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Daycycle 105 [ August 28 - September 03]

daycycle 105

[Aug 28 - Sept 3]

Early Morning [0800 - 0900] — All Troubleshooters Report for Duty
Felicity Smoak and Natasha Romanoff, have been selected for today’s mission. Details are below:

‘In order to help us improve our combat simulators, you will need to run through any combat situation you encounter at least three times. On the second pass through, engage the combat at a greater range than originally. On the third pass through, attempt it at a much closer range. You will provide tactical notes to our staff afterwards. If the simulators catch fire, or fail to respond to override commands... note that too. The eggheads were supposed to have fixed that.’

Please debrief the computer on the status of your mission by the end of the Daycycle here.

Morning & Afternoon [0900 - 1600] — Service Firm Positions
All Troubleshooters not assigned a mission should report to their Service Firm for their daily duties, unless specifically assigned a different shift.

Evening [1600 - 2200] — Citizen Improvement
All Alpha citizens are encouraged to better themselves through Alpha’s wide variety of educational, entertainment and cultural opportunities offered each evening. Attending these sanctioned events are not mandatory, but is highly encouraged by The Computer. Citizens choosing not to take advantage of these opportunities, have a growing number of other options available to them in how to spend their hard earned credits and free time.

Tonight’s event will be at 1700 in Hangar 15, Armed Forces Sector and will be hosted by the Alpha Complex Dogeball Association. Join us for a game of Alpha Dodgeball! All clearance levels above INFRARED welcome.

Alpha Curfew Restrictions
All Alpha citizens should be in their quarters within the Wagon Wheel by 2200, unless they’ve been given permission from a GREEN or higher clearance level citizen. Sleeping Aid gas is dispelled each night in the Wagon Wheel at 2200 to assist citizens in getting a productive sleeping period.

Confession Booths
There are hundreds of confession booths available around Alpha Complex if a citizen would like to communicate directly with the computer. Please use these confession booths to report mission statuses, report treason or terrorist acts, unregistered mutants, confess your trespasses against Alpha Complex, request propaganda or speak with Your Friend, The Computer, at any time.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Roling his eyes, Derek shrugs. "There's like six hundred of these places around here, Stiles, if they use this one, we just find another. It can't be that hard," he says, sounding a lot more sure about it than he actually is. The fact of the matter is that he has no idea whether they'll be able to find another place if they need one in the future. He hasn't had much of a chance to look around enough to have a stance on that.

"Three, right?" Derek asks as he gets the jumpsuit back on and turns back to face Stiles again. "Three spirals that sort of meet in the middle. Right?"

That's something, isn't it? The fact that the symbol he remembers from the glitch is actually on his body, still. That has to mean something, right, that has to mean that there's more to the glitches than a hiccup in a system somewhere.

Stiles gives Derek the side-eye, he does not share that certainty. "Somewhere new every time?" he asks. They would run out of spaces one day, even if all of them were usable.

"Yep," he says. "They all turn the same way too." He wouldn't try to draw it out - he doesn't have a pen, for one, and two, getting it to look right could be a challenge. "It's not the only time I've seen it either - the symbol, not your tattoo." He shrugs, he isn't really clear if it actually means anything, just that it's an important symbol for the Hales. Like a family sigil.

"I doubt we'll always have to find a new place each time. Some of them are bound to be abandoned for a while," he points out. There's only so much man power, after all, right?

He nods at Stiles's description as he finishes buttoning up the jumpsuit again. "Yeah. ...my sister and I got them after the fire," he says experimentally, giving Stiles a wary look as if to ask if any of that rings a bell. "It's not the only place I've seen it either. I remember it even when I was a kid," he adds, and it feels strange to sound like he believes it because he's been fighting it since he woke up here. He pauses.

"I remember going to the tattoo parlor. I remember my sister taking a blowtorch to my back when we got home, but that's crazy, right?" He pauses again. "...or no?" Because the healing thing.

Stiles might have suggested a new place each time, if it wasn't for what they're trying to do: basically poking at trouble with a big stick. It's like a bad habit he won't ever try to change.

"We could probably read it off a sign," Stiles says, thinking back to the ones they'd passed while making their way here. And it's not like the City ever sleeps anyway, not the machines, at least.

He doesn't know much about Laura, especially not the stuff she and Derek may have gotten up to when they'd left Beacon Hills after the fire. "I never knew your sister." Corpses don't count, and it wasn't like the Hales were people he would have run into much when he was a kid. They might have been involved in the community - he doesn't know - but not in a way he would've paid attention to. Except for when the fire made the news. "It's was a door. Like X marks the spot."

