CT (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
tuskenlancer) wrote2012-09-21 05:07 pm
tuskenlancer) wrote2012-09-21 05:07 pm
Entry tags:
App for Tu Shanshu
Player Information:
Name: Buttercup
Age: well over 18
Contact: tmk2383 (AIM)
Game Cast: none (previously Samwise Gamgee)
Character Information:
Name: Agent Connecticut (CT or Connie)
Canon: Red vs Blue
Canon Point: Season 10 episode 3 “Follow the Leader,” just after betraying the Freelancers but before they go on their mission to take her in
Age: early to mid-twenties
Reference: http://rvb.wikia.com/wiki/C.T.
Entire webseries available at http://roosterteeth.com/archive/?sid=rvb&v=more&s=1, CT appears in seasons 9 and 10, during the Project Freelancer flashback portion of the episodes; these chronologically take place prior to the events of the main Red vs. Blue storyline.
Setting: The Halo story is the story of a war. Not having played (much of) the Halo games, my understanding of the specifics of this war is very limited. Luckily for me, the characters in Red vs. Blue seem to know and care about the war just about as much as I do. (Which is to say: not much.)
That said, here are the highlights.
Once upon a time, there were the Forerunners. The Forerunners were a race of aliens who created a bunch of stuff and then left, including the eponymous Halos - gigantic ring-shaped installations scattered throughout the galaxy. So they’re basically the Ancients. Or the Vorlons. The point is, they’re gone, and they left a lot of mysterious artifacts behind.
There are a lot of aliens in the galaxy, even after the Forerunners leave. One group of aliens in particular is important to our story. This group is the Covenant, an alliance of alien races with a common religion. This religion happens to be the worship of the Forerunners, and the technology they left behind.
The Covenant believes that they are the “Chosen Ones,” the rightful heirs of the Forerunners. They also believe that activating the Halos will basically bring about the Rapture and send the faithful to paradise, rather than just blowing everyone to smithereens, as they were actually built to do.
So the Covenant are doing their thing, doing okay all the way up until they meet humans and their entire belief system is turned upside down. Because the Covenant had believed that they were the true believers, the worthy inheritors of Forerunner technology. And then they met humans, and whoops. It turns out that we’re the descendents of the Forerunners. Humans can activate Forerunner technology - we’re the only ones who can. (So we’re John Sheppard. And the Forerunners are the Ancients.)
Rather than welcoming the humans into their Forerunner-worshipping buddy club, the Covenant, in a massive show of cross-species denial, instead declare war on humanity, a holy war meant to wipe us out completely. And that’s where our story starts - humanity is at war with this alliance who wants nothing more than to destroy us, the war has lasted for decades, and it’s not going very well.
The Covenant, by the time the events of Red vs. Blue take place, have already destroyed tens of billions of human lives. Humanity as a whole is struggling, and is eager to end the war as soon as possible. There are many groups searching to find a “magic bullet” to put an end to all of this - the Spartan supersoldier program of the Halo games is just one example.
The Freelancer Program is another. Director Leonard Church created the program to do his part in the “great war” against the Covenant, through research rather than military prowess. His research involved the use of AI in battle - implanting AI directly into soldiers’ minds in order to make them better fighters.
Unfortunately, AI are incredibly difficult and expensive to create, and Church was granted only the use of a single AI for use in his project. Unsatisfied with this, he took matters into his own hands. How do you acquire multiple AI from a single source? To Church, the answer was simple. If a mind can be broken, if a mind can be fragmented, then it stands to reason that an AI based on a human mind can do the same. In effect, he induced the equivalent of multiple personality disorder in the original AI, breaking off different “fragments” that were then implanted into the soldiers.
Project Freelancer is an incredibly competitive program. The soldiers are constantly set against each other in training, and their performance both in training and in the field affects their standing in the rankings, which are displayed on a giant blue leaderboard that overlooks the training floor and, literally and metaphorically, looms over every part of the Freelancers’ lives. Those at the top of the board are the best, the strongest, the most creative and the most willing to do what is needed to get the job done, and they are rewarded for it - in other words, they are the first in line to receive their AI.
