Arrival

[raavashing]

He woke up to the odd sensation of not being able to feel the earth beneath him and, instead, feeling an odd vibration in the air. It was also very bright out and he found himself surprised at that because usually he rose with the sun, it's power energizing him as it broke over the horizon. Except that he was feeling energized - more so than he'd ever felt before. It was like the sun was close enough to touch and his whole body could feel it's power rushing through him. Wan took a deep breath and then let it out as he stretched and opened his eyes, a small jet of flame lazily arcing up just beyond his lips.

The oddly contented feeling he had from it was abruptly ended once he got a good look at his surroundings. He was in some sort of strangely colored room made of some sort of wood or non-stone he couldn't feel and there were brightly shining lamps that clearly burned - he could feel the heat in them - without producing flame. All around him were tables with plants on them. It was a large room, large enough to be a building all on it's own. On one side were doors and he headed toward them. It was his luck that someone opened them from the other side just as he got near. It was a human woman in strange clothing who stopped in the doorway when she saw him. Wan waved at her, but moved past to get into the hallway beyond. The room was part of a very large building. When he turned around to ask her where he was, the door was already shut. And, even more oddly, he didn't see any handles to open it. Taking his chances, he turned to left and began to wander.

A Turbo Lift

Every so often Wan dragged a hand along the wall of the long hallway he walked down. He passed many of those same doors without handles and they seemed to go on forever. Each of the doors had a strange plaque to the side of them, with symbols he didn't recognize. It was obviously a way to label them, because with a building this large, they needed to label the rooms, but he didn't understand any of the labels.

He passed many more humans dressed in those strange outfits and at this point he was certain he must have gotten himself onto some new, very foreign, Lion Turtle City that used something other than stone to build with. He still hadn't figured out how the lighting worked, or how they opened the doors. And so far all of the people walking the halls had ignored him after a cursory glance. All busy with something, some carrying strange tablets in their hands.

Wan lucked out when one of the doors near him opened up into a small room and one of the strange humans stepped out of it. Finally a door had opened! Wan ducked inside the tiny room and pressed his hands against the walls. He didn't really care what the room was for, he just wanted to get out of that endless hall. But then the floor gave a soft lurch - one he could just barely feel - and he got the sense that he was moving for some reason. When the doors next opened, there was another person there and when they got on, Wan lifted a hand to wave at them.

"Hello," he said, voice and smile bright, "I'm Wan. Do you know where I am?"


The door to Ten Forward

Wan had managed to get directed to 'Ten Forward', a gathering place of some sort. But so far, he'd gotten stuck at the door. He hadn't realized until he tried to go inside that the doors opened for him. Completely on their own. All the doors he'd passed, they could have opened for him just by him standing a little too close a little too long. Now that he realized this, he was taking the opportunity to try it out.

By going through the doors to Ten Forward over and over and over and over and over and over...

So far he hadn't noticed anything else about the place. Just that door. That fascinating door.

Comments

[electro_kinetic]

"Having fun playing with the door, I assume," comes the dry voice of someone standing on the other side of it--and who happens to be trying to go through.

Noriko is patient--sometimes--but not that patient. (She might be more so if they didn't have auto-opening doors where she's from too.) "You know there's the same stuff on both sides every time, right?"

[raavashing]

"Oh, it's not about what's on either side," Wan said as he continued his game. "It's the doors, themselves. They move on their own."

As he turned around for the next pass, doors opening for him, he stopped in the center of their frame to lift a hand in a wave, "Hello. I'm Wan."

[electro_kinetic]

"Uh, yeah," she says, as if this might be obvious. "They're IR-sensors. When it sees a body standing in the way, it opens. Auto-closes, though, I think so you might wanna not stop in the middle."

She's...not quite getting the origin of everyone's level of fascination with the tech around here--sure, she geeked out a little over the comm systems on Alemar, now known as That Rock She's Never Going Back To Ever, but...doors were not that surprising. But the she has zero idea of when half the people on this boat actually come from, so maybe they get leeway. A little.

"Nice to meet you. I'm Noriko. Mostly, people call me Nori."

[raavashing]

Wan stepped forward just in time to avoid the doors closing on him. He'd gone through them enough he had the timing down and didn't have to look to know when they were ready to slide shut.

"Nori. That's a pretty name," he replied before focusing on the rest of what she was talking about, "What's an IR Sensor? Is it a spirit?"

[electro_kinetic]

"No, no, they're....pretty spirit-less around here. It's just an infrared beam of light--invisible to the human eye, which is why you can't see it. When you step into the path of the beam for long enough, the door opens," she explains.

"These things are everywhere where I come from."

[raavashing]

Wan's head tilted to the side and he turned around to look carefully around the door's frame, obviously searching for the invisible beam of light, "Yeah, but, once the light sees you, someone has to open the door. Doors can't just open on their own. Not really..."

'Where I come from' was not a usual thing for someone who was native to the city to say.

He turned his attention back to her, eyebrows raising, "Where you come from? You're not from this city?"

