TEST DRIVE #18 - Ten Forward & the Low Grav Gymnasium

[ten_fwd_mods]

Option 001. Ten Forward: The first thing you see is a bar. A large, lively bar filled with many different faces and many different smells, sights, and sounds. This is Ten Forward, the Enterprise's off-duty lounge; feel free to get acquainted with your fellow travelers and try to find somebody who's in charge: this is your new home now, after all...







Option 002. The Low-Gravity Gymnasium: The gym is a large room with several alcove-like sections housing the aerobics and martial arts areas, a parrises squares area, an anbo-jyutsu court, and a separate fencing room. Most noteworthy is the area dedicated for zero-gravity training.

Zero-gravity can be, well, kind of weird, because it's not like a gradual loss of the pressure holding you to the floor--you may have taken the turbolifts, just expecting to take a leisurely run, or maybe work out with a treadmill to get in some cardio, but the minute you step into the gym you're floating, as is anything you might have been holding or bringing with you.

What now? Panic, flail, and try to swim through the air back to where the gravity is normal? Do you make the best of it and tough it out to get your exercise in? Or, as we recommend, do you start having fun with the sudden game of weightlessness? Pick your personal scenario and have fun with all the other weightless people.

Boy, this is gonna make hitting the showers after your workout awkward...

Comments

[prefers_magneto]

"It was a long time." He glances away. "I don't know if it will make you respect me more or less if I tell you how long it took me to realize nobody was coming for me. Probably less. I respect me less. I must have caught a bout of 'hope' from Charles." He glances at her. "But it passed."

He takes a breath and folds the napkin - more something to do with his hands than a necessity - before reapplying it.

"No good deed goes unpunished. Ten years for trying to save a man's life. Finally building something with meaning and then losing it right away. What good has hope ever done anyone?"

But at least, in Shaw's custody, he'd known he was alone. He knew nobody was coming for him. He knew he had no family. In Washington, he'd been fooled.

He looks away.

"That's grim, isn't it?" A small, humourless laugh. "Sorry."

[anexquisitecreature]

She shakes her head. She'd come for him... but he'd taught her to save those who needed it, not just those she wanted to.

"You were safe. Others weren't. I did what needed to be done."

A fist forms, and she glances down at it before using it to slug him gently in the bicep.

"You taught me that, too... and that you can't rely on hope." And here it is, with actual sincerity. "I'm sorry."

[prefers_magneto]

He shook his head. She didn't have to apologize for sticking to their principles.

Except.

"I could have helped you with the ones that weren't safe. ...Once I was slightly less safe."

[anexquisitecreature]

"Yeah, maybe."

She shrugs.

"In hindsight, you probably could have. But at the time, I did what I saw as the only viable option. You were the one for the many, Erik, so I left you there because I knew I could come back."

Then there was all this time-travel bullshit messing up her plans.

[prefers_magneto]

"I was in there for ten years. All I did for ten years was age. And when Charles finally came to get me, he still thought I killed the President and all he wanted me to do was convince you to go home with him. I don't even know what it was he planned on doing with me afterwards. I had no intention of finding out."

He glanced at the bar top.

"In the middle of trying to shoot you, I stole the specs for those robots. That's how I knew how to wire them so I could control them." He chanced a glance at her. "Imagine what we could have done together."

[anexquisitecreature]

"I know that! I spent two of them planning, testing, and throwing away multiple rescue missions, and then some asshole decided mutants were for experimenting on and we had a fucking war, Erik! I had other priorities, and I'm not going to apologise for them again!"

She sighs.

"I don't know what Charles wanted. Except maybe throw me at Hank as some sort of weird way of thanking him for his drug addiction, I don't know."

His glance at her isn't seen, she's avoiding eye contact by shredding another napkin.

But, "I figured that out, actually. But we didn't do that together, because you shot me. So we're back at square one, and I don't want to go around again. It's done, and it's past."

[prefers_magneto]

"I don't know what Charles' obsession is with sheltering someone who keeps building things that can be used as weapons against us in an effort to make himself just like them."

Erik has never liked Hank or his objectives.

He glanced around the room.

"What are we going to do here?"

[anexquisitecreature]

"Maybe he feels like he failed with me, because I made a decision on my own, so now he needs to prove his way is right."

Oh, that had many layers of bitterness.

She shrugs it off, and follows the path his eyes take.

"Recon sounds like a plan. Find out if we're in a really good hallucination, or if we're really in space."

[prefers_magneto]

"I wonder if we're free to leave this room," Erik remarks, tossing the napkin onto the bar and heading for the door.

[anexquisitecreature]

"I sure hope so," she mutters, then slides off her stool and scoops up her backpack, slinging it over her shoulder before striding after him.

[prefers_magneto]

Erik's cape flutters around his calves as he approaches the door, stopping just short of it, but it slides open on its own with a soft 'whoosh'. He glances over his shoulder at Raven, then steps into an immaculate, wide hallway.

That answers one question.

He looks at her again. "Which way?"

[anexquisitecreature]

She's glad she's behind him, so he doesn't see her grin at his cape. Majestic as fuck, he is.

Her expression is under control by the time he speaks, and she looks out at the hall, before looking back into the bar. If those windows are real, either way will take them deeper in the the ship.

"Left."

[prefers_magneto]

Left. He turns, heading in the direction she indicated.

"It's very...pristine. Like a cruiseship."

[anexquisitecreature]

"Do you think they have a kick line show with feather headdresses and spangled underwear we can watch while drinking cocktails with umbrellas in them?"

A joke, to cover the mild uneasiness at how very accurate his description was. Pristine. It's a difficult standard to maintain, and suggests money or power - or both, and far too much of it.

[prefers_magneto]

"I hope they let us know what time happy hour is," he returned dryly. The corridor seemed to go on and on and on. "This thing is huge." He could feel it, already, when they were in the bar. But walking it was entirely more intimate.

[anexquisitecreature]

If they'd just left it, it doesn't bode well for a bar. Although, do they really want to be on a floating hunk of metal in space piloted by people who were completely and utterly drunk off their tits, as Charles had been heard to say and swiftly denied? No.

"How huge? Stadium huge?"