ten_fwd_ooc | TEST DRIVE #6 - The Bridge and Ten Forward

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test drives

TEST DRIVE #6 - The Bridge and Ten Forward

Option 01. 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 02. The Bridge: Well, aren't you a lucky duck? You've found yourself in hallowed quarters. Wherever you were before, you're not there anymore. Now you're in a room that could be some kind of command center or control room; there's a captain's chair flanked by seats for his chief officers, computer panels and stations at each interior wall, and before you a broad viewscreen that shows the wide expanse of space rushing towards you. Have you ever wanted to be a starship captain for a day? Well, here's your chance. Feel free to roam around, but try not to touch anything shiny.

[OOC: The Bridge isn't usually available for in-game posts, so if you've ever wanted to play there, here's your chance!]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Yes. That's one way of putting it.

If it doesn't have caffeine then it has a very good placebo effect. I've gotten fairly wired off of some of their coffee.

[Of course it takes very little to make Alec wired, so that's not saying much. And yes, if you're drunk enough anything can tasted good.]

I guess it's so people can have the tasted without the side effects, like obnoxious hangovers.

Placebo effect isn't really good enough.

[ He's starting to come around - even if his voice is still rough, he's looking a little more with it. ]

Where am I, anyway?

Ah! Welcome to the USS Enterprise. We're in space!

[The expansive gesture Alec gives is perhaps a bit overly dramatic, but he likes drama sometimes.]

I can tell we're in space. I mean where in space.

[ It's not snapped, if anything it's tired. And slightly irritated. ]

And who owns this ship?

I dunno. In space space. Pretty far from Earth last I checked, though.

[Actual positioning is sometimes lost on Alec. He knows that he's Here and everything else Not Here and not important.]

Starfleet. Captain Picard is the captain.

[Now comes the interesting part: will Erik recognize what Alec is saying? He always finds it fascinating how people react to those sorts of things. It says a lot about them in his opinion.]

[ He exhales, scrunching his face up for a moment to rub his nose. ]

Anyway to find other that information?

[ Neither name meant anything off hand to him - that didn't mean much, there was a good deal of space he hadn't learned of, many cultures and empires. ]

And I'm here now?

You could probably ask someone in a uniform.

[He points helpfully at someone.]

Yes. You are. A being of exceptional power who thinks that a single letter is good enough for his name brought you here as part of some sort of grand experiment... or to piss of the captain.

Possibly both.

[ He files the information away - for later. Immediate needs now. ]

Which letter?

[ That's the blanket acceptance. If someone calls themselves by a letter, so be it. ]

And he doesn't bother obtaining consent for his experiments or pranks, clearly.

Q

[Which is kind of him.]

Why should he? You are but ants to him. Or rats, I suppose since he's experimenting on you all. Can't really experiment very well on ants. Hm... Anyway. All powerful reality warping beings tend to be like that.

[And Alec is only being a tiny bit hypocritical there. If only because he doesn't experiment on people.]

Q.

[ He knows all about choosing names after all. ]

No, they don't.

[ That's a little personal of an answer. ]

And you get consent because you recognize that you aren't the only sentient being.

Yeah. His entire race is named Q. I'm fairly certain there has to be some sort of ... intonation or ... pheromone... wavelength... thingy that they use when speaking in their natural forms to differentiate Q from Q but I've yet to discover it.

[Names are important. The ones you chose and the ones you're given. He tilts his head a little at the other man curiously.]

They don't? Know many of them? And that would require him to care about that.

Telepathic or empathic communication perhaps?

[ This actually is helping after a fashion, distracting him from his aching head and motion-sick-like feeling he's getting from needing to adjust to completely different electromagnetic radiation. This is why he dislikes teleporting - it's the rapid, sudden shift of his bearings and even if his nervous system is fast, it's an adjustment. ]

A few. The only one who seemed to struggle with the concept was a five year old child.

Telepathic. I don't think they have any empathy.

[Bah-dum-shink... And yay to helping!]

Well, most five year olds have issues with that. And some never do grow out of it either. I imagine if you grew up with the ability to turn someone into a poodle because they annoyed you and no one ever told you it was wrong, you'd have a hard time with the empathy thing.

They exist together less frequently than people think. For various reasons.

[ It's the good thing about his more scientific nature - he can bury distractions and physical needs in order to pay attention to his work. On the other hand...he can bury distractions and physical needs in order to pay attention to his work. ]

That was my point. He's a child, it's to be expected. He had a good family though, and many people who love him. He'll be all right. But even those who are shown cruelty are capable of deep empathy.

[ Like his daughter. ]

[Alec is only a little bit miffed his pun went unnoticed. Admittedly it's a bad pun, but even a tiny wince might have been nice. Though Magento probably has other things on his mind besides the terrible puns spoken by a strange stranger.]

Mmm... yes. And Q has been accused of this on occasion, but he'll flat out deny it. But in any case you're stuck here for... some unknown period of time. Possibly until he gets bored with you. Hopefully it'll be quickly because then he'll send you home.

[ Given he was talking about powers, the pun flew over his head. ]

Most would deny it.

[ And that wasn't welcome news - he was needed. ]

I could manage to be boring. How long have you been here?

[Ah well. There's other people out there to appreciate his so called sense of humor.]

I've always owned up to the fact that I have the maturity level of about a six year old. Thirteen on a good day. But I'm fairly self-aware of my faults and issues.

[Some how Alec doubts Magento Master of Magnetism and All That could manage to be boring. But he won't contradict the man.]

