ten_fwd_ooc | TEST DRIVE #10 - Cetacean Pool and Ten Forward

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test drives

TEST DRIVE #10 - Cetacean Pool and Ten Forward

Option 001. Cetacean Pool/Aquatics Lab: Of all the places in the world, you open your eyes and you find yourself in a medium-sized aquatics laboratory, filled with various living specimens along with various science officers bustling about trying to maintain order. There's much to explore here (and hopefully, in the crew's opinion, not break), but the main attraction is the large pool at the far end of the lab; enormous but tanklike in appearance, it contains several dolphins happily swimming about, seemingly without a care in the world.

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Option 002. Aboard the Enterprise, Ten Forward: You have no idea what just happened. One minute you were home, and now you're on a spaceship, in the middle of a crowded room. It looks like a bar. There are people eating and drinking, some in uniform, others not. Some are clearly aliens.

You've managed to land in Ten Forward a long bar with barstools and a bartender, tables sprinkled throughout, and the far wall is nothing but windows out to space. It looks like a nice lounge, low conversation making the room hum.

Better ask some questions and find out where you are, or just tap the closest person on the shoulder and try to make friends. The bar is open.

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"Certainly not one of the People, then." Or he'd have heard of them through Foaly's database. The voice wasn't fun but he rationalised it through science. It helped only a small amount.

"Keep what alive?"

"Smallyoung Bigthing stay stillquiet, Smallyoung Bigthing learnunderstanddo!" the creature screeched happily. "Petalwing Do! Petalwing remember!"

"Petalwing needs to learn how to speak English. Or is that too much for your small, and most likely privative, brain to comprehend."

"Petalwing speak bigthing mouthwords just fine! Bigthings always grumpygrrr! Never stillquiet good. This why Petalwing stays with Highthings! Highthings listen and tell Petalwing whatdo!"

Not... that Petalwing generally listens to the Highthings it chooses to stay around. If it did, it would have wrapped itself moons ago.

Artemis sighs and shakes his head but a thought had come across his mind making him chuckling every so slightly inside. Only for a moment, he was amused. Then he turned his attention back to...Petalwing.

"What is it you want? Did you bring me here?"

Petalwing cocked it's small head, curiously. "Petalwing no bring Smallyoung Bigthing! Petalwing just comesee! Many Bigthings and the forest is gone!"

"So you were also brought here." It seemed as though many were. And most likely just as much against their will. He pondered this, not saying anything else. It would barely be comprehended after all.

"Smallyoung Bigthing stand still quiet now? Petalwing make wrapstuff?"

"I guess. This is the first bar I've ever been in." He doesn't have much of a frame of reference, though. He's never been in a bar--his mother likes to have a drink, sometimes, but they generally don't leave the house, and with the attacks...well, he's pretty sure everyone's priorities lie elsewhere. "There's a lot of people in here, that's for sure. Most of them are part of the crew, I think."

"Fur would have been very useful in winter, though I dread your friend's summer." The words come from knowing absolutely nothing else to say. He isn't a unique creature in the mind of humanity; many religions and folklore have creatures in them that resemble Kurt. Some of them are even benign.

But this young lady is talking about someone she knows, presumably another human being, who looks like him. That throws him for a loop, long enough for silence to stretch while his mind wraps around the concept. On realizing thus (and that he's been staring, probably while looking completely flabbergasted,) Kurt looks away, coincidentally toward the rest of the lab.

"Entschuldigung," he murmurs in apology, his shoulders drawing in more than their normal set. "I am not very used--nein, accustomed, to people saying they know someone who looks like me."

That reaction is unusual to see from someone he doesn't know, but certainly one he's seen before. In the circus it was common, particularly when he'd accidentally startle one of the fellow workers while moving around in the shadow.

His expression remains unchanged until she describes the ship as a dirigible; English is neither his first nor his second language, and while the word sounds familiar the definition is one he can't quite put his thumb on.

"You'll have to forgive me," he says, eyebrows still drawn together in thought. "I know the word, but I can't quite remember the definition. Do you mean to say a ship?"

"Well yes, an airship," she said, then considered, "Well, they claim it is a space ship, but fundamentally the concepts must be similar. I would know with more confidence, but they don't generally let us into the engine room or wherever it is they steer it from.

She made a face. "Admittedly I never got to see where Castle Wulfenbach was steered from either, so I might not be able to compare there... but I bet if they let me take the mechanism apart, I could not only understand it, but improve it!"

Do forgive the silence on Kurt's part; the part about their being in space has just sunk in. A very loud part of him doesn't want to believe it's possible; he grew up in twentieth century Germany, not the fifteenth century. What he's seen is far and beyond what he knows is possible.

