[Ten Forward] Release from Quarantine and Rooming Assignments

[ten_fwd_npcs]

Lieutenant Worf has gathered all of the new "guests" together in Ten Forward to instruct them on correct behavior and protocols now that they have been released from quarantine. He looks as happy and approachable as you might expect, which is to say he doesn't. It is his duty, and the captain's instructions, and so he will handle this riffraff the honorable way.

"The computer will instruct you on where all cleared-for-access decks are. You only have to ask where the area you are trying to get to is located, and it will give you clear directions. Do not visit any restricted areas. The bridge, engine rooms, transporter rooms, and all command centers are off-limits."

This is chased by a stern look to all the gathered guests.

"With that in mind, there are a few rules you must obey before I give you your new assignments. One, do not discharge any weapon while on the Enterprise. Two, do not assault any other passenger aboard in any way; that includes injury, death, or violating their personal rights. Three, do not tamper with the operational procedures of the ship. Four, do not steal items or technology from the ship. Five, do not interrupt any official areas of the ship without proper authorization, and do not invade the privacy of other guest or crew quarters.

"Copies of the Prime Directive will be made available to all of you, and placed in each room. As you are not Starfleet officers, you are not obligated to abide by this rule; however, it is important you understand why we do."

He takes a deep breath. Unless they show themselves to be undisciplined or unruly, it is the most he can do.

"Now, the rooms," he rumbles, reading aloud the list of quarters, their location, and the guests who will be sharing them.

Room # 0711 - Pyrrha and Trance Gemini
Room # 0712 - Caspian and Katherine Barlow
Room # 0713 - John Crichton and Eleanor Lamb
Room # 0714 - Butch Cassidy and Jack Twist
Room # 0715 - TWO SECURITY PERSONNEL
Room # 0716 - Shotaro and Amelia Pond
Room # 0717 - Loki and Sigyn
Room # 0718 - Zinda Blake and Natasha Romanoff
Room # 0719 - Stephanie Grace Rogers and Mireille
Room # 0720 - TWO SECURITY PERSONNEL
Room # 0721 - Lady Marian and Darcy Lewis
Room # 0722 - Ian Chesterton and Billy Cranston
Room # 0723 - Andros and Steve Rogers
Room # 0724 - Aeryn Sun and Booker DeWitt
Room # 0725 - TWO SECURITY PERSONNEL
Room # 0726 - Philip and Clint Barton
Room # 0727 - Sinthia Schmidt
Room # 0728 - Pavel Andreievich Chekov and Kate Newton
Room # 0729 - Leonard Horatio McCoy and Adam Park
Room # 0730 - TWO SECURITY PERSONNEL

"I will remain here to answer questions," Worf concludes. "And my team will be standing by to escort you where you need to be."

The list is also displayed on a PADD, where people can refer to it if they need to.


[ooc: This post is open for everyone to tag in and meet their new roommates and neighbors, "party post" style! Everyone should participate if and when they can, so they can get acquainted with who they will be rooming with for at least the next several months. Rooms are aligned the way they would be in a typical hotel: odd numbers on the left, even numbers on the right (so 0711 and 0713 will be next door neighbors, while 0712 is directly across the hall). There is an OOC post in the OOC comm where players can connect with questions and where we'll post more details about the rooms themselves, so check in over there! If you need to ask security questions, or need them to swing by another thread, just put "Security officer, please!" in the subject line of your tag, and the mods will send someone to you ASAP.]

Comments

Room # 0713 - John Crichton and Eleanor Lamb

[just_a_chemical]

So here's Eleanor, doing her best to seem normal. She's actually happy that there are no windows--much better than her fishbowl of a room at home--but with their advanced technology here, would she be able to spot security cameras?

This is important.

And explains why she's walking around touching everything, staring up at points on the ceiling, moving objects around. Like any normal girl would.

[never_felt_better]

Normal's about to go right out the window. John's just spent the last several months of his life on a spaceship with weird aliens, some of whom like to come in his room and rifle through his stuff when he's not there. Normal? Normal went the way of the Dodo the second he got sucked up by a wormhole and shot out in space.

So he's smiling when he walks in, brow crinkled but expression amused. "Uh... hi. You must be Eleanor Lamb? I'm John. John Crichton."

She's just a kid. Shoot, John probably looks old enough to be her ... extremely good-looking older brother. He's not going to date himself here, especially not in his own inner-monologue; though, holding out his hand for a shake might do it for him. Just be gentle on his ancient old bones, okay kid?

[just_a_chemical]

Hey, age is a relative thing. Most of the people Eleanor knows back home are either significantly older than she is, or mutated to one degree or another--really, it's just nice to know she's rooming with someone who looks reasonably healthy. And probably normal.

