vatheon | Monthly Mingle Log + Marks

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Monthly Mingle Log + Marks

Though things are certainly a bit busy, Station Master has decided to go ahead with the welcoming party for the new arrivals. Partially because he had decided to take this task upon himself and he certainly wasn't going to slack, and partially because making things appear as normal was as good a cover as they had right now.

However with how much has been going on, this party is not quite as extravagant as previous ones have been. The location is near to the elevator, on the beach. A large banner hung between two trees proclaims a cheerful 'Welcome to Vatheon'. The long food tables that normally take up most of the space are missing. There simply hadn't been the capability of whipping up the sort of food they normally served. What is there however is a lot of fruit. Fresh apples and pears. Bananas. A few bowls of strawberries and pièce de résistance several large and perfectly ripe water melons. One or two have already been split, the water melons pieces set out on small plates on one big table ready for any to take. Drinks are available too. Fresh water and fruit juices. The weather might not be entirely the best for this kinda thing (though occasionally the sun seems to peek out from between the clouds!) but at least it isn't raining.

But that is not all.

In the cover of the storage building turned bubble reparation headquarters sits C. She has been contacting the people who signed up for catching the fish, asking them to start bringing them to her today so she can start working on the marks. Similarly the people who have signed up for early mark change have been invited too to drop by today or in the next few days so the first step in making sure the coral is returned to proper working conditions can be taken.

[ooc: This month the monthly mingling log is combined with the log for the fish catching + early mark changing. Also, if your character is new but you want them to learn what is going on, please leave a small ooc note on your comment and we'll send a NPC your way. The mingling log part of this post is only on the first, in the afternoon. The fish catching and mark changing parts will serve as a collective point for threads of this nature for this whole week.]

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"Well, it sounds like I'll be here awhile. Plenty of time to fill you in later." Leo was a little curious himself about what sorts of things make Dirk's Earth different from his.

"I've already run into a troll, her name was Aradia? And then there was Marcy, she was kind of weird looking, too."

"Guess I got lucky then since my friends who are here came from the same time as I did. Less than an hour's difference at any rate." Leo pondered the rest of what Dirk said. Now he didn't have to worry about his friends failing to defeat Gaea without him, but that didn't really put him at ease.

"When you came back, did you remember your time here before? Or did you forget all about it permanently when you left?" He hoped that when he left it would be for good, but if had to come back and start all over again, it would be depressing.

"You'll find plenty of trolls around. A few of them even do tech shit too," Dirk said. He didn't know Marceline, but that was hardly worthy of comment at the moment.

He nodded- friends, plural, meant Leo got pretty lucky. There were occasions when a group of people who knew one another showed up all at once, but it was a rare phenomenon. He'd been lucky to show up with his best friend Roxy both times he'd appeared, or reappeared, to the bubble city.

"I remembered. If it's a short departure in Vatheon's time, a few days, then the person who reappears is likely to remember." Dirk shrugged. "That's what happened to me. But it's not a definite. Plenty of people show up without memories, and others show up again years later still remembering what happened the first time they got here. There're too many variables to make solid judgements about what will happen."

"Sounds like good times."

If there were other machine heads around then there was bound to be a supply of materials and maybe even a shop to work in with some more heavy duty equipment and a forge. His tool belt was great, but he couldn't always depend on it and there were some things that he just couldn't pull out of it because of their complexity. Whatever the case, that was probably in the city under the bubble and it would be awhile before he could make any use of it.

"It seems like a lot of things around here are inconsistent."

"To say the least." Dirk hitched his thumb over his shoulder toward the open ocean, where somewhere below, the bubble was still sitting, and still flooded. "This is a hell of a lot more uncertainty than usual, but curses really fucking love to mix it up."

To say the least. But the pamphlet mentions those, so he assumes that Leo has gotten information on that, and he's not likely to continue to talk about those unless prompted.

"Curses?" Leo asked. He didn't get to read all of the pamphlet because he accidentally incinerated it. "I hope whatever these curses are, they're not as bad as the ones back home. Well, some aren't that bad, but some have put kids in full body casts."

He managed to break the "curse" on his cabin by being all heroic and fixing up Festus, but he'd also heard tales of some of the kids at camp cursing others for various reasons. Those were generally not breakable and lasted some length of time. He really hoped the ones here were different.

"That varies too," Dirk told him. "They're all damn extreme in terms of what they can do for science, but they don't all cause injury. Some do random shit like make people get cat ears for a week. Some turn people into kids, or switch their bodies into something else."

He rolls up his sleeve to show his forearm, where his Vatheon mark is displayed. "It happens through these babies. There's no removing them, either."

"So that's what these things do?" Leo rolled up his sleeve to show the mark on his right arm. "One of my friends found out that they connect us with the coral, but she didn't say anything about curses. I'm sure she'll be thrilled when she hears this."

"Just as thrilled as everyone else," Dirk said with a shrug. He'd never met anyone who was happy to learn about various curses, even if the y enjoyed other parts of Vatheon the way he did.

Dirk tapped the mark with his finger before dragging his sleeve down to cover his arm again. "When the bubble's working, you just have to flash this at the natives and whatever you want, they give it to you for free. Not really applicable here, since no one's selling shit on the island, but once we get the dome fixed it's hella handy."

Leo could tell his sarcasm hadn't come across. He often said things with such gusto that it's hard to tell if he's serious or not. "I was kidding, man. Curses suck"

He blinked as he tried to process this. "Wait ,they just hand it over? Whatever you want? They got anything good for building things? I doubt they have any celestial bronze, but just regular bronze will do." There were so many things he could do if that were the case.