"A space ship," he murmurs, raising a hand comprising of three digits to rub at his forehead. "But this is--you said you would understand how this ship works? Do you know how it was that I would have come to be here?"

He might be less inclined to believe her if he weren't under the impression that Castle Wulfenbach were a literal castle, instead of a whimsical ship name.

"He sheds," she murmurs absently, still watching him, though more like she's trying to make sure he's...not her Kurt after a bad shaving accident than like she's concerned about than that he looks like a demon.

"I have no idea what that means," Noriko says, blank. "I..let me just show you," she continues, pulling her phone--now mostly a game engine and a photo repository--out to flip over to a picture of Kurt backbent and looking at the camera. "This is my Kurt. The one I know."

Pearl couldn't help but notice the pause before Artemis spoke. Was she making him uncomfortable somehow? She couldn't think how, aside from their current situation, but it still puzzled her.

"The San Gabriel mountains," she replied nonetheless. "Have you heard of them?"

Artemis had to pause again. The San Gabriel mountains weren't a place that came immediately to mind but the name had flashed up during his quick search before finding Mulch. So while the name itself was vaguely familiar, he knew nothing of them except what the name suggested.

He nodded slowly, wanting more answers but not finding the questions to ask. He blamed the circumstances before his arrival here for that fact.

"Does it take long to travel between your village and Los Angeles?" He finally asked, annoyed at himself for taking so long to ask the question in the first place.

"How you came to be here seems to have very little to do with how this ship operates. There is a being called Q who uses some sort of science I have never seen before. He doesn't stay around long enough to be studied," she said, mourfully. "But all of us were somewhere else one moment, then somewhere here on the ship. The technology here is fascinating, however, and most of the people are quite nice!"

"Someone slapped me the whole way out of reality into this." Eames smiles to herself. "She was some woman." And if she is capable of this, she is as dangerous as a James Bond villain.

He rubs at his chin. "It wouldn't surprise me, but darlin' look around." He's spotted the window and the view. "Teleportation can't have got this far."

RIker's seen a few of these small bots making their way around the ship. At first he's treated them with suspicion and alarm, and had security make sure that they are not looking to uncover all of the Enterprises secrets. They would make very effective spies after all. All reports have concluded that they are harmless, and he takes to watching them with some amusement.

He is about to leave the bar with his drink when one hops beside him. It's time to follow it back to its source. The sight of second officer trailing behind it must have been an amusing sight but he acted like it was the most natural thing in the world. He stops by Agatha's work station.

"I believe this little fellow belongs to you."

Things are always interesting in Ten Forward, especially with the new arrivals. Riker never knows what he is going to expect, and he enjoys it, consequently he's spending more of his free time in the bar. When he steps into the bar today, it looks like more people are interested in the ceiling that they are in the their drinks. He folds his arms comfortably above his chest and follows their eyeline to see what is so interesting.

His eyebrows shoot up towards his hairline as he spots a decent miniature of his ship. It's making good progress around the room and it corners pretty well. He becomes aware of a guy talking himself through the manoeuvres and listens in.

"You must be a pilot yourself."

"Tongo," Riker looks highly amused after expecting some dire warning. "I didn't realise the Ferengi game was such an important life skill to master.

When exactly did we meet before?"

'Sir' doesn't hold any particular charm for Riker, he's more interested in the person making the platitudes. He listens to her case carefully, "There is no need to salute. Tell me about a couple of these cases that you've solved." He likes specifics, it's one thing to say you can do something, another to have actually done it.

Eames is the corner of the room, watching the people come and go as he tries to get a handle on the surreal situation. His lips quirk up in amusement as Arthur enters and takes almost the exact same route he had an hour earlier. He pushes off the wall and walks towards him. His hand still hovers over his pocket where his poker chip is safely stored.

"Hello Arthur, have you actually developed an imagination or do you suppose alien abduction is real."

She stopped welding and pulled the goggles to the top of her head, green eyes peering out at him from behind smudged overlarge glasses.

"Was there something wrong with my order?" she asked.

Brilliant girl, gifted Spark, talented inventor... seemingly no clue that his uniform meant command.... rather than bar staff.

She pushed up her glasses to rub her eyes with oil stained hands, drying patches of her eyebrows black and giving one of her eyes an unintentional raccoon-like appearance. She set her glasses back in place. "Or... were you here to ask for one too?

"Yes, sir," she said, letting her hands fall to rest easily on the pommels of her dagger. It is clearly her "Ready" stance, and not any form of threat or intentional aggression.

