exsiliumlogs | Operation: Roll Out

Entry tags:

Operation: Roll Out

Date & Time: January 31st - February 4th, Present Day Exsilium Time
Location: Neo Las Vegas, in what formerly was called Turkey.
Characters: All Transports!
Summary: Transports have been sent to Neo Las Vegas to gather information on the origin point of the United Earth and the UE AI. Conference sabotage and the rest is expected and invited!
Warnings: Gambling and alcoholic beverages quite likely! Please PM the mod account for anything else.

By day, the landscape isn't desert, precisely, so much as it is dry. Winter's settled in and found in the biting chill of the wind when it finds you standing on the street. Hovercars and taxis thrum down the cobblestone streets, cavorting and honking like a noisy crowd of inelegant, overweight geese. Men walk by on stilts half in make-up, on their way back to their stage for the next night. Walks of shame are taken proudly in this district, one of the few approved and sanctioned vacation zones in the United Earth.

Evidence of law enforcement can be found all around, but they seem altogether too pleased to be there too. Talk with any one of them about crime rates, and they're liable to laugh at the idea. Those who come to gamble know the house is rigged to win. It's not about making or breaking the bank -- people whose funds dip too low are politely escorted back to their rooms and given a set of normal playing cards -- but it is about enjoyment.

Of the flesh too, and it'd be difficult to find anyone working in Neo Las Vegas who suffers from modesty, or anyone visiting who seems unwilling to politely ask visitors and staff if they'd like to keep them company for the night. In fact, Transports may find themselves needing to turn down multiple such requests! The refusal is always taken well. These are people looking to have a good time, and that's all.

No chance taken, nothing gained, right?

At night, the city really comes alive, the lights in all the hotels and casinos turning the Neo Las Vegas Strip into a carnival of sensation. Drinks and recreational drugs are freely passed around, men and women engage in a variety of sexual and other hedonistic excesses without regret, and the beautiful interiors and ostentatious or playful exteriors of the buildings hide and reveal a rich tapestry of events, delectables, and desires waiting to be fulfilled.

Neo Las Vegas is a fun place, and it is a safe place, and it is Where the Conferences For Our Future Are Made. Playtime is on, gang.

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She hesitated, looking honestly startled for a moment. She fidgets, she twitches, she has ace focus when she's interested in a topic, but she's not the girl you have sit down in panels and listen like she has a clue what's going on. She hadn't expected Caesar to ask. It jostles her out of her own thoughts, looking at him with clear eyes.

"I don't know," she says slowly, offering something of a smile. Her heart is halfway in it, for his sake rather than anything else. "I'm awful at sitting still quietly since I figured out that whole foot tapping thing. Think you can put up with that?"

It's not far to the first set of doors. Collette found it fascinating still, opening them with the hope of stairs beyond them, because unlike each discovery that left her bothered and looking for the elevator before, she could use them without morphing. It's an addiction she doesn't have words for, breaking a lifetime of habit to do what she hadn't been able to before.

She kind of wants to walk without needing to stop, except to rest her body. Pushing limits still remained unwise, yet the idea that she could was appealing as an impracticality.

I'll be there if it's what you want. That's all that matters. Only she can't say that anymore.

"I plan on sitting in the back of them all, so you wouldn't even have to be quiet," Caesar pointed out, hoping against all hope the crowd would be large enough to make sitting in the back of the proverbial class worthwhile. He didn't want attention, so front and center wasn't going to be happening.

When they approach the doors, he'll fall behind and let her lead the way on through them, to the stairs and onward into whatever, wherever they were about to end up. That was she wouldn't need to try and keep up with him.

"But if you don't want to, I'd understand."

There needed to be the obligatory out. There was an entire new city to explore out there, after all.

She hummed, an unconscious noise to accompany her progress upward. With one hand locked on to the railing, she moves with a steady sort of belief in her own locomotion. Her feet clear each step, and set down, supporting her weight properly.

