brethrencourt | TEST DRIVE 001b

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TEST DRIVE 001b

Try on those ridiculous clothes, sample the catering, and run through your lines. It's time for the Long 18th Test Drive.

ARRIVAL: Characters come to in a dark, tropical forest in a huddle. There are the sounds of strange birds, animals, and insects all around, some of them perhaps worryingly close. With a closer inspection, arrivals realize they're on an incline: Going up will prove fruitless, no matter who they are. The ground there starts to grow rocky the further they climb, and they may find themselves slipping back down to their arrival point, even if they're expert mountain climbers. The ground sloping downward will eventually level out leading toward light, music, and noise. But for the moment, they're simply a group of lost people (or monsters/bipedal animals/robots/etc) with no idea where they are or how they got here. Now's probably a good time to ask, "Who the hell are you? Where am I?" Time to use the buddy system.

TORTUGA: There's a town off the coast of Hispaniola that never sleeps, and that town is Tortuga. It's swapped hands more times than anyone can count, but for now, the French have it. And they do like the extra money the pirates that frequent it bring in; they like it so much that they imported over 1600 prostitutes from Europe to keep them happy. So you might as well relax while you're here, as much as you can with random gunshots and fist fights, anyway. Drop in for a drink at the Faithful Bride, check out the wares for sale (provided to you tax-free thanks to piracy) near the dock front. Visit the warehouse where those ill-gotten goods are stored and distributed. Maybe you're looking for work on a ship? The captains can usually be found - frazzled and busy - in the taverns and at the shipwrights and everywhere in between (just look for the hats), and if they're in a good mood, they might be willing. But the key point of Tortuga is this: Have fun. Some examples might include: A barfight! Wandering into a brothel (maybe by mistake)! Getting duped into joining a crew! There's no end of trouble to get into.

MIRROR POST: When they arrived, every person found, in a pocket or a bag or tucked away somewhere on their person, a little compact mirror. It's nothing fancy: Square, with hinges and a latch that keep it closed, the outer casing carved from seashell, the inner mirror a little spotted with age. But if it's played around with enough, it quickly becomes apparent it works as a communication device. Here you have access to all of the marked folks, no matter how far and wide they might spread. Need to have a heart to heart with a buddy in Singapore? Want to send out a general ad to everyone at large? Looking for answers to questions? This is the quickest way to get all of that.

CHOOSE YOUR OWN ADVENTURE: The world is open, and it's full of pearls that are just waiting for you to take them. Maybe you want to have some quiet time to scrub clean in a bathhouse in Singapore. Perhaps you're visiting the fabled pirate city of Libertalia in Madagascar. Maybe you've found yourself lost in Mayan ruins or stranded on an island. Or you were shipwrecked in a hurricane. Or you've decided to relocate to Port Royal or one of the American colonies for a quieter sort of life. Either way, this is your story, might as well make it a good one.

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[Snart glances at it, but he's more interested in the fact that the alien has moved his hand away from that arrow. He releases the grip of his cold gun and shrugs out of his parka.

There's an uneven weight in one of the pockets. He pulls out a mirror that matches his companions in size and shape.]

So, someone kidnaps us, plants compacts in our clothes--all without us knowing--and then drops us off on in a tropical paradise and flies away. [He gestures expansively to the jungle around them and then a swoop of his hand to mimic an airplane or spaceship in flight.]

I'm gonna go with reality tv show. [Not really his guess; this all feels more nefarious than that. But right now it fits the evidence about as much as anything else he can come up with.]

[Yondu doesn't know what a reality tv show is, but it sounds like something Peter would have said. Except there wasn't reality tv in Peter's time.]

Had dates end worse than that. Guess we're not getting off too bad, then.

But this bein' for somebody's entertainment. I'd buy it. [There's a lot of sickos in the galaxy. Him too, sometimes.]

I guess I have higher expectations for dates. [There better be promise of either an amazing heist or a fantastic dinner, or else no deal. And at the first sign of boredom or trouble, he's gone, date over. Gentle letdowns are for wusses.]

But if we're entertainment, that means that somebody's watching.

[He peers into the trees around them, looking for a blink of light or a flash of metal.]

[Yondu groans, a long deflating thing. He's looking around for something too, that noise subsiding into a grumble, idly propping his leg up onto a rock as he wonders.]

