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]

He's ready for danger. To seek it out, to avoid it, to face it, whatever the situation demands. He's ready for assessments, for strategies, for tactics, for the arena and everything it demands. For keeping Katniss and Peeta alive until the rescue plans can be put into place.

He isn't ready for this, isn't ready to be approached with caution, just close enough that he sees the movement, turns his head towards it, meets the eyes of a woman ... who he has never seen before.

She's not a victor. He knows every one of the people going into this arena with him. She is not one of them.

There's a blaze in Finnick's green eyes as they focus on her. There's a clear moment of calculation, assessment, a second when Finnick decides whether or not to attack. She's standing still, well away from him, and has no weapons in her hands. Still, he doesn't stand down.

"What's going on?"

[fallaces_sunt]

And that's the million dollar question, isn't it.

Natasha doesn't so much as shift her weight. He assesses her, she assess him. She knows what she looks like to most: the tight jeans, the fitted leather jacket, the straightened red hair which can cast her face into either youthful innocence or matured severeness (she's leaning a little towards the later; it's the angle of her head). But he's dressed damn weirdly, so a lot of her tells are off. So are his, presumably.

It doesn't, she knows, actually help the situation.

"A guy called Q brought you here" she says, her low voice even. "There's a number of us he's done that to, so you're not alone. It's not drugs. It's...let's call it magic. Or technology beyond any of us."

She pauses, watching him with cool green eyes.

"You follow me so far?" she asks. No condescension, just the slight, mostly impersonal concern of someone checking in.

[fishermansweater]

There's no hostility in her posture, but he knows that's not always a reliable guide. He's seen too many alliances formed and broken to believe any overtures of friendship in the arena. But this isn't the arena. She isn't one of his competitors.

Nor is she one of his co-conspirators, determined to free Katniss Everdeen from the arena to be the face of the revolution against the Capitol. It's not the right time yet. Third day. Midnight. And Haymitch would have sent them something if the plan had changed.

The woman doesn't flinch, doesn't move except to speak, and Finnick doesn't, either, not until she asks if he follows her, when he nods.

He does. Follows the words, understands their meaning, but doesn't understand the situation, why him, why now, what's happening. There's only one thing that makes sense, and yet it doesn't make sense.

"I'm in the Capitol?"

If he's been snatched from the arena and not by the planned rescue, not by being freed when the arena was destroyed, that's the only answer, though she looks nothing like she's from the Capitol.

[fallaces_sunt]

He's listening, at least. The longer he listens, the more chance Natasha has of getting him to stand down. It's the panic that usually does it. Here, he might decide to attack her, but he's thinking.

"No," she says. "No Capitol. You're not in your country. And, sorry to say, you're not actually on your planet any more.

As I said. Magic, or technology beyond us."

[fishermansweater]

The Capitol has technology beyond the reach, even the imagination, of many in the districts. Finnick, though, has been in and out of the Capitol for the past ten years, as tribute, as victor, as mentor. He's familiar with a wider range of their technology than most from the districts, and they have hovercraft, but nothing capable of leaving the planet.

The whole concept is surreal, so surreal that for a moment he wonders if he'd been sabotaged, given some sort of hallucinogen, though she'd insisted no drugs.

He tenses, not with a readiness to spring, but with a caution as he tries to both study his surroundings and keep this cool, red-headed woman in his view. The clothes are unlike those in the Capitol, some of them like and some unlike certain of the districts.

The view of stars moving past outside the window holds his attention for slightly longer than is wise before Finnick drags his gaze back to the woman.

He's suffered and perpetrated too many lies and deceptions to so easily believe her, and it's only years of doing just that, of living the constant lie of the glamor of victory in the Games, that stops his unease from showing in his body language.

"I find it easier to believe the Capitol would try to sabotage a tribute than that I'm suddenly not in Panem."

[fallaces_sunt]

She frowns suddenly and doesn't bother to hide it. Despite what people may think, she's more honest in her reactions than most give her credit for. Then again, it does help in seeming normal. Helpless. Civilian.

"Panem," she says, slowly. Tribute, he'd said. Panem et circenses. "Where's Panem?"

His accent is odd, sometimes a Texan drawl and others something she'd almost state as being Central American. But neither of those are coming together as if he were a native one and moved to the other.

[fishermansweater]

He's far less certain than he sounded, but Finnick is nothing if not a consummate actor, because it's only his acting ability that stops him showing the Capitol and the people there all the disdain he feels for them even as he's whispering the pretty nothings they pay for as though he were really their lover.

His certainty takes another drop as he sees the frown on her face.

It looks real, and the hesitation in the name Panem does, too. Can she be telling the truth about not being there anymore? Everyone knows Panem. It's all there is left habitable on the world, isn't it? Though there had once been other landmasses.

Not that he actually knows how much of what he learned in school in District 4 was true.

"It used to be called North America," he says, caution in his voice.

That much he does remember.

[fallaces_sunt]

It's a terrible, and telling, contradiction: spend too long afraid, and you don't know how to show it. Even when, perhaps, not only you could but when you should.

The guy is good - very good. But he's not showing nearly enough uncertainty to be someone who will accept things on faith, or even logic and facts. Facts can, and are, things to be twisted.

In other words, Natasha gives him a long moment and thinks, well, shit.

"In my time, there's North America," she says. "It's a continent with three countries: Canada, United States of America, Mexico. I'm gonna wager you were pulled here from a time long after mine."

She watches him.

"Originally, I'm from a country known as Russia. Proper name, the Russian Federation. Or, Rossiyskaya Federatsiya. Have you heard of it?"

[fishermansweater]

Some of the names are familiar. Others are not.

The first list gets her a cautious nod, though Finnick's bright eyes are still intent on her, watching her like she watches him, and watch him she does, though it's not how he's used to being watched. He's always turned heads, even before he became a star all around Panem at the Hunger Games. Now, everywhere he goes, he's watched, stared at, admired, ogled, wanted.

He knows the looks. This isn't one of them. This is more like two tributes assessing each other in the arena.

Mexico -- a name that used to be given to part of what is now District 4, Finnick's own home, the source of the occasional vaguely Spanish lilt in his accent. Canada? That name is less familiar. But all of it is wrong. Panem hasn't had any of those names for a long time, and they're only passed on now in history lessons and half-remembered stories from the times before Panem, before the rest of the world flooded.

"No," he says, and his tone shows no indication of believing her, or of any easing of his suspicion. "Panem's the only habitable land left. And Panem hasn't been called any of those things for a long time."