ten_fwd_meme | TEST DRIVE #16 - Turbolifts and Ten Forward

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test drives

TEST DRIVE #16 - Turbolifts and Ten Forward

Option 001. Trapped in a Turbolift: This space travel thing is new to you, and you're starting to think the ship is purposely out to get you. A turbolift is just a grandiose name for an elevator, which should be the safest way to travel after all! But someone out there is out to get you, you're sure of it. Because the next thing you know, the lights flicker and the lift grinds to a stop. You're trapped, with whomever was unlucky enough to be in the lift with you.

It could be hours before you're rescued. These turbolifts span the entire massive ship, and don't just travel straight up and down. No, they can travel horizontally, vertically, sometimes even diagonally. You could be stuck between any deck now. There is a small access panel on one of the smooth walls, but how good are you with getting these things to work? Let's not forget that sudden stop tossed everyone around a little, and people could be hurt. Time to put your emergency thinking cap on, and make friends with the people beside you fast. You could be the only way back to freedom.

Conversely, you could slide that pack of cards out of your pocket and start a rousing game of gin rummy. Really it's up to you.

Option 002. Ten Forward: You have no idea what just happened. One minute you were home, minding your own business, and now you're on a spaceship in the middle of a crowded room! It looks like a bar. There are people eating and drinking, some in uniform, others not. Some are clearly aliens, and some of the food is looking rather strange too.

You've managed to land in Ten Forward. A long bar with barstools and a bartender span one side of the room, with a bank of strange computers on that same wall. It looks like people are ordering food and drinks from them. Tables are sprinkled throughout, and the far wall is nothing but floor to ceiling windows with a view out to space. It looks like a nice lounge, low conversation making the room hum.

Better ask some questions and find out where you are, or just tap the closest person on the shoulder and try to make friends. The bar is open.

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"Yeah, I've got a problem with your hair." Not to mention feeling like his hair was standing on end. Witch? Not witch? Warlock? Whatever he was, it didn't matter. He felt like Wyatt. That in itself creeped him the fuck out.

Chris's eyes slid down to the rod that the man slid free, hanging in his hand. "Nice stick, " his voice more than a bit mocking. Apparently sarcasm was genetic.

It's not the first time Kiera has suddenly ended up somewhere she wasn't, although the last time this happened she was still in Vancouver — just the wrong Vancouver. This? This isn't the right time or the right place.

She gives herself a couple minutes to calm down from the initial panic and take stock of her situation. Her CMR seems to be operating just fine, except for the part where her comms are theoretically still working but she can't get ahold of Alec. There are people in this... lounge? bar? wearing what looks like some sort of uniform, and uniforms usually mean authority of some kind, so the first uniformed person she feels like she can address without biting their head off gets asked where the hell she is and what's going on.

The explanation she gets doesn't make any sense whatsoever, and her stomach flips when she realizes the uniformed man — Ensign Macauley, he'd introduced himself — is telling the truth. She's on a spaceship, centuries ahead of even her future, and as far as anyone knows there's no way to get her home.

Ensign. Military — navy? She glances over to the window, at that almost vertigo-inducing view.

Space navy.

Well, shit.

Kiera excuses herself as politely as she can manage and goes over to one of the tables, sitting down hard. A server comes by to ask her if there's anything she wants to eat or drink, and she almost says no, then reconsiders. A few minutes later she has a glass of what is ostensibly whiskey in her hands, but the moment she takes a drink she realizes something's off. It tastes like whiskey, but a quick scan is enough to tell her it's completely nonalcoholic.

Great. She's stuck in the 24th century with no one she knows and no one who can help her get home, with alcohol that isn't really alcohol. Who did she piss off to deserve this?

She's in shock, she knows that much. Eventually it'll wear off and Kiera really will start to realize how helpless she is — but until then, she's sitting at the table, staring at the glass of not-whiskey like it's betrayed her.

"If you're trying to pick a fight with me, you're going to have to try harder than that," Anakin said, hoping the man would do it. He wanted the other man to deliver a blow, so he could be justified in defending himself. He wanted to cut the punk's arm off.

Chris knew better. He'd grown up around Wyatt, he knew how to read him. And this man was similar in so many ways, just not as...unhinged. Wyatt wouldn't wait for Chris to start a fight. He'd start it and stop it before it even began. And then he'd cut Chris's arm off. Just to put him back together and do it all over again.

"I'm not that eager to go to jail actually, and there's enough security around here that nothing would happen. If we were to fight. Theoretically."

