[ open ] jingle bell, jingle bell, jingle bell rock

[lyingheart]

WHO: OPEN.
WHERE: De Chima.
WHEN: Saturday, December 13th, 2014.
WHAT: Earlier in the afternoon, there will be base-jumping in elf costumes. Later on is the charity silent date auction and different performances by USA celebrities fundraising for charity this holiday season. OOC information post here.
WARNINGS: None now, will update later. To avoid seeing all the silent auction threads, simply press on the (Hide ## comments) under the header comment for the auction section!

[ BASE JUMPING from TARTARUS TOWER ]
For those imPorts who volunteered to jump from Tartarus Tower, arrivals for fittings into their costumes begins at 2:00 PM sharp. Each costume comes with a name-tag attached, and make-up artists are on hand to help affix elf ears to participants and work on their eye make-up for the ease of the cameras catching all this live.

The jumps will start at 4:00 PM, and after all imPort elves have jumped and successfully reached the ground, they'll join the bus transporting presents and Malik to the De Chima children's hospital to deliver gifts to the children in the cancer ward (and elsewhere). ImPorts will then be transported over to the main facilities for the fundraiser event as a whole, invited to attend the Silent Date Auction as well as listen to any of the various performances occurring over the course of the evening.

[ CHARITY SILENT DATE AUCTION in DE CHIMA ]
Starting at 4:00 PM, the doors to the conference hall made available for the ImPort Charity Silent Date Auction will open. Live music will be provided, along with refreshments and catered hor d'oeuvres, and televisons displaying both the news stories and live coverage of the fundraiser events occurring over the course of the evening. ImPorts will be encouraged to attend any of these performances in person, but will not be required to leave the conference hall unless they wish to do so.

There is lounge seating available, and free wireless throughout the building. Different conference halls are hosting different events in this event center, and the largest productions are happening on a built stage outside. There's a massive lit tree in the central front courtyard of the event center, and many small stands selling hot drinks, good foods, and wares outside by the stage and surrounding streets, all with a portion of proceeds going to various named charities.

Please comment to this log with your own starters! Only the Auction Thread will be set-up under its own sub-thread, for ease of tracking. Auction Threads can be threaded in, but initial comments to those threads should be the bids that a character is placing on someone else (or themselves). Bidding will close OOCly by this time next week (or when a player states bidding is closed on their character - send me a PM to close that thread, or comment to close it on your own). ICly, all bids close at the end of the night.

Comments

[glowsferatu]

[ she glances back up to the building, seeing the next jumper start their descent. ]

Well, I won't be going anywhere until the rest of them have come down, so I can stay to keep on eye on matters until we move on. Paying due diligence, and all. [ she's going to wear that nametag out before the day's up. ]

[forsometimenow]

I appreciate it. And yeah, you need to live up to your given title for the day, right? [A pause, then:] I'm sorry, I never caught your actual name. I'm Dr. Keller.

[glowsferatu]

Sorry, I must have neglected to give anything to catch. Too distracted by my temporary identity. [ she offers jennifer her hand. ] Kanaya Maryam. I work at Health First Cape Canaveral, when I'm not leaping off buildings for charity.

[forsometimenow]

[Jennifer shakes the offered hand.]

Glad to meet you. Have you been stuck here for a while?

[glowsferatu]

[ something about kanaya's smile turns a little less genuine, more forced. it's a small change, just a tug at the corners of her lips. ]

You might say that, I've been on this world since January. But I'd been an imPort already for a few years before that.

[forsometimenow]

Man... [Jennifer sighs.] I've met more than one person who's been here for that long. It's been making me think about laying out some long-term plans in case it happens to me, too.

[glowsferatu]

I'm hardly the one I've known to be around the longest, but it isn't something you can exactly depend on, either. The way I see it, you can have an outline of what the future may include, but you also have to be ready for none of that to ultimately be feasible.

Even if you do stay indefinitely, there's no promise that other conditions won't change.

[ it's not really happy advice, but you can't be in this kind of situation this long without becoming jaded. and some people are just biologically predisposed to be very jaded. ]

[forsometimenow]

Yeah... and I want to try to be realistic. I want to open my own practice, but sometimes it's hard to be enthused about that idea when public opinion about imPorts sways back and forth a lot and I have no idea if I might be Ported out tomorrow, anyway.