Ten Forward!

[she_listens]

Guinan leans against the bar, chin propped in her hands, and watches.

So he's new. She smirks softly, choosing not to interrupt as he comes in and goes out, over and over. Partly because she doesn't want to interrupt, and partly because she's finding it rather amusing.

"Have you decided yet?"

Her voice is pleasant, low, tinged just lightly with laughter.

[raavashing]

Wan's head snapped back to look over his shoulder as he exited the room to make sure he was the one she was talking to. When he caught her eyes, he smiled and waved. He had to wait for the door to open again to jog himself over to her. He leaned on the bar, grinning at her, "Decided what?"

[electro_kinetic]

Hm.

That's gonna take some explaining.

"Okay, first...this isn't a city, it's a spaceship. Huge boat, floating in the stars. And no one's from here exactly. Everyone on this thing currently came from somewhere else, including me. I'm from a place called New York."

[raavashing]

Excuse him for a second because you just blew his mind.

Wan stared at Noriko for a long moment, mentally trying to process what she just said. As the time wore on, his face when from deer-in-headlights to confused-and-pouty and he opened and shut his mouth a couple times before he managed to say anything. When he finally found his voice, he spoke slowly, "How did the boat get to the stars? It's really hard to breathe when you get too close to the endless black and I don't think even the power of air could help a Lion Turtle fly that high and still breathe and make sure there's air enough for everyone in the city."

[electro_kinetic]

Um.

Good question.

"Magic?" she offers. There's a lot of way more complicated story behind that, and normally she hates using magic as an explanation when there's sound science behind it, but the glazed look on this guy's face says that talk will be a long time in coming. "Look at it this way. This boat isn't built for water--it was built to be in space. So it sort of comes equipped with all the stuff people need, like air and light and things. Prepackaged."

Net she'll tell him there's a magic man who brought them all here and who's really really powerful and also kind of a jackass.

Oh wait.

[raavashing]

"You know magic isn't real, right?" Wan said with a wry, disbelieving smile. "I know spirits can do a lot of things that seem like magic, but it's not. It's just the spiritual energy they possess and are able to shape. Even still, I don't think spirits could put a boat into the endless black. Some could survive because they don't breathe and I guess Raava probably has that kind of power, but she's not really able to do that..."

He trailed off as he tried to comprehend this better, still frowning with his hands going to his hips, "But okay. The boat was built to keep the people on it safe. And say it is floating in the endless black of space and stars... how did we get here? I didn't travel from the ground to the stars. I went to bed and when I woke up I was inside one of this city's larger rooms. Someone brought me here without me feeling it."

[electro_kinetic]

She just laughs for a second, shaking her head. "Oh, trust me, dude. So many things are possible here. It's gonna blow your mind."

[raavashing]

That didn't exactly answer his question, but since she seemed to be focusing on the bit about magic, he cocked his head to the side and looked at her with all seriousness, "So you believe in magic, then?"

[electro_kinetic]

"Magic, technology, same shit in a different language," she shrugs. "So not as a particular entity, but it makes for an easy explanation. Since something tells me it'll take a while to manage the whole thing with someone who doesn't know what an IR door is."

[raavashing]

"If it's not magic, then it's not magic," Wan gave his own shrug. "I'd rather have the truth. Even if I don't know what it is, it shouldn't be that hard to learn about it, right?"

[electro_kinetic]

"You know what a computer is?" she asks. "Because that, not spirits, is what controls all the automated functions on this boat. It's also the thing keeping us, in a wide sense, from running out of air. Leaks out here in the black would be bad, because space is a true void. It'd kill everyone on board who needs air to function."

[raavashing]

Wan shook his head, "No. Is this Computer the name of the Lion Turtle that protects the city?"

[electro_kinetic]

"Nope," she says. "No such thing as lion turtles here, not that I can find."

[raavashing]

"Than what carries the city?" he asked, extremely confused. He knew of boats that humans made to cross lakes - at least the ones that lived on the back of the Water Lion Turtle he'd met. But a city of this size, even a building of this size, that needed something to actually carry it. Right?

[electro_kinetic]

"It's less that something's carrying us, and more that w're not falling because there is no gravitational pull on us. We're not inside any atmosphere."

[raavashing]

She says to a man who has never heard of the concept of gravity despite being intimately familiar with it's effects on the world.

"People don't fall because something pulls them down. They fall because there's a down and an up," Wan explained with a completely straight face. "Some things are light enough or strong enough that they can fly or sit high in the sky. Like the moon and sun and the endless black of the stars. And birds. Though birds sometimes come down when they get tired of flapping their wings."

[electro_kinetic]

"Not so," she says, shaking her head. "Say you're holding a ball--a pretty light one--and you tilt your hand. It rolls off, and falls to the ground, right? So what pulls it down off your hand? Gravity."

[raavashing]

"Nothing pulls it down. It just falls. Because there's a down and an up," Wan countered. "The ground and the sky."

[electro_kinetic]

"Then why don't things fall up?"