She debated for a moment, over which cases to discuss. Not the one where she lost her temper...and her control. Yes, for what those *****s were planning to do to those children, had done to other children, they would not have left that basement alive anyway, but it was the way she killed them more than the fact of it that made her shy away from that case.

Probably better to go with more recent cases, anyway. Her best story, she figured was how she figured out who had poisoned the Lord of The West March, even if it did paint Lord Evvarim in a better light than he deserved, but she realized that she couldn't spill the secrets of the High Court and that there would be too many Barrani out for her head if she mentioned the undying under the High Halls. So she changed her focus to another recent case.

"We were dispatched to investigate a disturbance at Evanton's shop, on Elani street. When we arrived, his board proclaiming his wares was not out, which while atypical for Elani street was not all together atypical for Evanton. He is known to be..."

what could she say that wouldn't insult the only person on the whole ***** street she actually LIKED? What had Tiamaris called him...?

"Taciturn." At least, she thought that was the word. It had been in High Barrani so had way more syllables than it needed, anyway.

However something was clearly amiss. Cautiously we requested entrance. Nothing seemed out of place in the shop itself." Even seeing as a Hawk sees, she wasn't fully certain she could have noticed if it was, cluttered as the interior was.

"Evanton denied having filed a report, but allowed that one might have been sent. He admitted that something had been stolen. What he showed us there after I am not allowed to discuss with any who had not been there themselves." In an emergency, however, that rule would be out the window. Gods, she'd brought a DRAGON into the Garden unbidden.

"In the course of investigating his holdings, we learned that a reliquary was stolen from a room that should have been inaccessible to any but him. We discovered two sets of footprints not his and not our own. One belonged to an adult, another to a child." her face pinched with pain, thinking of what had happened to Mayalee, what had almost happened to her.

"We also came upon evidence of a missing child that turned out not to be Mayalee, but another. In trying to find this missing child, whom we thought was the one that had been brought to the Ga.... to his shop" and she had, just not in the lifetime of anyone living in the city... "we went to missing persons. While my partner spoke to the man in charge of that department," he face clearly showed how little she thought of that snake of a man. Her hatred of him had only grown since, and she hoped never again to see him behind Marcus' desk...

"I consulted with the Tha'alani on duty, to see of a child matching the one I saw evidence of had been reported missing." At the word Tha'alani her face filled with too many emotions to be easily read. Where normally she was an open book, her memory of the revulsion she had felt in that moment warred with how she felt about the Tha'alani now - protective. She had been a bigot then, she had since learned better, but the conflict showed on her face. Still, her stance did not waver.

"He knew of no such child, but extended to me an invitation from the castelord of the Tha'alani. She wished to see me and it was urgent."

She hesitated, then felt compelled by honesty to add "at this point we were still in theory investigating a report of a theft that was not reported by the victim. As no one had reported the child I saw missing, hunting for her was not...technically... what we were supposed to be doing."

But it was a child. Kaylin would burn herself to a cinder to help a child. And the bruised look in those eyes... She swallowed hard now, even knowing how it turned out. She would never forget how those eyes looked then, she hoped to never see them look that way again.

"As my partner pointed out, we weren't going officially to the Tha'alani quarter, because special request or not, I would not have been the Hawk sent. But we did go, and Ybelline, the caste lord," there was an open look of longing and love on her face at the name - not romantic love - this woman clearly meant something dear to Kaylin. "Ybelline told us that a Tha'alani child was missing. It was not the girl I had seen in the Wa.... the girl I had seen. So now the official case was one missing reliquary, and unofficially...two missing children. There was also a deaf adult Tha'alani missing, but it may or may not have been connected to Mayalee's disappearance." Spoiler alert, it was. Her face all but said so.

"Things connect in odd ways, and we are trained to watch for these connections. I had lessons, in addition to my regular duties, with Sanabalis," she winced, she could almost feel Severn step on her toes. "Lord Sanabalis," she corrected. "And since the reliquary stolen had to do with water, I asked him about water."

Then she looked somewhat grumpy. The whole of her heart could generally be read on her face. "Next I know, I'm in an imperial carriage with him, heading to the oracles!" Again that conflicted look, for at the time she had been sneering and dismissive. It shamed her now that she had felt that way. Now she knew better. They weren't vague on purpose, they were like confused children. Many of them WERE children.

"Everly," gods there were too many E names in her life, "was painting, and we were led in to see him." She swallowed, still a bit shaken by this. "He was painting... me."

Her hands twitched for a moment, she almost reached to touch her arm and stopped herself, forcing palms to remain still on her pommels.

