TEST DRIVE #16 - Turbolifts and Ten Forward

[ten_fwd_mods]

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.

Comments

[leaponti]

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?"

[futureprotector]

"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.