CT has never been near the top.
When we first see her she has just returned from a mission, a failed mission that both she and, judging by her drop in the rankings, the Director blame her for. CT is not on the board listing the top eight agents; she knows she’s falling behind. She knows, too, that the Project is bigger than it has yet been revealed to be; though this takes place before the AI are introduced, she knows that something big is coming, that the Director is filtering his agents for something, and that that something is of paramount importance to him.
As time goes on and the AI are revealed, as they begin to be implanted in the Freelancers, CT never stops considering the Director’s motives, considering the significance of his actions and the Project itself, and she begins to take her own actions. She starts gathering data. She starts sending encrypted messages to outside parties. And at the beginning of Season Ten, she finally acts, taking her data and abandoning her team during a mission.
And this is where we come in. It’s not clear exactly what data CT has gathered; she’s been “feeding intel to the Resistance for months,” according to Freelancer Agent Carolina, and the Insurrectionist contact she meets is able to use that data to help locate a Forerunner artifact that had gone previously undiscovered. CT hopes that between the data she’s gathered from the Project and her specialized Freelancer armor - an asset highly valued by both the Project and the UNSC - she’ll be able to make a deal with the authorities, and keep both of them out of prison. Though her plans, motives and the information she has are all very unclear, I assume until proven otherwise that part of CT’s plan is to bring down the Director and the Project. She knows it’s nothing but trouble, knows that the Director is breaking the law, and that the Freelancers will pay for his crimes.
However, the Freelancers are only half the cast of Red vs. Blue. The show starts with the story of two teams of soldiers, one in red (or lightish red) armor, and one in blue armor. They are fighting in a box canyon, and have been for years - if “fighting” is the correct word when neither side ever really ever attacks the other. The Reds and the Blues star in the majority of the show, and though at first they seem to bear little connection with the Freelancers, it is eventually revealed that they are one of many groups of simulation soldiers, and everything that happens to them is part of a group of training scenarios designed to improve the Freelancers’ skills. While we never see CT herself meet the sim soldiers, it is possible that she herself participated in one or more training scenarios in a similar setup at some point during her Freelancer career.
In Season 7, the sim soldiers do meet up with someone in brown armor identical to CT’s, who, after a long and aggravating period of time trying to get them to keep out of the alien dig site they’re investigating, is eventually killed by one of the blue soldiers. When Wash later finds her helmet, he assumes that it was CT who was killed; however, we learn differently during the Freelancer flashback portion of Season 10. After betraying her team, CT is killed, and her Insurrectionist contact and apparent lover takes her armor for himself. It is he who is killed in the desert during Season 7.
Personality: CT is an observer. She spent her time in Freelancer on the edge of the group, observing others’ motives, trying to figure out what secrets everyone was keeping and the relationships between them all, sometimes making jaded comments or observations about she sees. She is good at what she does - hence being accepted into Freelancer at all - but is not among the best. When we first meet her, it is directly after a failed mission. As a result of this mission, CT is knocked off the Freelancer leaderboard, a large, brightly lit list showing the top eight rated Freelancers that dominates the character’s professional lives while onboard the ship.
CT refuses to give herself any leeway or shift any of the blame from herself when she fails. She is stubborn, sometimes to the point of exasperating her fellow teammates, always asking questions, challenging others and refusing to be swayed by the opinions of her fellow teammates. Being listened to and taken seriously is incredibly important to her - when we are first introduced to her, she admonishes Wash for using the nickname "Connie," telling him derisively that it makes her sound "like a fucking kid."
Despite her suspicions of the Director, succeeding within the bounds he’d set up was incredibly important to her. She was terrified of what might happen if she failed, perhaps of what might happen to her or where she would go next. When Wash tried to comfort her after the failed mission, reminding her that everyone is in this together and telling her that it wasn’t her fault, she snapped at him, taking the blame on herself and refusing to make or accept excuses.
