ateratooc | TD006

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test drive

TD006

Test Drive 006

WELCOME TO ATERAT

Here is our Fifth Test Drive Meme! There are a lot of areas of the city to explore, so please have a look around! In case you need a little help getting started, I've included a few prompts below, or feel free to start your own! Exploration and player initiative are the names of the game here!

Helpful Links to Get Started

Arrival & General Information | Setting & Bestiary | Locales & Businesses | Residences & Housing Info | Rules & FAQ (ask questions here!)

I. Crash Into Me

Not exactly, but close enough. You have just arrived and received a strange satchel from a tiny, strange little man and are left more or less to your own devices (more information on what to expect upon arrival can be found here)! Follow directions to the north and check out the housing, or maybe have a look around the Historium and try to get some information from that giant glowing ball, see what you can waste your meager starter coin on in the Market District, or maybe just meet the neighbors.

II. What Goes Bump in the Night

It looks like Aterat proper has a spirit problem. Maybe you're seeing specters, hearing disembodied voices, your windows rattle when there's no breeze outside. Maybe there are cold spots in your place of business (or your apartment, which is so much worse). Either way, you're 100% convinced you're haunted. Hopefully, someone else believes you, or maybe you're used to feeling crazy.

III. When the Carnival Came to Town?

Take a look at the prompts from our latest event and go to town (or the carnival).

IV. Try the Network

The Tell-Phone allows for text, video, and audio transmissions to everyone else who has one. Give it a whirl!

V. Wildcard

The above prompts are all options, and there's much more to the setting than what they provide. Do your best (or your worst)!

Navigation

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

01 ▷ MARKET

There's a profound melancholy in the young woman seen so often with the horses. It doesn't matter what kind of horse, or whose horse it even is; if she happens to pass by one, she always stops to pet and spend time with it, or at least try. She talks to them on occasion too, and, while she never goes into details, there are hints that she's lost a great deal of people in her life from war or some other gruesome catastrophe.

She also likes flowers, especially roses.

And there's this song she likes to hum, just as melancholic as she is. Sometimes she looks like she's going to cry — but then she'll straighten and square her shoulders, and stubbornly refuse to shed a tear. She's already shed so many of them. For her father and brother. For the son she'll never see again.

02 ▷ NETWORK

[ It takes a while, and a lot of tutoring and practice, for Lyanna to get used to the idea of texting. She'd been dreadfully concerned at first that the Tell-Phone's a living raven magically transformed into a contraption of some sort — which wouldn't be surprising given that she thinks she'd been brought here by the Old Gods — then she'd lamented about not having a quill to write with. Thus it's only once she's comfortable enough that she takes to the network. ]

Pray tell, are there others from Westeros in this land?

[ She would not be too keen to give out her name, not with the war still so fresh, but she supposes it's the fastest way to gather more information. ]

03 ▷ WILDCARD

[ i'm easy, so go wild or pp me at notanybunny to plot! ♥ lyanna is from the books where she has substantially more backstory, but i'm well-versed in the show as well. still checking with the mods but intending to age her up to 18 as she's only 16 by her death, so i hope that makes things more comfortable for everyone. considering her canon, please expect topics related to war, violence, death, underage pregnancies, age gap relationships, politics, and some other problematic stuff, but i'll be happy to avoid them in our interactions if you let me know! c: ]

Jon is familiar with the locations of this place, both due to living here for a time and due to being on the force that guards the city. He's also familiar with the animals that live here, and they're used to Ghost by now. (Ghost is also used to being around horses, and knows how to avoid being seen as a threat by them.) Today, however, he's not working, and is in the market to do some shopping. He wants to find a ring for Inesa, like Llewellyn had mentioned, so he's making his way from one jewelry store to another. Today he's wearing the tunic Sansa made for him, with a three-headed wolf embroidered in bright Targaryen red.

He greets one of the vendors on his way past when he feels someone tugging in his pocket. He turns to look and finds one of the horses pulling at the fabric. His face splits into a grin (Ned's grin, everyone thought, but in reality his mother's) and he reaches up to stroke the horse's muzzle. "Hello. You're looking for this, aren't you." He reaches into his pocket and pulls out an apple, which he offers to the horse. The horse reaches out and grabs it, and soon the sound of the horse crunching the apple mixes with the sounds of the market.

Lyanna's almost mournful sojourns to the market take a surprising turn that day as she finds an oddly familiar tableau laid out in front of her, faltering in her step at the sight of a large white wolf gazing intensely back at her. It... it couldn't be a direwolf, could it? Yet she's in a part of the Realm apparently blessed just as much by the Old Gods as her beloved North, so should she really be surprised that such a creature — the symbol of her House — walks among them?

But that's not where the familiarity ends. Standing with his back turned to her, near the direwolf, is a man. He seems to have taken to the horses too, but more importantly, something about him just has her drawing close. She could swear he's a Northerner, and her breath hitches in her throat as she thinks she recognizes who he is.

"Ned?" The name is out of her lips before she could stop herself, and her feet propel her forward. Her mind's already running a mile a minute, for if this was a place for those who have passed on — she's yet to meet anyone who's had a different story, who hadn't died like she was certain she had — what did it mean to have her brother here? And on that note, what happened, then, to her son?

