redshiftlogs | Let's partyyyyyyy! [open]

Entry tags:

Let's partyyyyyyy! [open]

Who: EVERYONE.
What: A meet-and-greet party for everybody in Anchor!
When: early October
Where: the VR room lobby
Warnings: none yet
Format: go wild!

[ The day before, a wild network post appears, from the username @aa : ]

hi everyone!
i just wanted to let you all know
the meet and greet party previously discussed in this space
will be held tomorrow afternoon!

it will take place in the vr room lobby
and of course everyone is invited
refreshments and games will be provided
but if you would like a little extra challenge
please feel free to bring something to share!

attendance is mandatory!
(lol just kidding)
seriously though i do hope to see all of you there ;)

[ She's also posted handwritten signs to that effect in the mess hall and several of the staircases. Just in case! ]

The day of, a party appears in the VR Room lobby area, as promised!

Though it's not brightly lit, the lights there are are brightly colored, creating a chilled-out evening atmosphere like you'd find at a club. Plush chairs and couches are interspersed throughout the room, and there's been a solid attempt to clean the place up, or at least do something about all the dust.

A shortage of conventional party supplies has forced Ami and Cho to get creative, so the tables and parts of the wall are decorated with paper flowers, and the buffet table is presided over by a number of ... weird, pink, glitter-covered, vaguely animal-shaped sculptures made out of spare plastic pipes and stuff. With googly eyes. If nothing else they're a conversation piece.

FOOD: The main offering is barbecue! There's a pretty wide assortment of meats, all of which Cho has certified safe for human consumption, and also certified delicious. Chips, dried fruit, and a few different desserts are available, including homemade chocolate chip cookies that Ami made herself (wich Cho's help). All the trays are helpfully labeled, including allergy information.

Any and all potluck submissions are welcome as well! Just set it down over here and make a little card of your own.

DRINKS: Sadly, the coffee machine is still out of order. But there is a cooler stocked with ice and a few different choices of juice and soda. Alcoholic selections are limited to two types of pre-mixed drinks, which are intentionally weak on the alcohol, but at least they're not tequila sunrises. If guests want anything stronger, they'll need to bring it themselves.

ENTERTAINMENT: In fiddling with the controls, Ami got the overhead speakers to play some music, but couldn't figure out how to modify the playlist, so it's just one song on loop. Maybe if she keeps the volume kind of low, no one will notice. No live music is scheduled, but if anyone wants to bring a guitar and jam for a while, they will be more than welcome to.

And most of the arcade games are online! Anyone for Fruit Ninja? Air hockey? Dance Dance Retribution? Virtual Billiards? Or perhaps you'd like to try out a full-simulation game in the VR Rooms proper? Now's as good a time as any!

Oh, and don't forget to enter the raffle! The winner will be chosen randomly and announced a few hours into the party.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Cho reaches for the star a few times, but stops shy of actually jumping for it. Instead, she purses her lips at him for a moment, and then tears off a piece of tape and holds that up, instead. "I'm almost done. Just one more bag. Would you please hang that off the ceiling above you?" They're far enough from anything of interest that tall people shouldn't run into it. "And no, not all of them. Ami helped with the flowers that are on the walls and around the table edges." Cho points to one garland near them, folded from the loose pages of one of the alien books from the library that was far too damaged to salvage. "You don't like them?"

That's not nearly as amusing but he supposes it's all he's going to get.

"Fine. You get one. One only." He holds up a finger to emphasize the whole one thing as if she doesn't know how to count. Taking the tape he sticks it to the string holding the star and the whole thing to the ceiling where it dangles a few inches above his head. There. He's officially a helper. What a swell guy.

"What are they for? I thought this was food and alcohol and shit. You look like you're getting ready for a high school dance."

Cho just smiles at him, because hanging just one is still helping. It's one that she doesn't have to climb up on the step ladder to hang herself, and she'll take it. "I've never been to a school dance," she says, as she moves the ladder a few feet to the side of the star he's just hung to do another one herself. "They're to make the place look nice - different from the usual. Ami seemed excited when I mentioned decorations, and I find it soothing. I-- don't sleep well here, and I promised a friend that I wouldn't go wandering on my own. So, when it's late, and everyone is in bed, and I can't sleep... I do this." Kabal would probably judge her so hard if he ever saw her room.