I say we go lookin' for 'em. Beats stickin' around here. And I'm not too keen on being' someone's wildlife documentary.

There're enough self-important assholes out there that think nothin' of stringin' someone along like that. Hell, if you do it, at least realize it ain't common or normal.

Degenerates.

[He's already muttering as he's starting to head down the hill. He's taking it slow, though, looking for traps.] Hey, you see a two legged big ol' rat with clothes you let me know, an' stay out of his line of fire 'cause he's probably armed.

And if we find them, we let them know that they just made a big mistake.

[His hand goes back to his cold gun, not so much out of suspicion of the blue alien (they seem to have reached at least a temporary truce against a possible common enemy) but rather out of a readiness to freeze whatever bastards brought him here.

The alien's warning makes Snart glance his way in confusion though. Rat with clothes, armed and dangerous. Not as weird as a telepathic gorilla, but still pretty damn weird.]

Two-legged rat. I'll keep that in mind. [He drawls.]

By the way, the name's Snart. But some people call me Cold. [He wears Cisco's nickname like a prison tattoo. It's his now. It's a part of his identity.]

Yondu. I'm a Ravager captain. Sorta an independent fleet.

[A space pirate guild. He takes breaks between his sentence to listen, and he's fairly quiet in his stride. Says a lot for a guy in thick boots, much like Snart is.]

Be honest. How much money you got on your head that you know about? I'm wanted by a buncha Kree. And I wouldn't put 'em past this kinda shit.

[All the spite there. All of it.]

The people who are after me lately don't do bounties. They send their own personal staff to deal with their problems. [Personal brainwashed staff in the case of the Time Masters.]

Freaks who don't care about money, just about getting the job done. This isn't their style. [He thinks. He doesn't know nearly as much about their M.O. as Mick and Rip, but based on what they've said, the Time Masters go for swift execution, not this kind of playing around.]

I know some people that would be into this kind of thing. But if you don't then it don't line up proper.

Somebody who don't care about money is a lot more off-puttin' than someone who does. At least they got some grounding in reality. [He doesn't know if these guys do.] Usually they get too damn used to gettin' their own way. Or they're a priest.

[Equally crazy.]

[Snart considers any of his other enemies, aside from the Time Masters, who could be responsible. But the Mafia doesn't play this type of game, and Team Flash...yeah, maybe Team Flash would drop him off on a tropical island just to get him out of the way for a while, but he can't see why they'd put this other guy here with him.

Besides which, Snart had been in the uninhabited Alpine mountains of 16th century Italy before finding himself here, which was already plenty far the hell out of the way of Team Flash.]

Any of those people you know who'd be into this kind of thing got time travel?

Time travel? [He stops to ask incredulously.]

How do you figure time travel got somethin' to do with this? [He looks at that weird mirror again. He thinks, just maybe, he sees some distant light through the trees.]

Just a theory I'm working on.

[And the fact that he's fairly sure that no one on 15th Earth spoke the way Yondu speaks, which means that Snart was carried across time as well as space. Unless Yondu is speaking alien and this is Rip's translation pill making him sound like he has a southern accent.]

Any idea what year it is? By Earth reckoning? [He adds, just in case.]

[It's even stranger to think that he's a special brand of Space Southern.]

Well, I picked Peter up in ah... nineteen eighty... hell, what year. I know he goes on about. Oh yeah. Nineteen eighty eight. And Terran years are about three-hundred sixty days, right? And a day's about as long as a Xandarian day.

So twenty-five, twenty-six years give or take... Around the range o' twenty-fourteen I reckon.

What's it for you, Frosty?

Frosty? Last I checked I ain't a jolly happy soul.

[He tilts his head.]

Time's a complicated thing. I'm from two thousand sixteen originally, but before I was brought here I was in fifteen-something, saying "Hi" to baby Galileo.

You should see a frost giant. Might give you some other options.

[But, anyway.]

Okay, that is weird.

I think... we're gettin' near somewhere. Startin' to hear some people carryin' on.

[Which means he's slowing down, as this can go very well or very badly.]

Don't imagine this is the place to go sight seeing for frost giants. I doubt they take tropical vacations. [Snart tugs off his black leather gloves and matches Yondu's pace.]

I really hope this isn't Lian Yu, or we're going to have some problems.