Oh, right, shaking hands is a thing that people do.

"It's nice to meet you," she says as she does so. English-sounding. "They'd be angry with me if I took that panel apart, wouldn't they."

[never_felt_better]

"Yeah, nice to meet you," he says, almost sounding surprised. It's been a while since someone responded the normal, human way. Shake your hand, say it's nice to meet you, smile. Not body flip you, or spit on you, or knock you out with their tongue, or ... it's complicated.

He glances at the panel, then back at Eleanor. "I'm going to go with yes. Any reason why, or just curious?"

[just_a_chemical]

"I'm looking for cameras," she admits, lowering her voice as she glances around.

Not too tinfoil-hat, not yet.

"We have them at home--they're everywhere. They stick out from the walls, and they move, so they cover the entire area. I don't see any here, but everything's much more advanced, and if I were going to put one in here it would be where that panel is."

It's not that she minds being watched. She's used to it. She just likes to know, that's all.

[never_felt_better]

"Cameras?" he repeats, eyebrows arched. He can't help but involuntarily look around the room. He likes George Orwell as much as the next guy, at least as much as the next human guy, so he wouldn't put it out of the realm of possibility. "You really think Big Brother is watching?"

John has no bags, nothing to put in his room or stuff in a drawer, so he just walks over to the panel and gives it a once-over. "I'd think, if they want to keep track of us, they'd use the information they got in sickbay to log our DNA into their computers. Why use a camera when you can just follow everyone's biological blueprint from room to room?"

Did somebody say tinfoil-hats?

[just_a_chemical]

"Big Sister is always watching," she says.

That's what the graffiti around her city says, anyway. Never mind that there's more than one Big Sister, and it's really Eleanor's mother who's keeping an eye on the entire city... yeah, she's got reason to worry about cameras.

"Not that I'm planning on doing anything they might have a problem with, but sometimes things come up unplanned. And sometimes a person just doesn't want to be seen, not for nefarious purposes, just... people feel like that, don't they?"

[never_felt_better]

"Oh, my bad," he chuckles. "Big Sister."

She's kind of a strange kid, isn't she? Not that John minds. She reminds him of a girl he knew back home, and that's a lot more comforting than being stuck on a ship with the rejects from Madame Curie's Wax Museum. He's getting used to D'Argo and Rygel, but he feels like they're constantly arguing about who's the alpha male. Does Rygel even have those parts? No, John, back that thought train up.

"Yeah," he says, shaking his head. "Yeah, they do. Privacy, it's a big thing. I didn't get much of it on my other ship, but uh, I can promise to give you your space. Can't make any promises about cameras or computers, but the folks in charge seem decent enough."

He pushes away from the panel and takes a look around the room. "So which room is mine?"

[just_a_chemical]

"My room at home, one entire wall is glass, and there's cameras besides. There's a curtain at the back where the plumbing facilities are, but that's it. And if I'm back there too long, my mother comes on the radio and tells me not to."

And if she's really in for it, her mother will appear on the TV screens too.

"The rooms are both the same--I don't have a preference. I didn't move anything in; I didn't bring anything but that book and the pep bar there."

The pep bar she hasn't eaten, and is still carrying around, because if she does end up popped back into her room, her mother might notice its absence.

[never_felt_better]

Jeez, that sounds extreme.

"Where are you from?" he asks, his distaste on unbridled display. John's got an expressive face and a sometimes harmful lack of tact. "Or should I be asking why your mom is that concerned with your whereabouts?"

He's not that interested in searching out the rooms anymore, but he does glance at the pep bar. "Looks... tasty."

[just_a_chemical]

"My mother's a psychiatrist," she says, as though that explains more than it probably does. "She's got very particular views about raising a child, and... well, I'm part of her work, you could say. So she needs to be able to observe me."

Like any normal parent with supervillain tendencies, probably.

"Those bars are my favorite. I've thought about opening it, just a tiny bit, to see if the computers here can scan and replicate it exactly--I have to be careful what I eat."

[never_felt_better]

Yeeeeah, John doesn't look convinced.

"Huh," he says, not wanting to step on any toes by saying the wrong thing about the kid's mom. They're going to be rooming together for who knows how long, and relationships with parents can be, uh, complicated. "Yeah, well. It must suck having a mom who brings her work home with her, huh? Man, how's a kid supposed to sneak out a window and go drink beers with her friends if mom's always watching?"

He smiles a little. It's a joke. "What's in them? The bars, I mean. You, like, gluten-free or something?"

[just_a_chemical]

"I learned to hack our security system when I was five," she says, with at least a little pride. "The cameras and the robots--and there's a steep learning curve there. The robots are armed, and they shoot at intruders."

