Hide and Seek

[rikered]

There is something damn odd going on onboard, kids are sprouting up all over the ship. After three days it’s clear there is going to be no quick fix and arrangements have to be made. Sadly for the kids, it means they are confined to a few areas on the ship. Riker can hear the noise building every time he walks past the room that’s been set aside for them to spend their free time inside. It’s building up to an explosion of some outrageous behaviour if they aren’t given something to do. He’s got a few ideas on how to fix it, without causing complete disruption to the ship. After pitching his idea to Picard and getting grudging permission, he sets his plan in motion.

He approaches the room the kids are in and sticks his head around the door. His body follows when he is sure there no projectiles being fired at his head. “Listen up,” he says, glancing around with some amusement, “I know you’re bored, so while the ship is quiet, we’re going to do something no one has done before on the Enterprise. We are going to have a ship wide game of Hide and Seek. The usual areas remain out of bounds. .” Oh yes, he’s giving one or two people a look, he knows like to get up to a little mischief.

He gives them a brief run down of the rules. “Once you’ve been found, you’ll join the team of seekers. I can’t stay to seek myself, you’ll have to pick another seeker or two. I can hang around for twenty minutes or so if you’ve got an immediate questions about your current condition.” He steps back and gestures for the kids to begin.

[ooc: Okay guys, have at it! Start your threads however you want, whether its at the start, half way through the game or at the end. Have fun!]

Comments

OTA

[rikered]

Riker wanders over to the finger paint table at the far side of the room, so anyone can speak to him in private. With his hands behind his back, he makes a pretence of examining the work.

Re: OTA

[tragic_optimist]

There was a short but obviously grown man there, sitting down and enjoying the festivities with the children. One in a coat that seemed very out of place for finger painting, and yet seemed to be absent of paint. Being around this many children, as angry as he wanted to be, made it nearly impossible. It was almost like that night, so long ago, where he had quite magically came across shoes that fit. It was such an odd memory to return to, that flash of happy just after his regeneration, but that is what his mind went to.

"Pardon me, sir, would you happen to know where the purple went? I was int he middle of a piece and

[rikered]

Riker glances around the room. "It's by the ball pit." Data would hate this room because there is no logic to how things have ended up scattered around the room. "What masterpiece are you creating?"

[tragic_optimist]

"Masterpiece? No, no, not at all. It's more...visceral. More cathartic. More..."

The Doctors hands come into view with his enthusiastic movements, and they are covered in paint. Smeared reds and greens are somehow kept away from the coat, but anywhere not covered with clothes has at least a small bit of color.

"More of a means to keep my mind busy. I like fingerpainting."

Re: OTA

[kaylinneya]

She strode over to him. Like Ro in the episode, her body was that of a child, but she walked and held herself like someone who was used to fighting, just to survive.

"Games?" She asked, her brows almost to her hair line, resting her hands on the pommels of her daggers. Sadly for her, she wasn't all that much shorter. But the lack of a mark on her face, how much skinner she was, the absence of her familiar... She walked like Kaylin, the voice was the same, the daggers and the bracer were the same, but... she looked so different. She looked like a scrawny street urchin. Which is exactly what she had been at 12. Underfed, over tired, used to stealing to survive, to feed...

She turned away from those thoughts.

"We are not actually children, no matter how we look. I should be helping to investigate this, not being shoved into a holding cell like a criminal," she snapped.

And then under his breath, "besides, there was only one game worth playing when I actually was this age and it sure as **** wasn't hide and seek."

[rikered]

Riker knows that everyone's childhoods are different, and anyone can tell that this one has had it tough. "We can't have you running loose around the ship, I'm sorry. We've got kids on board who are really kids, and they need their rules and boundaries, we can't change them for you, or we will have a kid mutiny." Which might be more intense than a real one.

"Have you ever played Hide and Seek?"

[kaylinneya]

"When we hid, we hid from Ferals. Tall, part canine, stupid, vicious, violent, pack hunting ferals with a taste for human flesh," she said darkly. "There was nothing fun about it. Well... not if you were the one being seeked."


"....."


"Sought. Like I said, there was only one game worth playing, back then. But we'd need something to use to play with."

[agathaheterodyne]

"I could build us a seeking clank! So we can all hide!" Agatha volunteered brightly, standing on a table.

She was enjoying this second childhood, since this time she could THINK.

Open to whomever wants it

[born_of_love]

Aeryn is uncertain of this whole thing. She does not like this being a child again situation. But she's restless and she'd rather not be stuck in the room while everyone else is allowed to leave. If she just happened to hide so well she didn't come back, too, well that suited her just fine, too.

Still she shouldered in next to another kid with a hissed whisper of, "What is Hide and Seek?"

