sixthiteration | Test Drive 20 (August & September)

→ Holds and applications are always open. Holds are required for all applications.

→ Choose one of the scenarios below or make up your own. Feel free to try multiple scenarios.

→ Write LOGS or TEXT prompts, or both.

→ THERE ARE ONLY THREE RULES FOR THE TDM:

1. It has to take place in the 6I universe.
2. It cannot be the character's arrival into the game.
3. Please only test new characters who do not have a version in the game. Our cast list is here.

→ TDM threads cannot be used to meet AC, but if the character is accepted into the game and both players agree, you may keep the CR.

→ Character want ads are here.

Prompts

Happy anniversary, villagers! Buckle up!

HEAT WAVE - Poor you. All you were trying to do was get yourself a little something to eat from the kitchen at the inn. Maybe you cooked it up yourself (The inn does, after all, have an electric stove — FANCY!), or maybe you just grabbed some leftovers. By accident or on purpose, you ended up with way more RED SALT in there than you maybe should have, and this is no ordinary seasoning. Whether you like things eye-wateringly spicy or not, it's August, you're sweating buckets, and it's only getting worse.

SKUNK DRUNK - Isn't that just the way? You're out and about, minding your own business, and you get sprayed by a BROWN SKUNK. The good news? It doesn't stink like a normal skunk. The also possibly good news, depending on who you ask? You're now in for about 5 hours of being very, very friendly. (Just remember to keep the test drive PG!)

BRAIN CANDY - Whether you made it to the anniversary party or not, you've gotten your hands on a piece of leftover candy from the big bash. Careful, though, these treats are more than meets the eye: Whatever COLOR it was, you've now taken on the associated personality traits. (Not the power, just the traits.) At least it only lasts 10 minutes.

WILDCARD - Choose your own adventure. Maybe play powers roulette.

Texts

All characters are fitted with a smart watch-like device on their left wrist, which they can use to send text messages to other villagers.

- Texts may only be 140 characters long
- No video or voice, text only
- Display names may be changed by characters on the fly, but anyone can tap to see someone's real full name

Please list your CHARACTER NAME, CANON & PROMPT in your SUBJECT LINE.

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If there was anyone that he could accept walking in on this, it would be Tony, a noticeable fact considering how much he tensed up and then abruptly relaxed. Bruce never really bothered to be anyone else but himself with Tony from the moment they met, a singular and strange experience that he nevertheless appreciated. "You know, it's one of those times when you go hey, why not try something new, it'll be fine. And then ---" he waved a hand at the results. Bruce ordinarily would have refused the help, he tried to clean his own messes, but he thought this would be a good time to remember how to swallow without pain.

"I used to actually be good at spice, I think. Never at cooking. I'm glad I never took a home ec class." Dark eyes turned toward Tony as he put what was left of it in the sink. "Are you hungry? For something I'm not making." He was in the kitchen after all. It'd been years they were apart, but for Bruce it was only a fuzzy short period of time. He wasn't sure he could read him the same way anymore.

"It got me too, when I first arrived." It wasn't the worst mess Tony had seen in this kitchen (that was partially his and Peter's fault, surprising a hungry teenager when an uncaffeinated zombie ended in a lot of swearing and flailing), and therefore wasn't worth much commentary. Milk from the ice box poured like a highball cocktail, no ice, all flourish before Tony offered it over. "Drink. I got this."

If he wanted to eat he'd need to clean up, no hired help to be found here. Well. There was but the currency only ever meant more work for him which was as helpful as it was potentially exhausting. Trying to work out the slushie machine problem continued to boil down to finding a proper refrigerant and he didn't have near enough access to half of what he'd need to make that happen. Tony wiped up the last of it, squinting around for anything that he knew how to put together without burning anything. Himself included. "Came to grab something I could carry back to the forge. There's usually soup on."

Soup was- Pot, water, onions? Onions. Carrots. Potatoes. Fuck it. Tony started grabbing a little bit of everything and diced it to a relatively uniform cube before chucking it in the pot. Food would happen eventually.

"Oh good, I guess I'm part of the bad spice choice team now." It sounded like a terrible reply in his head, and with anyone else he would have clumsily attempted to joke a little more, but Bruce just sighed and took the milk. Much, much better. His face was still very overheated from a mix of the spice and the embarrassment, but the latter was not new. "Thanks. Sorry." He really didn't like other people cleaning up his messes, except in retrospect it was exactly what he was best at. Running away, leaving people behind. That mental reminder made him frown and put the glass in the sink too.

