♥ November Intro Mingle Log

[hugtopiamods]

November Intro Mingle Log
Welcome to Hugtopia, and to the city of Havenwell. This mingle is meant for new arrivals to get settled and meet the other inhabitants. New characters should be the only top-levels but everyone is free to tag around and make new friends. Who knows, you may find that Perfect Hug in here. You can use the prompts here, or create a wildcard of your own.

ICly, this takes place from the 2nd to around the 10th, with a proper event coming soon after applications are processed. The prompts below are optional, but are a way to get you started if you wish. To help you create your own prompts, please take a look through our Settings and FAQ. Click on each prompt's title to see the text.

If you have any questions, feel free to direct them to the FAQ or to the Mod Question thread below.

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❥ PROMPT I: Awakening

When you awaken, you're in the last outfit you remember wearing, (up to) three of your belongings laid nearby or your animal friend curled up by you, waking as you do. A stone slab is not the most comfortable place to sleep, but once you're awake, a humanoid-looking robot comes into the room and explains that you're in Havenwell, then leads you out of the room and into the main portion of the temple where a welcoming committee of similarly humanoid-looking robots hand over a clear smartphone-sized tablet, some starting funds, and explain their dilemma. Then they release you into Havenwell to pick your new home from free housing in the city and give you the chance to settle. It might be a bit disorienting, but thankfully there seem to be a lot of robots and even some non-robots around. Maybe ask them for help? Strike up a friendly conversation, get to know your neighbours! It seems as if you may be here for the long haul.

❥ PROMPT II: Buddy System

With all the changes and the fear of a secondary attack lingering, the natives are a lot more protective of their newest arrivals. When new characters begin to appear at the temples, they receive the welcome speech, get their communicators and the simple map of the city, and a warning to stay away from the walls. Then they get taken to the front of the temple by a helpful robotic priest. Rather than turn the newcomers loose right away, they pull someone seemingly at random off the street and push the two people together with a cheerful, "It's dangerous to go alone, so please show our newest resident around. Please be buddies!" They wait until they're certain the pair is going to be moving off together before going back inside.

They try to place a new arrival with one of those who previously arrived, but who can keep track of all that, right? Characters may find themselves thrown together with an actual veteran or with another new arrival who only came here a day or even just an hour before them! Good luck helping each other out, offworlders, and don't lose your buddy!

❥ PROMPT III: Virtual Research

After the attack, every part of the city is on repair duty and the means the Entertainment District as well. As new arrivals wander the city, they might be called into one of the numerous Virtual Reality cafes. These cafes vary in layout, but most have areas for the natives to plug directly into the machines and other areas which have older looking virtual reality helmets that allow flesh bodied people experience the games. For those who need assistance with their sensory inputs, basic options like audio descriptions of visual scenes, enhanced audio and descriptive speech, closed captions, and crude mobility chairs are available. A handful of cafes have other options like direct visual or audio cortex stimulation to simulate vision or hearing, or suspension tanks to allow simulated movement, but these are currently unavailable due to damage.

All of these facilities are, unfortunately, under repair. The direct plug-in systems are easier for the robot natives to fix because they can do the most important part of it - testing - by themselves. But for the helmets and other interface systems, they need your help. Naturally, they'll pay you for the work, but they need the offworlders to play the available games and record any areas where they find glitches. Playing with a partner increases your chances of finding and fixing any issues, so feel free to log in for free for once and test any of the following games:

• Big Bass Fishing
The beautiful lake has blue-green waters surrounded by forest and rocky, reedy shores. You and your companion are on a small single-motor fishing boat and you have fishing gear - two poles in the water. As the game starts up a read-out announces the objective: Catch the largest fish before the time limit ends. What's the time limit? ...Well, that's your first glitch because it reads as static. Might as well start fishing though, right? It doesn't take long to catch a few regular sized fish, nothing too exciting, and then? You get the big one - it bows your fishing rod nearly in half as you reel it up. The fish leaps into the air and you realize this is your next glitch because the fish hangs there - the size of a minivan - and yells, "BIG. BASS. FISHING. ATTACK." The fish slaps its fins and tails at the boat and now you and your fishing companion better fight this fish or you'll end up in the lake or worse.


• A (un)Familiar Experience
Jump into the life of the temple familiars and see life from their perspective! Choose the temple, any temple is fine, and be transformed into a fledgling rainbow dragon, a purple mouse, a white raven, or a blue feline. You're free to move about the virtual confines of the temples and, in fact, you can even interact with other familiars in their temples - who may be other players in this game. Play, climb, try to get your fledgling wings to fly, tumble about with the other mice, enjoy your simple life as an animal! --or you would if you weren't an insane size. Rather than being a small mouse, you're the size of a horse. That fledgling rainbow dragon? About the size of a fly. The building sizes are off, too - one might have door that's 30 feet tall, but a ceiling that's only 12. Everything else seems fine, but those sizes? Well, you better figure out how to get around that.


• Robot Crossing
Logging in with another character will net you a little farm and a variety of games to choose from:
1. Pick and harvest as many Aellyn vegetables and fruits as you can before the timer runs out! The more you pick, the better your score. Work together with your partner to clear the field in any way you can. Strangely, once you finish clearing a tree or a field row of their bounty, they seem to magically refill when you turn your back. Strangely, when the timer runs out? It flashes 00:00 and the game...doesn't? Stop? In fact, the fruits and vegetables just keep multiplying and multiplying and if you don't hurry up you might just get buried in them all!
   