Stairs are an artform she's gotten down to a science. She doesn't really stumble over them so much anymore.

"Mornings would be good," she said when she reached the landing, leading into a pea-green colored hall. "If this is anything like the old Vegas, it only comes to life at night, anyway." Looking down the hall, she paused again. She could get a good fly by in, for a sense of where things were laid out, but she doesn't voice the thought.

"I can just be HR or whatever. They're friendly, right?"

Mornings would be good. Conferences tended to only run on business hours, if his memory from the future yet now past Paris was right. It could have changed since then, as hundreds of years are wont to do, but somehow he doubted it. The suits would undoubtedly want ample time to enjoy whatever was around in the evenings.

"That works," he agreed. Again, he paused when she paused, waiting. "And don't ask me. I don't think I've ever encountered an HR."

He wasn't even sure what that stood for!

Collette decided left would work, given neither direction showed immediate promise of an out. "An HR? Oh, haha, sorry, HR stands for Human Resources. I think they're in charge of hiring people in companies and stuff, like they're good with people?"

Collette wasn't sure. She knew it was a department in larger companies and government organizations, and sometimes it came up in movies, and usually people smiled a lot of they were in HR in the movies. All of this seemed right up her alley.

"Why haven't we run into any staff yet?" She asked as she walked on, looking up (those weren't fluorescent lights, but she wasn't sure what they were), and to the sides, noting arrows pointing in both directions, and two foot square metal covers installed at regular intervals on the walls. "I wonder what those are for?"

"Oh."

People who worked at hiring other people for stuff. Alright then. He couldn't tell why that necessarily meant they'd be friendly, but on this, he would go along with her definition of it. She was good with people, at least, so she had that part down.

As they continued onward down the left hall, he would eventually stop to take a closer look at one of the metal covers they were passing. Decoration?

"Who knows. Maybe they staff the place with robots."

The etchings in the metal look like they're depicting something much like robots, along with numbers and the letter F. Collette peered at one further down, curious.

"Do you think so? That's the one thing we haven't seen much of, you know. Even your world has barrel robots, but here, we haven't seen more than the AI's. I wonder why?"

Even in her time, robots were the big thing. Why not build toward something that could comprehensively do what you didn't want to do?

"We talk about the AI's all day, but the most advanced thingy we've seen is the rover. Why? Even their ships never made sense. They could cloak them from sight, but they flew low enough we could reach them?"

"Your definition of advanced and mine are vastly different," Caesar pointed out before going on and trying to locate, perhaps, a button of some kind on the panel he was inspecting. "That said, it really doesn't strike me as having changed so much from, say, our time in Paris. Was there a period of time where they regressed? Or are they simply too static to move on?"

It could be that would soon find that out, depending on what the conference panels went on about. He would claim their spaceship was the most advanced, actually, but even that had been an underfunded project that apparently had held little interest of the AI or the bigwigs of the UE.

Edited 2014-02-05 06:10 (UTC)

He'd find at least three, two side by side, the third underneath one of the upper buttons.

"Too static? Or too controlling? Funding's gotta come out of the big names in the UE, but if anything like what we knew from before was around... projects got funding if they proved viable for bigger goals. Robots would have made everything easier."

So she assumed, at least. "Weren't indoor showers advanced for you?" she teased, fingers tracing the etching on the panel she was examining.

"Yeah, well, shut up," was Caesar's immensely mature response.

Some people don't have showers, Collette! Shhh!

"But yes, too controlling, which is what keeps everything static. I wonder if the AI has issues with change. That'd make some sense, if something might come up to challenge it."

Though he wasn't sure how much more they should hang around in one spot and talk like this. They were in hostile territory, no matter what kind of city might lay beyond the doors (assuming they ever found any). He poked at the panel one last time, trying anything that might even look like a button, before stepping away.

"We should keep moving."