She is perceptive, recognizing that the rankings mean something, that the Director was behind the live firearms used against Agent Texas on the training floor - she knows how far he’s willing to go, that he expects his agents to do the same. She left largely because this scared her - she realized before anyone else that what the Director was doing was wrong, and that they would all pay for it, sooner or later. Despite this, she was not aghast as Wash was when Maine and Wyoming used live rounds rather than paint on Tex during training - she saw what was coming, whether she was prepared to join in or not.
My headcanon for CT is that she was one of the younger Freelancers. She was very much in over her head, struggling to keep up and getting far more than she bargained for in the process. She finds it hard to make friends, being naturally quiet, suspicious and distrustful and with something of a prickly personality - she is still figuring out who she is and where she belongs in a lot of ways. But I think she did genuinely like the others, or at least most of them. She simply didn’t know how to show it: for example, pushing Wash away when he tried to comfort her. She does not want pity, but she did attempt to warn Wash not to fall too low in the rankings, and she clearly felt guilty when he caught her making transmissions, lashing out at him in defense.
Despite her prickly nature, and the fact that we rarely see her in a noncombative mood, I play her as a more three-dimensional character. I believe that she does know how to have fun, and values friendship when it is offered, although she may have trouble really accepting it at first.
CT did betray her team and the UNSC when she left Freelancer, and while she knows that, she believed up until the end that she was doing the right thing. When Tex and Carolina come after her to bring her back in - or at least to retrieve her armor - she pleads with them, trying to get them to see things from her point of view, to see that the Director’s actions were both wrong and dangerous, and that if he wasn’t stopped, they would all end up paying the price.
Upon hearing an explanation of where she’s ended up and what Tu Shanshu is, she will likely be extremely disbelieving and really, unimpressed with the whole situation. CT is a very focused person, and she is being pulled from the middle of doing something incredibly important to her. She’s also naturally suspicious, examining others’ motives and always looking beneath the surface to find out what’s really going on. She does not have time to be kidnapped and told she’s in a mystical, nonexistent purgatory.
Appearance:
Abilities: CT was chosen for the Freelancer program, which already puts her at a high level of fighting skill. She is not ranked among the top agents in the program, but she is regularly chosen for missions and usually manages to hold her own, with some exceptions. In season 9, episode 7, we see the aftermath of a failed mission, when Washington attempts to comfort her for the mistakes she made on the battlefield, but we never find out exactly what went went wrong.
Each Freelancer has a unique armor “enhancement” that is meant to help them in battle - for example, York has a special healing unit, and Carolina can change her armor color. CT’s enhancement is the ability to project a hologram of her armor, in order to fool enemies into attacking the hologram instead of herself.
Inventory: Brown Freelancer armor with hologram enhancement (see Abilities)
Suite: Fire, 2 floors. Coming as she is from directly after betraying the Freelancer program, she will be very, very wary of seeing any familiar faces. She would be extremely uncomfortable settling in the metal sector; it would remind her far too much of the Freelancers’ ship, the Mother of Invention, and she would be constantly on edge, knowing that any other members of the UNSC who arrived there would be extremely likely to choose to live there.
Both Water and Earth sectors alike would be far too quiet and calm for CT. The hippie lifestyle is not for her, and neither is the calm, quiet life of Earth sector. At her canon point, CT is very on edge, frustrated and afraid; she would find the tense Fire sector the perfect place to find like-minded peoplewho would only encourage her paranoia and defensiveness.
In-Character Samples:
Third Person: She’d been quiet when she’d joined Freelancer, not shy exactly, but just quiet, unwilling to throw herself right into the middle of things and stake out a spot in the social scene like so many of the others had. She’d preferred to stay on the sidelines at first, watching and waiting, trying to figure out everyone’s relationships, their motivations, who was hiding secrets.
Parties aren’t really her thing, but she’d said okay, and she shows up about a half-hour after eight, peering into the room. It’s loud and crowded, she hadn’t even realized there were so many of them in the program, and the noise is overbearing enough that she’s really considering sneaking right back out again before she’s noticed when York catches sight of her.
“Hey, look, guys, Connie’s here!” He grins, and makes his way across the room, pressing a drink into her hands so that she has to grab it before it spills, giving him a nervous smile. “C’mon in, have a drink. And whatever you do, don’t steal Maine’s favorite seat.”
