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[initiates]

Date & Time: Evening, 10th February 3312
Location: Transport Room
Characters: Open To All
Summary: Everyone is brought into the transport room at roughly the same time, in a great succession and flow of imported individuals. Everyone is being lead around in small bundles, or left to their own devices together inside the Initiative Hold.
Warnings: None.

Widespread and crowded, everyone is being transported into this unusually bright room with an efficiency that is almost horrifying. One after the other, new people are appearing -- being led, shown around and then ultimately abandoned with one final phrase; "Good luck."

The Initiative Hold is wide, like a small town in its depth and industry. You've received your weapon; you've got your keys, your netbook, and one of those robed strangers has shoved a small pouch full of what you can only assume is money into your open palm. You've been given an apartment, but where on earth -- are we on earth? -- is it? Your best opportunity right now is to mingle; at least, that's what everyone else appears to be doing. Those strangers in the robes have left. They're tending to the people who are arriving, one by one and in a quick procession. Energy bustles all around you, as you're strapped up with your sudden gifts and looking around.

Hey, maybe you'll even see some familiar faces.

Comments

[misfortunes]

How charming: a savage. Vincent takes a step in as well, pulls the gun closer, tilted higher, so that her outstretched fingers won't brush it. His tone's still conversational.

"You'll have to pardon me," he says, and if Artika had an ear for it, she might recognise the foregone assumption of that superficial politeness. But then, if he thought that she could recognise it, he wouldn't have spoken the words. "I can't say I recognise the custom."

[flightlessbird]

She definitely doesn't have an ear for it, and will enjoy cluelessness a while longer. As far as she can tell, this is a perfectly normal and civil conversation they're having here. She looks a little skeptical, but keeps her hand stuck out.

"Do you mean the hand custom? You are supposed to wrap your fingers around mine and we move them up and down. To say hello." She frowns, peering up at him like maybe she'd missed something terribly wrong about him. Maybe he's slow. "You are not a very good human if you don't know about hand-shaking."

[misfortunes]

Ignorance, assumptions, bluntness. How fortunate that he doesn't keep count of tedious flaws in others. (How unfortunate that he's already losing track.) Vincent lingers, too close and, to all appearances, unprepared to move.

"That explains it," he says, and sounds perfectly enlightened by this result. "It appears you were misinformed, Miss Artika!"

[flightlessbird]

She had been a little tempted to grab this stranger's hand and show him properly how it's done, but this newest piece of information gives her a pause. She glances up from eying his hand, eyes wide with interest all over again as she finally drops her own hand. For distraction's sake, of course. If she remembers the foregone handshake later, he won't escape quite so easily.

"Really?" A chirp, bright and happy to be taught. "Are you not human? Oh, your eyes are strange, I never have seen eyes like that for a human before."

[misfortunes]

"You'll have to see more of them, then," Vincent says, as cheerful as she. Her scattered remarks are catching up to him all at once, and he's thinking: humans? with some mixture of vexedness and irritation. He has Ada Vessalius for tedious femininity; even a dream and a world away, it seems unnecessarily impractical to put up with more.

Still, he continues—because she's ignorant and unclothed and he's in a rather petty mood. "But it isn't polite to shake hands with a woman, among humans."

[flightlessbird]

"Really?" There's no offense there, but neither is there any sense of apology for having apparently tried something taboo. That would just be silly. She drops her eyes to study her own hands, slender and tipped with pointedly sharp black nails. She glances to his next, frowning thoughtfully. Aside from size, there's no readily apparent difference.

When she looks up again, that skepticism is back. It sounds like an awfully stupid courtesy, the more she thinks about it. "Pyran never told me of that. Why is it a--" She pauses, searching for the word, but has it eventually. "Impolite?"