forum "This is a fridge." "Dear god what does it do?" (OxO Open!)

Started April 19, 2023 by @StarlessSkys

tune

First time making a post in like this so please go easy on me if something is off!

This is an idea that has been bouncing around my brain for a while now! (I'd like to be Character A)
Character A is someone who's taking the scenic route on their way home. It's a completely normal day for them, and the road is essentially abandoned, not passing any others cars at this time of day and this far out. Until they meet character B.

B has somehow, I'll leave it up to you, traveled through time, even worlds if you'd rather have that. For whatever reason they are now here, in this time, in this place. And absolutely lost.

Character A stumbles upon them in the middle of the road and realizes they can't just leave them there!

Mostly I just want shenanigans involving someone completely unfamiliar with the modern world and the person who somehow got roped into looking after them.

A writing sample would be greatly appreciated! I prefer long responses and while I would like for this to be fun, it does not necessarily have to be light-hearted.

Name: Katarina Asteri
Nicknames: Fang of the South, Kingkiller, Godslayer, Hūatl's Pride, Natāh's Champion
Age: Unknown; assumed to be in her early 30's, however
Ethnicity: Leonin
Gender: Female, definitely female
Sexuality: (?)

Appearance-
Hair Color & Length: Her fur is an ashy black with splotches of dark yellow and forest green.
Eye Color: Pale bluish-orange color
Height: 8'4"
Weight: As a leonin, she's quite slim but muscular; most of the 208.32 lbs of mass on her are from pure muscle.
Skin Color: N/A
Scars: A long scar stretching from the left side of her hairline, across the bridge of her nose, and curving sharply to end just beneath the right side of her jaw
Body Type: Think lioness, but humanoid
Face Claim (Optional): N/A
Voice Claim (Optional): N/A

Personality-
Basic Traits: Very playful and fiery, she is not at all familiar with anything outside of the southern jungles and savannahs of her home country. She loves fighting anything that's bigger or possibly stronger than her. She has a major soft spot for weaker/smaller creatures, though! And also really loves what in the modern world would be called catnip ;)
Biases: HATES people who abuse their power
Political Lean (Optional): N/A
Motivations (Optional): To be that world's strongest
Flaws: Will go out of her way to fight the biggest things she can find, actually! Can and will track the scent of meat for more than three miles.
Hobbies: Fighting, eating, playing
Talents: Fighting, eating, playing

Power(s)- Beast Form, Elemental Enhancement: Earth, Elemental Sorcery: Earth, Grounding, War Arts: Strength Enhancement
Basic Outline: Beast Form is exactly what it sounds like: she takes the form of a collosal beast of legend. . . the Golem. Golems are 12 foot humanoids with feline features that can rarely be found hidden beneath the soil of her homeworld's savannahs. Elemental Enhancement: Earth renders her immune to any earth-based attacks, such as metal blades or even bullets, though she isn't immune to the force these attacks have on her body, and some days wakes up with large bruises. Elemental Sorcery: Earth basically grants her the powers of a normal earthbender as seen in ATLA, and Grounding is a passive ability that renders her incapable of being stunned or even moved when she has solid footing on any sort of ground as long as her feet touch something that was once of the earth. War Arts: Strength Enhancement is a skill that she has to concentrate to activate, but once activated requires no focus to maintain. This is her main power that she uses for anything, including and up to fighting Natāh, the Goddess of the Earth. (Natāh is not the earth itself; she is what is called a Conduit: an immortal receptacle of a portion of Earth energies that she can use as she pleases. Katarina has won against her, but still has yet to win against an entire planet - but that doesn't mean she's stopped trying to fight actual mountains. Natāh is vastly more proficient with Earth based sorceries than Katarina is)
Drawbacks: There are no real drawbacks to her powers. Either she's gained such mastery over her powers that there are no drawbacks, or there were none in the first place. Either way, she's pretty damn powerful.
Inherent Limitations: The most she can use her Elemental Sorcery: Earth to manipulate is up to a half a foot ball field's worth of earth based things. (Note: this " half a football field's worth" also applies to depth, width and height, not just length)
Special Applications (Optional): She doesn't know it quite yet, but since iron and calcium are metals, she could use her Elemental Mastery: Earth to bloodbend or simply snap your bones. Fun stuff!

