TEST DRIVE #10 - Cetacean Pool and Ten Forward

[tenforward_m]

#1

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.


2

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.

Comments

Eames | Inception | Option 2

[bigdreamer]

Eames trips to the bar are nothing if not colourful. In Mumbai, his cocktail is rudely interrupted by a spray of gunfire, as a few mafia thugs come looking for the vial of one of Usuf's concoctions that he is carrying. "Hello there ladies," he says as he dives into a group to disguise his exit. He slings an arm around a girl's shoulder, and gets slapped for his troubles.

It must be one hell of a slap, because when Eames opens his eyes, he's in a completely different bar, surrounded by people who wouldn't be out of place in sci fi convention. He reaches into his pocket for his gun and poker chip as he looks around himself. If someone's put him under, they've really sucked at coming up with a creative scenario that he can believe.

"Down the rabbit hole once me," he says to himself as he rubs at his cheek.

[still_looking]

"So, here's a trick question," Ariadne says, dropping herself onto a bar stool near Eames and giving him a wry, suspicious look, "are you real? Or are you a projection?

Or," she adds, rubbing at the back of her neck under her hair, "I suppose you could be a forger pretending to be Eames, except that's getting way too complicated."

Particularly as the bishop in her jacket pocket has its correct weight.

[bigdreamer]

"No one is good enough to forge me darling," Eames says with his customary drawl. "You are over thinking things." Just like Arthur would if he was here. He flips the chip one last time for good measure and releases his hold on it. The second he starts questioning the results of his own totem, he's lost.

"Someone wants to play with our minds."

[still_looking]

There are many reasons why Arthur and Ariadne have gotten along as well as they have.

"Hey, now, I said it was getting too complicated," she protests, but more amicably than not. "Yeah, I'd agree with that. But I don't see the mechanism. I was in Paris, then here. But it's a different from a dream. There's no...gap in where things happened. I was just here.

Don't suppose the military was also experimenting with teleportation?"

Sorry this ended up in my spam folder :/

[bigdreamer]

"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."