"Worked out that the alcohol's not real already, have ya?" Ran asks from her own chair. The leggy victor had noticed her arrival, but she'd seemed to have her reaction well in hand and sometimes, people in uniforms can be comforting.

People, Ran is working, come from very, very different places than Panem.

She herself is very much not wearing a uniform. A dress, not unlike those from the 1930s or 40s, short-sleeved, printed white with tiny cherries, and belted around her waist, with boots that run up to mid-calf.

She's nursing a glass, but it's lemonade. Not fake alcohol. The fake alcohol is just taunting and cruel.

The cat on "Hux's" shoulders turns to stare at him, but for all Poe can tell, "Hux" himself seems to be completely oblivious. Also, as he's walking a holster for a gun appears. So, there's one weapon.

He goes out of the bar and into the corridor, making a left. It seems to be fairly empty of people.

She had been here for some time already, had gotten used to the idea of her death and what it meant. Others had come, that she knew. Both Obi-Wan and Yoda had arrived, along with a handful of others that Padmé wasn't as familiar with. Of course, had she been asked to name them all, she would have missed several.

Did she long for home? She did, but she also knew that there would be nothing waiting for her there as her time had come and gone. The hustle here was different, slower, with no true need for a Senator at the moment, and she had found ways to spent her time. Classes had been taken, learning more about the history of this galaxy, finding a spot to fit in as best she could.

Her ultimate goal had been to return to the quarters shared with Jadzia, but she had made a detour. Padmé had realized that she had no need to eat or drink or even sleep. Yet it didn't stop her from conversing with those she had already met, or perhaps seeking out those she hadn't. It was why she had found herself there, moving to take a seat, only to pause.

Had she a heartbeat, it likely would have skipped several times, and the breath that she didn't need was inhaled sharply. As if unbelieving, his name did slip past her lips. "Anakin...?"

Like anyone would arrest a Jedi. "I have no fear of jail," he said simply, implying that the other man was less because he did. He really wanted this man to go after him. He wanted this fight, but he would not draw first, he would not deliver the first blow. He was a Jedi, after all.

There are different sides to Padmé. That has always been a given. The public figure and the private figure might be different, but there had been times when the two had overlapped. It isn't hard to notice the girl, especially when she moves in to what one might consider to be personal space. Yet, rather than looking annoyed at the gesture, Padmé does offer a hint of a smile.

"Hello." There is an inquisitive air about her person, mingled with that gentle sadness that seems etched in to her soul these days. Not that she minds people peering at her, although it doesn't happen that often. "Did you need a hand with anything?"

A hazard guess that perhaps she might be new, or just inquisitive on her own accord.

He looked up, hearing her voice, and a warm smile lit on his lips, an expression he showed to few but her, these days. His concerns about this odd restaurant fell away at the sight of her. He rose to take her hands. "I was told that we would enjoy this place," he told her, bringing her over to the table he secured for them.

Kiera, who had been at work before she unexpectedly showed up over three centuries in the future, is dressed in a charcoal gray suit jacket and pants with a bright purple blouse. She is wearing her CPS suit underneath, because she wears it almost all the time now, but the way she has her clothing arranged would have made it difficult if not impossible to see even without the suit's optical camouflage. All the same, she still looks like a woman in a uniform. She's law enforcement through and through, and before that she was military. It shows in her bearing, the way she holds herself straight without slouching even though she's sitting at a table in a bar, the strength in the line of her shoulders.

She doesn't startle, exactly, when the young woman addresses her, but maybe her reaction is a little sharper than it normally would be. Kiera takes a deep breath, lets it out, and forces a small smile. "Yeah. Doesn't burn going down like it should."

She can still talk to civilians. Mostly.

"Not a regular around here either, I take it?"

There we go. That doesn't sound like an interrogation.

Annie Cresta is a busybody. A busybody who dragged Ran to counselling, so now Ran has a perfectly nice woman to try and help her deal with her sense of paranoia, which is apparently overdeveloped for anywhere outside Panem.

Which Ran thinks is bullshit. She's fine. And when Q winked her here, she'd been lined up in front of a wall while the Peacekeepers took aim.

But she's been practising.

Talking to people who hold themselves like they are still expecting white body armour to keep their spines straight. Talking normally. Chatting.

Still, underneath her apparent ease, Ran is tense.

"Very much no," she replies. "From what is probably another universe entirely. Still have Earth. Just no...aliens or spaceships."

She tilts her head forward, large brown eyes bright with intelligence. Whatever the impression her big blonde hair and drawling accent gives, Ran is not actually a stupid a girl.