She opens her mouth to respond, but then Carolina calls from across the room and York looks over, his whole face lighting up. He turns back to her briefly, clapping her on the shoulder. “Good to see you here, Connie,” and he disappears into the crowd again before she can say a word.
She looks around, finding herself surrounded by people who aren’t in her training group, who she doesn’t know, all of them turned away from her and caught up in their own conversations. She makes her way over to the wall, instead, and finds a row of chairs, and Washington sitting in one of them.
He’s in her group, but he’s quiet like her, focused on his work and friendly enough to everyone, but not loudly opinionated or outgoing. He’s always been nice to her, though, and she smiles a little hopefully as she gingerly sits down next to him, careful of her drink.
“Hi.”
Washington looks at her, and smiles back, looking almost surprised that she’d said anything, but he looks pleased, too, and she relaxes a little bit.
“Hey.”
Network: [She knows where she is, or at least where the aliens have claimed she is. It seems fantastic to think that they’re actually telling the truth, but then, why anyone would bother to make up such a story is equally inexplicable.
She’d taken a few days just to watch, to learn what she can, to get a feel for the place and the people in it. Most of what’s being posted on the network is crap. People whining about money, about food, whining just for the sake of whining.
There are a few interesting tidbits of information, though. The word resistance catches her eye, puts her on guard instantly, and though she quickly determines that it’s not the same resistance, that nothing is the same here, it’s still unnerving, just to hear the familiar word.
The curfew doesn’t sound promising, either.
It’s only when she digs a little deeper that she finally runs across a familiar face, and freezes. No. Here, of all places - here, wherever here is, and she still hadn’t gotten away from them all? She quickly searches for more, reading every last one of York’s public posts, but he never mentions her, never mentions looking for her, and there doesn’t seem to be anyone else from the Project here, or anyone from the UNSC at all.
At least that’s something.
She’s not too big on the idea of giving herself away, though, and so when she does finally sit down at the console and speak to the network, it’s audio only, and her voice modifier is on.]
So.
Has anyone managed to learn anything useful about what this place really is?
[It's as much to create a stir as anything, to see if anyone has any interesting theories or if they're all as blindly accepting of this as they seem.]
Name: Buttercup
Age: well over 18
Contact: tmk2383 (AIM)
Game Cast: none (previously Samwise Gamgee)
Character Information:
Name: Agent Connecticut (CT or Connie)
Canon: Red vs Blue
Canon Point: Season 10 episode 3 “Follow the Leader,” just after betraying the Freelancers but before they go on their mission to take her in
Age: early to mid-twenties
Reference: http://rvb.wikia.com/wiki/C.T.
Entire webseries available at http://roosterteeth.com/archive/?sid=rvb&v=more&s=1, CT appears in seasons 9 and 10, during the Project Freelancer flashback portion of the episodes; these chronologically take place prior to the events of the main Red vs. Blue storyline.
Setting: The Halo story is the story of a war. Not having played (much of) the Halo games, my understanding of the specifics of this war is very limited. Luckily for me, the characters in Red vs. Blue seem to know and care about the war just about as much as I do. (Which is to say: not much.)
That said, here are the highlights.
Once upon a time, there were the Forerunners. The Forerunners were a race of aliens who created a bunch of stuff and then left, including the eponymous Halos - gigantic ring-shaped installations scattered throughout the galaxy. So they’re basically the Ancients. Or the Vorlons. The point is, they’re gone, and they left a lot of mysterious artifacts behind.
There are a lot of aliens in the galaxy, even after the Forerunners leave. One group of aliens in particular is important to our story. This group is the Covenant, an alliance of alien races with a common religion. This religion happens to be the worship of the Forerunners, and the technology they left behind.
The Covenant believes that they are the “Chosen Ones,” the rightful heirs of the Forerunners. They also believe that activating the Halos will basically bring about the Rapture and send the faithful to paradise, rather than just blowing everyone to smithereens, as they were actually built to do.
