week 1

[airlockedmods]

Week 1

[After the reveal of their handsome and well-dressed but stern-looking Overseer on Sunday, the Champions were left to their own devices in investigating the mall to their hearts' content. At around 10 pm every night the lights in all the shops will go down and the sturdy metal grates over the doors of the restaurants will go down. The stores will remain unlocked, though.

On Monday morning, a buzzing alarm chirps at them again from their PIPs at 7 am on the dot. There's also a pop-up message waiting for them: a notice announcing Xander will be holding office hours

Enjoy your week, Champions.]

Sunday Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday

Comments

[ratherdoweddings]

A little like that. [She shows the marking on the back of her hand, which has faded to grey.] It's more of an injection. The nanocontroller lets you control anything that uses an Image Feedback System, but if your body isn't used to it, it can have a reaction that'll make the user very aggressive and impulsive, at least at first.

[a10tionplz]

Yeah, well. Nanomachines.

[It could be a lot worse than aggressive and impulsive, trust him.]

Still, something that could've been read as an injury of some kind, an attack on the blood, something. There's been a few of us who were hurt to some degree or another before we got here. ...That still only barely begins to make sense, mind, but so far it's the only commonality I've found.

[ratherdoweddings]

Maybe. So they deliberately targeted people who were injured?

[a10tionplz]

Maybe. There's medical systems that can target individuals in need of treatment, even at distance, but nothing like what's happening here.

[ratherdoweddings]

I wish we had something like that at home. It'd have made our lives so much easier.

[a10tionplz]

Well, you'd still need to be careful with that kind of thing. Easy for it to get overzealous, if someone doesn't just hijack it for their own purposes.

[ratherdoweddings]

I know. But even so... it could've solved a lot of problems, you know?

[a10tionplz]

Oh, yeah, well. That's what human progress is all about, isn't it. Finding some problem, sickness or hunger or death, and finding a way to fix it. Or finding a way to replace it with newer more interesting problems, at least.

[ratherdoweddings]

You seem to know a lot about that sort of thing, don't you? I mean, time and progress, from how you talk.

[a10tionplz]

I should hope so. I'm a time traveler.

[ratherdoweddings]

Really? You mean... on purpose, not by accident. Right?

[a10tionplz]

...Mostly on purpose, these days. Almost always.

[He thinks for a second, then gives a noncommittal hand-wiggle.]

Ninety-nine point nine percent, say?

[ratherdoweddings]

[giggle] I just asked because we lost a few months coming back from Mars the first time, since we basically had no idea what we were doing. Chulip technology is a little difficult.

[a10tionplz]

Chulip technology?

[new universe who dis]

[ratherdoweddings]

Oh, it stands for... hmm, what was it? "Cellular Hangover" -- I think they meant holdover, the person who did it wasn't very good with English -- "from Unknown Labyrinthine Intelligence of the Prehistoric age." And the gates look sort of like tulips opening and closing, so it stuck!

[a10tionplz]

Sounds fitting, at least. And this was something you found on Mars?

[ratherdoweddings]

Technically, the Jovians found it first. They were the descendants of a fringe group of colonists who were banished from Earth territory on the Moon and had to run and build colonies around Jupiter, but the United Earth Forces covered up their existence and made us think that the people from Jupiter attacking us were aliens.

[a10tionplz]

Sounds about right, yeah.

[Seems legit.]

...What year were you from, again?

[ratherdoweddings]

2195! Why do you ask? [She absently rubs the back of the hand with the IFS marking.]

[a10tionplz]

Well, like I said, I'm pretty good with time and history and all that, and none of this sounds like the history of humanity that I'm familiar with. And not in that conspiracy-theory "hidden history" way, only about half of that stuff is ever true, I mean different in that parallel timelines kind of way, which really shouldn't be possible.

[ratherdoweddings]

Do you really think so? I mean, I know alternate universes are a big theory, but they haven't actually proved them in hundreds of years of trying.

[a10tionplz]

Oh, they definitely exist, it just shouldn't be possible to travel between them anymore, not with any kind of ease. Well. Normally. You could probably ask Junpei about them, he seems to be a bit of a special circumstance.

[ratherdoweddings]

Hmm... I'm going to have to ask some other people about this. Thank you! You've given me a lot to think about. You've been gathering information from everyone, then, right?