Name: Jonathan Mitchells

Nicknames: John

Age: 26

Species: Human

Gender, Sexuality: Male Pansexual

Talents: Jack of all trades, master of none.

Job: Works as a software engineer, so he doesn't have to leave the house.

Appearance: Oh my god, he's just a pathetic little wet cat honestly. John probably barely hits 155 lbs soaking wet and has the muscle mass of an anemic sparrow. Standing at about 5'11" he's built very gangly, all arms and legs and torso. Dark black hair cut short if he can remember to do it and bright blue eyes. Has the pale complexion of someone who doesn't go outside if it can be avoided. Jonathan has a cute little round nose and a surprisingly decent jawline. He tends to grit his teeth when he's frustrated. Tends to wear "easy" clothes like jeans and a t-shirt. Sneakers are a must.

Personality: Jonathan is kind of a mess. He's got terrible time management skills and can't keep a deadline to save his life. A bit shy with new people and incredibly easily spooked. He's awkward but very curious about things he's interested in. Has a bad habit of getting involved in things way over his head. Has a million projects he's started working on and then abandoned. Overwhelmed by small things but when the stress begins to mount he just bottles everything up instead until he can't deal with it anymore.

Extra: Despite not being able to keep a pet alive, there's three cats that show up at his apartment semi-regularly, so he likes to leave a dish of cat food out for them. They're doing much better than his dead houseplants.

Jonathan kind of liked driving.
It was something he'd realized a while back when he'd been briefly obsessed with F1 racing games. The speed was nice and the ability to go anywhere you'd like was tantalizing with all of its opportunity.

Still, it was hard to imagine racing in a car like his. A beat up old thing, that might have once been a mini-van. Dinged in half a dozen different places and the pale grey paint job wasn't particularly inspiring. The inside wasn't much better, but he had remembered to buy an air freshener last time he'd been to the store, it was still sitting in its plastic, shoved in the corner of one of the grocerie bags in the passengers side seat. John glanced at it, then leaned over, making a blind grab with one hand the other on the wheel and only half of his attention on the road.

Not that he'd actually hit anybody. He'd been in a nearby city to visit some friends, a measly hour drive there and back again. But he'd gotten a bit distracted, picking up some McDonalds for dinner and taking a wrong exit here and just missing a turn there.. He wasn't exactly lost, but it sure looked like a car hadn't been on this road for some time. Trees lined one side of the road, fields on the other, the paint lines faded with age. He hadn't seen a hint of headlights or tires in a couple miles, but he was sure that if he just kept going things would start looking recognizable soon.

His hand missed the inside of the plastic bag, catching on the handle instead, knocking the bag off the seat and onto the floor. It rustled for a moment, then settled in, he could almost imagine that it was content being smugly out of reach. Instead, he fiddled with the radio which didn't make any noise. He'd been planning on taking it to a mechanic this week, but the whole thing with his friends, work, and.. Not much else.. Had absolutely side-tracked him. Jonathan sighed, leaving it be, he should be looking for road signs anyways. He'd be damned if he caved and used his GPS. He was 65% sure he'd been down this road before and if he just kept going it would probably definitely hit the main road.

The man started making a game of how many birds he could spot instead. But atleast his eyes were on the road.

(I forgot a property of rock and soil. . . it doesn't conduct electricity XDDD so uh- let's just remember that for later)

While Jonathon was driving and paying attention to the road. Katarina was not paying attention - and so when some strange force sweeps her off her feet and tosses her through a short tunnel, she was caught way off guard.

She landed feet first on a strange rock with weirdly colored lines running through it, with strange poles rising into the air. Made of wood, they connected. . . string? She was thoroughly rattled, but she at least had very solid footing.

