THE SQUAD DOES AN INTRO: GROUP MEET UP - [modplot] [event] [free-for-all]

[wildermods]

THE SQUAD DOES AN INTRO: GROUP MEET UP
OOC POST
The Green's binding spell finally works out its kinks and the entire group is teleported into the same area in the center of the city, near the statues of the Tin Man, Cowardly Lion, and Scarecrow.

Everyone in the group feels a tingling sensation as the magic sets in place and binds them. Anyone that tries to leave will now find themselves being teleported back if they wander too far. The group will have to try to stay together when it moves now.

They have a little bit of time to figure things out.

---

OOC INFO
✦ Post in actionspam format. Plots and mod-run events in the game are meant to be in actionspam format to keep a brisk pace.

✦ Free-for-all Post. This event will be in "free-for-all" format, meaning that threadhopping is encouraged and that threading should be treated in the same conversational way as network posts.

✦ By now, the language magic should be fully in place. By now, everyone should have magically learned Sylvaen so that everyone can speak it fluently and understand each other.

Comments

[therevanchist]

[Now that the random teleportation seems to have died down, Revan's taking the opportunity to thoroughly troubleshoot her lightsabers--which means disassembling them with the Force while she sits cross-legged in a sunny spot.

There is, as far as she can tell, absolutely nothing wrong with either of them. They simply won't switch on.]

Great.

[She reassembles the second one and stands almost simultaneously, plucking the hilt out of the air and clipping it back on her belt.]

Where am I supposed to find a vibroblade around here?

[It's a rhetorical question. Probably. Maybe.

...Nah, she wants swords and she wants them now.]

[wherenoonegoes]

What are those?

[Hiccup stares at the lightsabers with naked curiousity, itching to figure out what they are, what they do, and how he could recreate them.]

Sorry, I'm kind of a blacksmith and inventor, and I've never seen anything like those before.

[therevanchist]

They're lightsabers. Plasma blades.

[And they are basically pretty metal clubs right now. Revan sighs.]

And they're not working.

[wherenoonegoes]

...you're telling me you can make plasma into a blade. You have to be pulling my leg. The real one, not the peg-leg.

complete bullshit, but it's canon bullshit

[therevanchist]

The emitter generates a containment field that creates a recirculating closed circuit.

[Revan retrieves the lightsaber she just put back on her belt and taps a finger against the unlit business end where the blade emitter is set.]

Re: complete bullshit, but it's canon bullshit

[wherenoonegoes]

...I know what those words mean, but I have no idea how they go together.

[Hiccup was smart, but what Revan had just said was completely outside his frame of reference.]

[therevanchist]

The emitter pulls from the power cell to create a magnetic field that keeps the plasma from dispersing. It circulates from the emitter to the blade tip and back so the power can be recaptured. It's not break-even, but it's close.

[Revan doesn't really have a frame of reference for pre-spaceflight societies. The Republic has existed for 20,000 years, and while they do occasionally stumble over a world that fell out of contact and backslid technologically, by and large even people who live simply like the Jedi are supposed to are surrounded by high technology at all times...meaning she thinks Hiccup has a solid high school physics knowledge of electricity and magnetism.]

[suckitblue]

It's not just her, the aliens do it where I'm from too.

[ He's helping. ]

[awfulcer]

[Now that things have calmed down and he's spent some time napping off the worst of the drunkenness, Dixon's trying to take advantage of the fact that he's surrounded by other people. The drive to not be alone with himself is hard and real, especially now that his thoughts aren't so scrambled by inebriation.

He was getting along fine with Revan before the whole spat with Phosphowhatever, and he's pretty sure he's mad at the weird gem person instead of her. He ambles over and squats down next to her and the light sabers, still a little unsteady but much more lucid than he was earlier.]

Want me to see if I can help?

[He can't, but when has incompetence ever stopped anyone from trying?]

[therevanchist]

[Yeah, no, but she'll play along.]

