academyooc | test drive meme

Test Drive Meme The Pan Pacific Defense Corps was usually offered any of a variety of local buildings to set up their testing centers. For reasons of access and availability, most testing clinics were set up in central areas for any given community. Those of the PPDC staff on hand vary in their personal intensity. Some of the men and women wearing Strike Group insignia seemed overly serious, to the point of frowning with intensity at some of the youngest checking in for this testing round. Those from the K-Science division are tight with nervous energy as they direct prospective cadets through various activities. Everything was meant to measure potential, looking for that spark that meant they had somebody who was Drift Compatible. The majority of people were turned away after the first series of seemingly random tests, officials looking in eyes, placing odd looking contraptions over heads, asking for people to play a series of short games, one even in a virtual reality set-up.

	( SCENARIO ONE ) If you are still here now, you've made it past the first cut. You'll be sat down in a room with the rest who have made it this far, then systematically led into smaller interview rooms as pairs. If you came with a partner, they're your first interview candidate. If you came on your own, all your interviews are random assignment. All who have been asked to stay are required to sit through and conduct a series of short peer to peer interviews. The questions are straightforward. What is your least favorite color? Which tool in a standard toolbox is most useful to you? What time of day do you accomplish the most? Do you have children? What do you believe the Drift is like? Peer to peer interviews last for half an hour to an hour, and each person is asked to participate in at least three peer-to-peer interviews. There is no punishment for going off script. There is a one-way mirror looking into each interview area, and one door leading into the room with a small panel of glass located on the door. There is a clock on the wall in each room. The time they report is odd, when examined. These are not digital clocks, but timers, counting up time since the last Kaiju attack.

	( SCENARIO TWO ) Congratulations! You have been judged Drift Compatible, and sent home to pack after giving a definite yes to the Pan Pacific Defense Corps. The next thing you face down is the flight into Santiago, Chile, and the subsequent drive in to Valparaíso's Shatterdome. You and the rest of the crowd of soon to be PPDC Ranger Cadets have been gathered together to wait for the old bus scheduled to take you to the Shatterdome. While waiting in the open air, those from any Northern Hemisphere countries may find the summer weather strange. Today's high is going to be in the upper 80's, and there's not a cloud to be seen that's not clinging to the distant mountains. Welcome to Chile. When the bus arrives, it's another hour ride out toward the coastline to get to the Shatterdome. Even better? The bus Air Conditioner is broken. Safe travels, Cadets!

Please set up your own scenarios as you like. The above two scenarios are suggestions. Anything goes!

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It makes sense, really, to start off applicants with potential matches they have a previous history with. Perhaps it will be easier to bounce the questions off a friend as opposed to a stranger, depending on how intimate they range. While Eren's eyes drift upwards, Armin's remain fixed firmly on his clipboard even as he settles straight-backed in his seat, sifting through every printed query before raising his gaze.

Only to find the other stubbornly glued to the clock. He's had a fascination—nigh obsession—since that fateful day, one that permeates his entire being and radiates out like an aura blinding as the sun. With the attacks, with the program, and ever since he'd made it beyond the first stage, it's been more intense than ever.

But they won't progress if they don't focus on the task proper.

Armin opens his mouth to snare Eren's attention, but it isn't necessary. As if the tiny movement had yanked him back to reality, he's mulling over the questions for himself now.

"I can start," asking the questions, that is. Should they just start at the top? Seems the proper way to do it. "What is your least favorite color?"

Surprisingly, it's not something he can say they've ever brought up so directly.

He'd learned somewhere that the foundation of a good drift is trust. It's not uncommon for the drift compatible to be friends, siblings, lovers. They'd be hard pressed to find someone who Eren trusts more than his best friend, so that they've been started off together isn't at all a surprise.

Hell, it's probably for the best that Armin is first, because as seriously as Eren's trying to take this, he wrinkles his nose down at the questions in muted frustration as he reads them, shoulders drawn up and tense with concentration as he leans against the table. Armin already knows half this stuff about him, anyway. The rest just seems arbitrary. Unimportant.

But before he can voice the thought Armin reins him in again, starts at the top of the list. Least favorite color. He makes a hedging noise as he casts about for an answer.

"Purple? I dunno. It's just a color, isn't it?" There's an impatient air to it. He feels sort of silly. "What's all this got to do with piloting, anyway?"