"You missed out. They're great places to get laid since no one wants to be there and they're boring as hell." Said with the conviction that everyone has the same priorities that Kabal has, even back in high school.

"I don't think anyone sleeps well here. We got kidnapped, there's a weird fucking hum from the lights, we're apparently being watched and the beds suck." The beds are probably fine for people who aren't six foot four and weigh nearly three hundred pounds. But since he is both of those things they're too short and too soft which is not helping with the whole sleeping thing. "Why not go wandering on your own? It's not like you can get lost."

Cho makes a thoughtful noise in the back of her throat. That... does not sound like a thing she would have enjoyed in high school. And not only because... "I was twelve when I started grade ten. All of my classmates were so much older than I was. I probably wouldn't have enjoyed a dance very much even if we'd had them." She gets down off her ladder, moves it over another few feet, and gets back on it to hang another decoration.

"And the last time I went wandering on my own, I almost got killed. Three people had to come save me from a pack of killer lizards. Two of them got hurt pretty badly. Diego made me promise I would stick to the buddy system after that." She looks guilty. Guilty and deflated. Curiosity didn't kill the cat, but it nearly killed the cat's friends. That's her fault. God, she doesn't want to think about that. "What's wrong with your bed? Not firm enough?"

"Why were you twelve in tenth grade?" That seems a few years too young for high school. Which would have made her a fourteen year old senior and Kabal has about two standards when it comes to fuck-buddies and that's one of them.

"Maybe you need a gun. If you can protect yourself no one has to come find you." But now he's curious about the killer lizards, he'll be coming back to that later - because if there's something out there that will put up a good fight he will definitely be out there trying to kill it. "It's about four inches too short. And I think the whole thing is going to collapse."

"My grandfather made a large donation so that they would let me take the entrance examination, and when I passed it, they had to let me in." It had been quite a feather in his cap. Cho had been mostly lonely and uncomfortable, but it had been an impressive feat, and that was all that mattered.

Cho has never shot a gun, and she's pretty sure it's harder than it looks. It must be. Besides, what if she panics and shoots someone she knows accidentally? She'd never be able to forgive herself. She'd much rather risk being injured herself. Which she's sure he doesn't want to hear. Diego hadn't wanted to hear it, either. Beds, though, they can talk about that. Cho obviously does not have the same problem that Kabal does, but she can sympathize with not being comfortable. "Maybe we could make some kind of... extension? For the bed, I mean. Even if it didn't match up exactly, it might still be more comfortable than having your feet just hanging off?"

"The fuck would you wanna do that for? School sucked. Probably sucked more being way younger than everyone else." This is someone who has never done anything he didn't want to his entire life and definitely wouldn't have given a shit about anything his family did to try and get him into school early.

"I guess. Like have a box with a cushion at the end of the bed?" It's a pretty simple solution, but he hasn't tried it yet which he's kicking himself for now. He went a way more complicated way, "I tried to pry the other bed off the wall and stick them together but it didn't really work out. I need a bedframe for the other one, it keeps falling over."

Also he now has a hole in part of his room where it used to be attached to the wall with chunks of concrete and rebar sticking out. Home sweet home.

"My family decided I should." She says it with a finality that strongly implies that this reasoning determined the outcome of quite a few large decisions in her life. She moves her step ladder again to hang another few decorations. She's almost all the way through this final bag.

The box with a cushion is what Cho had in mind, yes. Mostly because she can not rip a bed out of the wall. Would not have even occurred to her. Now that he has, though... "I was thinking a box with a cushion on it, but if you've already got the other bed off the wall... We could measure the distance between the bottom of the bed and the floor, make a template of the curve on the underside, and build a stand to sit it on. Then your bed would be twice as long." That would have to be long enough for him, and that way they would be even. Plus, if the mattress isn't taking his weight. Oh. Yes. "And, since you don't have a top bunk now, there's enough extra space, maybe we could put another set of mattresses on top of the first ones? Build up the sides of the frames so they don't slide off. Do you think the mattresses would be enough if they were doubled up?"

She's pretty much entirely distracted herself from the decorations now, and is hurrying through getting the rest of them up. Her mind is full of ideas for Kabal's bed now.

"You say that like it explains anything and it doesn't." What are family obligations? He wouldn't know.

Wow thats.. a lot more than he was expecting from an offhanded comment about his bed being a few inches short. "That'd probably work. There's gonna be a room with no mattresses if I do that though. So you're taking the blame if a bunch of people suddenly have nowhere to sleep because I'm not giving up a four mattress bed if I make it."

