pglogs | NEW COMERS POST 1

Who: OPEN TO ALL
What: The first wave of newcomers arrive in the hospital.
Where: The Hospital, Center City
When: July 26
Warnings: Please tag any smut or triggers in the comment subject line.

The common room is just as brightly lit and white as the rest of the hospital. There are some scattered seats - large plush chairs and stiff looking couches, as well as wooden chairs at tables - and a TV blaring local soap operas in the corner. A few long tables are set up along the walls, each with a sign dangling down from the front to inform newcomers of what they can find here. Housing, job opportunities, and the Proxima Gamma Information Desk. Minus a few pamphlets about the unique attractions the island has to offer, there isn’t really that much of use on the last table. It’s clearly meant more for tourists than people who have been kidnapped.

Another set of tables hold a variety of snacks; fruits, vegetables, various candies, as well as a table with water, punch, and soda. No alcohol, unfortunately - this is a hospital, after all. You’ll have to leave to go find a bar for something stronger than that.

There’s not much place else to go - so come on in, settle down, and maybe find a familiar face, if you’re lucky.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"You're excused," she said. "Er- no actually what do you say when people hiccup? Do we have a thing for that? It must be a thing. Dammit that was supposed to be clever."

Why didn't they have a thing to respond to people hiccuping?? They had a thing for burps and sneezes. They didn't have one for farts either, did they? The closest to that was like 'who was it' but that wasn't really a formal thing.

"Uh, Kim. I mean. Is my name. You don't have to explain about how that was your name and not the sound because people don't literally say 'hiccup' when they hiccup so I wasn't confused or anything it was supposed to be a... it was a good joke in my head."

There was a small, silent pause of confusion, before he started chuckling, a sense of relaxation coming over him that he hadn't quite shown so far. The joke was apparently funny enough, or maybe it was the awkward stumbling afterward that made him laugh. Either way, it was nice to smile again.

"Nice to meet you, Kim. It was a better attempt than most people make. Back where I'm from, Hiccups are the nickname they give runts of a litter who manager to survive despite the odds against them. So most of the jokes I get are related to being well... tinier than everyone else." Which was saying something, given that he was over six feet, but. Well. Vikings.

"Oh, kind of like in Rumplestiltskin Jr and the Silver Trimmed Easter Egg, where Rumplestiltskin Jr's friend, Beanstalk, was cast out of Cloud City because he was a half giant and shorter and weaker than everyone else, but he was still like twice the height of everyone else in Deutschland."

Just smile and nod, Hiccup. That would be the smart thing to do here. What was Deutschland? And what kind of name was Rumplestiltskin Jr? "... I have no idea what you're talking about."

"It's a book series. It was really good for the first twelve volumes, but after that they started getting adapted into films and I think the author just started phoning it in. It really should have ended in volume fourteen, they'd been leading up to it since the very first book, but then J.K. Loling pretty much pulled an 'it was all a dream' deus ex machina out of their ass and resurrected a whole bunch of characters, which was a huge disservice to Pinkylina especially, since it completely invalidated her retribution arc after she sold Gresel and Hantel to the witch.

"I think LoLing really started to get the message by the twenty first novel, Rumplestiltskin Jr and the Cleverly Named Expy, and you could really tell that the effort really got put back in with fresh storylines and new characters that didn't just feel like recycles from older novels, but by then most of the original fanbase was gone and the new fanbase which had been drawn in by the movies were uninterested. Kind of sad, actually, because I was looking forward to the next issue, but I kind of got dimension-napped before it came out."

It was pretty obvious that he was only sort of half-understanding everything that was coming out of her mouth. None of the names sounded familiar, he wasn't sure what a deus ex machina was in the slightest, but she sounded very passionate about it. So it was hard not to listen.

But he figured he'd ask the only thing that he could easily wrap his mind around; "They put stories into book form in your world? They're not just told orally?"

"Oh, yeah. Books are an entire industry. I'm gonna assume that if they aren't a thing in your world they haven't invented the printing press yet. In more advanced cultures they don't write books out by hand - its done with large machine that press the ink onto an entire page at a time and mass produce them. And paper is way cheaper than like, vellum. It's made from pressed and dried wood pulp."

Hiccup's eyes were wide with interest, enough so that he forgot almost entirely about the situation he was stuck in for the moment and scooted a little farther on the edge of his seat. "Entire pages? How do you get enough ink to mass produce books like that, though? How do they get enough wood pulp? You'd have to cut down a lot of trees to make books into an - an industry, as you put it. Do they use it for books that aren't fictitious?"

So many questions and they're all coming out at once.

No objection from Kim! If anything his interest was just feeding her love of talking!!

"Actually, yeah, we do a ton of logging, although the wood used to make books isn't really the issue, the trees can reproduce fast enough to fix that. It's the petroleum production that's making deforestation a problem... which feeds into the ink question since ink is predominantly made from petroleum or petroleum derivatives with a few other ingredients tossed in.

"And yeah, I think reference materials actually makes up the BULK of our paper and ink use. Encyclopedias, text books, newspapers, records... which is starting to go down now that digital archiving is becoming a thing."

His forehead wrinkled at petroleum, not entirely sure what it is, but the sounds of 'deforestation' didn't seem good. He could put logic to what that sort of vocabulary could be applied to. "Keeping records is important, but why would you want to destroy so many trees just to do it?" He shook his head at the though. The Earth was important to his people and caring for and respecting it were just as valued as anything else.

"Di--dijeetul? What's that?"

"Oh, like I said, the creation of books isn't even the bulk of our use of gas. Transportation is - fright and commutes. We have these big steel wagons of various sizes that we use to propel ourselves across vast distances - an average wage worker's commute takes him maybe twenty miles away from where he lives to where he works, and they can make that distance in half an hour by using paved roads explicitly for that purpose.

"And freight trucks go across MUCH larger distances, like THOUSANDS of miles. It's not unusual at all to be trucking thousands of pounds of one type of trade good from Los Angeles to New York, which is three thousand some miles away. We also use tons of petroleum in the manufacture of PLASTICS, which is a synthetic construction material."

She pulls up her sleeve to show off her arm, which is mostly made of carbon-fiber reinforced plastic.

"Digital is actually rather easy to explain-" she leans forward and taps his tablet. "All the files on that are digital. Information stored as massive arrays of electrical signals."

Each explanation was going to raise more questions, but Kim was down to catch Hiccup up on every technological development of the past several centuries.

NEW COMERS POST 1

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject