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test drive meme

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( the test drive meme )

This is for anyone wanting to test out their characters in the setting before the applications open, see what clicks. Multiples will be allowed for this post, and you can generally assume any threads are a self-contained continuity unless you feel like getting creative.

Just post a thread with your CHARACTER NAME and CANON NAME in the title with a prompt and others will reply. Prompts and threads can be action spam or prose or whatever. These threads can be used on the sample section of your application, as well. Go out and have fun! Feel free to consult the institute tour and dorm guide for setting info. We also encourage you to check out the "!!event" tag on the IC comms to brush up on the story so far.

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The door to the hallway is open while Ylva is cleaning the room, lifting up furniture with one hand to reach under it with the vacuumer with the other. A little project for chemistry went over board just a bit and left a fine film of silver on everything. Wonderful. She's singing what she works, and for those not familiar with Icelandic it will sound beautiful. For those who understand the language it will be clear that the words tell a story of war and bloodshed, some re-imagined Viking tale.

Timo leans on the door, listening. He knows the language, if not the words, but he can still enjoy the song. When there's a break in it, he'll step forward, forgetting that she probably didn't hear him approach over the hoover. "Is that Icelandic?" He asks, smiling.

The look that she gives him is caught somewhere between skeptic and surprised, but then she nods. "Yeah. I wouldn't have thought that an American would recognize it." Implied is that she doesn't expect Timo to understand - implied is also that she cannot tell one English accent from the other yet. Her skills with the language are mostly from English class, occasional movies (she's rarely had the time to just sit down and watch them, and her town has no cinema so that was never something to do with friends, either) and some foreigners from all over the world that sometimes spoke worse English than her. So she can answer without problems, but intricacies of accent or slang will be lost on her.

"...You're pretty short for a guy, you know?" It's a practical assessment - she would have asked him to hold a few things up for her, but he's hardly tall enough for that.

"I'm Finnish." Oh, come on now, he knows that his accent isn't that good. Not that he would be necessarily able to pin her down that easily if he hadn't heard her singing, but at least he would have known that she wasn't American!

"And I'll probably grow while I'm here! Mom says she grew when she was my age." ...Although she's pretty short so many he shouldn't hope too much.

"Finnish or just Finnish American?" She's already met her first cases of people like that. 'Hey, you're Icelandic, that is cool! I'm Icelandic too my grandfather's dad was from there' - she really has no sense for that. Americans are weird anyway, and so very impractical - yeah, someone has a strong case of culture shock (it being her first time abroad, that is not particularely suprising). And has no patience for it, being on edge with the new situation and the worry about leaving her mother back home. She always wanted to become a hero and travel around, but being in an unfamiliar enviroment where she knows nobody is more stressful than she expected, and she also never dreamed of going on adventures while her mother sits sick at home...

There are a lot of factors playing into all of this that make her even brasher than she would normally be.

And that comment about still growing gains Timo raised eyebrows and then a shrug. "Boys can still grow quite lately, I guess." And at that she halts for just a split moment, wondering how tall her brother would be now if he was still alive. Their father was very tall, after all, and their mother not short, either... But then the moment is over and she shrugs and gets back to work. It took her a while to let go and leave room for mourning in herself, and even then it was only the bare minimum. She's still eager to push it aside.

"Finnish! Honestly, don't count me in as one of them, I wouldn't say it if I wasn't." He flicks languages easily, one hand on his hip now, but then changes back to English. "There's a few international people here. I suppose that's not too surprising... Ah, but you should meet Ari and Sigurd! They both grew up there. And I think Ari was born there, but really they've all moved around so much it's hard to keep track sometimes!" He pauses to take a breath, and then hums, stepping into the room. "Do you want help? What happened, anyway?"

Okay, she understood not a word of that, except for that it sounded Finnish, but she can guess what his point was. The next thing surprises her though, and she nods - she won't necessarily become friends with those boys, but it is good to know that there are others who speak her language just in case that something would make it necessary to find native speakers. Whatever that would be.

~~Homesickness is irrational and impractical so it doesn't happen, okay?~~

"A project exploded." She gestures at the silver shimmer that covers everything. "I completely forgot that the water here has a different chemistry than the one back home, and that should have changed everything." The temperature had been different, too. "So I'm cleaning up and starting over. What grade are you in?"

He glances around for a moment, and then picks off a cloth to start wiping off the surfaces for her. "Eleven. It's harder studying in English then I thought it'd be, though. What about you?" He can understand the mistake she made all too easily. There's too many things to think about that simple things get forgotten.

"Ten. Some things are a lot easier here, like math, but others are just... too different." She frowns as she picks up some larger shards of glass. "I wanted to go on adventures, but I'd rather have gone to a place that was unknown to mankind, or at least reasonably wild. And not run-over by tourists." There might be a bit snark at this, because the middle part of her description is how she's often heard others describe her home.

"I don't know if there's anywhere like that still really." Timo says, frowning a little as well. "One time Nalle and I ended up biking back to Finland, and even then when we spent a lot of time camping out I don't think we were ever completely isolated.

But you know, there'll still be time for adventures after we finish school! And there has to be somewhere left unexplored."

"Back to Finland? From where?" She sits up into a crouching position, eyes judging how much of the silver she has managed to make go away so far.