Edited (bluh tenses) 2014-02-06 04:49 (UTC)

The panel he'd been poking at slid back, revealing an empty chamber. A low whine came out of the chamber, as if from a far distance away. Clattering clunking echoed out of the opening.

Collette blinked at all of it, then yelped as something shot out of the opening to smack against the far wall. Wine carried it's own particular scent, filling the air with an acidic tang, but she wasn't inclined to stick around and figure out why something had come flying out of that opening.

"We've gotta book it!" she said instead, which was something of a hilarity since her coordination didn't handle running so well.

Which meant Collette managed a jog away from the scene of the crime against wine-manity, small worker robots coming out of lower entrances and whirring their way along to the accident site.

She pushed through the first door she saw to the left, stumbling into a naturally lit stairwell leading up to a parking lot. There was no handle on the outside of the door. Once it shut, she was firmly locked outside.

Of all the things that could have possibly done...!

Caesar didn't need to be told twice to run. He had no idea who might be summoned by the sudden sound of a wine bottle being shot at a wall. Really, he couldn't even dream up a reason that would be a useful function at all.

Once he caught up to Collette (which took very little time, let's be real here), it was really hard to keep himself from passing her by. He considered trying to grab her and drag her along faster or possibly even pick her up, but the first option might offend, the second, well, they both knew how badly that typically went.

It wouldn't be something to dwell on for long, in any case, as in the following seconds they were crashing out a door and she was locking it behind them. He turned to look at the door, then at her, then back to the door.

"That..."

His startled expression dissolved slowly, but when it did, it was into a laugh and then he slumped against a wall for support, just until he caught his breath.

"That was ridiculous. Did you just lock everyone else in there with those little things?"

She looked back to the door too, noting the lack of handle. His laughter is all it takes to provoke her into a fit of her own. "I -- what? Oh man!"

It's a helpless motion, her back thumping against the closed door as she groaned through the smile her laughter brought to her face. "I did," she admitted, hands coming up to cover her face. "I totally just did!"

Collette was glad to hear him laugh again. It was always a pleasant note to her days, and not just because it was Caesar. Any of her friends finding time and reason to laugh was something to cherish. Too many people had too easy a time finding excuses not to, that if accidentally locking people in with a horde of tiny cleaning robots is all it took today, why not? She found an inherent humor to the situation too.

"They probably aren't evil cleaner robots?"

Edited 2014-02-07 09:02 (UTC)

"Looks like they'll have to find their own ways out," he said, sounding highly amused by the idea instead of worried.

She was likely right, that the robots would be fine towards guests. What had the highest probability of happening would be that they cleaned up the mess and then returned to the holes in the wall they had arrived from. What Transport would have a problem with that?

Well, there were the ones that broke anything for any reason, but there wasn't much to be done about them...

"Though they may have better luck finding something that isn't a stairwell now."

"Oh, sure, they get to find the elevators!" Her exasperation is delivered with a smile, palms pressed against the door at her back. It took another moment to collect herself enough to push off, craning her head back to check out the expanse of blue sky visible at the top of the cement stairs.

"How about we get back into the sunlight in the meantime? I'm getting cold down here."

She moved toward the staircase without waiting, hand seeking the rail that would guide her to the top.

"Who knows. Could be the elevators down that far need keys."

He added that as if that would make the stairs seem all the better, though knowing the elevators likely wouldn't be that way. They were supposedly in a more open kind of city than they could expect elsewhere in the United Earth. What that meant exactly, he supposed they were about to find out.

Caesar leaned away from the door and turned to follow along. Unlike Collette, he had no need for a railing, and so his hands found his pockets instead.

"Are you so sure it'll be any warmer up above?"

"In the sun?" She laughed, continuing her steady, determined climb. "It's always warmer in the sun, Caesar!" Warmer where the shadows were held at bay, even if there was a wind chill to factor into everything. In clouds, or in darkness, it was always worse.