Her scrap armor of patched pelts and woven metal covered the important and vulnerable areas - but no more. Her tail swishes slightly as she raises her head and sniffs the air, at the same time listening to the strange noise that was coming at her, like a cross between a crunching hiss and the hum of a demented jïki, or hornet.

The next thing she knows, a strange bright light illuminates the surrounding night, and crashes into her.

She, of course, doesn't move.

The thing makes a sound like a metal tree being crushed by the fist of Natāh as it crumples around her.

Jonathan's eyes hesitated on the phone lines, spotting a whole flock of birds all in a row. He briefly wondered if they were all there together or if all of them had decided separately to land on this one spot.

So distracted he made another open handed grab at the bag on the floor, halfway leaned over the wheel, eyes very much not on the road. He could feel the car swerving slightly, so his head shot back up, just in time to see a something standing in the middle of the road?

All his brain could register in time was that it was tall and standing on two legs, so he jumped to the conclusion of person fairly quickly. John panicked, trying to slam on the brakes and stop the cars momentum, but he was several seconds too late. The car slid right into the figure and for a second, everything went black.

The air bag had deployed, and any other time John would have been slightly impressed that it still worked. For now he was only relieved. The dark haired man groaned, having only been unconscious for a few moments, he raised his hand to his head. He didn't feel like he was in pain.. Except for his shoulders where they'd jerked against the seatbelt. He slumped against the seat for a moment, his shoulders sagging in relief. He was alive, that was good, was the other-

Oh god. The other person. His mouth went dry.
He was too young to go to jail- Why were they in the middle of the road? Why had his car stopped?? Wouldn't- The man paused again, his brain trying to wrap around the concept, maybe his car would have been thrown off course, maybe dented, but it wouldn't be stopped. Hesitantly, he opened the car door, stepping out and glancing around warily. He cringed at every noise, and the only good source of light was the rapidly setting sun and his broken headlights, still giving out jagged streams of light.

He felt like he was going to be sick. "Oh god.."

Katarina stands, nowhere close to dead, in front of a now-dead metal construct or beast.

She looks aroud in the cloud of smoke and sniffs, smelling something strange, but at the same time was human.

She exhales sharply and enhances her arms only, tearing the car in half and then tossing the halves into the arid air beside the road.

Katarina looks around and then spots the human-thing, tilting her leonin head and striding towards him. She stops about a foot away and then grins.

"Are ye the one responsible for putting me in the middle of a fucking desert?" she asks.

Jonathan froze in the middle of the street, trying to see look at the ground for the body. There wasn't anything there, nothing on the ground, not even any blood. He moved a couple more steps towards the nose of the car and stopped as the metal hunk was lifted and a terrible screeching sound attacked his ears before two halves of what was once his minivan were thrown to the side.

And standing there, was a massive, several feet taller than him, fucking lion woman.

John screamed, shielding his face with his hands and falling backwards onto the road. He skittered back a few steps, mouth agape. Okay. This confirmed it. He'd died in that car crash and purgatory was one hell of a trip. Maybe it was a coma??

He didn't even hear the thing speak over his screaming. He was more consumed with fear that there was a lion right there that had ripped his car in half. Later on, he'd look back on this moment and kind of shake his head in shame. He could have at least screamed in a more dignified way, or not be a pile of quivering flesh on the ground, but he really couldn't blame himself.

The only discernible word he managed to get out from his unintelligible gibberish of panic was a loud "WHAT"

Katarina looks bemused as she stares down at the man quivering on the ground. Quite a normal reaction, actually.

"QUIET!" she roars after a moment of listening to the gibbering mess of a man for a few moments longer.

It was funny, but she was quite a bit more concerned with where the fuck she currently was. It was clearly nowhere close to her home country - it smelled and sounded too different. . . plus the appearance of the metal thing and this human didn't help her at all in figuring out where she was.

She stands and takes a deep breath.

"Who are you? Where am I?" she asks.