Because that sounds magical. He will be the most comfortable person in the whole place.

"Sure." The answer is bright, happy, and automatic. Cho will accept the blame if they end up running out of mattresses. If it comes to it, she can give up hers. Most beds are a little too soft for her, anyway. They're a very long way from that being a concern, though. "If we run out of mattresses, I'll take the blame."

She tapes the decoration in place, a large paper sphere made up of several dozen small floral looking shapes all interlocked. Now finished with the step ladder, she folds it up and looks around for a place to store it out of the way until she needs to take all the decorations down again. "You're in a double? I haven't seen those. Is there enough space at the foot of your bed to put another one? Or at the head of it? Either end will work."

"I was sticking them side by side. The room isn't long enough the other way. Then I can sleep diagonally I guess." It was an attempt anyway, from someone who doesn't have a lot of creative thinking skills. The fact he tried to do anything is showing a lot of growth for a guy who probably would sleep in a chair if something was on the bed because he's too lazy to move it.

"The room I picked was the closest to the vending machines. Why? Are there ones with more beds?"

Cho nods her head as she gives up on finding a place where it won't be seen, and instead goes to place it with the cart she used to bring the food over with, as well as the extra cups and plates and things, so at least all the party prep stuff is in one place. "My room has four beds in it. I don't know if the ones with two beds are laid out differently." She's giving this all serious thought now, though. This is a problem to solve.

Done with the decorations, and glancing around to see that Ami is busy fussing with the layout of the food and drinks, she takes her tablet out of her bag, switches it on and takes her stylus in hand. "How much room would you say is between the foot of your bed and the wall across from it?" The first thing she does is sketch the floor-plan of her own room, with the two sets of bunk beds, and the space between all the fixed pieces of furniture very nearly perfectly in scale. "My room looks like this. Is this close to what yours looks like?"

"We're doing this right now huh? This is how you want to spend your party? I'm sorta flattered you care so much about the state of my bed, since no one else ever has, but this is a little weird." He watches as she draws a perfectly to scale blueprint of her room from memory.

"Make that a lot weird."

"Well, not the whole party, but..." She looks around them one more time, even though things have not changed much. "I'm done hanging decorations, Ami is making the food table look nice, and no one is really here yet. I've got five minutes." She's not sure how she feels about being called a little weird, and then a lot weird. That's usually a bad thing, right? Cho bites her lip, then she hits the sleep button on the side of the tablet, and the screen goes dark. "We don't have to."

"If you really want to see my bed you can just ask," his tone is light and joking, but he doesn't follow through with any of the normally vulgar things he'd say after that. Folding his arms he looks down at her.

"Alright five minutes then. My room is longer the other way than yours." She's doing that thing where she immediately folds under a minimal amount of prodding and behind the mask he frowns. Where's the fun in that? "How are you able to draw all that from memory?"

"I think it probably looks like mine," she says, the intended dirty joke sailing right over her head.

When he mentions the dimensions being different, she unlocks her tablet again, transfers her sketch into her rendering app, and begins adjusting the walls. "I just-- remember it. The way I did with the layout of the city from the simulation. Most people remember things they've seen and heard and experienced only partially, I think. I remember all of it. Like... photographs? Or movies that I can play back." She's not sure how exactly to explain it, because it's just the way her brain has always operated. She doesn't know any other way to be. She only knows about faded memories and questionable recollections second-hand.

She's moved a few of the walls, and deleted one set of beds. "Like this?" she asks him, showing him the screen again.

"Sure but you're in yours and not in mine."

He has a hunch she won't get that one either, probably make a comment about how there'd be even less room for him at that point. It's hopeless.

Watching her sketch this out is kind of fascinating. He barely remembers what he ate let alone how many feet there are between the bed and the door. "Yeah. And then I put the other bed I broke off the wall next to it. Kinda made it king sized. Except ones shorter than the other."

Look he tried, and for him that's a lot.

"Mm-hmm." Cho nods her head. That's an accurate assessment of the difference between their two beds, and the point that he's tryig to make is lost in favour of a much more obtuse one. "I don't think it matters, though. These things were stamped out of a master die. It wouldn't be very efficient to have a die for the beds in the double rooms, and another die for the beds for the quads. They would need two sets of measurements for everything - mattresses, sheets, even the brackets to bolt them onto the walls. It's much more likely that our beds ar identical, and the only difference is the configuration in the room."