He watched Tony attempt to make ... something, arching an eyebrow. "I feel like I shouldn't have to point out the precarious reality of putting liquids near work." Bruce was clumsy, of that everyone was very aware, so he learned that lesson and was never allowed to have anything damaging in the lab at college. Tony had his own set of rules. Or lack of rules. "So I guess it hasn't really changed, has it? The forge. The forgetting to eat and probably sleep." He smiled faintly, fondly, at that. It was a nice thought, that good things didn't change when he wasn't looking, but he knew it was not real.

Tony snorted quietly as he finished wiping up the mess. Bad life choices, bad spice choices. Brilliant men with knee jerk reactions to complicated situations- adding a little too much red salt was the worst of their sins. "You'll probably still be feeling warm for awhile. That's a side effect of whatever the compound in that mineral is. Heats you up."

Sometimes too much, in Tony's opinion, not that he ever needed it with as much time as he spent in and around the Forge.

"If I still had computers, wires, and Dum-E to worry about? It'd be an issue." But the forge was- not basic so much as kicked back an age or so in tech. Enough to keep him busy. Useful. Focused on the projects he had written on the wall and not how terribly everything back home ended. "You'd think that- but no. Peggy makes sure I eat. And Steph. And Bull."

Explaining the first and last would be a trip. "They get...annoyed with me if I stay up too late in the forge. Stern words were had, Gummibear."

"Very good thing to note if we ever have a heat problem or someone is freezing, although it wouldn't be much of a long term solution." And it was that natural mind, to analyze, to break apart, to assume the worst. Something heated you up, great, in case someone was dying. Bruce had a running list of all the easy and hard ways to die in any given situation, it used to only be a concern for other people. Now? Now it was more personal.

Bruce had a momentary pang of feeling that he instantly felt guilty about, and pushed away, because it was irrational to fear being replaced when that wasn't the case, and also when you were the one who left in the first place. Bruce had friends he could count on one hand, more like two fingers. Other people had many more. It was how it was. The nickname instantly warmed over the bad thoughts, and he smiled. "Good, you need that."

He rubbed his hands together, never really sure where to put them, unless in a lab where they were able to go everywhere. "You're ---" Bruce paused and crossed his arms. "I was going to say okay like a question, but I know you're not. I could, um ---" He shrugged. "I wouldn't fall asleep. If you had things to say."

"I thought you'd like hearing that." Garlic? Garlic. It wasn't food if there wasn't garlic- dicing that took a little bit more of his focus than the rest of everything else starting to simmer in the pot. There were more steps he'd skipped, he thinks, but he didn't need anything major. Vegetables, starch, protein, a carrier fluid by way of stock or broth which he didn't know how to make but- wasn't this a step? "You're no longer alone in the 'Keep Tony Stark Sane' club."

It was a small club. Pretty exclusive. It'd gotten smaller recently- so the additions were both a surprise and still a little startling. People didn't often sign on to deal with him.

Peggy he was still half certain only did it out of a sense of obligation, but he wasn't about to turn her away. Bull, now. That? That he still didn't know how to read.

"...I've got work." He murmured, shoulders winding tight as he added garlic to the pot, eyes dark. "It's been a rough two years. Rough couple of days before I came here." But- he swallowed down bitterness and resentment both, painting on a PR smile that's too wide and too bright to be any kind of honest. "But I'm good."

Ish.

Relatively.

"Keeping Tony Stark Sane, huh? Me doing that was the blind leading the blind." They were mad scientists. That was what Tony said, and it was true. The two of them separate made bad decisions, caused a lot of violence and turmoil, and then together, they did much more. It was sad but inevitable. Sad that a friendship made with such sincerity and rarity had to come hand in hand with so much regret and pain. Bruce didn't have a single connection in his life that wasn't a hundred different variations of Complicated or Difficult. Simple didn't last long in the equation.

"I'm glad, I am, it's good that you have people." When Bruce first met him, he assumed Tony was who he appeared to be in the public. Brilliant and beloved and good with everyone, good at all the things Banner himself couldn't even dream about. And he was. He was just other things too. Even now, he had a magnetic (not intentional) pull, it drew people in. Whoever these three were, it was important.

Bruce of years ago would just let that fly, but time together, time with the Avengers, and then some truly terrible things happening made him a lot less scared than he used to be. Not of the things that mattered, when they saw most of it die. He usually shied away from being in other people's space, and Tony was the one who just ambled through his personal space, so he did the same, sidling up to his side. "Tony, you know I'm don't believe that." He watched his friend carefully. "I know it's been awhile, but it's still just me here. You can tell me anything." The lack of judgment between two mad scientists? Necessary.