Ghost watches her approach, as he does with everyone who approaches his master, but he must have decided that she's not a threat, because he stays seated near Jon. He had heard the people around him in the market, so he's not surprised to discover that there's someone behind him. What surprises him more is hearing someone address him, and with that name specifically. Someone who not only knows Ned but is confusing him with the other man is not only from Westeros, but from the North itself. Which brings back a sort of homesickness in his chest, a homesickness for the North more than for all of Westeros itself. The North was home to him in a way that he hasn't found anywhere else, although this place has come close.

He gives the horse's muzzle one final pat to send it on its way. "Ned was my..."

Then he turns, the action exposing not only the knife at his belt but also the hybrid sigil embroidered on his chest, and he stops. She's obviously a Stark; he can see that from her face. A face that looks like his, in fact. And she's a Stark who knew Ned. Could she be...? The sudden surprise of looking into eyes that mirror his own set him off balance, and the end of his sentence is much less confident than the start of it.

"...father."

Everything in Lyanna grinds to a halt as she comes face-to-face with the stranger she'd mistaken for her brother. Because it almost feels like she's looking into a mirror. He's not Ned, that's suddenly clear, but there's no mistaking that the man is a Stark. Much as the Targaryens had a distinct look about them, so did the wolves of the North: long face, dark hair, dark eyes.

It takes her a moment to speak, caught off-guard not just by the man's resemblance to her family and his overall familiarity, but also by what he says. "You can't mean Eddard," she finally manages to say, taking a cautious step forward with the briefest of glances at Ghost, "of House Stark? Son of Lord Rickard?" Then she laughs, despite still not quite shaking whatever it is she's feeling. Ned has a son this man's age? "I'd believe it if it were Robert, but Ned..."

She squints at Jon. Must be another Ned. A cousin... though she's sure that's not it. The strange feeling continues to gnaw at her. How does she know this man?

He doesn't know for sure, without outright asking, if she is who he suspects she is, since he had never known what she looked like beyond the statue in the underground crypt at Winterfell, and his own appearance. He doesn't want to assume, because if he's wrong it's just awkward and disappointing for both of them. But she knows Robert Baratheon well enough to call him by his given name...

"Eddard Stark, lord Winterfell," he confirms, because if she doesn't know that yet, she'll need to be told soon anyway. "He raised me as if I were his own son."

Eddard Stark, Lord of Winterfell. The words pierce her heart like a lance, and she shivers at the coldness that it brings. Ned would be Lord of Winterfell now, wouldn't he? Since their father and Brandon were dead.

Sorrow clouds her face in remembrance, her guilt returning. If she hadn't been so foolish...

Then the stranger says something outright preposterous: that he'd been raised as though he was Ned's own son. Lyanna eyes, eyes that might as well be the same as his, once more narrow. "How is that possible? You are a man grown, and Ned—"

She's no stranger to magic, not anymore. How else could she have been in her deathbed one moment, and here in the next? Ned having a grown son could simply imply a different world, perhaps a different time, though she's yet to fully grasp either of those concepts. But that's not what she struggles with, however; it's the possibility that he might be who she's beginning to suspect he is.

She turns to the horse and starts to pet it, if only to have something to do to calm her nerves. Could she really dare to hope the impossible? Have the gods taken pity on her and granted her not just a second chance at life, but a glimpse of the man her son would become? Or was she really still back in the mountains of Dorne, slowly dying, her life — and the future — flashing in front of her eyes?

His face brightens. How he ended up here isn't something he understands, but after his time in the Sphere, he's at least familiar with the idea of traveling between different realms, and even of those realms having different qualities from each other. (He's still amazed by electricity and showers; heat and light without needing to light a fire? Bathing without having to heat pans of water? To him, those are magic.) He can identify her point of confusion, and explain it in a way that might help them sort all of this out.

"This place, it not only takes people from different realms and brings them here. It also takes people from the same realm but different times and brings them here. There could be years between any two people from the same world."

She starts to shake her head halfway through his explanation. Different realms she understands, though it's still quite hard to grasp just how large the world actually is. But there's so much more than Westeros and the world she knows, and that she's come to accept. He tells her more, though: same realm but different... times? In his context it seems to make sense, since Ned would've been very young to have a son as old as he is. Unless Ned had taken in a child as his ward while he was fostered in the Vale. One of Robert's bastards? But no, this man looks distinctly like a Stark, and their father would've known.

Perhaps she should just believe what he's saying, as preposterous as it sounds. Her mind will just keep going around in circles otherwise.

"You speak of matters of myth and legend," she finally says, and she's unable to keep the incredulity out of her voice. Some old magic, perhaps? Like dragons, and the Others? "You mean to tell me that you and I..."

She trails off as her gaze turns to his strange sigil again. "You are a Northman, perhaps even a Stark," she points out, giving his achingly familiar face another glance, "yet the symbols you wear are strange." It's as if Houses Stark and Targaryen had united—

She stubbornly ignores the part of her that wants to believe in the impossible. Maybe, after everything, she just doesn't want to be disappointed.

good, cause that would be weird

king_inthenorth - 2022-07-28 12:51 (UTC) - Expand

she's younger than him but already thinks "this boy" hahaha

reko - 2022-07-28 16:03 (UTC) - Expand

he tries his best, he really does

king_inthenorth - 2022-07-28 17:40 (UTC) - Expand

lyanna stark | a song of ice and fire

she better prepare herself for a great big hug

he better prepare himself for being older than his mom hahaha

he's just glad he finally gets to have one

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at least his mom won't be telling him that he knows nothing hahaha

01 MARKET

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Market

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