COME ON AND SLAM

[darkpants_warmfeeling]

WHO: Everyone! Especially YOU!
WHERE: The International Moon Research Base, Mare Nubium, THE MOON
WHEN: April 18th, all day
WHAT: Aegis Force, the government-funded imPort peacekeeping team, is hosting this month's Swear-In to promote their ideals of teamwork and cooperation! Come compete and spectate in the SPACE SLAM, the sporting event that's out of this world! Also featuring a LUNAR DISCO, a DIPLOMATIC EVENT, and a BATTLE AGAINST ATTACKING ROBOTS! Wait, what was that last one?
WARNINGS: Violence, awkward locker rooms. Any questions or issues, hit up the OOC post!

PART I: THE SWEAR-IN

Welcome to the Moon, imPorts! You arrive through the Porter in the base's atrium dome, designed in a futuristic style that emphasizes sleek, spotless white surfaces. You will immediately notice how much less you weigh here in the Moon's low-gravity environment- be careful jumping, or you may hit the ceiling!

Before you can get to the main event, you'll have to pass through strict security comparable to an airport experience (if the airport was surrounded by merciless vacuum and filled with flammable oxygen). Any weapons will have to be surrendered and locked up by base personnel during the event, unless you can convince officials to make an exception. Once past security, airlock tunnels will lead to the Base's other domes, where the main body of the Swear-In will be today.

The RESIDENCE dome is the largest of the interlinked habitable bubbles that make up the main Moon Base, holding tourist hotels, staff apartments, restaurants, and even a grassy park beneath a glass dome offering a view of the Earth above. Crowds are thick today, as plenty of people have flocked to the Moon to behold the heavily-advertised SPACE SLAM. The Slam is an Aegis-sponsored live-streamed sporting event, game show and fundraiser where imPorts assemble themselves into teams of 2 - 6 characters and compete in different challenges, held in hotel gyms and in the park. Giant screens and bright holo-displays notify of the different causes benefiting from today’s event, including the Endeavor Centre, SELF, and HOPE. Participating characters can choose any or all of:

1. Basketball - but of course. A court has been set up, and the stands are packed with cheering fans. Two teams face off and try to get the ball through each other’s hoops!
2. Battle Royale - the obligatory superhero sparring fight, available in free-for-all and team-vs.-team editions. Square off against with your rivals in an open arena and show the world who’s the toughest- just don’t kill or seriously maim anybody in the fray, or you’ll be disqualified!
3. Low-gravity laser tag - the less violent alternative to the Battle Royale, again in free-for-all or team-vs-team options. Grab your vest and plastic light gun and bounce your way into the neon-lit Zap Zone for a match!
4. Irritation Lane - a particularly challenging event, part demolition derby, part go-karting race. Your team must choose and customize their own ground vehicle(s) in a garage with sixty minutes to spare, working from pre-existing chassis like rugged old-fashioned moon buggies, light and fast hover cycles, and the massive heavy-footed Lunar Construction Mech. Decorate and modify your creations as you please and outfit them with nonlethal weapons like glue-foam missiles, EMP mines, net launchers, and smoke screens. Then put on a space suit and face your rivals in a thrilling race around the track that’s been constructed outside the base, complete with soaring low-gravity jumps and daring shortcuts through twisty, narrow canyons!
5. Charades - livestreamed to the entire planet so EVERYONE can see you choking as you try to think of how to mime a banana without looking like a pervert.
6. Competitive karaoke - livestreamed to the entire planet so EVERYONE can see you choking as you try to hit those high notes on ‘Don’t Stop Believing.’
7. Cooking contest - hop into a futuristic, well-stocked kitchen in one of the hotels with your team and roll up your sleeves. You’ve got an hour to whip up a dish that will impress, after which you’ll share your creation with other Swear-In attendees. The more delicious your cooking, the more votes you’ll get when it comes time for judging!
8. Dance-off - does your team have the moves to win over the audience? Put together a killer routine and show what you’ve got!
9. Bouncy castle endurance contest - A massive bouncy castle awaits in a huge room on one of the lower floors of the dome, with protective pads covering the walls and floors and ceilings. Get on the castle with your teammates and jump, jump, jump sky-high in the lowered gravity! Keep jumping no matter what, even if the opposing team tries to knock you off the castle. The team with the last people still bouncing wins this contest!
10. Lunar volleyball - the moondust on the moon’s surface is kind of like sand, isn’t it? At any rate, someone has set up a net outside the Residence dome and space suits are available for those who want to see how hard they can spike a ball in low-gravity.