Do you know much about diatium power cells?

[Revan plucks a single component from the hovering parts. It's a featureless silver cylinder the diameter of a pencil but only about as long as a finger. It narrows to some kind of connector on one end, and looks like the sort of thing you'd order out of an electronics catalog.]

It's brand new and shouldn't be anywhere close to drained yet.

[awfulcer]

Plenty. [For a second he pauses, then snorts.] Nah, not a thing.

[He squints at them instead of trying to pick them up; for all he knows they're going to zap him or bite him or whatever. That seems plausible within this realm.]

So it's like a battery?

[He glances over at Revan as if he's hoping for some sort of approval. After all, she seems like the most level-headed person here.

It also reminds him with a bit of a pang that his iPod will eventually run out of batteries, and he can't be having that. He'll have to find someone with a charger. (The realization that there's also no electricity out here hasn't hit him yet).]

they're self-recharging because star wars is UTTER BULLSHIT

[therevanchist]

Yes.

[Good job, Dixon. Revan doesn't even sound patronizing. He's obviously trying to connect, clumsily and perhaps not even knowing why himself. Knocking aside that outstretched hand would serve no one, no matter how much of an ass the man is.

She's not quite Light Side enough not to be a little sulky on the inside that no one's around to see how Light Side she's being.]

It shouldn't need an external recharge unless I use it near-constantly for weeks.

[Revan gents into trouble near-constantly, but doesn't have her lightsabers on for all of it.]

[awfulcer]

[He sits down and chews on a fingernail absentmindedly, then catches himself and stops. He can tell she's being patient with him, humoring his cover of interest in her space-age technology, and he doesn't totally blame her that it probably takes effort. He didn't exactly come in making the best impression to the whole group, even if he still feels pretty justified.]

Alright, here's a stupid question.

[As if Dixon hasn't asked plenty of those in the last few hours.]

How do we know it ain't already been a few weeks? We're not all from the same place, and some planets have days different than others.

[The corner of his mouth ticks up.]

Since you're from Venus or wherever.

[therevanchist]

Dantooine.

[Look, they already have an in-joke.]

Hmm.

[She's not sure how to engage with his misunderstanding of the effects of planetary day length on the passage of time, but his underlying point is still one to consider, since none of them know how long the vision lasted.]

If it's not being used, the power cell should be good indefinitely.

[So no way of telling there. She opens up her hand and the cell floats back to its place in the hilt before the parts collapse into each other and the lightsaber is in one piece again.]

None of the men have beards, though.

[invisibleheir]

[ Arturia, tired of the criss-crossing conversations, moves across the small space everyone seems to be confined to and sits down next to Revan in seiza (you pick up some habits when you spend time in Japan, okay?). Her hands placed neatly on her knees, Saber peers curiously at the pair of hilts before speaking up. ]

Pardon, but what is a vibroblade?

[ Talking to someone who has sense is a relief in this place. ]

[therevanchist]

[Revan prefers lotus, as difficult as it is in those stiff knee-high Jedi boots. She looks over at Arturia and smiles by way of greeting.]

It's a sword with a vibration cell in the hilt. Improves the cut.

[Swords!]

[invisibleheir]

A vibration cell? I don't think I've ever seen a sword that needed assistance cutting before.

[ At least Excalibur never has. But then again it's kind of magic. Sort of. ]

[therevanchist]

If you need to break through armor or a melee shield, you want every bit of help you can get.

[Like having working lightsabers, but apparently that's too much to ask. Thanks, galaxy.]

[invisibleheir]

You don't break through armor. You avoid it--go for a joint or gap in the armor. Smashing your sword on armor is a good way to tire yourself out and chip the blade.

[ Revan she likes you but c'mon... ]

[the_hit_list]

[ Wandering through the crowd, Tim has been doing his best to be unobtrusive. He’s getting the sense that he and his friends are an oddity – no one else acts like they have well-established bonds, and Tim knows four people here, although one not well (yes, he’s spotted Brainiac 5 in the group).