[abyssum_invocat]

"It's a game," Sinthia answered. "Everyone chooses a separate location to hide, and one person must find them. As he finds the people hidden, they join him in looking for the others. The goal is to be the last one found."

She had no more experience than Aeryn with playing games with other children, it was true, but Sinthia was considerably better at picking explanations from unspoken thoughts. It was a habit she hadn't given up simply because all the adults had somehow regressed to nearer her own age; she refused to see why she was suddenly being treated like a baby just because there were more children on board when she'd been perfectly amenable to acting like an adult all this time. As she studied the newly-small-again warrior, her mouth firmed as if considering something she wasn't particularly sure would have a good outcome.

"I can hide us both well enough that nobody can find us. If you want to be alone for a while."

[born_of_love]

Aeryn tiny brow furrowed up seriously. Or, at least, it attempted seriously, and probably ended up closer to uncertain fretting. Tilting her head and looking at the group of those gathered in this room with them, scattered ages all the way up to the adults running it, and now setting them out to do whatever this was outside of the room finally.

"What is the point of it?" Aeryn asked, after pressing her tiny mouth into a line. "Is it a strategy simulation?"

[abyssum_invocat]

Sinthia's quiet for a moment before she answers, seeming to concentrate on a point about a foot to the left of Aeryn's head. "I don't...think so," she says, brows pulling together.

"I think it's supposed to be fun?To see if you can hide better than the other person can look," Sinthia finishes, making it somewhat clear, for those who know the signs of such, that she's trying to paraphrase someone else's thoughts. It doesn't make for smooth, well-thought-out sentences.

"It...could be used for strategy. To teach people to look where they wouldn't think people are?" she suggests. "Maybe."

[born_of_love]

Aeryn is not certain what is making sense less, the girl speaking or what the girl is speaking of. There have to be better things to do than to partake in some nonsense that just cleverly disguises itself as some way to keep all the contaminated people out from under foot and what they should be most focusing on: getting to the bottom of this problem and making it end.

But locking them in this room had been a clear enough message of where The Enterprise thought they should be.

"Compulsory maneuvers," Aeryn said, with a wavering frown toward the other child-sized bodies converging on the first officer of The Enterprise or dividing themselves quickly into groups for this 'freedom.'

[abyssum_invocat]

"Compulsory in what sense?" Sinthia asks, attention finally snapping back to Aeryn.

"You don't have to play the game." Unspoken goes the idea that Sinthia won't be playing it; she fully intends to find somewhere unobtrusive to be for the time being, and from there go about her normal routine, or as routine as anything on this ship can be.

And a solid minute later: "Not all of us are contaminated."

[born_of_love]

Aeryn's tiny face furrowed up even as her shoulders went flatter and her posture straighter.

She went back, and then again. Before she said very certainly, "I didn't say anyone was."

[abyssum_invocat]

"You didn't have to," Sinthia replies simply. It's the truth; Aeryn didn't have to say it out loud for her to hear it.

[born_of_love]

Okay. Aeryn still gives her a slightly suspicious look, but her gaze went back to the group forming up next.

[abyssum_invocat]

Sinthia huffs once. "I'm a telepath. I can hear what you think as clearly as if you'd said it out loud," she says, frustrated that nobody seems to understand.

[born_of_love]

"I got that the first time you said it." Clarification was not her problem.

Her people knew what that was. The Scarran ruling cast all had certain degrees of it.

[abyssum_invocat]

"Then why did you give me that look?" she asks, indignant.

[born_of_love]

The look she gets this time is not as pronounced on a little face as it would be on her older. About the whined indignation, and why the question needs asking if the girl can do as she just said. Read Aeryn's thoughts. Then she should have already gotten it.

But she can clarify it down, while looking at the girl even more speculatively.

"Only certain types of people have that where I come from."

The wrong type. The ones you were trained against.

[abyssum_invocat]

"I'm not a wrong type," she says flatly.

[born_of_love]

That gets a frown. It's one thing to say it. It's another to use it.

It makes Aeryn's gaze shift back. "And you have more than your word to vouch for that?"

[abyssum_invocat]

"Do you have more than yours that proves I am?" she asks icily, eyes gone flat with frustration. She could, easily, hurt people here, and she hasn't this whole time.

That really should account for more than it seems to. "Shouldn't the burden of proof be on you to say I'm somehow bad rather than on me to prove I'm not?"

[born_of_love]

"It might be-" Aeryn said, completely blank of anything remotely like an emotion to the girl's ranted responses. "-if I'd said anything about it to start with."

The culpability for the whole conversation of assumptions and reaction even happening wasn't on Aeryn in the slightest. She felt no need to defend her thoughts, or her bearing, or her background. Not when the whole point of the conversation was that it had started by having something taken from her own thoughts she hadn't chosen to give.