Test Drive #7 - Ten Forward and Captain's Yacht

[ten_fwd_mods]

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 Captain's Yacht: Oooh, you sneaky stowaway! You've found yourself in a very exclusive part of the ship: Captain Picard's personal craft, used for short jaunts when a shuttle just won't do. (One must retain some decorum, after all.) It may not be as large as the Enterprise itself, but there are sure to be some surprises aboard once people start snooping.


[OOC: The Captain's Yacht is located at the very base of the Enterprise's saucer portion, so if you put someone in there you can also play them trying to get back to somewhere they know!]

Comments

[fishermansweater]

The perfect alertness in his body, the readiness to spend the next minute, just a minute, and that's all he'd get, taking in everything he could about his surroundings because that's the only way he'd survive the bloodbath at the Cornucopia, all of them narrow, focus, not on the arena, but on here. Now.

A lounge. None of the crass glamor and fashions that border on self-mutilation that are so popular in the Capitol. None of the shine, the brightness, the self-indulgent laughter that he knows to be merely a thin layer over a world of depravity. He's plumbed its depths.

He doesn't know what this is, or where this is.

It can't be 13. Not yet. Not without Katniss. Not before the Games.

He's almost persuaded himself that it's a hallucination, and the appearance of a woman with a horse's body is almost too much.

"This is a trick."

But while her hands are so plainly away from the weapon he can't help but notice at her belt, he doesn't attack.

[aster_planetes]

"Not as how you're thinking it," Roshanak says, keeping her hands in the air. Her hooves could hit him before any knife, but it's the gesture which is important. Even she knows that lesson.

"I do not mean you harm, be it in action or deception. This I give you my word."

[fishermansweater]

That's a hard word to trust.

It looks glamorous and exciting, like a life of luxury, fame, and ease nobody else in the districts can approach, but the life of a victor is all deception, because under that gleaming facade is a darkness that nobody sees. You can't trust somebody's word in the arena, and you can't trust it out of the arena, either.

Especially when you deal in secrets, in the shadowy world where appearances are nothing more than lies and beauty, especially beauty like Finnick's, is poison.

Finnick stares at her for another few long moments, the eyes that are so famous in the Capitol still wide and intent, before, slowly, he drops the defensive stance.

"This isn't the arena."

And she's not human, though that, perhaps laughably, is a secondary concern.

[aster_planetes]

"No," she says. "It's not. This is a starship."

Arena - an escaped gladiator from Old Rome, maybe? He's all desperation, like those who've escaped something terrible are.

She moves a bit, hooves clicking on the floor and tail flicking and her ears briefly flattening against her skull, at the thought of being captured, made to fight for sport.

(And her people are called barbarian, bah.)

"I am called Roshanak. What, uh. What do you want to know?"

Then she bites down on the inside of her lip to keep from babbling. Babble would not be helpful.

[fishermansweater]

There's a visible moment when Finnick has to stop and process what she's told him.

It looks like a bar, with the sort of metallic walls you'd see in a hovercraft, but what sort of hovercraft has a bar on it? That's the only reference he has that's anything like this; the term is completely unfamiliar, and it means nothing in his understanding. Is it something that the Capitol has been working on in secret, some new weapon, an advanced hovercraft, perhaps, to use against rebellion?

It can't be. They'd have wiped out District 4 when it rebelled this year if they'd had a way to do it.

"Is this some new twist in the Games?" he says, maintaining his tone, like a tribute warily asking new information about the Games, not like a rebel full of bitter anger against the Capitol.

The Games have strict routines, but this year, a lot has changed, including the intentions of the tributes.

He has to find out somehow if this is a Capitol punishment without letting anyone know that's what he's doing.