So the Covenant are doing their thing, doing okay all the way up until they meet humans and their entire belief system is turned upside down. Because the Covenant had believed that they were the true believers, the worthy inheritors of Forerunner technology. And then they met humans, and whoops. It turns out that we’re the descendents of the Forerunners. Humans can activate Forerunner technology - we’re the only ones who can. (So we’re John Sheppard. And the Forerunners are the Ancients.)
Rather than welcoming the humans into their Forerunner-worshipping buddy club, the Covenant, in a massive show of cross-species denial, instead declare war on humanity, a holy war meant to wipe us out completely. And that’s where our story starts - humanity is at war with this alliance who wants nothing more than to destroy us, the war has lasted for decades, and it’s not going very well.
The Covenant, by the time the events of Red vs. Blue take place, have already destroyed tens of billions of human lives. Humanity as a whole is struggling, and is eager to end the war as soon as possible. There are many groups searching to find a “magic bullet” to put an end to all of this - the Spartan supersoldier program of the Halo games is just one example.
The Freelancer Program is another. Director Leonard Church created the program to do his part in the “great war” against the Covenant, through research rather than military prowess. His research involved the use of AI in battle - implanting AI directly into soldiers’ minds in order to make them better fighters.
Unfortunately, AI are incredibly difficult and expensive to create, and Church was granted only the use of a single AI for use in his project. Unsatisfied with this, he took matters into his own hands. How do you acquire multiple AI from a single source? To Church, the answer was simple. If a mind can be broken, if a mind can be fragmented, then it stands to reason that an AI based on a human mind can do the same. In effect, he induced the equivalent of multiple personality disorder in the original AI, breaking off different “fragments” that were then implanted into the soldiers.
Project Freelancer is an incredibly competitive program. The soldiers are constantly set against each other in training, and their performance both in training and in the field affects their standing in the rankings, which are displayed on a giant blue leaderboard that overlooks the training floor and, literally and metaphorically, looms over every part of the Freelancers’ lives. Those at the top of the board are the best, the strongest, the most creative and the most willing to do what is needed to get the job done, and they are rewarded for it - in other words, they are the first in line to receive their AI.
CT has never been near the top.
When we first see her she has just returned from a mission, a failed mission that both she and, judging by her drop in the rankings, the Director blame her for. CT is not on the board listing the top eight agents; she knows she’s falling behind. She knows, too, that the Project is bigger than it has yet been revealed to be; though this takes place before the AI are introduced, she knows that something big is coming, that the Director is filtering his agents for something, and that that something is of paramount importance to him.
As time goes on and the AI are revealed, as they begin to be implanted in the Freelancers, CT never stops considering the Director’s motives, considering the significance of his actions and the Project itself, and she begins to take her own actions. She starts gathering data. She starts sending encrypted messages to outside parties. And at the beginning of Season Ten, she finally acts, taking her data and abandoning her team during a mission.
And this is where we come in. It’s not clear exactly what data CT has gathered; she’s been “feeding intel to the Resistance for months,” according to Freelancer Agent Carolina, and the Insurrectionist contact she meets is able to use that data to help locate a Forerunner artifact that had gone previously undiscovered. CT hopes that between the data she’s gathered from the Project and her specialized Freelancer armor - an asset highly valued by both the Project and the UNSC - she’ll be able to make a deal with the authorities, and keep both of them out of prison. Though her plans, motives and the information she has are all very unclear, I assume until proven otherwise that part of CT’s plan is to bring down the Director and the Project. She knows it’s nothing but trouble, knows that the Director is breaking the law, and that the Freelancers will pay for his crimes.
However, the Freelancers are only half the cast of Red vs. Blue. The show starts with the story of two teams of soldiers, one in red (or lightish red) armor, and one in blue armor. They are fighting in a box canyon, and have been for years - if “fighting” is the correct word when neither side ever really ever attacks the other. The Reds and the Blues star in the majority of the show, and though at first they seem to bear little connection with the Freelancers, it is eventually revealed that they are one of many groups of simulation soldiers, and everything that happens to them is part of a group of training scenarios designed to improve the Freelancers’ skills. While we never see CT herself meet the sim soldiers, it is possible that she herself participated in one or more training scenarios in a similar setup at some point during her Freelancer career.