At the sound of a roar, Jonathan went dead quiet, afraid that if he moved what had happened to his car would happen to him. Didn't stop his trembling though, it was only just dawning on him how weird all of this was. This was definitely not normal. Pretty sure.

As if to prove just how not normal this day was, the lion.. uhh, woman? Started speaking again. How did she know english? Scratch that, how was she standing? Scratch that, what was going on??

"Who are you? Where am I?" she asks.

John glanced around, as if looking to see if anyone else could answer the question for him. Then after a long moment where she didn't eat him or roar again, he hesitantly piped up.

"Uhm- I-I'm Jonathan?" He lowered his voice to a whisper, mumbling to himself. "Pretty sure I'm dead?" Then his voice went back to its quavering full volume. "You're uh-" Oh he definitely should have checked the GPS.. Wait no. How would a lion woman know where a back road in Kentucky was anyways? Maybe go broader.

"We're in Kentucky? The United States? Um, Earth?" He cringed away again, she probably hated his answer or was hungry, oh god don't let his weird afterlife end this soon!

"Thank you." Katarina chuckles when Jonathon goes quiet.

"Jonathan. . . and no, you're not dead. Trust me, if you were dead, you wouldn't be able to talk to me." she laughs uproariously.

"Ken. . . huh? Errth?" she asks. She looked genuinely stumped before shaking her head.

"Nope. Nevermind. Way too complicated most likely. Hey, do you know of any good taverns to eat and have a keg or two?" she asks, lifting Johnathan like he was a sack of feathers, setting him down on his feet.

SHe sniffs the air but smells nothing besides those same strange smells.

Jonathan blinks when the lion woman could hear his mumbled comment, then he wanted to face palm. Hard. She was a cat, cats could hear really well, of course she could- Stupid, stupid..

He was just about to offer another location, maybe something like "milky way galaxy", when he finds that the ground is no longer the ground. He was briefly disoriented, then felt himself standing again. It took all of his willpower not to shriek right then and there. Oh gOd- Her teeth were longer than his fingers-

"I- A tavern? You mean, like a bar??" He glanced around, then slowly began taking out his phone. Could he call the police? Would they believe him?

"I guess I can google if there's any in the area..?" He said hesitantly. A drink sounded nice right now.

Katarina stares at Jonathan and chuckles. "What were you about to say?"

"No, I mean a tavern." she huffs. "A 'bar' is something like a metal rod, or whatever."

She was already getting used to the strange words, at this point. "If it gets me food, do it. I honestly do not care."

She continues to sniff the air and listen, slowly gathering information on everything.

Despite his situation, Jonathan almost snorted at the lion woman's interpretation of the word 'bar'. He guessed not everything translated over. He was getting used to this remarkably quickly, but he supposed it was probably just his brains coping mechanism. A kind of 'screw it, if you can't beat them join them'.

At the mention of food however, he started looking around for the two halves of his car. He thought wistfully of his lost McDonalds and sighed walking over to the nearest half of the car.

"You were so young.." He sniffed once, then almost burst out laughing. Yep, he'd definitely lost his mind. Marbles lost, bats in the belfry, crazy as a loon.

Then he saw just a hint of a golden arch and he got a little bit excited. Maybe he wouldn't end up being dinner.
"Um.. Lion.. Lady..? If you're hungry I think I can still salvage my dinner from my.. Metal carriage?" He tried slowly. he doubted she'd know what a car was. Hell she didn't know what 'Errth' was, he doubted she'd understand much. His phone suddenly felt a lot safer.

"What? Did I say something strange?" Katarina asks.

She watches him as he goes over to his metal monster.

"What are you talking about?" she asks, laughing loudly.

"'Metal carriage.' Strange name. It is more of a monster than a 'metal carriage,' whatever that means." she snorts. "But do what you-"

She freezes, finally locking onto a specific scent. She turns to Jonathan and grins broadly. "New plan."

She lifts him up and tosses him over his shoulders, wires of iron winding around him from the earth, securing him, before Katarina launches into a full gallop down the road.