She's been tweaking things on her tablet while she talks, and now she squints down at it and bites her lip. "I think I have an idea... Is the wall by the foot of your bed solid? No windows or built in shelves or anything? At bed height, I mean."

"That is one hundred percent not what I was talking about. Why would I care how the beds are made?" But he knows it won't do any good to explain, and he's not sure he wants to.

"Yeah, it's a flat wall on that side. Cinderblocks or metal plates or something. I haven't looked at it too closely." While she was busy memorizing her room layout, he was eating stolen food and not realizing he had a chair until he tripped over it one morning. Kabal is not the most observant person in Anchor.

Cho shrugs. "No idea. You brought it up." She's just following the conversation where she thinks it's going.

She's done drawing now. She thinks she has some ideas. "All right. We can do them side by side if you want. That's an option. It would look kind of like this." She toggles the rendering so that a transparent green space fills the space next to his bed. "It won't give you a lot of room to walk around it. But that might not matter."

Next option, she toggles another setting and now a transparent blue shape appears at the foot of the bed, much smaller than the full mattress. "Or we could try cutting the frame and extending your bed to the wall. You wouldn't lose much room that way."

"One of us needs to work on our conversation skills." And he's pretty sure it's her. But he's not ruling out the possibility that being dead for twenty years with only revenants to talk to might have done something bad for his charming personality.

"If we extend it to the wall what would we put on it? The mattress is only so big and I'm pretty sure if you cut mattresses up they don't work right anymore. The springs get all bent." Not that he's cut any mattresses up but that seems like something that would happen. He's actually fascinated at this point that she's spent so much time trying to fix his bed situation. Which is appreciated because his back is killing him from sleeping crunched up. But also a little weird and ... well... awkward. Because he's never had anyone really give a shit before so this feels all kinds of wrong.

"I guess I could put couch cushions or something there. It'd just be for my feet anyway."

"I have five minutes to do this. Your rules. I'm trying to be efficient. We can talk about the differences between our beds later if you want." Look at Cho, completely missing the point yet again. Practically an art form with this woman.

She brings up a new digital sheet, and begins sketching on it quickly. "I'd cut the bed that's still mounted to the wall here, along this line, just to open it up at the foot end. Then we take a section of the loose bed that will span from here to the wall, like this. We can weld it to the existing frame, and bolt it to the wall. We might even be able to use one of the old brackets, if you didn't bend them too badly. Probably worth still putting at least one support from the new section of the bed to the floor, but it would give it a lot of additional support, and since it's only for your feet, I don't think we'd need it to be as strong a connection as we would if we were just moving an entire bed to a new location. If we do that, we might be able to either find some cushions to fill the gap, or very carefully re-purpose portions of a mattress. Assuming the springs aren't interconnected, or maybe it's some really advanced form of alien memory foam. Mine doesn't squeak like springs left alone for as long as this place has been abandoned." Of course, she also weighs a lot less than he does. "Does yours?"

Okay that's a lot of questions all at once and he's used to getting orders that were two sentences or less so this is a lot to process for him.

"Memory foam? I have no idea, I didn't take my mattress apart. It's squishy? What's memory foam?" It sounds like something real sciency and probably not in beds so he's pretty sure he's just not understanding her or they're talking about two different things.

"Okay, I'm down for this plan. Except I don't know how to weld, or have a saw to cut the bedframe. I don't think I bent it, I'm not that strong." He can be a cocky jerk, but he does actually know his limits. Most of the time.

"You know, memory foam. Like those commercials where the person puts the wine glass on the bed and then jumps on it." Not that that's the important part. "It's viscoelastic polyurethane foam. It makes a very comfortable mattress, and if that's what's in ours, we'll be able to cut into it without any problems. They should have a uniform air cell matrix all the way through."

Cho is liking her idea for lengthening his current bed more and more, and especially the option where she doesn't cannibalize beds from other rooms too badly. She'll feel less guilty about it all that way if they ever do end up with too many people and not enough beds. "I think this could work. I can show you how to weld, if you want to learn. It's pretty straightforward. And I think I know where we can find a torch to cut through the frames. Or... I know who will know where we can find one."

Let's partyyyyyyy! [open]

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