Welcome to the Program

[airlockedmods]

Good Morning, Champions. In the interest of maintaining healthy sleep patterns, a day/night cycle is in effect. Your presence is expected in the cafeteria in exactly one hour.

[The voice comes through not a large speaker, but through the device that's attached to each Champion's arm. Further investigation of the features of the device will reveal a list of profiles, a mini-map, and a list of rules. The hallways are shiny white and silver, with running lights along the floor and lights on the ceiling, and at the junction of the hallways is a sign with a knife and fork icon and an arrow pointing down the hall.

Welcome to the Excellence Program, Champions. Time to get to know your teammates.]

Comments

[karappo]

N-nothing! I was just surprised, is all...I was not expecting my assumption of you fighting aliens to be the correct one.

[Though he has met someone else who has spent a hell of a lot of time in space so it probably shouldn't be all that surprising.]

[batfortheprincess]

Huh?

[Aliens... Martians... oh. He doesn't relax quite yet, but.]

N-no, it has nothing to do with aliens. You... you haven't heard of the Vers Empire?

[karappo]

...I am afraid I do not know what that is.

[batfortheprincess]

[Ah... he's not sure if he should be feeling relieved or not over all this unfamiliarity with things that are common knowledge to him, but the tension does leave his shoulders.]

The Vers Empire is a nation that was founded on Mars almost thirty years ago, by the colonists that settled there from Earth. There has been... a great deal of tension between the planets since then.

[Although shit is a lot more complicated than just that, but he figures that's probably enough context for Karamatsu right now.]

[karappo]

[Wow. That's...wow.]

I cannot say that Mars is settled at all back home, at least not as far as I know...we have only made it so far as the moon.

[batfortheprincess]

There wasn't a hypergate excavated on the Moon?

[This is apparently news to him. Yeah...]

[karappo]

A...a what?

[Apparently no, there wasn't.]

[batfortheprincess]

Oh. The technology that allowed us to travel to Mars, it... it was found on the Moon first, by one of the landers. They said it was the remnants of an ancient Marsian civilization and they named it the hypergate.

[so yes, Karamatsu. aliens were a thing once upon a time.]

[karappo]

[Little does he know that he'll remember that aliens are a thing in his world, too...just not right now.]

How long did it take to uncover something like that? Surely we would have noticed it by now, too...

[batfortheprincess]

I'm not sure, but I believe it was discovered shortly after they had landed, since it was a fairly conspicuous device. It was capable of warping fleets of transport ships, so it must have been sizable.