on a guild forum elsewhere, one of our resident game masters has posted an invitational to join him in the local tavern. in fact, he’s just installed a machine to open a dimensional portal in front of those who ‘need a drink’ and whisk them away to the place.
the idea being that you have to come up with a story to explain how you get there. from there, who knows? the roleplay is fast, furious, and free-form. my favorite.
this, my ‘entrance’, which seems to have gone over nicely. there will be more. i’ll tag it up so you can find it. just search for ‘forum rp’.
“I’m telling you, I don’t KNOW how it happened!” She could feel her jaw clench as she struggled to fight down the annoyance with the decidedly slow-witted enforcement officer. Today had not been the best of days. In fact, it was quickly moving along the scale from ‘best of days’ toward ‘worst of days’, hovering at the moment over the point of the scale that might read ‘slow torment unto death by stupidity’.
She sighed as she checked her digichip and realized this was pushing her entire schedule out by at least another week. Recounting the series of events in her head, she pondered why she always made the mistake of trying to be a good person when it so often resulted in being cornered by someone asking plodding, slow questions in plodding, slow voices, and requiring plodding, slow days or weeks to just get… out… of… her… way.
“So, alright,” The officer drew a breath and scratched a few more notes about things, “Let’s go over it one more time, shall we?”
She had a fleeting sense of whimsical thought that she may actually have felt the little switch somewhere in her brain click and release her self-control, but it was quickly enveloped and burned away in the resulting burst of temper, “No, I don’t think we shall, officer. Not only have I told you the same story eight times in the last hour and a half, I’ve stopped precisely twenty times along the way to wait for you to take notes, seven times to carefully spell names for you, four more times to spell them again, and, quite frankly, if you don’t have all the details at this point, I scarce believe you’ll ever have them, even if they were tattooed on your hands for quick reference.”
She didn’t wait for him to respond. Brushing by him, she loped over to her hovercycle and slung a leather-clad leg over it, reaching down in the same flow of motion to flick the biometric ignition. A quick tap of her foot and a tandem flick of her wrist upon the throttle and she leapt away from the curve as the sinuous machine purred in response.
“HEY!,” The officer shouted angrily as he swung to track her direction, “HEY! I’m not finished with you yet!” She snarled into her side mirror as he grew smaller with distance, “Oh hell yes you are, buster. You want more, you snail your slow ass to my offices and make an appointment like everyone else.”
She redirected her attention to the road just in time to slam head-first into what appeared to be a tear in reality. Rearing back, she instinctively stiffened as she braked hard, feeling the hovercycle shimmy and buck in protest. The world disappeared in the middle of the skid, and she fought to avoid the involuntary blink as it seemed she was smashing into an edge of existence.
The brief expanse of complete and utter emptiness flashed by and, unbelievably, she found herself crashing into the open floor of what looked like a tavern. The hovercycle floundered and twisted under her as gravity and physics resumed their rightful places and she remembered to let go of the throttle. The cycle subsided into a low growl as the contradicting forces trying to direct it resolved and it idled smoothly as the woman astride it swung her head to investigate her surroundings.
Flicking a thumb over the ignition, she switched the cycle off and it gracefully lowered itself from under her to the ground. With practiced ease, she swung over and away from it and reached up to the high-impact helmet, breaking the trace beam to send it folding and retracting to reveal her face.
Swinging her head finally toward the man behind the bar, she grunted slightly as her mind finally made the adjustment to the actuality of a shifting reality, “Well,” She drawled lazily as she strode across the distance to the bar and took a stool, “I don’t know who you are or where we are or why, but you look like you can serve a drink and that’s just about what I need at the moment.” An impish grin crossed her face, “Tell me you’ve got a flask of Sedalion Mist under that counter and you’ll make me a very happy woman, indeed.”