Holographic and force field technology is in play during these events to ensure everyone's safety in the fragile environment of the Moon Base. Teams of metahumans are also competing, if you want to play out your team playing against NPCs. Before and after your matches, you may want to huddle with your team to discuss strategy and get psyched, engage in some trash talk with your rivals to get in their heads, and give interviews to clustering reporters about how you and your teammates are going to play hard, you know, just give it your very best. Locker rooms are also available for you and your teammates to get changed and shower in, which may or may not be excruciatingly awkward for you. Good luck and have fun, imPorts!

Once you’ve had your fill of the adrenaline of the Space Slam, why not move into the Embassy Dome for a more relaxing and mingle-friendly time? A LUNAR DISCO is happening in the gorgeous Grand Ballroom at the dome’s top level, with huge windows offering a gorgeous view of the cosmos, music to groove to across the marble floor, and a spread of free appropriately-themed snacks and drinks. Among the refreshments is finger food from The Nickel, and Abigail Hobbs will be playing the harpsichord. If you feel like you need to get outside for some (lack of) air, you can also step away for a moonwalk tour, ambling across the desolate gray lunar landscape in a space suit or a clear sealed 'hamster ball' under the supervision of base staff.

You may also find yourself on the Earth Viewing Deck, an elegant lounge dominated by a vast window view of the Earth, with soft music, low lighting, and private alcoves for personal conversation. Here is where the political aspect of the Swear-In comes into play. Not only is there a desk staffed by a government official where you can declare yourself Registered or Unsettled, but there are also optional conversation-starting name tags available with prompts like ‘I’m (INSERT FACTION/ALLEGIANCE HERE), ask me why’ or ‘I am a (INSERT SPECIES/PROFESSION/OTHER RELEVANT IDENTITY HERE), ask me anything’ or ‘I’m (REGISTERED/UNSETTLED), change my mind!’ The goal of this event is encouraging imPorts to talk to each other and resolve issues within their community peacefully and proactively, easing possible disputes before they end up making more work for Aegis.


PART II: ROBOT ATTACK!!
Things run smoothly until late in the evening of the event, when the buzz is immediately killed by a shrill siren, cutting through conversation and competition alike. A hushed silence falls over the gathering, broken by nervous murmuring. Those with experience in these things already know what’s happening: a Swear-In is about to go to hell again.

An eerily calm announcement sounds over the base’s PA system: ”Red Alert. Red Alert. Hostile forces closing on base perimeter. Lockdown protocol now in effect. All civilians are directed to proceed in a calm and orderly manner to the Atrium Porter for evacuation to Earth. All security staff and heroes to your emergency stations. This is not a drill.”

The announcement repeats once, and then the siren resumes. Time to make a decision, imPorts. Are you a civilian who will be evacuating with other noncombatants? Or are you a hero who will stay behind and defend the Moon Base from the oncoming assault?

If you’re evacuating, you can still help to guide and assist the streams of civilians- scientists, VIPs, reporters, tourists, some of them panicking- back to the overcrowded Porter. Once you’re safely back on Earth via the Porter base of your choosing, there’ll be little left to do but huddle with others and wait for news of the crisis unfolding far above the sky, as bits and pieces of information trickle in from the news and social media.

Those of you who choose to buy time for the evacuation by staying to defend the base will find yourselves in a dire situation. Because the Moon Base was built for tourism, science, and diplomacy as a symbol of peace, and thus has no real defenses. It has sensors though, and base staff report at least fifty contacts approaching from all around the base, most of them headed for the Science Dome, home of the base’s labs, lecture hall, and archives, with maybe ten minutes before they arrive. Barely enough time to retrieve your gear (if any) from security and come up with a plan!

First, you’ll have to decide where to make your stand. Will you don a space suit and venture onto the lunar surface in unarmed buggies and shuttles, trying to intercept the enemies before they reach the base itself? Your daring may spare damage to the base and its inhabitants, but out there on the bleak grey dust of the Moon most of you will be only one suit rupture away from a terrible death! You’ll be safer defending from within the base itself, where at least there’s shelter.

The oncoming robots come in two varieties: beefy KILLER ROBOT SPACE LIZARDs, and more subtle COPYCAT DROIDS. The lizards are seven feet long, tough and armoured, equipped with razor teeth and claws, an electric tail, and laser-beam eyes. They also lay ACID-BOMB EGGS that characters will have to disable or dispose of before they burst, corroding the Moon Base still further and causing structural damage. But they're really just the demolition crew for the base, and not that dangerous to imPorts compared to the smaller cats.

