TEST DRIVE #2 - The Holodeck/Ten Forward

[tenforward_m]

Where were you a minute ago? Well, you aren't there anymore. Instead, you're standing in a very large, dark room lined with yellow. There are doors at either end of it.

Here's where things get a little choose your own adventure-y. You could:



1: Approach a console filled with buttons, located a few feet away. Press one, and it'll let you out of the room. Travel down a long hallway and you'll be in Ten Forward, the Enterprises' entertainment lounge. Have a drink, mingle and try to figure out why you're here.

OR

2: Maybe you just muttered some vague request under your breath. Maybe you wished aloud you were somewhere else. Or for help? If you did, might be in a fire station. Muttered something about killing whoever dumped you here? Surprise - you're in a slasher movie!

Though they're confusing, these visions feel about as real as they can be. And guess what - other people can experience those fantasies with you, as if they too were really there. How ever will you escape? Or do you want to?

[OOC: Welcome to the Holodeck! If you choose this option, whatever your character chooses to say out loud will cause a virtual reality program to load and play. While your character feels as if what they're experiencing and seeing is quite real, they're purely living through the latest and best in what he Enterprise has to offer in entertainment. Make sure to detail what your character's fantasy is, so that those threading with them will know how to react.

Open til next month's test drive!]

Comments

[and_she_waited]

"Because I know him," she says, stubborn and petulant in the same breath.

So he does know the Doctor, she thought so. Maybe some old friend of his, or...

"I've known him most of my life. We travel together, him and I. And Rory," she adds.

[thelasttimelord]

There is a great straightforwardness and faultless severity with which fall his next words.

"I am The Doctor, and I don't know you." In a million-million lives, and ten, you could lose one.
But you would not lose someone you'd know all of their life. Even the length of a human life.
He remembered them all. All of the people who said yes. No matter how short it was.


There is the chance she's lying. But there's, also, other options. Other possibilities.




"Which means," he follows. Slowly. "We have a problem."



A greater problem than the ones he had already been juggling.



There is a chance that this place is crossing him through his own timeline.
Which could be far more disastrous than fifty people ripped from the past to here.

[and_she_waited]

She's torn between anger and an ill kind of whiplash at his words, because who is he to say such things? She knows The Doctor. He's her best friend in the whole universe, and for someone to claim his name and disavow her existence in his life is going too bloody far.

She swallows back the tremor trying to work its way into her voice, and beetles her brow.

"A problem other than you being completely mad?" she snaps.

[thelasttimelord]

Sincerity radiated from her reaction. Anger and pain like being slapped, which flew right back at him. But. Sincere emotion. Like something had been taken from her hands. Making his own hands tighten in the pockets of his duster, because it was not by any means his wish or will to hurt her.

"If you are what you claim to be, then, yes." There's some suspicion, but there's, also, honesty in that.

There were any number of times in his past he could not have claimed to know what was coming, who would be with him next. He shouldn't have been allowed to even see her face, shouldn't suddenly wonder with deep, dangerous, curiosity what her name was, and where she was from, and when it would be, if she was from then. He should do his best to keep everything from tangling as much as possible.

[and_she_waited]

"I am," she says, as if she's claiming the English throne. "And you're one to talk."

But even as she lashes out, she can feel a sureness creeping in her gut. A little voice whispering that this is the Doctor, just not her Doctor. It has her blinking, giving a little shake to her head to shut it up and stamp it down.

"Why should I believe you anyway?" she asks.

[thelasttimelord]

"Because you already do." Because even if that wasn't true, she doubted enough it wasn't false either.
There was enough doubt and, by it, enough knowledge of the possibility, it made her harder to doubt, too.

Someone who knew that the potential might happen. That the differences between, faces and situations, were only details as malleable as time and place. The flip of a switch. If a very different kind than used for the Tardis. But it was there in her face and those wounded, but intelligent, eyes.

The Doctor canted his head, shifting his weight in his shoes. "And because I have no reason to lie about who I am to you, and even less to be gained from pretending to be myself in this place, where very few people have arrived knowing any of the other arrivals. Nor have been from the same times, no less the same universes so far."

[and_she_waited]

She hates being called out like that. There's only one person in all the universe she'll let do that to her, and only then after an argument, usually.

"Circumstantial," she argues, ignoring what he said at the off and concentrating on what doesn't feel like a thousand needles stabbing her heart over and over again. "Everyone's here for a reason, because there's always a reason. And with a reason comes a person, someone to think it and make it so. What makes you think I'd suspect you any less than anybody else in this room? Someone who knows the Doctor's name and has his friend trapped here? That's enough of a feather in your cap to make lying reasonable."

She paces, making a slow half-circle around him. The Doctor. It's still ringing in her ears, closing her lungs off with panic she doesn't have the time or the frailty to entertain.

"He's coming for me. He always comes for me. He wouldn't let me down by being someone else, someone who doesn't remember. So what, then? A trap, perhaps? Learn his weakness and exploit it? Get his friends to tell you what you want to know? It won't work."

[thelasttimelord]

She circles and let he lets her. Eyes following her. In case. Narrowing a little because the complication isn't that he thinks the shouting and snapping will at any second turn into an brandished weapon or attack. It's that he can already se a glimmer of it. In her sharp tongue, and her every sharper eyes. The pain that comes only from deep passion, and deeper loyalty. So human, and so honest.

He can already see the glimmers of it. Why she'd be a compelling choice. Even if he shouldn't be thinking it.

"That's a lot to put on one set of shoulders." It's offhand and a little too mild for the depth of memories that shiver behind it. The number of people to come and go in the past. The times he has heard those words thrown back at him, for coming back or not coming back. For being everything. Right up until he wasn't. Until something else. Or someone else. Or bigger events.

"It's good I don't want to know then." The Doctor pops off a second later, a little more serious, a little more callously pushing those dusty memories back. "Especially not if you're who you say you are. The last thing I want to know is about myself." Even if it's not true. He wants to know. He always wants to know. At least a little. Who. Where. What. When. How long. But not as much as he can't know. Never as much as the knowledge of how knowing could change all of time. The way her being here, next to him, threatened that, too.

[and_she_waited]

It certainly sounds like something he'd say, the recognition of which doesn't do anything to help. It just weighs on her more.

"It's a likely story, bub," she says within a cynical laugh.

All bravado, all cold confidence and self-assuredness, because that's the only way to keep her heart where it belongs. Safely in her chest, not down in her shoes or up in her throat. It's the only way to not hate him a little bit for always being right.

"Say one thing," she adds at last, betraying a hint of desperation. "Just one true thing."