Or little girls trying to sneak out to read unauthorized books with their friends.

This may be why security's so tight on her these days.

"They've got protein and vitamins and caffeine--those are chocolate and peanut flavored, they're my favorite. I don't really eat meat anymore, so it's hard to get protein."

[never_felt_better]

John leans back against the arm of the closest chair and clasps his hands in front of him.

"Well, hot damn, little lady," he says, eyebrows arched. "Those are some impressive skills you have. Armed robot guards — yeah, I'm guessing you're not from Earth?"

Not John's Earth, anyway. It's the twenty-forth century, maybe they've got robots in government now. But if that's the case, he's kind of amused they're still making the same protein bars he remembers from nineteen-ninety-nine. "Gotcha. Rocky Road was my favorite flavor, but the PB and chocolate is good, too."

[just_a_chemical]

"Oh, I'm from Earth," she says. "It's 1968, back home. I come from a city at the bottom of the Atlantic that no one here seems to have heard of, not even people from the future--but then, the man who built the city wanted it to be secret, so I suppose his plans worked."

The secrecy part, anyway. The building a functioning utopian society part had failed.

"Our food at home isn't the freshest; it's either canned food, packaged things like the bars or cakes or chips, or fish. I like the bars."

Energy bars, Twinkies and soda: that's Eleanor's normal diet.

[never_felt_better]

Wait.



What?

John cants his head ever-so-slightly, a mixture of shock, confusion, and awe on his face. He's almost afraid to hear her answer to his next question. "Are ... are you ... from Atlantis?"

[just_a_chemical]

"Oh, no," she says. "A city called Rapture. It was built after the war, a few years before I was born. Mr. Ryan was worried there'd be a nuclear war, and thought that if he put a city at the bottom of the ocean it would be safe--and if he kept it secret, it would be even safer."

She almost wishes she'd meet someone here who has heard of her city, except there aren't many circumstances she can imagine where that would be a good thing.

[never_felt_better]

"Rapture?" he repeats, his brain slowly thawing from the shock (and let's be real, he was kind of hoping she was from Atlantis; how cool would that have been?). "After the war... the World War? World War II? That's how long your city has been under the water?"

Holy moley. That's amazing.

[just_a_chemical]

"It was started in 1946, and cut off from the surface in 1951," she says. "I was born there, a year after that. We've been on our own, for the most part, ever since--some people have found their way down, and others have gone to the surface for one reason or another, but those are very rare exceptions."

[never_felt_better]

"Dude," he exhales, looking at this girl in a whole new light. "That. is. amazing. You have an actual, functioning underwater society? And it's been there since the fifties?!"

Oh, just wait until the conspiracy theorists get ahold of this nugget. John's actually surprised Sea World hasn't tried to make Rapture part of its theme park. "Get out of town. That's gotta be... Wait a second, how do you grow? Buy, sell, trade?"

[just_a_chemical]

"Not very well anymore," she admits. "We weren't supposed to need trade with outsiders--we had fishermen, of course, but no trade with the surface. We have farms, and factories, shops, schools, theaters, anything people would have on the surface."

Except... you know, the surface.

"Just a self-sufficient community, that happens to be at the bottom of the ocean."

[never_felt_better]

He pulls his hand over his face.

"Wow. Wow," he repeats, shaking his head to loosen the bits that grind to a stop. "So it's all completely sustainable? What do you use for sunlight?"

[just_a_chemical]

"We get light," she says. "We're not so far down--our foundation is on the sea floor, but some parts are shallower than others, and the taller the buildings are, the more light they get. Where I live is over a trench, so it's darker, but even there you can tell the difference between day and night. But we take vitamins, and they had to make arrangements for the crops. They don't get quite enough natural light."

[never_felt_better]

He nods in quick, jerky movements, eyes bright and focused. Mouth half-open to ask another question, he suddenly stops himself and laughs.

"Sorry, I'm kind of giving you the third degree, aren't I?" he says, shaking his head. "And after all those jokes about Big Sister, too. My bad."

He's a scientist. It's in his nature to be curious.

Relaxing a little, he pushes his hands down the knees of his pants and sits in an informal, easy position. "I guess I should probably tell you a little about myself, huh? I'm a scientist, an astronaut, and ... well, I guess you could say I'm an explorer now. Which might explain all the questioning. I'm from Earth, but recently I got myself into a pickle out in uncharted space without a way back home. So I guess you could say that's another reason for all the questions. It's been a while since I've had anyone to talk to from home."

He smiles lopsidedly. "If I get on your nerves, just turn the stereo up and slam the door. I speak Earth teen."