2. With a partner, use the giant slingshot to launch comically large fruits into a garden patch of other colored fruits. Match a line of 3 or more similarly shaped fruits to clear it from the field. The more fruits you can clear, the higher your score - aka welcome to Fruit Crush. Stack lines of 6 or more to get shining clear diamond fruits that clear the entire row and snag yourself some bonus points. Or they should, but whenever you clear away a matching set, the fruits explode, sending fruit bits and juice everywhere - most notably on you and your partner. Still, the game is going on and it looks like it won't stop until you finish, so good thing it's all a computer game, right? Sure feels real though - reeeeeeally sticky.
   
3. You and your partner(s) are given a magical golden pumpkin and it's your job to grow it into the largest pumpkin possible. Why? There's a county fair of course and the largest pumpkin wins! But how do you grow this pumpkin? Well, for whatever reason? This pumpkin is already the size of a grizzly bear and it just won't stop growing! You and your partner better find a way to stop it from growing out of control or you might get (virtually) crushed! You could do a song and dance routine together to touch the pumpkin's soul to teach it moderation or calm its insane vegetable puberty. You could hold hands and share stories and entertain the pumpkin until it feels satisfied that it's grown enough. You could just hack and slash at it in an attempt to reduce its unwieldy bulk. The possibilities are endless and so is the pumpkin's growth, so you better hurry!

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Comments

[necromanswers]

[Oh boy, it sure does feel like they're having too different conversations here. What the heck is she talking about?]

You might want to be a little more specific about that one. [She pauses, her hand loosening around Pyra's, a heartbeat away from pulling free, and her other hand lifts to mock a drilling motion against the side of her own head.] Not poking around in here, are you?

[Because sensing magic is one thing, but sensing thoughts is more invasive than she'd like, and that would sour this whole interaction. She can't feel anything like that, though.]

[iustaegis]

Wh-- [ Her eyes widen briefly, and then she quickly shakes her head. ] No... No! [ She would never! Also, she can't.

Pyra delays further by casting her eyes away, then back. ] It's.. difficult to explain, [ And, she realizes, explaining at all means that she'll be giving away that this is a bit of her abilities. Cat's already out of the bag with that one with Lup, however. ] but somehow you feel as if you are... deceased.

[necromanswers]

[Lup blinks. Oh. Ohhhh, that makes sense, now.]

Shit, you can sense undead? Got it. No wonder!

[And then she laughs, light and brief to avoid hurting her still-sickly throat, and turns away to continue their walk, tugging Pyra along with her.]

You could say it's complicated. I'm dead, but not like, dead-dead. So don't go shedding tears over me when I'm standing right here!

[iustaegis]

I-- yes, of course. [ She should be happy that she's here, living. "Living"? Here and now! And so she forces a smile for her, although it's exceedingly troubled. ]

You're right, I'm happy you're here. [ And truly she is! Only, she has to get over her sorrow for her first to enjoy that fact. It's not as if Lup is the only dead person here. It's just that it's awful that there are so many. ] You have another chance in this world to live, that's... a wonderful thing.

[necromanswers]

[This poor sad snowflake, she has no idea. But if that's how she wants to interpret things, Lup isn't about to correct her. Undead - especially liches - as the sort of creatures you hunt down and slay in the night, for most folk. You certainly don't befriend them, and she's content to keep that particular secret to herself for a while.]

Uh... yeah, I sure do. Lucky me.

[And hey, conveniently, here's the cafe! A proper distraction that she sorely needs in this moment, and she gratefully pushes open the door to lead them inside.]

I hope you're hungry, because you're going to want to try at least one of everything.

[iustaegis]

[ ...Right, right. She has to get a grip over her emotions. She is aligned to Rawna, after all. Apathy is-- ...It's an important part to her (although she tends to forget this). ] --Ah? Oh, yes. [ A nod, and then another nod. She recognizes when a topic needs to be dropped.

She looks over the pastries displayed inside, as well as the menu above.

Seeing as how the locals have no need to eat, she wonders if these recipes had been salvages from documents uncovered long ago. If so, they must be traditional ones of this world. It brightens her mood just a bit, and her stance relaxes. ] This one-- with that berry on top. Have you had it before?

[necromanswers]

[Thank gods. Hopefully the pastries will help cheer the poor thing up, because there really isn't anything to be depressed about, in her opinion.

Lup follows her over and leans in to check.]

Oh, yeah, that one's nice. I've tried every single one since I got here, and they've really improved over the last few months. I think the only one that's still kind of garbage is, uhh...

[She looks, then points to a lumpy-looking puff-pastry off to the side, almost as if it's an afterthought.]

I think they were going for custard, but it ended up more like a cheese and vinegar blend. They keep trying, but they just can't pull it off. It's sad, really.

[iustaegis]

[ Cheese and vinegar. Wow. ] ...Goodness, I feel sorry for the first otherworlder who happened to sample that one.

[ Pyra selects the one she had motioned to before to try. ]

[necromanswers]

I'll take your sympathy, because it might've been me.

[She leans down and orders a handful of others with varying flavours, both for take-home and to eat here, and then pays for the whole lot. Pyra's new, she can't have much money on her, and sweets aren't that expensive here.]

[iustaegis]

[ ...Do dead people have two stomachs, she wonders as Lup orders the treats. ]

Oh-- maybe... have you tried making some custard yourself?

[necromanswers]

[Dead people have stomachs and Lup's is bottomless for sweets, or so she would claim.]

Oh sure, I make a mean custard. The softest, creamiest shit you'd ever taste. This place doesn't always have the right spices, though. Guess the apocalypse killed the nutmeg plants.

[She accepts the package of pastries and leads them over to one of the little tables tucked away in a corner.]