NEW COMERS POST 1

[proximods]

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.

Comments

[horrendoushaddock]

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?"

[misanthropicmezzode]

"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."

[horrendoushaddock]

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.

[misanthropicmezzode]

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."

[horrendoushaddock]

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?"

[misanthropicmezzode]

"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.