[glowsferatu]

The best recommendation I can make is to consider what fallbacks may be necessary. Know what you'll do if the tide does turn against us. If you do start your practice, determine what will happen to it if you are ported out.

When you aren't promised tomorrow, contingencies are absolutely necessary.

[ for kanaya, that means $50k in cash, collected over the past year and kept in a safe hidden in her closet. she can't trust that to a bank, not if the banks turn against them. ]

[forsometimenow]

[Jennifer perks up a little at that.]

All good pieces of advice- all this sort of political manuvering is very new for me. Back home, not everyone was exactly happy to see the doctor, but I could travel and help others without having to consider these kinds of things.

[glowsferatu]

Keeping new variables in mind is just, well, part of a life where new conditions are always introducing themselves. You get used to it. You don't really have much choice not to.

[ but this is an unreasonably depressing topic, so she decides to take the opportunity to change it. ]

Is that what you did, back on your native world, traveling with your practice? It was my understanding that most medical workers tended to be more...based, I suppose. Committed to one location, one hospital.

[forsometimenow]

[Jennifer gratefully seized on the chance to talk about something else.]

I was the head of medicine for a scientific expedition, actually. We we based on a large city, but our scientific and exploration teams traveled to other planets pretty often, and the locals didn't always have regular access to a doctor or any decent medical supplies. My team and I helped out wherever we could.

[glowsferatu]

Just traveling to other planets? You make it sound like such a casual matter. I didn't think many humans really had that technology.

[ of course, that's also making the assumption she is human just because she looks the part. maybe not a safe assumption, seeing how human kanaya looks now, how human she looks nearly every day, since lachesis first brought her over. ]

Or I might have made a terrible mistake in that.

[forsometimenow]

Most humans in my world aren't aware it exists, to be fair- it's a tightly-guarded secret. Mostly because travel to other planets can be dangerous at times.

[glowsferatu]

Well, certainly not something to be done haphazardly. Everyone has their own approaches to random visitors, not all of them are going to be friendly.

[forsometimenow]

Right- and, well, to be frank, the government wants to find out anything that may be useful to us first before a bunch of humans come to take a look and trample it all over.

[glowsferatu]

So, you're the forward reconnaissance to a future military conquest.

[ she says it plainly, like she's talking about someone going to the store for a jug of milk. military conquests are just a thing that happens, she's not here to judge. ]

[forsometimenow]

No plans for conquest, really... not that I know of, anyway. There were plenty of species that wanted to conquer Earth, though.

[glowsferatu]

I've never really understood that. Earth may be an easy mark for any kind of significant invading force, but it just never struck me as particularly worth the effort.

I know it certainly wouldn't be my first choice.

[forsometimenow]

There are a few different reasons I heard- one species thought of humans as food, for example. Earth would have been a feast.

[glowsferatu]

I suppose that's an option. If you have the palate for it. Though I can't help wondering what they must have been eating before, that they'd come to Earth to set their banquet.

[forsometimenow]

Humans, actually- but in their home galaxy, there were too many Wraith and not enough food to go around. They fed by draining life energy, so they could spread out feedings a little bit, but eventually...

[And she'd tried to make them able to consume actual food for sustenance instead of life energy. That definitely hadn't turned out well.]

[glowsferatu]

[ her first thought is that they should have tried keeping livestock instead of just eating everything, any society that doesn't try to be sustainable probably deserves to go extinct. but she knows that's far too callous to say, especially to a human, so she doesn't.

she finds a more technical way to say it instead, because that is just really stupid of these wraith. bunch of gluttons, from the sound of it. ]

Sounds like an...ecosystem unbalance. Overpopulation leading to endangerment of all involved species. Typically, it would result from introducing a new predator that isn't native to the system itself, but.

Well, I guess they must have let it get a bit out of hand.

[forsometimenow]

Yeah- and they would typically go into hibernation between cullings. Our expedition woke them up too early by accident.

[She grimaces, knowing that didn't exactly help, even if it was true- very little was known about the Pegasus Galaxy before they traveled there.]

[glowsferatu]

Ah. Well, I suppose you walked into that one, then. Most people are cranky and hungry when awoken by an intruder.