He winces, "Yeah, no, I totally didn't need to know about the tattooing process. The needles were bad enough, I am leaving the room the next time you get your hands on a blowtorch. I don't even care if that's not possible here, I'm saying no in advance."

Derek gives a little non-commital facial shrug. "Yeah, probably," he agrees. He makes a mental note to do that when they're on their way back, because...they should probably head to their respective rooms soon unless they want to end up spending the night in this place, which is exactly what'll happen if they don't go back before the SleepAid gas gets released for the night. There's got to be a way around that...

"I know that," Derek replies. Digging up her body doesn't count, he thinks and a frown forms on his face for a moment. But the fact that he acknowledges that yes, Derek has a sister, and yes, Stiles knows she existed in the past tense is still a baby step of progress.

Rolling his eyes, Derek gives a long suffering sigh. "Yeah you didn't take it well when I did it for Scott, either. Don't worry. I'm not a big fan of the process myself. It hurts like a bitch."

Derek looks down at his PDC. "...it's getting late..."

He's stalling. Right now, he doesn't really want to go when they've barely gotten anywhere with the discussion they're having, but he also doesn't actually know where they hell they are or how long it'll take to get back to their rooms. So maybe he's sort of off-handedly fishing for that information without even realizing it.

Does the gas affect the entire city? And would they find themselves carted off somewhere if someone happens across them if it did?

Would that be the bit about the vault door, or his sister, Stiles wonders, giving Derek a quick look. "For both things?" he asks. "Sucks that her dying was the reason you even went back in the first place."

Stiles makes an exasperated expression. "I hated his tattoo," he says quietly. Beyond what had been required to get it done in the first place. But it was Scott's choice, and for all his misgivings over Scott's reasoning, he'd still gone with him when he'd gotten it. And then had to actually help out again after. Ugh. "And good." He points, for emphasis.

Humming, Stiles leans over to try and look at Derek's PDC screen. It's not like he doesn't believe Derek, but he just likes to see for himself. There never seems to be enough time. "It wasn't like it was early when we headed off. The night life isn't exactly active here - not even a single bump in the night."

Derek figures it's better to err on the side of caution when he has no idea what the whole process of the SleepAid gas actually is beyond the walls of his own room because, so far, he's always been in it when the gas has been released. He only ever takes the curfew seriously because it's not like there's been anything else really vying for his attention at the 22:00 hour mark every night so far.

"My sister," he clarifies. "Some things are still kind of fuzzy. The vault door. I don't...my family's vault? Or the bank vault…? My family's vault had the triskele, yeah." Sucks. Stiles thinks it sucks that Laura's murder is the reason he came back to Beacon Hills at all and Derek thinks that's incredibly generous. "Yeah, well. It is what it is." He gives a tone of finality because even though he's only still just starting to come around to the idea that these "glitches" are actual memories, they hurt. They hurt a lot. And they hurt even more when he thinks about the fact that they're becoming more and more real and less and less glitch by the minute. No wonder he was so easy to brainwash once he finally gave in. He wanted it all to be a glitch, because if it isn't, then the whole second half of his life so far as been completely terrible. Who wouldn't want that to be a lie?

A small, humorless huff of semi-amusement escapes him. "Yeah, that tattoo is ugly as hell, agreed."

Stiles's response doesn't give Derek much to work off, so he asks directly. "How long do you think it'll take us to get back? I don't know where we are." He gives a little facial shrug. "I'm actually kind of okay with the lack of nightlife and bumps in the night."

There's also how curfew is emphasized on a daily basis, like they'll somehow forget about it without the constant reminder. He would have preferred the choice of them having a choice in what they do in their rooms - but that wouldn't be considered "restful". Nothing said restful like pins and needles, neck cricks and back pain, but that isn't a problem any computer could really understand.

Stiles nods at that. "Definitely your family vault," he says, then pauses. He never really understood why it was where it was, how accessible would it have been in an emergency? Or was it supposed to also be a place for the younger Hales too? All questions he'll never get an answer to. "Which was under the high school." For all that he'd been involved in the plans, Stiles never actually went to the bank vault. Not before, and certainly not after.

"It wasn't the worst choice he could have made," he mutters from between his hands. That whole freaking summer of self improvement.

"Uh, we were walking for about twenty minutes, and it was what? Half an hour from the Wagonwheel to get to the hangar." So, just under an hour to get back, if they retraced there route. "All the trains lead back too, as long as you take the right train." There's probably a station somewhere nearby.