In Season 7, the sim soldiers do meet up with someone in brown armor identical to CT’s, who, after a long and aggravating period of time trying to get them to keep out of the alien dig site they’re investigating, is eventually killed by one of the blue soldiers. When Wash later finds her helmet, he assumes that it was CT who was killed; however, we learn differently during the Freelancer flashback portion of Season 10. After betraying her team, CT is killed, and her Insurrectionist contact and apparent lover takes her armor for himself. It is he who is killed in the desert during Season 7.
Personality: CT is an observer. She spent her time in Freelancer on the edge of the group, observing others’ motives, trying to figure out what secrets everyone was keeping and the relationships between them all, sometimes making jaded comments or observations about she sees. She is good at what she does - hence being accepted into Freelancer at all - but is not among the best. When we first meet her, it is directly after a failed mission. As a result of this mission, CT is knocked off the Freelancer leaderboard, a large, brightly lit list showing the top eight rated Freelancers that dominates the character’s professional lives while onboard the ship.
CT refuses to give herself any leeway or shift any of the blame from herself when she fails. She is stubborn, sometimes to the point of exasperating her fellow teammates, always asking questions, challenging others and refusing to be swayed by the opinions of her fellow teammates. Being listened to and taken seriously is incredibly important to her - when we are first introduced to her, she admonishes Wash for using the nickname "Connie," telling him derisively that it makes her sound "like a fucking kid."
Despite her suspicions of the Director, succeeding within the bounds he’d set up was incredibly important to her. She was terrified of what might happen if she failed, perhaps of what might happen to her or where she would go next. When Wash tried to comfort her after the failed mission, reminding her that everyone is in this together and telling her that it wasn’t her fault, she snapped at him, taking the blame on herself and refusing to make or accept excuses.
She is perceptive, recognizing that the rankings mean something, that the Director was behind the live firearms used against Agent Texas on the training floor - she knows how far he’s willing to go, that he expects his agents to do the same. She left largely because this scared her - she realized before anyone else that what the Director was doing was wrong, and that they would all pay for it, sooner or later. Despite this, she was not aghast as Wash was when Maine and Wyoming used live rounds rather than paint on Tex during training - she saw what was coming, whether she was prepared to join in or not.
My headcanon for CT is that she was one of the younger Freelancers. She was very much in over her head, struggling to keep up and getting far more than she bargained for in the process. She finds it hard to make friends, being naturally quiet, suspicious and distrustful and with something of a prickly personality - she is still figuring out who she is and where she belongs in a lot of ways. But I think she did genuinely like the others, or at least most of them. She simply didn’t know how to show it: for example, pushing Wash away when he tried to comfort her. She does not want pity, but she did attempt to warn Wash not to fall too low in the rankings, and she clearly felt guilty when he caught her making transmissions, lashing out at him in defense.
Despite her prickly nature, and the fact that we rarely see her in a noncombative mood, I play her as a more three-dimensional character. I believe that she does know how to have fun, and values friendship when it is offered, although she may have trouble really accepting it at first.
CT did betray her team and the UNSC when she left Freelancer, and while she knows that, she believed up until the end that she was doing the right thing. When Tex and Carolina come after her to bring her back in - or at least to retrieve her armor - she pleads with them, trying to get them to see things from her point of view, to see that the Director’s actions were both wrong and dangerous, and that if he wasn’t stopped, they would all end up paying the price.
Upon hearing an explanation of where she’s ended up and what Tu Shanshu is, she will likely be extremely disbelieving and really, unimpressed with the whole situation. CT is a very focused person, and she is being pulled from the middle of doing something incredibly important to her. She’s also naturally suspicious, examining others’ motives and always looking beneath the surface to find out what’s really going on. She does not have time to be kidnapped and told she’s in a mystical, nonexistent purgatory.
Appearance:
Abilities: CT was chosen for the Freelancer program, which already puts her at a high level of fighting skill. She is not ranked among the top agents in the program, but she is regularly chosen for missions and usually manages to hold her own, with some exceptions. In season 9, episode 7, we see the aftermath of a failed mission, when Washington attempts to comfort her for the mistakes she made on the battlefield, but we never find out exactly what went went wrong.