Me? I dunno. Maybe about an hour or so. I was here and then I left and came back again a few times. But, I'm also pushing my luck. Eventually they'll notice me doing that and either kick me out permanently or smack me down and force me to stay here.

[ No one gets his humor either. ]

That's rare.

[ He can be boring. It's how he fakes his own death so often. ]

How are you leaving?

[ All discomfort forgotten, his gaze focuses sharply on Alec. ]

[No one realizes he's died because they never hang around long enough to see if he's alive or not?]

I can sort of... mmmm... side-step out of reality and into ... this non-existent space and go elsewhere.

And no, I can't take you with me. I can only move myself. It's not teleporting it's ... I'm not really completely here. I exist partly outside of everything, kinda like one of those Cthullu creatures, and I'm more projecting myself into this space. So the side-stepping is leaving this space and going somewhere else.

[At least he sounds apologetic about it.]

[ Occasionally. Other times he just...vanishes. ]

So you're more fitting into the spaces where dimensions bump against each other?

[ that is disappointing, but physics is more distracting. He's actually forgotten about eating. ]

[Alec blinks in shock at Magento's statement before flat out beaming.]

Yes! Exactly! That's a brilliant way to put it. I never thought to explain it that way!

[People have sometimes compared Alec to a parakeet. At this particular moment in time, as he gets excited at Magento's statement it's easy to see why.]

I'm totally stealing that!

I can steal that, right?

[ Given all the time he's invested in his own fields of study, the excitement is good to see. ]

Of course you may.

How do you keep track of the different dimensions?

You mean individual ones? Because there's kinda two different types. You've got the ones that are radically different from each other - like this one from yours - and then you've got the individual variations with in the individuals. Kinda like a forest?

[He starts drawing lines in the air, leaving glowing marks, each a different color.]

So, this is your reality, this is my reality, this is this reality here, for example. And then you've got the branching.

[He draws branches off each of the main lines. It looks kinda like a conifer tree now.]

Which is the variations with in the main trunk. The whole turning left instead of turning right, killing Hitler etc.

And then you've got the really weird bits where things sometimes blend.

[Some of the lines get smushed together.]

Which is when two realities have a coinciding history with each other, so their worlds blend. That actually happened in a couple of variations of your world. There was another world with superheroes and the two of them got smushed together. Heroes had their histories scrambled so um... Xavier got mixed around with another hero called Dr. Fate as well as your world's Doctor Strange so he became Dr. Strangefate. Then you just have your sort of standard crossover which is when two realities connect and people from one crossover into another because of various circumstances.

[Alec studies the forest he's drawn]

It's easier for me to keep track of the bigger trunk realities because they're so different from each other. It's like keeping track of books you've read. The smaller variations tend to blend into each other, so I don't really bother.

[There's a pause.]

And that was totally more information than you probably wanted to know.

[ He's not just studying Alec's drawings - he knows how the realities work, after all, he's studying what the young man is doing. The other information about some of the variant worlds and timelines are filed away for later. ]

No, it's interesting actually.

[The lines look rather like what someone would see in a photograph of some one playing with light. They don't give off any heat either. As for Alec, himself, this is clearly a subject he knows a lot about and is greatly interested, but also knows that some people's eyes might glaze over. He draws the lines like he'd draw on a chalkboard and he puts about as much thought into doing them.

Despite his apparent age, Alec is very comfortable with his abilities and his readiness to just use them off-handly shows that hiding, or needing to hide what he can do has never occurred to him.]

Oh, that's good. It's a bit of a hobby of mine.

Actually, what Q has done is something rather interesting and insanely difficult to do. He's turned the Enterprise into a Nexus point.

[He scratches some more trees and have their branches tangle into one spot.]

Usually Nexus points are like tiny ... tree houses that are free floating from any one reality, major or minor branching. They exist sort of like me, but draw people to them. But by bringing so many people from different realities here he turning the Enterprise into one.

Which is bad. Because then you start getting cracks. [He finger quotes around the word cracks.]

((Oh, yes, happy Christmas if you celebrate it! If not happy end of all the Christmas suffocation! XD))

It is a sad and lonely dance sometimes

It is. I have a few myself

I mostly have them. But it's fun when nice people do play with them. ^_^

It is! I'm glad to, espeically orginal canon OCs. I lvoe the world building.

Hah. Most of mine are original canon OCs with detailed worlds

That's really cool

I've had Alec since the early 90s so he's my best developed

Kate's mine, dating to about the same age

Nice! Rarely meet someone with one so old!

I think it's because RPers range younger

And now I feel *old* XD

So do I.

*starts an old fogies RP club*

*waves the 'used to be the youngest where did you ids come from' banner*

*shakes cane at the youngens and talks about how in my day RPing ...blah blah"

*we only had ONE icon!*

Gosh. I remember how exciting it was when we got THREE icons.

AND THEN THERE WERE FIFTEEN. It was like O.O :D

What were we supposed to do with so many icons!? :O

Andnow 250 doesn't seem like enough for some characters!

I know! A friend went to IJ because 250 wasn't enough

I've been tempted.

Me too, but I like the edit features and stuff here.

Yeah so do I. Fun fact, btw, there were Marvel/Trek cross-overs!

I may have all the comic books/novel from that crossover... >.>

And now I feel old XD

starts an old fogies RP club

waves the 'used to be the youngest where did you ids come from' banner

we only had ONE icon!