"The kind that means running for your life? Yeah."

Derek, too, gives another nod to acknowledge Stiles's response. "Yeah, I know..." he replies and his voice trails off thoughtfully. "I always kind of wondered why it was under the high school, but it's been there for like a quarter of a century or something, I think, so maybe it wasn't a high school when my ancestors put the vault there. Maybe the school was something else once upon a time." He really has kind of always wondered this and it's never really been explained to him, but then he never really questioned it, either. You just didn't question Talia Hale. No one did, because once they started to, that was when things would get ugly and messy. His mother had been a good Alpha. He'd been an embarrassment. Remembering that actually makes him wince a little.

He lifts his eyebrows a little. "Do I even want to know?" he asks, but it's mostly rhetorical. He probably doesn't want to know. Even if he did, he's pretty sure he doesn't actually care.

"We should probably get going then," he thinks aloud. "Make sure we give ourselves time in case the train station is equally as confusing as literally everything else in this hell hole and we end up on the wrong one, no?"

Derek's tired of running, so his response to that last is a deep breath and a long-suffering sigh coupled with a nod. Yeah. That's exactly what he means.

"They just tore down what was there and built up on top of it?" he asks. "That could have happened. Not like there isn't a ton of abandoned buildings around town." Of course, that would still mean the Hales had to have connections so that the right arrangements could be made to keep the vault a secret, and accessible. "And with the number of people on the force, you can get away with hanging around those places without getting noticed."

Stiles coughs into his hand. "Eh, probably not," he draws out the first word. The samples the tattooist had weren't that great, and from Scott's reaction before Stiles took a header into the floor, definitely not appreciated.

Nodding, he looks back towards the door. "At least with the trains, there's only two options - and it won't take long to figure out if it's going the wrong way." There's got to be a system map in the station, or on the train cars themselves.

"Maybe," Derek responds with a shrug. He's never been all that into town histories. He's always been more interested in the mythology of the beings that reside in it. For all he knows, it could've been a grocery store. "Yeah, that and when I was a kid, my family was in good standing with the town in general. I imagine that was also true a long, long time ago. But I don't really know. My mom never talked about that. It never really seemed relevant to conversation."

Derek's nose scrunches a little and he gives a small nod. Yeah, probably not.

"Yeah? I haven't actually taken the trains, yet. I've never been this far from where I needed to be, so I never really needed to." Then again, he hasn't been here that long. Better late than never, he supposes, because these will probably be useful later on down the line. Eventually he'll want to explore more and he'll have time to do it. "Small favors, huh?" he asks as they move toward the station. Sure enough, there's a map on the wall, backlit with florescent lighting so that it's easier to see. Derek approaches it and there's...so many stops that it takes him a moment just to get past the overwhelming feeling of looking at the damn thing. "Jesus..." he mutters under his breath.

"Probably a good investment." Not that everything can be planned for, he thinks, given what did happen. If it hadn't been for the fire, would he have even known about the Hales in any way, he wonders. He can't remember if there had been any Hales that were public pillars of the community at all.

"Well, yeah." That's just common knowledge. Trains go along their tracks, and different lines will have them running in opposite directions. So less of a favor, and more of an engineering success. But it works, so maybe he should just accept it, and stop nitpicking. "I like them because they're faster than having to walk everywhere." Unless you take the wrong train.

Which is why they're staring at the map that looked a lot like a plate of spaghetti thrown at the wall. Stiles checks what the name of the station they're currently at, squints at the writing, and places his finger over the name on the map. "We need to get here-" he indicates the Wagonwheel with his other hand. "That's like four different possible trains." He says, after seeing what's available at this station, and stops at the Wagonwheel without going all over the map. There are still deviations, but at least they won't be getting a free 'tour' of the city on the way.

[ooc: that was supposed to be at the school, not on the force. orz]

"Well," Derek starts as he looks at the map with his eyebrows lifted. "Assuming you can read the map and you don't end up on the wrong train, they're faster..." Stiles is probably better at this than Derek is, but he steps up beside the teenager and frowns as he tries to follow the paths presented before them.

It really shouldn't be this difficult to find the easiest route; they shouldn't need Stiles's fingers on the map, or Derek's — but he adds his anyway to trace what looks like the shortest route just to make sure that it is, in fact, going from here to the Wagon Wheel, because even though the lines are color coded, they're so tangled together, it's still a pain in the ass to decipher.

"This one?" he asks. "I think?"