Each Freelancer has a unique armor “enhancement” that is meant to help them in battle - for example, York has a special healing unit, and Carolina can change her armor color. CT’s enhancement is the ability to project a hologram of her armor, in order to fool enemies into attacking the hologram instead of herself.
Inventory: Brown Freelancer armor with hologram enhancement (see Abilities)
Suite: Fire, 2 floors. Coming as she is from directly after betraying the Freelancer program, she will be very, very wary of seeing any familiar faces. She would be extremely uncomfortable settling in the metal sector; it would remind her far too much of the Freelancers’ ship, the Mother of Invention, and she would be constantly on edge, knowing that any other members of the UNSC who arrived there would be extremely likely to choose to live there.
Both Water and Earth sectors alike would be far too quiet and calm for CT. The hippie lifestyle is not for her, and neither is the calm, quiet life of Earth sector. At her canon point, CT is very on edge, frustrated and afraid; she would find the tense Fire sector the perfect place to find like-minded people
In-Character Samples:
Third Person: She’d been quiet when she’d joined Freelancer, not shy exactly, but just quiet, unwilling to throw herself right into the middle of things and stake out a spot in the social scene like so many of the others had. She’d preferred to stay on the sidelines at first, watching and waiting, trying to figure out everyone’s relationships, their motivations, who was hiding secrets.
Parties aren’t really her thing, but she’d said okay, and she shows up about a half-hour after eight, peering into the room. It’s loud and crowded, she hadn’t even realized there were so many of them in the program, and the noise is overbearing enough that she’s really considering sneaking right back out again before she’s noticed when York catches sight of her.
“Hey, look, guys, Connie’s here!” He grins, and makes his way across the room, pressing a drink into her hands so that she has to grab it before it spills, giving him a nervous smile. “C’mon in, have a drink. And whatever you do, don’t steal Maine’s favorite seat.”
She opens her mouth to respond, but then Carolina calls from across the room and York looks over, his whole face lighting up. He turns back to her briefly, clapping her on the shoulder. “Good to see you here, Connie,” and he disappears into the crowd again before she can say a word.
She looks around, finding herself surrounded by people who aren’t in her training group, who she doesn’t know, all of them turned away from her and caught up in their own conversations. She makes her way over to the wall, instead, and finds a row of chairs, and Washington sitting in one of them.
He’s in her group, but he’s quiet like her, focused on his work and friendly enough to everyone, but not loudly opinionated or outgoing. He’s always been nice to her, though, and she smiles a little hopefully as she gingerly sits down next to him, careful of her drink.
“Hi.”
Washington looks at her, and smiles back, looking almost surprised that she’d said anything, but he looks pleased, too, and she relaxes a little bit.
“Hey.”
Network: [She knows where she is, or at least where the aliens have claimed she is. It seems fantastic to think that they’re actually telling the truth, but then, why anyone would bother to make up such a story is equally inexplicable.
She’d taken a few days just to watch, to learn what she can, to get a feel for the place and the people in it. Most of what’s being posted on the network is crap. People whining about money, about food, whining just for the sake of whining.
There are a few interesting tidbits of information, though. The word resistance catches her eye, puts her on guard instantly, and though she quickly determines that it’s not the same resistance, that nothing is the same here, it’s still unnerving, just to hear the familiar word.
The curfew doesn’t sound promising, either.
It’s only when she digs a little deeper that she finally runs across a familiar face, and freezes. No. Here, of all places - here, wherever here is, and she still hadn’t gotten away from them all? She quickly searches for more, reading every last one of York’s public posts, but he never mentions her, never mentions looking for her, and there doesn’t seem to be anyone else from the Project here, or anyone from the UNSC at all.
At least that’s something.
She’s not too big on the idea of giving herself away, though, and so when she does finally sit down at the console and speak to the network, it’s audio only, and her voice modifier is on.]
So.
Has anyone managed to learn anything useful about what this place really is?
[It's as much to create a stir as anything, to see if anyone has any interesting theories or if they're all as blindly accepting of this as they seem.]