"Do you have Earth, or is the whole thing new?"

Poe has no idea that one of the heroes of the rebellion is just on the other side of the lounge. He's heard stories of Luke Skywalker, but hasn't met him yet. He hadn't joined the resistance until after Luke's disappearance, and had never seen an image of him.

So Luke's presence doesn't draw his attention while he sits at a nearby table, sipping at what's failing to be the drink he wanted it to be. At least it's liquid. This things called 'replicators' aren't as useful as they claim to be, apparently. Which is one of the few things he's figured out about this place.

What he hasn't figured out yet is that the replicators work on clothing too, which is why he's in Ten Forward in a very familiar-looking flight suit.

"Earth? Sure." Kiera tries not to show how much that question disturbs her. She can't actually imagine anywhere where there is no Earth, and isn't sure she would want to.

The words another universe actually hit her some seconds after the other woman says them, and she swallows hard. It fits with what she'd been told before. Kiera knows about other timelines; why should alternate universes seem so strange?

She's going to have to process that later when she has time. A military counselor — not the holographic software one she has programmed into her CMR, but a real, flesh and blood one she was assigned after the war ended — told her once that the best thing to do when you've had a bad shock is to do normal things, like cooking or laundry, to keep the mind busy. The conversation she's having right now is just going to have to do.

Kiera doesn't take her eyes off of her conversation partner, and she notices that the younger woman seems nervous. She doesn't even need her tech to do it. She's been relying on her gut more and more lately, which she's just going to blame on Carlos. The girl's nervousness on its own doesn't really tell her anything, though, and so she puts the observation to the back of her mind for now. "But we don't have... any of this, either. Not like this."

The space program had crashed with the old economy, and aliens... well. Unlike in the Capitol, humans in Kiera's world mostly still look like humans. She can almost believe the blue people and the people with oddly-shaped ears and the people with fur are not human, because what the hell. With the kind of day she's starting to have, more weird shit would just be par for the course.

Edited 2016-01-09 04:34 (UTC)

Chris wanted to kick this guys ass too. It would be therapeutic. Take all his anger and frustration about Wyatt and Gideon and the whole mess out on him. But, Chris wasn't stupid. If there was one thing he learned as a Halliwell it was to always check the book first. Make sure there's a vanquishing spell, or potion. Something. Have a plan. So you don't get killed.

"Yeah, well you will if they leave you there to rot." What was this guys childhood trauma? Chris suppressed the urge to roll his eyes and instead left his hands resting against the hoodie he insisted on wearing.

That stillness remained, as if unbelieving. Knowing that he might show up here and him actually showing up here were two different things. Even after everything, even with her dying breath, she knew that there was still good in him. Her eyes searched, wondering... What was the last thing he remembered?

Taking a seat, she pursed her lips, eyes dropping for a moment, before raising them again. Her search was exploring. "... did you just arrive then?"

Following her was a practice in both calmness and impatience. Luke found himself feeling more relaxed, somehow, than he had since he arrived, and also more tense, more... unsure. The connection between them only seemed to grow more strong. Just how strong would it get?

Sitting opposite her, he smiled, and nodded. While he felt an urge to sit next to her, the idea of not meeting her eyes straight on was abhorrent suddenly, and he did so, immediately. As soon as he did, he felt a shock, again, and for a moment, the power of the Force seemed to fill him to the brim, as it never had before. From outside, he would appear to almost vanish, and yet glow, at the same time, before it stopped, as soon as it started. In the aftermath, he felt relaxed and was grinning, and yet even more aware of her.

"I would be glad to answer anything I can, ah, my Queen." The words felt right. He sat back, then smiled, and listened to her. Her request for his questions started an avalanche of them.

"What is this bond we share? Can you tell me more about your people and ways? Why me? What exactly is this supposed to mean? How long have you been here?" He clapped one hand over his mouth, swallowed, then relaxed again, stopping his questions.

"Sorry. Sometimes my mouth moves faster than my mind." He thought of how Princess Leia would speak and spoke more slowly, carefully. "I would appreciate anything you could tell me about this link, and, er, you."

Luke opened his mouth, then closed it. "I'm not a Jedi, and I don't have a master. I suppose if he had lived, my master would have been Old Ben. He was the one who found me. But he died before he could train me."

Sorry, pop. Luke's on the babble train now. Welcome to your future! "He died when we faced Darth Vader on the Death Star, saving our lives and buying us time to escape." He swallowed, the sadness of it hitting him again and making him droop. The only connection he had ever had to his father, gone, and his new friend, and a possible trainer, all at the same time. "That led to me blowing up the Death Star to stop them from killing the Rebel Alliance against the Empire, but... I wish he was here. It's been a really rough kind of week, really."