Dirk hadn't had many opportunities to meet people before he came to Vatheon, so tone didn't always connect for him, leading to the occasional mistake. It was awkward, to say the least, but he brushed it off as best he could. And by brushing it off, he meant moving on from that bit of the conversation.

"Not just bronze, either. There are all fucking kinds of tools around. And you can get celestial bronze, whatever the hell that is, it'll just be one of the few things you need to pay for."

"I can get celestial bronze?" Leo started getting excited about the prospect. "I'll be able to repair the Archimedes sphere I got while I was in Rome." He reaches into his satchel and pulls it out to show Dirk. "I've also got some of his scrolls, including the one on spheres."

Dirk leaned in to get a closer look, not yet reaching out to touch it. "What's it do?" he asked, instead of poking at it to figure it out on his own. Something that needed a material called celestial bronze was probably not safe to fiddle around with too carelessly.

"You can, it just costs. There's a section of the city called the Nostalgia Nook where they sell shit from our own universes," Dirk said, with most of his attention still focused on the sphere. "Bought my rocketboard there."

Leo noticed his hesitation and laughed. "It won't bite, you can touch it. Even if it has weapons and they triggered, they wouldn't hurt you. Celestial bronze doesn't harm mortals." The sphere was roughly the size of a basketball with many markings all over it that could be moved - sort of like a Rubik's cube, but spherical.

Where to begin on what it can do...

"I don't even know half of what it can do, but when I found it, I did a little tinkering and was able to use it to control all the other spheres and the automatons that were in the room. That's why I need the scrolls. They'll tell me everything about the sphere and more."

Dirk didn't need any more invitation than that. Only a moment later, he was reaching out without any ceremony, hefting it for himself and turning it to take a look at the symbols that covered it. It wasn't long before he was sliding the pieces of it from place to place.

"Fuck, that's awesome. So at the very least it's a universal remote for robotics?" Dirk said. He grinned briefly. "I'd ask about the scrolls, but I bet they're in Greek."

"At the very least." Leo grinned. It was great having someone here that he could talk about this stuff with.

"Yeah, they're in Ancient Greek. I'll be sure to let you know when I get them translated."

"If I could learn the language faster than you could translate, I'd offer to help." Dirk said. There was always the chance he would learn it anyway, but that was just because he liked a challenge, and learning another language sounded like one he would enjoy.

"As for that Archimedes Sphere. I don't doubt you'll find a place to work yourself, but if you need shit to test it on, I have a workshop in the bubble."

"Translating is easy. Demigod brains are kind of hard-wired for Ancient Greek."

He adds, a little more quietly because it's still a little embarrassing talking about this, "It's easier for me to read Ancient Greek than it is to read English or Spanish, both of which I grew up speaking as a kid. The letters tend to jumble together and float off the page, so I have to concentrate really hard to read things in either of those languages."

The idea of eventually having his own workshop is amazing. Bunker 9 was a bit like that as he was the only one who could open it, but his demigod siblings spent a lot of time there working with him on the Argo II.

"I'll have to take you up on that offer." He grinned.

"Interesting. I wonder how the genetics behind that work," Dirk said, before pausing. "If it even counts as genetics. Fuck if I know how Gods work yet. Dirk was a natural learner, and he'd never had a hard time picking up any of the things he'd applied himself to learning. Some of it was because of the copious amounts of time he'd always had to learn, but some of it was just that it came easily to him.

His first instinct was to push Leo to learn reading English and Spanish better, but he ignored that. It was none of his fucking business, and he'd been trying not to pull that any more.

"Hell yes, dude," Dirk said, holding out a fist toward Leo. No better way to agree to it than a fist bump, right?

"I'm not sure how it all works either. Don't know if anyone really does." Leo shrugged. All he knew was that's how things were.

Leo tries his best! It's just frustrating and difficult. He'd be relieved if he knew Dirk held back that comment. But he doesn't.

"Hell yeah." This guy knew what a fist bump was. He met Dirk's fist with his own and grinned. After his failed attempt at a fist bump with Italy, it was great to know the gesture wasn't foreign to everyone.

"Not my style of science, but it'd be interesting to find out," Dirk noted, but he was setting the idea aside. That was a curious thing, but he understood robots better than anything else, and besides, there was enough experimenting on people going on in the bubble already.

Fist bumps were practically currency with Dirk. They were something he did, just as much as wearing shades or liking hats. Hence why he was probably just as happy to find someone else who did it as Leo was. "So, any other shit you're desperate to find out?" he asked.

"I think I got about as much as I can handle for one day. There's some crazy stuff going on with this place, that's for sure." There was a lot Leo would need to process and share with his friends over the coming days.

"Sure thing, bro." Dirk said. Then he took a moment to pull his SFC out and show it to Leo. "You have any more questions, you can contact me on this thing. It's our phone equivalent here."

"Cool, man. I thought it was something like that. Didn't get to check it out much beyond whether it was fireproof or not. It was." He grinned and tapped his SFC that was attached to his tool belt.

"Even if it wasn't, you can get it fixed or replaced if you need to," Dirk said. "That's another thing the techheads around here are good for. Anyway, now you know. Use your knowledge for good, and all that shit."

"Thanks, bro. You've been a big help," Leo said, giving him a thumbs up.

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shippingmath - 2013-05-14 22:43 (UTC) - Expand

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