This has left him with the impression that the mass abduction was targeted on his team and/or universe, or those most like it, because a quarter of the abductees would be too high a statistical grouping to be a mere outlier. The others are a massive amount of statistical noise, which makes some sense. Blinding pulling victims through a boomtube equivalent would lead to unwanted persons being caught up as flotsam, rather than jetsam.

Then, in one word, Tim’s thrown back into questioning the nature of reality. Just as Oz shouldn’t exist, vibroblades are fictional. He stares at the woman’s face, then looks her over, gaze finally settling on the grip of a lightsaber.

As if today couldn’t get stranger, the theorized Oz-themed villain is now a living fanfiction crossover, and it sucks on the merits. ]

I’m going to go out on a limb and say you aren’t going to find one.

[therevanchist]

[Revan returns the scrutiny--a young human male in what she suspects are his pyjamas, with High Galactic script on his shirt. She focuses on that for a moment, but the words are nonsense. It's the least of her problems right now, but it still bothers her in the way a minor annoyance can eclipse important things. After a moment too long frowning at his chest and waiting for the writing to make sense, her eyes flick back to his face and her expression clears to polite interest.]

Why's that?

[Tim, please tell her she's not just on some backwater planet. She hasn't figured it out herself or met anyone genre-savvy enough to explain it to her.]

[the_hit_list]

[ The obvious answer, that they’re fictional and she’s… taking a cosplay too far? LARPing?

She’s as real as this city is, which means Tim can’t call it either way.

Luckily, he has other reasons. ]

Look around you. There’s no signs of recent commercial activity, and the city itself looks to be on the early side of the industrial age. Maybe they’ve got a few mills tucked away somewhere, but I haven’t picked up on anything with advanced engineering. Maybe they’ve figured out calculus. Maybe.

[ That's circling in on sarcastic, and Tim reins it in. There's no point in being mean about it. ]

They were at the brand new cotton gin and clockwork stage when this place last saw people. It’s not so decayed to be ancient ruins… I’m sorry, but I think a lightsaber repair shop is out of their technological skillset.

[therevanchist]

[Revan doesn't know what a cotton gin is and the concept of an "industrial age" is the kind of thing she learned about as a theory in Jedi middle school but that no world she's ever heard of has experienced in at least 20,000 years.]

The spaceport will have merchants...unless you think this is a lost colony?

[The only mental category she has for a human-settled world that lacks repulsorlifts and blasters is one that fell out of contact with the galaxy and lost its technological know-how over the centuries. The balance of power in the galaxy shifts back and forth, but the major philosophies and institutions have existed in more or less their current form for millennia, and the technology advances only marginally, becoming more efficient or more compact, but never really changing. Revan's universe is essentially static.]

[the_hit_list]

[ Tim shook his head and put aside questions about her believability. ]

That’s what I’m trying to tell you. There’s not going to be a spaceport. This isn’t a colony that’s lost contact with the motherworld.

[ Maybe there’s a way to slowly ease someone into an acceptance of reality, but Tim doubts it works even five percent of the time (See: asylum, Arkham). Outside of a life-or-death situation, it doesn’t seem worth the effort. Besides, the various other suspicions regarding her motives continue to linger. ]

This is the motherworld. They’re pre-intragalactic travel.

[technomagic]

[Sean has been sort of lingering on the outskirts of the group, not quite hidden but not quite revealed either, and keeping a very, absolutely, so-totally-casual ear on the conversation when Revan explains how her lightsaber works to several people, who all equally obviously don't get it. Okay, she could have figured out how to replicate the effects of levitation - or she could be an actual Jedi.]

[A little nervous - and also a little sheepish - he draws out of the shadows and gives her a nod.]

I'm an actual engineer. [ unlike those other chumps. ] I could take a look.

[He keeps the eagerness to help out of his voice. Guess he's just pretending that whole thing earlier near the end didn't happen.]