tony's direction. But when Steve finally sees him, he stops dead in his tracks.

"TONY?"

It couldn't be. He'd been dragged away by the Computer months ago.

Buffy has been in this place for a couple of weeks, long enough to hear all the conspiracy theories and do plenty of grousing about the lack of stylish clothing, not to mention the supreme void of pop culture. Okay, so she hates this place. She's got her own world to save and a sister to keep safe. She really can't take time out of her busy schedule to play 'clone or not clone' in an underground bunker.

"Seriously? Does no one here watch movies? This betrayal, totally inevitable," Buffy grumbles (loudly) just before executing a round house kick that takes out one of the guard bots. She's armed with an arm (haha) that she pulled off a bot previously and she's managed to fashion it into a club slash sort of sharp and pointy thing. She's definitely going to have to see about doing some strategic furniture breakage so that the next time this happens (because watch some movies, folks; there's always going to be a next time) she'll be appropriately weaponized.

It's a busy morning, day, night ad nauseam for Buffy because she's going to be all over the compound trying to save people from the raging robots. She's resourceful, but this isn't her usual kind of monster mashing. Then again, did she really expect usual in a place like this?

Buffy isn't happy about the whole 'clone' thing either and they are oddly specific, especially since her memories of her world are entirely different from Cisco's. In fact, Cisco's world sounds like something out of one of Xander's comic books. Yes, he's made her read them on occasion. No, she didn't hate them. She just doesn't have the patience and attention span.

There are worse things, like battling soda pop as it's launched at high speeds from the vending machine. Yeah, Buffy ended up completely splattered in bubble drink one that one. She'd been able to avoid being hit in the head, but only because she'd ~~hulk~~ smashed an attacking guard bot and purloined one of his arms as a weapon.

She flings open the door to her room moping already unzipping her jumpsuit so she can trade it out for one that's not covered in sticky ick. Thus far, she's had the room to herself so she's not expecting it to contain one boy shaped creature. She stutters to a stop, mangled bot arm in one hand, other hand frozen at just about her bra line (which is as far as she got in the unzipping). "I--You--this isn't where I parked my car."

She promptly zips the jumpsuit back up and waves weakly. "I'm Buffy. Either I have the wrong room, or you're my new room mate."

There are far too few people in Alpha who have the kinds of talents Elliott has. His new heading is good-- any flags that had been in the process of popping up on his trail will pass right over him, now.

"Call me Root."

Her voice is quiet, on the higher register of alto in the near-whisper. Root stands, leaning against the cold metal of the wall in a RED's uniform, hip jutting out with confidence but lacking her usual sing-song tone. There's a small bit drill in one hand and a janky looking almost-PDC in the other. Maybe it's stupid to be this bold, but lately she feels like she's running out of time to complete her fool's errand.

"The cameras in this block will be down for another minute."

At the sound of someone entering the room, Cisco looks up and the confusion and surprise at the fact that a) she's a she, and b) she's covered in soda and wielding a piece of friggen robot like a weapon absolutely registers on his face. He sits up and that's when he notices that she's actually started undressing, probably because she hadn't realized he'd be laying there — as evidenced by the way she stops short and stutters out something that sounds a little too much like the sort of thing he'd say in her shoes for him not to decide he already likes her.

His hands go up defensively and he turns his head. "I didn't see anything," he replies quickly by reflex. "...that's a lie, sorry, I totally did, but I wasn't looking, if that makes you feel better," he adds in defensive apology.

It isn't until she introduces herself and he actually gets a good look at her face that Cisco looks back at her with recognition. "Stop it," he says playfully, tilting his head a little as he grins before sitting up straighter. "No you're not. Shut up, are you?" Buffy. Like...the vampire slayer? Like, the TV show he vaguely remembers watching in the "glitches" he's still not entirely sure aren't memories?

"Jesus fuck," he mutters. Someone suddenly showing up in his room? That never ends well in his experience.

He stands, then, his back to the wall, facing her. "How did you get in here?" he asks, taking her in, all of her, but most especially the tool.

What kind of name is Root? Almost immediately, Elliot doesn't trust her. Why should he? Hackers are notoriously secretive and independent. He is no exception and if she is a hacker and she's here? She wants something.

His first thought with the cameras being down is to run.

They say that the memories that don't line up with Alpha Complex aren't real. Glitches, they say. Pietro believes that, because he can't run the way that the glitches suggest. He believes them because it doesn't make sense for a person to be able to run that fast, anyway. He's just Pietro Maximoff and he thinks Sokovia is an awfully strange name for the glitches to have created but he thinks the memories of the protests are probably what got him killed in the first place, really. Not being an Avenger — there's no such thing — or being a hero. It makes more sense to him that he was killed in one of the protests against the Computer. Treasonous, that sounds about right for Pietro. He'll do better this time, though. There aren't enough clones of him to safely perpetuate his rebellion, he knows that now. He understands.

At least, he tells himself so. Instincts, it seems, are a lot more natural and difficult to override than he would like, because when he hears the screams and sees the Guardbot shoot; a subsequent RED jumpsuit dropping limply to the floor.

"Go!" he calls out to the others milling around in panicked confusion. "Why you still stay here?! Run!" His English is a little bit broken and the accent is thick and of Eastern European origin, but he figures that he makes enough sense that the people around him should listen. All but one does, as a matter of fact, and the crowd scatters like cockroaches; as if Pietro's voice was the light switch being turned on and they finally broke out of their frozen fear to get out of the line of fire. Pietro can't decide if the one left over is still too afraid or is going to try to fight the damn thing off, but when the Guardbot aims again, Pietro doesn't wait to find out.

He lunges for the other, tackling them to the ground and managing to keep them both from being hit before he scrambles back to his feet and drags them up with him. "Come on, what you doing just standing there? You trying to die today? Let's go," he says urgently.

Scratch at it, Elliott. Root access.

/

She shrugs. "Everything's communal at this level. Your roommates are just out trying to look normal."

She pockets her device, and folds her arms to let the drill dangle at her elbow. But she doesn't move, and spends more time looking at the pieces of tech Elliott went to town on than watching him. He'd done a precise job, where most people simply went for as much destruction as they could.

He reminds her of a couple of the other Specials. Already paranoid, extremely sullen; she wonders if this was a mistake. Maybe he would do better completely off the grid.

"Your memories are real. Don't listen to that glitch crap."

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Page 1 of 7

July/August Test Drive Meme

Alpha Complex Test Drive Meme

Elliot Alderson <mr.robot.s1>

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Isaac Lahey | Teen Wolf

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Cisco Ramon | The Flash

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Tony Stark | MCU

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pietro maximoff ⚡ mcu (aou)

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