"Pretend we actually know what we're doing for an instant," Stiles says sardonically. Tracing the different routes the trains take is a slow process, and the whole thing reminds him that this isn't the first time he's gone over a map like this.

"Okay." Stiles studies the train Derek picked out, noting little circled number on the route, seventeen - that's what they're looking for. "Now we just need to find it."

Find the platform, find the train.

Easy, right?

Rolling his eyes, Derek heaves another long suffering sigh. "Right," he replies. If they knew what they were doing, then it wouldn't feel like such a gamble to Derek, he suspects. And maybe they don't release the gas through the whole complex, but Derek doesn't want to find out the hard way if they do.

One would think that once they found the route they needed that actually finding the platform and getting on the correct train would be easy, but one would be wrong. It's still a challenge. Even with the signage all over the place, it's still a jumbled, disorganized mess and Derek wonders if this might be what people with dyslexia feel like all the time, because it feels like he's looking at one thing but reading entirely another.

But, after a few minutes, he thinks he's figured it out. "Come on, I think I got it. Look at all the REDs headed in the same direction," he says, "it's late. They've gotta be trying to get back just like we are. I vote we follow them." Especially since most of the Alphas around here appear to be largely in favor of The Computer and its policies.

So much for that bit of positivity, Stiles thinks, as he continues to look around for the right place to go. It would have helped if the text didn't cycle through on the signs - just when you thought you had found what you wanted, they changed. It's frustrating, waiting for the right words to come back around, and the signs around it wouldn't display the same information. There are others - but finding the signs still leaves the same problem as before - there isn't enough time to read everything.

He looks over his shoulder from where he'd finally resorted to waiting, and blinks. "That, that would be the easiest way," he says sheepishly. Still he gives the sign one last narrowed eyed look before following after Derek, and the other REDs, past a few archways, and down towards an escalator marked with a series of route numbers.

A bright stripe of lights marks out the edge of the platform, and they flash as a train approaches the station.

Derek admittedly feels marginally more confident when Stiles agrees to follow the other REDs, because it makes him think that maybe it's not just a random thought process, but a decent idea. Derek's not very good at having those. Ideas, sure. Good ones? Not so much.

As the train pulls up to the platform, a neon sign flashes on its side R&D, Wagon Wheel, Technology. That'll do, he thinks, and looks over at Stiles with his brows lifted in question.

"Well, here goes. Let's hope it's the right one."

((ooc: fade out there or keep going? totes up to you!))

It makes sense, since without specialized arrangements, all citizens beneath Blue clearance stayed at the Wagon Wheel. There's no reason Stiles can think of that would have a group of nearly a dozen other REDs stay elsewhere for the night, and sleepovers aren't exactly an option.

Though the windows, Stiles can make out some other people inside the train. "Yeah, but I'll say it's more than a hope." He indicates the number of people around them, and on the train.

The doors open with a soft hiss, and he steps in, reaching out for one of the poles in the center before the train starts up again.

Most of the other citizens keep to themselves; looking out the window, or down at their PDCs, but there are pockets of people, possibly coworkers, having a quiet conversation. The bits of it he can overhear doesn't hold his interest long. He doesn't try to start another conversation, doubting that small talk would last long, now that other topics are off the table, resigning himself to a mental game of I spy to pass the time.

A bright, cheerful voice announces each stop as they arrive, more people joining them as they ride on.

Once they actually get close enough and Derek can see the many REDS, ORANGES, and a smattering of YELLOWs and GREENs in the train car, he nods at Stiles's comment and feels a lot more confident that they're going to make it back in time just fine. There's no way the car would be this packed with people this late at night if it wasn't headed back to the Wagon Wheel.

The ride isn't too long, although it feels a lot longer than it is to Derek because he's standing through the lot of it, but he's more than happy to disembark when they get to the stop when the announcement from the obnoxiously perky voice says they've made it to the Wagon Wheel.

Derek and Stiles make their way up the elevator and have to wait a few turns in line before they'll fit, as there are so many people headed up, but Derek doesn't start a new conversation and neither does Stiles. Derek suspects that's because there's nothing left to say that can safely be overheard by others.

"All right, hey...thanks," he tells Stiles as they get off the elevator on their floor and his eyes shift toward the still-trashed common room. "I'll catch you later, okay?"

He nods goodnight to Stiles and moves into the common room to kill the last few minutes before he needs to go back to his room. They'll see each other tomorrow. He hopes.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Daycycle 105 [ August 28 - September 03]

daycycle 105

[Aug 28 - Sept 3]

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