That suit drew Luke like a fly to a carcass, and he swooped in, the sight of something familiar making him grin. "Well, aren't you a sight for sore eyes!" Luke wore his yellow jacket, the one given him for the ceremony, still, and on one arm the emblem of the Rebel Alliance stood out bold and bright.

"I didn't think anyone else from our galaxy was here!" Hi, Poe! Having a bouncy and very young Luke Skywalker at your table, just sitting down across from you, grinning at you.

Meanwhile, a several-days here Luke was fiddling with a replicator nearby, and arguing with the computer. "Come on! I know you can do better than that!" He had the face panel off, and was rerouting a bypass without looking, really. While the tech was different here, he had already found that some things were exactly the same, including cut offs and programming languages, sort of.

"Now, computer, try again. Skywalker Program 1a1b."

There was a hesitation, and then a glass filled with a sparkling amber drink appeared. Luke reached in and lifted it, sniffing it, then trying it. He grimaced, but took a slug down his throat before putting it back in the replicator. "Closer, but not quite. Let's try this again..."

A man in red came over to him, and spoke. "Sir, you shouldn't be messing with that. I'll have to call maintenance and security if you don't stop." W

Without thinking or looking, Luke spoke, one hand in the guys of the panel. "You don't have to do that right? I'm just trying to help." (And if Obi Wan could see his technique, delivered without trying to influence the man, but with passion, he might just wish he had never met this kid.)

The man stiffened and nodded. "I don't have to do that. You're just trying to help." And with that, he turned and walked away.

Finally, Luke got another glass, sipped it, and grinned. "Better! Han might even almost call that Corellian ale." He shut the panel back up again and wandered over to the table Kiera was sitting at. "Excuse me miss, would you try this and tell me if it tastes like alcohol to you?" His eyes were wide, warm and his whole face was filled with enthusiasm

He opened his mouth, hesitated, then nodded and led the way out of the room to the hallway. "I'm Wesley Crusher, just... from a few years in your future, I think. If you are coming in from the Child Turn incident?"

He had read the files, when he returned to Starfleet. He knew most of the journeys of the Enterprise by heart.

"Are you going to attack me," a slight subtle motion of his hand at that. Yes, he would use the Force to get this idiot to skip the banter and get to combat already. "or should I go back to my table and leave you here to brood and hate on you own?"

He was tensed, ready for combat, ready to be struck while he was speaking. He knew the trick only worked on the weak minded, and he knew it was unlikely to work on a Sith Lord. But he also knew a Sith Lord would know it for what it was, and would be angry enough to react without thinking.

He sat across from her and nodded. "Chancellor Palpatine suggested a new restaurant that we might enjoy. One Master Obi Wan never cared for, though looking around, I am not certain why." Of course, he wasn't looking around, he was looking at her, now. Only her.

He reached over to take one of her hands, to kiss it. For Anakin, the rest of the room could as well as have vanished. She was here with him, and she believed in him. What else could possibly matter?

And none of that made any sense. He knew of no Jedi named "old Ben" nor had he heard of any Sith named "Darth Vader", he would have presumed the Death Star to be an overly dramatic name for some new tool of the Trader Federation, however he wasn't sure what the rebel alliance was, or what Empire he was discussing. Even if this was all strictly Outer Rim happenings, he should have known about a Sith Lord.

"I know neither Old Ben, nor any Sith that goes by the name of Vader." Of course, if there were a Sith running around, killing Jedi, then Anakin would have to be respected, if he killed him. They would have to invite him to sit on the Council. No more slights.

It did come to his mind, that this might be a trap, but he dismissed the thought. Subterfuge was not the Jedi way.

"Tell me more of this Vader. If he is truly a Sith, then someone should stop him." Maybe he would even team up with this lad for a time. So long as the credit went where it rightfully belonged, at the end.

He tried to remember what else Princess Leia had called him, it was some name with a K, right? "The Princess called him something else, too, uhm... General... general Kenobi, yeah!" That was it! He grinned, proud of having figured that out.

Then he nodded. "Sure, I can do that. I don't know a lot, but apparently he works side by side with the Emperor, and is known as the Dark Lord of the Sith. I have no idea what that means, but everyone seems to be afraid of him, except for the Rebels."

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TEST DRIVE #16 - Turbolifts and Ten Forward

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