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.


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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.

Comments

[electro_kinetic]

"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."

[quiteafew]

It would have to be one interesting shaving accident to leave scars like those. The whorls carved into his skin have been done with an artist's hand and carefully treated to heal cleanly and in relief to the skin. The scars twist as Kurt makes a face, thinking of how much the process of shedding must itch. And all the little hairs everywhere!

"It means an apology," he murmurs, leaning closer to look at the little screen. His eyebrows raise when the picture comes up, his tail swishing behind him. "He's younger," the words blurted out as Kurt himself bends to peer more closely. The fur he can see, and the eyes that are almost nothing like his own. The tail looks different, mostly that the spade appears to be smaller than his own and he can't see the bone ridge (but that could be the angle). And it could be that the wrinkles that he himself is developing around the eyes and mouth are hidden by fur, but this other Kurt's cheeks are a little plumper, his body a little leaner. He looks very much like himself, not so many years ago.

[electro_kinetic]

"Oh," she says, handing the phone over so he can see it as close as he likes.

"He's...older than me? By a good bit." She can't help but find the parallels in the Kurt she knows and the one she's looking at, between the blue and the teeth and the faint German accent--or not so faint in this case. "Are you both Catholic?"

[quiteafew]

Murmuring his thanks, he cradles the phone in a care-worn and callused hand. Instead of even attempting to navigate with his thick fingers, Kurt snakes his tail over a shoulder. Using the spade of his tail, he zooms in on the picture with a deftness that implies experience.

Hm. Not so young, maybe? The fur really makes it difficult to tell whether the other man's begun developing wrinkles, and for the first time he feels a deep kinship with those who've had a difficult time telling his age. "And I much more, I imagine," he answers offhand, looking up from the phone when the young lady asks about his religion. Kurt smiles then, a wide and bright expression that creases the corners of his mouth lightly. "If he is, then yes. We would both be Catholic."

[electro_kinetic]

"Yeah," Noriko says. "He's Catholic, I think he's a priest. Or he was one, I dunno exactly. He's the chaplain at the school, but since we're all heathen teenagers it's not a steady occupation." She shrugs a little.

"I dunno all that much about Christianity, given I'm not in it. So."