Once bitten, twice shy. He hadn't withdrawn after spilling his guts and being met with disinterest- but redirected. Work talk was fine but his personal neuroses? He didn't bring it up. His damage was his. He'd deal. Had managed to for the most part, up until Ultron. Nothing like a good brain scrambling to set everything off in the worst way. And Bruce had vanished afterward-

Not that Tony could blame him. Everything they hated about themselves got painted across the public consciousness in one fell swoop. Bruce trying to protect himself? Not something Tony could begrudge. He'd always been braced, more than a little, for Bruce to bail. It was how he operated to keep himself safe, to deal with what happened to him. "What's there to say?"

He shouldn't slump into Bruce's space so easily, this too shall pass, shouldn't trust without thought, he knew better. He'd always known better. "We lost. Everything we did? Wasn't enough."

Bruce was surprised when Tony leaned in, but he reacted carefully and sincerely, moving his hand from Tony's shoulder to just moving the arm around him. Bruce lacked affection in his life, the few times it existed being fleeting, but he remembered. And he remembered wanting these flickers of reassurance too. Tony was the first person in years to do this, be in his space, so shortly after they met. He'd been startled, taken aback, already so nervous just shaking hands with others. Tony did this for him when they were only strangers. Bruce could do it now for him.

"I know. We tried and it wasn't enough." He was always a bleak person, but this time? For a few moments, he really thought they could do it. He thought they had a chance. He felt maybe they had, and they lost anyway. The Avengers and their fight, it all finally caught up to them. Bruce had so few people left to lose, but he wondered. Betty. The one tie to his past. Was she dust? Pepper, who was always so kind to him? But he had so little compared to Tony, because Tony believed in creating a suit to save the entire planet. They were all his to lose.

"I'm sorry. I shouldn't have left. I should've been stronger." That could apply to many things. Strong enough not to run. Strong enough for the Hulk to help, the Hulk could jump high, he might have been able to follow Tony into the sky, into space. Maybe that would have changed things. Woulda shoulda coulda. "We tried, that might be nothing, but it was something too. I know you of all people probably fought the hardest."

He'd forgotten how well they fit. It wasn't like Pepper, a lithe lines and soft curves, tucking around him like she could lift the weight he carried. Not like the solid bulk of Rhodey wrapped against his spine or his side, holding him up or hanging on for the ride. Bruce? Fit right under or over his shoulder. Had a dense weight to him Tony always chalked up to the Other Guy, a warmth he figured was a side effect of being full of Gamma radiation. A big, sciency teddybear that he thought nothing at all of sidling up to in the past, patting, listing, leaning, reaching out for him because- in all the time he'd been on the run, hunched in on himself, trying to keep his head down- who would he let close enough to do that?

No one- or not many.

It'd been a privilege. One Tony missed.

"Fourteen million futures- that one? The one where we lose? Apparently it was the only way for us to win." Time stone in play, him alive. Why was his life worth the stone- it wasn't. It couldn't be, and yet- Tony sighs, rubbing at his left side. "Enough that I was bleeding out when I woke up. Barnes saved me. Got me to town before I died."

Outside of Betty, Bruce didn't have anyone who got close to him. She was so gentle, always gentle, as if she knew the inner fragility of the man she decided to love. This was before the Hulk, before he fractured more, and he didn't know how to respond to such kindness outside of accepting it, being grateful for it. And then there was Nat. Nat shocked him, moved past his defenses, spun around them until he was raw with uncertainty. Tony was so easy in comparison. He gave and he took and it was natural.

Bruce offered the affection for Tony's sake, but now he was taking it too. Alive. He was alive. Bruce saw him follow the space ship, disappearing from Earth, and no one knew what happened. They had so short a time together again. No time for this. He considered what Tony said. "Maybe ...." No, that was not the way to take it. His mind considering detached what winning looked like, and what would happen next. They were stuck here. There was no continuation to find out what winning was after the snap. "Fourteen million futures, the odds were near impossible, we did what we could."

Damn. He came too close. Bruce leaned back a little to try to get a look. "Is it healed? Do you need anything?" Doctor in name, amateur medic at best, but concerned friend always. "Sounds like I owe Barnes a ... well not a drink. Since there isn't many. I'll have to think of something else as a thank you." For saving the person who saw him.

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Test Drive 20 (August & September)

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