"We followed a few more leads, some from Everly, some not. The first break in the case unfortunately came from a death. A couple were killed, drowned, without water anywhere but in their lungs. The reliquary.

"We consulted with the Arkon, and were shown to one of the older galleries." Where she was told to touch nothing, and utterly failed to follow that order when she found the trapped spirit of a dragon housed inside the bones of his human form.

"In the gallery I found an amulet that no one else could see, and at its heart...was the True Word for Water. I promised the guardian who had protected it all these centuries that I would find the proper home for it, with someone who did not seek to use its power."

"My investigation then took me to the fiefs, and the old magic at Castle Nightshade," she made a face, she still hated when she had to step into that place, and not just because the entry portal made her sick.

"I went to discuss the adult Tha'alani with the fief lord, for he had been Nightshade's guest the first time he left the quarter. For the first time, the Castle denied me entrance through the front. Nightshade showed me the back entrance, however he could not accompany me. I climbed down an old well for miles before falling into a subterranean river. The water caught me, and saved me, and I thought that it had been the amulet, however when Water deposited me on a spit of dry land..."

"The child I had seen was there," she whispered, eyes misting slightly, pain and hope mixed in her face. "She was a child and she wasn't. She was Elemental Water itself, and she was suffering because of the Reliquary, because someone was using it to force her essence against her will. She appeared to me as a young girl, knowing that I would do anything to help her, just as she was male when she appealed to Uri...."

she shook her head slightly. "She asked me for help, then aided me into the castle. The conversation with Nightshade yielded a name. Donalan Idis. Investigating the name in Records, we learned much about him." More than she had ever wanted to know. She spent whole nights tossing and turning in bed, trying to forget. She swore softly; in Leontine, which did not sound too unlike a human trying to mutter in Klingon. Unfortunately for her, the ever helpful translators told Riker exactly what creative obscenity she had used.

"He had been a torturer for the emperor, before the Tha'alani made a pact to help ferret out truth from lies in a criminal's testimony. But his focus was on the Tha'alani themselves, and their mind reading abilities. He..." she swallowed bile and rage together, "he experimented on them, cruelly, trying to reproduce their abilities, torturing and maiming them in the process."

She felt the need to add this, to explain to Riker so he would not fear the Tha'alani as she once had. "The Tha'alani don't want to touch our minds, they don't want to read our secrets. Our fears and shames hurt them, scar all but the strongest if them, the Tha'alanari. The ones who can work with the deaf, with us." Not that Ybelline would use that word. "They agreed to serve the emperor to stop the torture."

"So the interrogation dungeons were closed, the surviving Tha'alani were sent home with little more than apologies," she said darkly, fury on her face. It wasn't safe, back home, to express these emotions about the eternal emperor, but Kaylin never could keep her face impassive. Theoretically that was what Lord Dimat was supposed to be teaching her.

Idis and his foul ilk were disbanded, told to live normal, legal lives. But he cared more for his experiments than anything else." Her fingers curled over the pommels of her daggers. "He continued in secret. He convinced the boy, Grethan, to kidnap the child. He used Grethan to sneak into Evanton's to steal the Reliquary. He had discovered the connection between Water and the Tha'alani, or thought he had, and he stole away to where Water would be strongest, to try and take their powers for himself. He almost destroyed the city. He hurt Mayalee." It was clear her priorities were skewed somewhat, as the second produced more anger than the first.

But she continued her report.

"Donolan Idis is... no longer a danger. To anyone. Grethan helped save Mayalee and since it was a caste issue, Ybelline did not bring the case to court. We got Mayalee home," and oh the relief and joy in her voice at that simple word, at the memory of bringing Mayalee and all the orphans into the Tha'alani quarter. Because Mayalee had asked Severn if Kaylin had any children...and he said yes, meaning the foundlings. "Grethan now works for Eveanton, which is punishment enough for anyone." She muttered those last words under her breath in Aeriean, which the translator again fixed into English for Riker.

"Do you want to hear next about how I cleared my Sargent for being framed for murder, when he wanted to stay in jail to save his wife, and we wound up able to keep her safe as well?" she asked, trying to bring herself back to easy ready, loosening her fingers.

The trick would be making that report without mention of the mirror, Richard Rennick, or Constance Mallory....

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TEST DRIVE #10 - Cetacean Pool and Ten Forward

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Posting from my iPad, please excuse errors and brevity.

Sorry this ended up in my spam folder :/

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Re: Option 2

Sorry, I didn't realise you had posted!

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Trying to remember all the sailent points of this case.