I'm gonna be honest. I think we already got plenty of problems. So I guess we got the right set up to be not at all surprised.

[He says blandly, crouching behind some brush and finally catching sight of what looks like a derelict as hell ocean port.] There are a lotta people down there.

And if they ain't Terran, they're close to it.

[AKA he's the only blue guy, and that doesn't sit right.]

[Snart squints down at the shanty town and the raucous crowd milling the streets. Unless another species invented tricorn hats, they're definitely on Earth]

We're either in the eighteenth century or we stumbled across a Hamilton after-party.

[He drawls then turns back to Yondu.]

You want to get out of here?

I've got an idea. The team of do-gooders I was with before have probably noticed by now that I'm gone. They're going to look for me [He's confident that Mick will start bashing in skulls if they try to abandon him. Even after everything.] and they'll eventually use the ship's computer to do it. All we've got to do it send up the right kind of smoke signal they'll come for me.

You in?

[Earth people must have a hell of an entertainment industry if they reference it so much. Too bad they're not advanced enough for ports, yet.]

Yeah, I want out of here.

So what sorta smoke signal was you thinkin'? 'Cause I've heard that Terrans don't exactly react well to people with skin colors that don't match. I don't exactly come by often but I take it on good authority.

And mine ain't gonna go with nobody's.

A big blue alien in a tropical beach town circa Revolutionary War... [That's around when tricorns were big from what he remembers of history. Not a subject he studied much, unless it was art history. Gotta know the provenance of a painting if you're deciding if it's worth stealing or not.]

Yeah, that should get the Waverider's attention.

[And if it doesn't, he'll keep sending up smoke signals. Maybe find somebody important to history and kidnap them. Hold Thomas Jefferson at gunpoint and force him to add a coded message to the Declaration of Independence.]

So you want me to go down there and potentially gotta kill a lotta these folks if they start comin' after me with fire and brimstone and maybe some pitchforks.

I go down there, I ain't goin' alone. [Because Snart's friends aren't his friends, and Yondu doesn't have that many friends. He does, however, have allies.]

[He also seems oddly confident that they wouldn't be much of a match for him. Good news or bad news.]

Let's try to keep the casualties to a minimum. My...partners are touchy about that sort of thing. [They aren't his friends. He refuses to call them friends out loud. Mick is his friend. Sara's good. The rest are annoying do-gooders.] They'll whine for days if we kill people and who wants that?

[He draws his cold gun. Any excuse to use it is a good excuse.]

I'll help you give the town a cold welcome.

[With a grunt of discomfort (but acceptance) Yondu rises back up to his full height, again pulling back the right flap of his coat just in case he needs to defend himself.]

[So he waltzes down into a- what is this even?]

[There are already people stopping to look and Yondu's smirking as if it's nothing and trailing suspicious red eyes over them all.] What, y'ain't seen a Centaurian before?

[He chomps his jagged teeth at someone that gets too close, then chuckles when they rear back. Okay, this might actually end up fun.]

[Snart pulls his blue-tinted goggles down over his eyes just before they enter town, ready for fun and mayhem now. He grins and saunters next to Yondu, ready to ice the ground of anyone who runs at them with a weapon, or freeze any hand that raises a gun to them.]

Looking at you is enough to make their blood run cold.

Who? Little ol' me? Why I got the looks of an angel. I don't know why they'd be shyin' away from that...

[Except those two prostitutes that have retreated to the side of a door. And Yondu slows to check them out, giving one an up and down, before looking at Snart.]

Glad Terrans engage in the universe's oldest occupation in all your time periods, looks like.

[Some guy walks out of the brothel and spooks and runs right back in. Then hides behind the mistress. Well, at least no one is coming after them yet.]

Pretty sure there's nothing that looks like you on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

[When Yondu slows, Snart glances over towards whatever it is that's caught his attention. Behind his goggles, he rolls his eyes.]

Eyes on the prize, Blue. Don't get distracted from the job by a pretty face.

[But although they're getting plenty of stares, it's largely the kind of glassy-eyed shock of someone who thinks that life might be a drunken hallucination. No one's seriously kicking up a fuss yet. What does it take to get some proper notoriety around here? He aims his cold gun at a nearby well and freezes the water. A filthy man with a scraggly beard taps at the ice-filled bucket in confusion.]

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