She didn't need to hold her arms out to feel like she was walking on a balance beam. Collette could handle the flat landscape ambulation fairly well unaided, given she could even stand to jog (and fall) at this point in her life. When she made it to the sunshine, she tilted her head back, letting the sun spill across her face.

"I missed this part of France."

Caesar shook his head at that. Always warmer in the sun? Logically speaking, that was hardly true! He wouldn't argue over it, though. It wasn't a fight worth picking, even if it would have kept the conversation going.

He stepped up beside her onto the other side of the top step, entering the sunlight along with her. Instead of basking, he squinted.

"Too bad this definitely isn't France."

The blinding bright signs, the too colorful buildings, the crush of people who, as they had no way of knowing, were all enemies. Caesar didn't like what he saw. He didn't like it at all.

"We'll always have Paris in our hearts," she sang, a tease and a happy statement. There was a mixed bag of emotions and a hell of a lot of hard work involved with Paris, but a feeling of overall good lingered with her still.

She didn't like Vegas, but she did like the feeling of being somewhere thriving on human life again. She's missed the change in tempo back in Exsilium.

"Come on! Let's look around here, figure out where we're supposed to be!" Close to bouncing on her feet, Collette reached out to Caesar to tug on his sleeve. "Time to get down to the nitty gritty!"

At least someone here was excited. He didn't want to ruin that too much, only there was one little detail she may have forgotten about. If she was seeking to grab his sleeve and drag him along, he wouldn't put up much fight, but while she was revving up to go charging around, he just shook his head and pointed a thumb back over his shoulder.

"I think I'll have to ruin the adventure and point out the convention's in the big ugly hotel right behind us."

They had come up from the workings below into the underground parking, then up onto the street above that. The transporter may have dumped them into a laundry room, but it had gotten the actual mark down just fine.

Collette takes all of a brief moment to laugh off the idea of that being a limitation on what she wanted to do. "Yes, and we're early! So we check in and then go around before it starts!"

While she'd never been to a convention in her life, she's pretty sure there was room between the panels and actually doing things that didn't require holding still.

Really, he knew that much about her. Collette, willingly staying in one place? Better be sick or sleeping, since it was that unlikely to happen at random! And while she'd agreed to help him out, it didn't make her less itchy to move inbetween the other obligations.

"Plus, it's a miniature adventure finding the front entrance. We could totally get lost!"

On purpose.

He does know better, but one could always hope! So her resolve that they go get "lost" after checking in has him sighing. Sighing and turning to start towards the hotel, that is. They can walk and talk at the same time. It's a thing they can do and there is a warning he should hand out before they run into any crowds here.

"Need I remind you this is technically hostile territory? We could get into a lot of trouble here!"

"If we act out," she said, following his lead. "Different from what they expect, which means you need to have fun, too, Caesar. Coming here to be serious all the time is kind of the total opposite of blending in! If this is the one places meant to be all fun and games for a group of people who aren't supposed to do other than they're told, then you need to look like you're glad to get out there and do things at least some of the time!"

She grinned, more amused at the situation than anything else. "Though I don't know if you should go around smiling. Imagine that heartbreak? For the ones who aren't weirded out!"

It was too easy to tease sometimes.

Fine, she had a point there. He didn't have to like the point, but he did have to grudgingly admit it. Everyone else who came here came here to let loose, only if their group let loose, things would probably start exploding! Of course, it was hard not to dwell on worst case scenarios these days.

Of all the places to be tense, Caesar had picked the worst one.

"I... guess," he finally got around to agreeing. Though she got a funny look for the smile comment. "And now you're just exaggerating."

"Only a little," she said, laughing. "Not as much of one as it could be. Anyway, now that you've agreed, that means we do get to have fun while we're here! Which should totally include walking around here before the conference, hmm? You'll like it better in the daytime than at night. I bet it gets really crowded out here at night."

Hovercars catch her attention as they make their way to the entrance, distracting her away from bothering Caesar with pleas of having fun. "It's like Back to the Future around here. This is so different from that small town we were in before!"

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