Calibrations Waiting Room Mingle

[trpmods]

WHO: ALL HE ROWS
WHERE: The Secret Tunnel, which has become the Calibrations Waiting Room (or was it always...?)
WHAT: Mingle log for literally anything you'd like to take place in the waiting room between sleep cycles during the event
WHEN: June 3 - July 10
WARNINGS: Please mark individual threads with warnings

For those that have heeded Ga Re's warning, the door within the secret tunnel - which looks suspiciously like the hatch to one of your shuttles - is wide open, waiting for you. You walk through... and the door behind you disappears. You’re now standing in a cavernous, cold, white waiting room. There are hallways leading off the main corridor with names above each. One of them has your name and will draw you toward it, inevitably.

And on the wall, in pink, running letters is written this single greeting:

‘Welcome to Calibrations’.

The secret tunnel has become a large waiting room with chairs, tables, and the same food dispensers available in the shuttles. There are also communal bathrooms - one for each gender - with several toilet stalls and shower stalls in each, including basic shampoo and soap dispensers, like you might find in a hotel. The water isn’t hot, so hopefully you don’t mind lukewarm showers. Somehow, at least, it never goes cold.

Branching off the main waiting room room are the labeled hallways. At the end of each short hallway is a door, with the same character’s name written on them. Anyone can enter any room, regardless of the name written on it. Everyone has their own room, though of course people can share. Each room has a simple bed (approximately queen-sized) and a set of drawers.

You can opt to spend time in your room or in the larger, common waiting room. (And if you do, you can thread it out here!) But every 16 hours, you'll feel a compulsion: You need to sleep. Right now. You find yourself going into your room (or someone else's, if you really want). But you’re drawn to the bed. You can’t help but lie down. And then, you fall asleep.

Comments

[in_extremis]

"Isn't that kinda..." Tony started, searching for what it was about the request to 'let 'em go' that he found so distasteful, "culty?" Maybe 'army' had been appropriate, Cayde didn't have an immediate argument and they didn't encourage an individual identity, either. Tony did get the brain issue, he hadn't forgotten that part, but an unavoidable deterioration and the suggestion to let it happen were different issues. He did a lot of terrible shit to his brain, but not because anybody else told him to. Cayde was relieved of his barnacle for Tony to lean over to the bag again, laying this page beside it to nudge the mouth open and search for another easy one to snatch. "How do you remember Ace?" could have been two different questions; functionally how, or what he was like in that memory, however Cayde wanted to tackle it.

[deal_me_in]

Cayde laughed. "I don't think they were thinking that way. Focused on efficiency. They didn't figure on things like the Ghosts and rezzing and the weird stuff that does to an Exo, because it wasn't a thing then."

He tried to hide a frown as Tony went rummaging around his stuff. The next one started off conversationally, just like the first, touching on the strange but fun forced-locals of their involuntary imprisonment. The few sketched faces were simple, partial, but enough of faces to identify, even without the scrawled notes in between, like 'has a stuffed cat' and 'workaholic' and 'Trouble'.

"..." The question was a simple one, but he turned it over in his head and spun it around like an engram he'd consider from all sides. "...I don't," he finally said. "I got brought back by my Ghost, found the name, the journal with me. Decided it couldn't hurt to stick to it."

[in_extremis]

Tony didn't know if it was worse if the kid actually existed, or had never existed at all; both possibilities made him stop bouncing around, sliding demurely back to the edge of the bed to watch Cayde out of the corner of his eye as he slipped a hand under his cape to hold his shoulder again. He was not the one to be telling this kind of thing to for emotional support, and hoped his lean this time read as an apology for putting Cayde in that position with the snooping he wasn't about to stop. It wasn't like Tony wanted anyone else to know these details before Tony did, how was he supposed to control the conversation then?

Instead, he offered a smile, snapping this new page up to his chin and muttered, "You do have excellent taste," as though Cayde had any control over who was hanging around him in this situation. "Are you giving these to Jon? I think it's the kind of thing he wants in the library, you're doing all of the work for him. I thought you were the muscle, but you might actually be the desk jockey." They were all supposed to forget all of this, weren't they? Maybe Cayde didn't hear that yet, and Tony didn't want to be the one to tell him, not when he didn't even know if it was true.