These bad kitties are prowling for imPorts, and will fire energy beams at them from their heads, attempting to steal their talent powers. If the beam strikes true, not only is the imPort de-powered until the Copycat is destroyed, but the Copycat will also morph into liquid metal and shift into a metallic copy of the imPort in question, complete with their powers and any specialized gear they may have, which they'll immediately use to wreak havoc on imPorts and natives alike. Get ready to experience firsthand what it’s like to be powerless in the face of a superpowered attacker!

As lasers flash, heroes smash, and robots explode, the Moon Base will begin taking damage despite the best efforts of characters. Injured staff will cry out for assistance and rescue, falling debris will threaten to pin people to the floor, hull breaches will threaten to drain the base’s oxygen and blow people out into space, and fires and explosions will wrack the Science Dome in particular as the robots try to detonate its volatile experiments and power sources to wipe out the entire base!

By the end of the fray everyone at the Moon Base will have been evacuated alive if not necessarily uninjured while all robots are disabled. However, there will have been heavy damage to the Science Dome in particular. Your characters can get started on repair and recovery if they want to stick around. Either way, the bravery shown by imPorts defending the Swear-In will result in EVERYONE being declared a winner at the Space Slam!

In the aftermath, characters will be able to glean more information about what just happened and why. It appears the robots ‘hatched’ from pods buried around the perimeter of the base in response to an activation signal. Apparently these pods have been lying in wait for over a year, while the Moon Base itself was still under construction as a highly-public imPort-led project! Those who are familiar with the history of the Otherworld Technologies Organization (OTO) may find familiarity in the design of the robots and pods. It would hardly be the first time the more extreme OTO elements were alleged to have pitted their killer machines against imPorts and civilians alike…

Comments

[obediences]

Luther almost pulls away again as she reaches for him — it's an automatic thing, a knee-jerk thing, in which the only contact he's really grown accustomed to lately is aloof, polite handshakes with the new people he's been meeting. Those people don't know what hides beneath all his layers of clothing, but she does. And so part of him is always steeling itself for that look of pity as she touches him, the infinitesimal twitch of revulsion at getting too close; he's always searching for it even as he'd like to believe it won't be there. (He always worries.) But then her hand is turning his forearm over, fingertips tracing across the faintly-luminescent tattoo at his wrist (just a couple inches from the black umbrella, a bit further down), anchoring him in front of her, anchoring his sight as—

As a box appears in front of him, tethered to nothing, and he almost reels then but Allison holds him steady.

"—What?" he asks. Blinks, blinks until it fades away like a ghostly after-image, then looks back at her and meets her gaze. "How... how did you do that?"

[numberthree]

The smiles that floods across her face, goes in every direction, without warning or impending crack, and might be a little too amused at his shock. (Maybe even a little too carefully possessive of the fragile fact he hasn't scrambled back from her yet, for either reason.) There's no real way to stop the even vague shadow relief, from that clawing consuming full stop silence, that is palpable in Luther looking at her, still stunned, blinking, asking her that, that never came in the same way when Jacob said she got it.

Maybe it makes things a little too light for second, and her first response is as cheap as it is that -- light:

To: Luther Hargreeves

Magic.

But she tips her head and pressed her mouth, even if the edges are still straining a little more upward than outward, as though maybe acknowledging that it's, obviously, not actually the answer. Which is why another message appears right after the first.

To: Luther Hargreeves

There's a mental network connected to the messaging system.
Apparently, its design is for mission communication?

[obediences]

"Mental network?" he echoes, still stunned. "How do they even..." God, the technology in this world really is something else, isn't it? And of course Luther's mind immediately latches onto that idea -- mission communication -- and considers how useful this sort of thing would've been. Could've been, in their battlefield environments. Being able to communicate across distances and even if you're gagged and muffled.

But they're not in the field and not on a mission and, more importantly right now: it's given Allison back her voice. Some form of her voice.

He squints, concentrates. Focuses on it. It doesn't come easily to him at first, but:

To: Allison Hargreeves

Like this?
A mental network???

[numberthree]

Not that he needs it, Allison almost thinks. Writes. Knows, just because for the moment there's a windfall of being pleased that she's not touching it, that she means because he has the ability to speak still. (That she means it because he's already in her head, always has been, and it's only become more true since he came back into her life, too).