"If everything fails I'm sure space programs should advance a lot with mutant powers aiding in them... eventually. When the higher ups get their shit together and stop being babies about people who are different." She sighs. This is not going anywhere. She needs a different method of cleaning... "Not that I can really talk, it was never a problem back home. But I guess that's partly because my father was just popular with the people. Always a helping ear and arm and all that, way too nice for his own good."

"From Denmark. It took half the summer, but it was fun." He explains, smiling at the memories. "Nalle used to visit his brother there before he moved, but one time they had a fight so we decided to make our own way back." There were a few facts missing in that, but Timo didn't even think about it.

He finishes wiping off the desk and goes to shake his cloth out of the window. "You can't be too nice!" He says, cheerfully.

"Of course you can be too nice." Wow some people... you start to really really remind her of her father :| You'll make things harder on your family if you are like that. "You have to look after your own weelbeing and health and financial stability before reaching out to help others, and then when the helping would do more harm to you than it would help them you still shouldn't do it if you could." The shrug that goes with the words indicates that she doesn't care too much if he follows her words or not, though - she is kind of used to that kind of advice falling on deaf ears.

Timo considers that and frowns. He's not entirely sure that he agrees. "I don't think I could live with myself if a friend needed help and I didn't offer it if I could." But he's not childing, or trying to force her to change her opinion. That's just how he feels, and if she can live with herself, then that's probably a good thing. "You're right, though, because otherwise you can't be around to help them next time, but then what if they're not around to help next time?" If he waited every year to buy Björn a present in the hope that next year he'd have enough money to buy him something that was worthy of his friend, he'd never get him anything.

"Friends and family are different." She stops and considers him for a moment, wondering if he was talking about friends just there or if he would be one of those weird people who consider everyone a friends. "They are a part of your own wellbeing and so on. Though even then - think about it like this. I bet you flew here. They say in the safety instructions that you should place the mask on your own face before helping others, because if you try to help others first and then lose consciouseness before you really get to that, you are useless.

And that applies to most things." Middle ground. They should be able to meet here.

Pretty accurate. Unless they're the opposing team of a hockey match he'll consider everyone a friend - and even then he'll be friendly after the match. But she's brought up a good point and he frowns, and then nods. Some situations are different, but that's a time when she's definitely right. "Most things." He agrees, cheerfully. They can agree to disagree.

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economically - 2013-02-14 20:02 (UTC) - Expand

Poor Liir is a sucker for music. He doesn't understand the words, but the lilting melody tugs him up from his infirmary bed towards the source. There he can see a beautiful (girl? boy?) fellow teenager singing while they sweep, covered in a fine dust of silver that dances in the late afternoon light.

So, like an idiot, he's staring there, still wearing his infirmary gown (though over his regular clothes, as he'd stubbornly insisted). And when he's noticed, he'll blush a bright green.

For a few moments, Ylva will just stand there, still and staring. Sure, she knew that there would be other mutants here, that is kind of the point of this school, but she did not expect there to be... Well. People who didn't look human. Or she expected it but when she sees the green upon his cheeks she realizes that she wasn't prepared for it.

"Hello." The surprise shows in her eyes, though she isn't staring too openly.

"Hello." He says, in a voice a little scratched up from a ravaged throat. And since Your singing was beautiful and the fine silver dust and early evening sunlight made you look so ethereal I wasn't sure if i'd just been given another dose of painkillers is the kind of thing a creepy weirdo would say (and he's only the latter), Liir follows up with: "Do you want help?" Pause. "And what...does the song mean?" He regretted making her self conscious with that second question but he had to know.

It doesn't make her self-conscious, but rather excited - she's not overeager to share, but since she asked she more than happily will do it. Only after instructing him to take the vacuumer and clean under the things that she is lifting up for him, though.

But when that is said, she continues: "And about the song, the first verses are about a band of men who travel the seas and fight many battles, raiding rich villages, pillaging and finally bringing home very fine booty. It's a bit like a Hollywood movie, just without the love story." Okay, much more graphic and detailed, which a translation would reveal, but the description still stands, inaccurate as it is.

Liir takes the long arm of the vacuum with one hand. With the other, he concentrates, and long feathers grow over his forearm, making a good block to keep dust from escaping.

"A...saga then? Something traditional?" A person connected to their heritage, he thinks, adrift, stateless.

"Yeah, though it is a modern re-imagination - language changes and nobody knows anymore what the original way of canting was, things like that." She shrugs, though only lightly to not make the bed that she is currently holding up move and if worst came to worst slip from her fingers and crash down. "You'd have to ask old fool Leif about those things. Though with him you never know where truth ends and fiction starts, and the other way round.

Why are you asking?"

"I'm just curious. It gets boring in the infirmary." He says. Whatever tales his 'siblings' had gotten told them before sleep, he'd been excluded from. Perhaps to make up for that, he found that kind of thing fascinating.

Liir might be thin but he's mroe than strong enough to hold up some furniture. However as she's moving it, some of the dust moves as well and settles on his hand.

Abruptly he can see the accident that led to it being everywhere and there's a sound of halted breath as he stops himself from laughing.

She raises her head and looks at him, one eyebrow raised, head slightly cocked. What was that amused reaction for? Or at least she assumes that it was that.

He tries to look serious, and succeeds in plastering his normal, lineface expression back on.

"Ah, how did this happen?"

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Ylva Thorsdóttir | Vinland Saga

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sorry for the two rotating icons I will get more once I have my laptop back

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sorry for the two rotating icons, I'll get more once my laptop is back form repairs.

It's OK, he's only got about five

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