15strangers | WEEK 1

WEEK 1

[Awaken.

Fifteen strangers have been gathered to the Depths.

When the strangers awaken, they will feel nauseous in their stomachs. No doubt confused. Maybe a little sick, Perhaps, even terrified. And certainly, there is a good reason for it - they are not where they were before. If they had powers back where they came from, they seem to be all gone. And it appears that someone has left...guidelines for them. All of them addressed to a specific Title.

Their Title. Somehow, each person knows, upon seeing this, this is their Title, even if it seems to make no sense whatsoever. And its clear that whoever wrote these things knew it as well. Who was it?

Its uncertain. So far, there seems to be no one else save for them, and those who dare to venture out of their rooms - save, for some reason, the individuals in rooms 1, 8 and 7 - in this hot and stuffy place. No...'intercessor' to be seen yet, certainly. No outward signs that there's anyone else aside from the people with 'Titles'.

So, Titled: welcome.

There are fifteen strangers in this place.]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

...Do you think they've just left us down here? If they don't want anything from us, it would make the most sense to not have any of their people where we can reach them.

They bothered setting all of this up, though. It'd be kinda weird if they didn't have something else in mind.

[It'd be less hassle to kill them if they didn't care if they just rotted away, wouldn't it? And there was that one other thing, too...]

There're those rules too. I dunno how they'd enforce anything if there wasn't anyone around.

They might have cameras hidden somewhere. That way they'd know if we break any rules without staying where we could attack them.

Mmm. I guess they could sic some archaisms on us if that was the case. Wonder if we should check around for some traps, too.

Without our powers, even basic guard droids might be dangerous. Especially since they took my gun.

They took my grenades, too. Wonder if we could improvise something here.

It shouldn't be too hard. A lot of common substances are volatile when mixed.

Guess we'll have to see what's around. Time to make use of Xeno and Leo's teachings.

If we can find any cleaning supplies, they have useful chemicals in them for making explosives. This place doesn't exactly look like it'd have Environmental Bugs.

Might be able to do something with stuff used for food prep, too.

[Assuming their captors don't want everyone to starve, anyways. But hey, that sure is something else she hasn't heard of.]

Environmental Bugs?

Yeah, they're an invention of Joachim Mizrahi's. They clean and maintain an environment and atmosphere so that you don't have to worry about things getting dirty or air going stale in an enclosed environment.

[She's no expert on history, so the name doesn't mean anything to her, but she is definitely sure that something like that doesn't exist in Erebonia. Yet another weird thing about this place...]

Sounds like it'd come in handy right about now. ...Where're you from, anyways? [She knows he mentioned some kind of institute, but that wasn't very informative if she's never heard of it, either way.]

The Yuriev Institute, on planet Zavarov.

[Planet... yeah no, that's not something she's ever thought of. Space travel isn't even really a consideration in the Zemurian continent, so hearing about something like that is a bit hard to imagine and even moreso because she hasn't learned much of anything about astronomy aside from the bare basics.]

So you're saying you're from the stars or something? [Like some kind of fairy tale...]

No, I'm from a planet. Stars are made up of super compressed gas undergoing a constant fusion reaction, they're way hotter than even the center of a planet!

[She has no clue what the hell a constant fusion reaction is (or even the concept of nuclear power, for that matter) so pretty much everything he says flies over her head. Maybe Machias would've been able to lecture her on all this, but she never bothered asking since it never seemed important.]

Huh. The planet's hot on the inside, too?

[??? how do physics work...]

Yeah. Haven't you ever heard of lava and magma? If the inside of a planet wasn't hot, there wouldn't be any volcanoes.

[There weren't any full on volcanoes ~~that canon's told us about~~ she knows of, but hot springs exist, so...]

Didn't know that went all the way to the center, though. [She kind of just accepted that these things happened without bothering to think about the bigger picture.]

Yeah, the further down you get, the hotter it is. Under a planet's crust, it's all magma until you get to the core. That's usually made of really hot metal, but the pressure keeps it solid.

[SCIENCE!]

[She's learning so much?? Well honestly, Rubedo's straightforward in his explanations, so it's one-up from the school lectures she's had to sit through. Still, she tends to lose interest easily if there isn't an obvious practical use for this knowledge...]

Hmm. Would be nice if we could use that heat for something. [Geothermal energy isn't really a thing in Zemuria, not when orbal energy exists.]

[Why wouldn't he be straightforward? Being roundabout would just hide the information.]

People used to use it, in the pre-Zohar era. These days, though, it just affects what kind of terraforming a planet needs to be habitable, and what areas are friendly to aquatic animals.

Edited 2017-05-20 03:28 (UTC)

[She has had weird instructors who enjoy demonstrating concepts with completely circuituous methods and/or unrelated tangents. Life at Thors is hard, man.

And wow, more terms she's not familiar with. She'll cant her head at terraforming, although it won't last as she lapses into thought. Talk about affecting the entirety of a planet is beyond the scope of what she's accustomed to, where the scale is usually limited to the whole continent as its largest.]

Some of the stuff you're saying sounds hard to believe. [Not that she's necessarily doubting him, but there's just such a gulf in worldviews that... it really just sounds like fiction.]

What's hard to believe about it? It's just simple science.

I've never heard of anything that could affect a planet. Maybe something that can wreck a country, but nothing that big.

[And even the phenomenon she'd heard bits about only affected a small principality at that.]

Really? You must not pay a lot of attention to interplanetary news.

(no subject)

zephyranthe - 2017-05-20 05:37 (UTC) - Expand

carries_war - 2017-05-20 05:40 (UTC) - Expand

zephyranthe - 2017-05-20 06:02 (UTC) - Expand

carries_war - 2017-05-20 06:06 (UTC) - Expand

zephyranthe - 2017-05-20 06:17 (UTC) - Expand

carries_war - 2017-05-20 06:28 (UTC) - Expand