[deal_me_in]

Emotional support wasn't something he was asking for anyway. He didn't do that sort of thing. He hated feeling vulnerable, and right here was walking that fine line. Maybe his way of coping with loss was unhealthy, but it had worked for him these many, many years, and so long as that was the case, he didn't see any point to stopping.

The Exo snorted again as Tony spoke. He figured if anyone had to know about it, he could live with it being Tony Stark. The man in some ways wasn't all too different from himself for personality, and they both had the tendency to deflect conversations.

"No way! If he wants these, he'll have to go scrounge around for 'em. I usually don't keep 'em once I write. I stash them with my hidden caches." He laughed, this time a little more genuine, but how could he not laugh at the thought of Jon trekking around the woods or a cave trying to decipher his infamously unhelpful clues?

"Hah! You say that, but that's pretty much what I've been stuck doing as Vanguard. No more runnin' around out in the field, all paperwork and telling Guardians to run my errands. Except recently. See, you don't get in trouble if you leave a note when you sneak out. Then they can't get mad at you because you're already out there."

He hadn't heard about the details, of remembering and forgetting and what not, not for here. But he won't stand for it either. The whole job they were expected to do still sucked, but when you weren't focused on that part, it wasn't so bad.

[in_extremis]

"And you did tell someone, formally written request," Tony agreed, grinning like he would have done the exact same thing in that position. Well, not exactly. He wasn't patient enough to leave the note himself, but Pepper had gotten very good at writing that kind of letter to excuse his eccentric behaviour. He squinted though, knowing he couldn't be contained to a desk from day one, he didn't spend any time working up to it like it sounded Cayde might have. "What got you out the door?" he asked, "Have a backlog?" He gave the page a wiggle again, journals to secret away in his hidden caches of thrilling administrative duties and all of the Guardians who gave him the hardest time.

[deal_me_in]

There was an emphatic nod of agreement to that. Cayde could count on Tony to be on the same page as him. "Exactly," he said. The whole Vanguard gig was a tricky matter, if only because the Hunters made it so. No one who called themselves a Hunter wanted to be saddled with the job.

"Eh, the space rhinos. This fancy pants guy called Gary or something. ...is that like, a common name for aliens now?" The Exo shrugged. "He came and punched us Guardians in the face, did some real damage to the City. So we finally got around to kicking him back, and after that it was like- why am I just sittin' around here? There's some jerks out there that need to be headed off before they come 'round to our end of the solar system. So yeah, called in a few favors-" Practically begged, really. "-got a few calls to help out, knew Big Blue would give a giant speech about why we're needed at the City blahblahblah so I skipped that part."

Cayde grinned, even as he suddenly reached out to try snatching that page back. "Not that much. I mean, it's not as fun if you don't actually have stuff to hide. There is an almost insulting lack of beautiful firearms around here to hoard."

[in_extremis]

Space rhinos was almost enough to get Tony talking, but it was Gary that had him shaking his head while Cayde continued, suggesting under Cayde's explanation, "Same guy, actually. One alien Gary, really fixated on you." That was the noblest of reasons to quite your day job that Tony had no arguments for, so he was the one nodding, eyes closed, of course Cayde didn't stick around to be told off by the people's choice voice of reason, there was space out there and it was full of ass to kick. There were plenty of people more than capable of running a company while he was gone.

Tony let him take his doodles back with a pout of loss, but he wasn't about to fight over it and get accused of being the sentimental one in the room. Cayde had that role locked down, there were other ways Tony could sneak the portraits away. "That's deliberate," he pointed out, "Gary's coming back for round two. Doesn't want you kicking his ass again." It was only partially a joke. Cal and Jon might not have been convinced, but some heroes used a bit of firepower to defend their cause and there did seem to be a very deliberate cultivation of what managed to make it to the surface of this planet when the Agrii could, surroundings noted, obviously make some calculated choices.

[deal_me_in]

"I knew it," Cayde said with a scowl, as though some great conspiracy had just been cleared up. "Shoulda had our Guardian bring back his head. On second thought, no, that guy was just ugly. Most Cabal are though."

He turned as he straightened the journal-letters, rolling them with care before sliding them back into his bag.

A 'bit' of firepower didn't even begin to cover it. Guardians practically carried an entire arsenal. Being able to transmat weapons at the drop of a hat sure was something you took for granted until some army came and blew up all your stuff or you got transmatted yourself into another world way off the normal charts.

"Gary's a sore loser," Cayde said, smirking at Tony.