new player welcome post

[yhlee]

[Hello, new players! This post is for new and old players to get acquainted with each other in-character (IC) and out-of-character (OOC). I will be updating the character roster shortly for easy reference. Characters from the first arc who are still wrapping things up in Move 24, feel free to continue; I'll get to y'all shortly.

In the meantime, feel free to introduce yourself in OOC threads, including any information you want other players to have about you (including pronouns if relevant, or what time zones you're usually on, that kind of thing.]

[IC]
Ashari has just recruited a number of newcomers to the team in the hopes of shoring up its weaknesses and is, in classic Andan fashion, throwing a party on the Cantata (the moth ship formerly known as the Wasp and/or Bumblebee) so that folks can meet-and-greet. There are canapés, and Ashari promised Sulen that there are no recreational substances other than the alcohol if anyone wants it; Ashari is currently in the galley mixing drinks for anyone who asks. The public spaces of the interior have been decorated with somewhat lopsided and overly colorful artificial flowers (the matter printer was feeling cranky) as well as plush moths. There are in addition six friendly levitating baby moths, all wriggly tentacles and eyes, who will gravitate toward anyone who sings to them, and who like to be petted.

For the purposes of this post, "public areas" include the galley, the common room, and the storage hold, which has been temporarily pressed into service as a place where people can hang out. People are also welcome to hold private conversations elsewhere. For the moment, however, the cockpit, engine room, commander's office, and communications room/gunnery are off-limits.

[See this wiki entry on the Cantata-Wasp for more details on its layout.]

Comments

Re: practice spaces

[bariolage]

"Unfortunately, or maybe fortunately depending on how much you like physics? The person who can give you all the details on that answer isn't here. Because he only leaves his lab when he has to. Short answer," Ione says with a tiny little twitch shrug of one shoulder, "is that they're ... most likely not, since we made ours. I mean, they were deliberately constructed using ... math ... the details don't get taught to the majority of agents because they're confusing, and math isn't my strong point? But I suppose it is possible for that sort of matter-deconstructing-and-reconstructing to happen on a wild basis. I just don't have the faintest clue if it ever does. They don't feel similar, though, in the 'going through the rift here did not make me throw up' kind of way."

Conscious of the possible too-much-info, Ione smiles charmingly and sips her drink.

Re: practice spaces

[zuhrovet]

Sasha wishes people would try to explain math occasionally, instead of despairing from the beginning, but there are plenty of more practical questions to ask. "Did your rifts function like ours? That is, did you travel significantly in both time and space? Did you ever encounter people who seemed to be from other--other branches in time, I guess, where things turned out differently?"

Re: practice spaces

[bariolage]

If only Ione could - she's not an expert on the subject and has to squint for a second to find the right words.

"I'm not a technician, so I can only speak from the experience of someone who got sent through transport a lot, as opposed to -- I didn't actually do any of it, I don't know how to operate the system," thus implying also that she doesn't know how it works, maybe, "We rarely stayed in the same dimensional system, transport is generally used to switch between them, so it depends on how you define space I guess. Wouldn't use it to go to another planet in the same dimension, that would be a waste of computing power. A different dimension's version of that planet, yes, but not one you could travel to by ship or something. And as to time branching, they get classified as different worlds entirely then, so that's both a yes and a no I guess? Series Sixes, for instance, all have identical planetary structures but they're different because the outcomes of historical events are different? But I've probably been to nearly thirty of them, and sometimes we can look and say oh, this choice that was made here is why this is now 6-delta-4201 and not 6-delta-4200, and otherwise it's pretty much all the same down to the people living on it, rather like that?"

Ione's short answers are not short.

Never ask her for long answers.

[I was not the GM of her source game and did not devise this material, but I do have permission to have her blather about it ... since I later married the GM.]

Re: practice spaces

[zuhrovet]

"So you didn't go forward or backward within a timeline? You were primarily skipping sideways between different branches, what you're calling dimensions? And there wasn't a systematic way to characterize when a new dimension would split off? Can you give me any idea of what the power draw was to create one of your rifts, at least the order of magnitude?"

Sasha's also wondering if there are military applications, but she's not sure if Ione would tell her, and it's not like she has an R&D budget.

Re: practice spaces

[bariolage]

Ione would know more about military applications than how it all works, really; she is now in over her head and her expression shows it a bit - she does wish she could be more helpful and give details, but,

"Right, our entire job is to go places where worlds might collapse or were having other ... substantial problems that needed outside help, so we only used it for world to world because that's all we did. Do. There is a system to catalog dimensions and map divergences, I just don't have any involvement with that, I don't even have clearance to go in that lab -- I'm sorry that I don't know numbers," Ione is becoming sorry that she's the one here instead of Lord, full stop, "But I do know that the generators are, er, about the size of this ship and there are ten of them."

Re: practice spaces

[zuhrovet]

Volume is not a useful metric for power capacity, but only the Prophet can guess why Sasha thought she'd get a better one. [Sorry, Ione, you have encountered Peak Engineer.]

"How did you get to the heptarchate?" Sasha asks. "Was it one of your kind of rifts, or one of ours?"

Re: practice spaces

[bariolage]

"Yep." Oh, wait, that's not a clear answer at all: "Um, a harnessed version of one of yours after our lab detected the spikes. It didn't really work the way it was supposed to, but ... It worked enough that here I am!"

The fact she may never get to go back is irrelevant.

Re: practice spaces

[zuhrovet]

So it's a related mechanism, but the rebellion doesn't need to anticipate an incursion of extradimensional people who think they can fix things. Although...

"Where you're from, is it--measurably better? When I came to the heptarchate, I thought, at least anyone can join a faction. That it just mattered what you were good at, not who your parents were. Every culture's fucked in its own way, I guess. But your people, they were trying to improve?"

Re: practice spaces

[bariolage]

They've already gotten everyone they're getting: Ione is the entirety of HQ's contribution here. The idea was she was supposed to report back if more were needed, but because rifts are tricky, now she can't. Generally interference is only by request.

"That ... depends," Ione says cautiously, "On who you count as my people, because my childhood was on one world, my early adulthood on another one, I've lived in four dimensions and six planets throughout my life and considering my parents are from different worlds, I'm not sure which I would count. The agency doesn't tend to push into others' business unless they either ask for it, or really clearly need it in a everything-is-metaphorically-on-fire kind of way. But the world my dad comes from, for instance, it's much better. It's very nice. I would have stayed there if there'd been use for me, but I got bored. Where I went to medical school was so bad it's not even there anymore. On a general scale of here-versus-other-places, everywhere else I lived, except that one, likely had more -- personal freedoms and less torture?"

interplanetary anthropology

[zuhrovet]

"Huh."

At this point, Sasha gets sucked back into the practical conversation with Seyli, and from there she goes to speak to Ashari and Sulen at the bar. When she returns to Ione's side, she's obviously flushed.

"The thing I keep wondering is, does the heptarchate really have more torture? Or is it just more obvious about it? Or--hells--more effective? I know it was easier to be a foreigner in the heptarchate in my time than it became, later. But where I come from--though they never said they tortured people--they said people had made appropriate recompense for crimes committed. Or that there was a little brushfire war somewhere else. The soldiers had not exhibited ideal control under stress. You know, the way governments always lie."