Likewise, there would never be another he'd come to trust more than Eren, but if drifting at its core is a pure, unadulterated mental compatibility, it would take a lot more than trust for them to see eye to eye in one another's heads. It'd be an uphill struggle for anyone, really. And even if their thought processes are completely perpendicular, the one thing Armin has over anyone else is understanding.

Eren's response being a textbook case in point. Of course he's frustrated with the questions at face value. They're simple and pointless, easy to brush off and think too hard on simultaneously, and for the most part, totally unrelated to the reason they're sitting here.

"I'd say it's less about us feeling the same about colors and more about how we answer the question. I don't know the criteria, but presumably similar thought processes are a sign of drift compatibility. Simple things are often the most telling."

That said, there's a beat while he considers the question for himself.

"I'm not too fond of red, myself."

Impatient or not, Eren watches Armin closely as he guesses at the purpose of the exercise. Armin's mind is an analytical thing, something hot-blooded Eren has trouble understanding, but something he's honestly admired since they were kids. That's why he needs Armin around sometimes. To make up for the places in which he falls short.

There's a look of distant thought on his face as he turns the concept over in his mind—thought processes and drift compatibility. He wouldn't mind Armin as a partner, they've been inseparable since they were kids but there's some part of him that worries that Armin isn't cut out for this sort of thing—until Armin once again refocuses on the task at hand.

"Why not?" As if this is suddenly important. He's changed gears within seconds, from skeptical to cooperative on the subject of the questioning, a rapid three-sixty turn facilitated largely by Armin's patient explanations. Years of friendship or no, Armin's answer surprises him. Not that he'd ever thought too hard on the matter, but it wouldn't have been his first guess. (Maybe because the first red thing that springs to mind is sentimental. Mikasa and the scarf he'd given her, years and years ago. He doesn't voice it.)

It's not the first time it's happened, but it never fails to get a bit of a grin out of him. Eren brushing off a concept only to have him latch back onto it with renewed vigor after being taken through its merits. But it does leave Armin having to cast about for an elaboration on his response.

If he had to overthink the question, he's always held warm colors in a harsher context. They're brighter, louder, more eye-catching, thus put to use where the eye needs to be caught most. Indications of danger. While yellow and orange are fundamentally more grating, they serve as more of a warning: a backdrop for important notices, a vest to stand out a vulnerable worker in a bustling construction site, a color scheme of a venomous animal. Red comes after. It's a sign that the damage has already been done; sirens, emergency vehicle lights, the color of blood.

Even if he hadn't been quite at ground zero, there had been a lot of red that day. A lot of confused and frantic and scrambling red, completely baffled as to how to handle the impossible situation. If that isn't overthinking, he's not sure what is.

"I'm just partial to cool colors. Yellow and orange get a bad enough rap as it is, but red is overrated."

Nailed it. There's a little shrug to follow. A thought process doesn't require a four-page essay of personal history, it requires a simple explanation (which is just as much the truth as anything else, even before any influential factors, he'd never quite understood the allure of the hue). Speaking of, had Eren's answer been genuine or had he simply thrown it out before coming to appreciate the exercise?

"Why don't you like purple?"

Why? If, in the language of association, Mikasa is red—and black and white, all stark and clean contrast—and Armin has favored greens and blues—like the ocean, or the sky—what was it that drove him to answer the way he did?

(Historically, it means royalty and wealth. Or else something light and lilac and delicate. For him, it's rather the opposite. The color of a bruise, on his knuckles, under his eyes. Not that Eren is opposed to brutal things—just the opposite, really—but there are some he won't stand for. Earned many of his bruises trying to spare others, stumbling on Armin backed into a corner by a handful of kids twice his size. Wrapping the scarf around the discolorations ringed around Mikasa's neck the day they'd met.)

He's looking down at his hands as he considers it. Eventually, he looks back at Armin and runs one of those hands through the hair at the back of his neck.

"I guess I didn't think that hard about it" he admits it readily. None of that had been why he'd answered the way he did, at least not consciously. It had been kneejerk, a gut reaction, little thought put into the why, because that's how Eren makes most of his decisions anyway. Act first, on a feeling. Rationalize it later. (If at all.) "It's not that big a deal, really. Like I said, it's just a color."

He'd dye his damn hair purple if that's what it took to become a Ranger.

test drive meme

obligatory harassment.

I'm being oppressed with surveys

you're in the survey corps, I don't know what you expected.

you just wanted to make that joke again didn't you

you made it hard not to.

it's a good joke.