Except. It's the reminder, too. Reading his,. Watching it vanish. Like with Jacob. It may feel like it gives her something, but it doesn't, too. Even if it happens in her voice, where she can hear herself, choosing words and making choices; for him, it's still only letters. That he still can't hear her. Even if it feels a little like he can.

To: Luther Hargreeves

It probably doesn't bode entirely well for whatever else they might have done to us before waking us up here, but

She leaves that hanging there. All the Hargreeves know what it is to be experimented on, at all hours, and states of consciousness, for more of their life lived still in that state than any of them had reached outside of it. And still. Still, even as there was a wariness to the admission like ink spreading in water, it gave her something.

More than she'd had before she got here even.

Nothing like her actual voice, and yet two different ways to still have words.

[obediences]

A palpable wince that flickers across his face, at that reminder; at that new consideration of what else the nanites buzzing along in their bloodstream might be doing to them. Fucked-up as it is to consider, at least their father experimenting on them was one thing. He was a relatively known quantity. They knew Sir Reginald, his piques and moods and temper and his mission statement.

Here, the powers-that-be? More of a blank slate.

I wish we'd known about this before. The paperwork about us didn't mention it. ---- Did this message go through?

Luther still looks a little trepidatious as he composes each message, his expression going from squinty over-concentration to shooting Allison a questioning glance. Despite growing up with marvels, this one somehow takes the cake. Luther works with his fists, mostly; he doesn't have any physical indication, here, that the message succeeded but he's having to feel it out, accept that it's working. And yet -- it's a slight weight off his shoulders, seeing the way it lights Allison up. Her excitement about it. The immediately-increased speed in all her messages to him. That freedom.

[numberthree]

It's definitely a thing worth considering, somewhere inside of it. What all it is these people, this 'Porter' whoever or whatever it is, might have done to them before bringing them to. The explanations they'd been given, and things like this that somehow existed along side them, but that no one she'd met, or written things to and for, had known about in the slights. People who'd been there months, and years, long.


Allison presses her mouth together in an effort not to laugh as she watched Luther stare at the space before them with all the focus of someone willing something into being, like they could see it, hammer it out, and then look to her, with all the questioning uncertainty and necessity of response of her daughter trying something new.

It's far more endearing than she should allow herself to feel with him, but it's so much harder to ignore.

There's a nod, even as she tried to keep it at that smile.

Yes. To both.

Both times.

[obediences]

Cool.

It's the world's biggest understatement, as ever, but Allison's smile is infectious and therefore it's so, so obvious from the growing grin on Luther's face that he's delighted, too. Realising that you had this unknown capability all along, an unexpected additional ability.

Then he pauses, mentally backtracks again to how she'd first described it. And because he remains, to this day, Sir Reginald Hargreeves' son, Luther goes ahead and says it:

'Mission communications'. God, what I would've given to have had something like this in the field.

[numberthree]

Luther's smile spreads across his face, even in the changing lights of the room, and they must look like idiotic children, who've forgotten they aren't children, but Allison can't bring herself to care for that moment. Her shoulders shaking a little in at the sheer lunacy of it, even if she can't laugh, at the disparity between the absolutely underwhelmed four-letter word he chooses, just fills her vision, and that smile just beyond it, in front of him.

Inflated relief, stupified giddiness.

That she can speak. (That she can talk to him.)
That somehow she can be heard. (That he can hear her.)

That he sobers it a little, doesn't surprise her. Returning to where she started. Her rambled explanation of pushing words out, when she was explaining and hoping it just wouldn't be too weird.

Well, we have it now. We'll have to tell the others about it, too.

There's a momentary pensiveness at the words, rereading them in her vision.
One in specific. But she sends it anyway.

done!

[obediences]

There's the irrational kneejerk response that hits him first, like a jealous kid -- no, this is their thing now, their own little corner of privacy carved out amongst all the noise and chaos, a way to have Allison within reach, anytime and anywhere, he doesn't want to share -- but then the responsible team leader side kicks in. Knowing that the rest of them need to know their capabilities, too. And besides: Luther does want to be able to reach the others quickly, in the event of an emergency. It's useful. So he nods, agreeing.

Then.

I'm ready to get the hell out of here if you are, he thinks-writes, and even in bare text she can guess his unease with their surroundings. His fraying nerves when it comes to the crowds, the sheer amount of people packed in around them. (He can't handle this environment sober; is still too straightlaced to really cut loose and enjoy it as he did that one time.)

And so, eventually, they leave -- to wander the rest of the base, to meet up again at the residential park.

To address the elephant in the room, under their feet.

To talk.