i wanna hold ‘em like they do in texas, please

[headandhand]

WHO: Open to all Dualizens
WHAT: Your regularly scheduled NAPs event for the month
WHERE: The brand-new Theronia Casino
WHEN: Dec. 7-10
WARNINGS: Please use these if applicable!


Look at all of these bright, shining new faces! There’s even a few less bright, less shining faces - maybe even a few folks without faces - but hey, this city welcomes all types. Chances are, if you’ve just arrived, you're seeing some pretty crazy things, unless you're used to an eye-blinding amount of neon, robots, weird-ass technology, magic, and an omnipresent police force...and hey, if you are, congrats, you're gonna settle in just fine! But for the rest of you, the Head knows this is gonna be pretty overwhelming, right?

Well, since your quaint individual processing units are probably having a hard time, why not link up with another one? By which the Head means...

Hello, new citizens of Dualis,
and welcome to your monthly Network Adjacency Protocol~!

NAPs are a monthly community networking event similar to the Earth concept of speed dating. Two citizens (new arrivals and old hands alike) are placed at a table together with a handy cue card of queries to help break the proverbial ice. Ask (possibly invasive) personal questions and receive results - or ignore the card and yeet yourself straight into a brand new friendship, whatever works! But don't be too shy - you've only got ten minutes together, and if you just sit in silence for the whole ten, the Network Admins are likely to come supervise and try to repair the uplink through a mild shock to the ol' central nervous system. You might find yourself saying all sorts of unintended facts about yourself if that happens...probably better to just make friends, right? Who doesn’t like friends?!

The weather outside is … not frightful, but this month’s event is still being held in a cozy indoor environment. Welcome to the newly-opened Theronia Casino, a 12-story building that boasts amazing buffets and dozens of different types of gambling on each floor. Enjoy a rousing game of blackjack, poker, or tall card with your friends! Try your luck at roulette, get a group together for dice games, or maybe meet some new faces over a round of mahjong. If there’s another type of gambling game local to your home world, chances are good it’ll have a table on one of the casino floors. Types of cuisine vary from floor to floor, but kosher, vegan, and allergen-free offerings are always available no matter where you choose to dine.

As a special bonus, all NAPs attendees receive free entry into the weekly Go Fish Tournament. Daily finalists win a prize of 1000 duos and advance to the championship game next month. Play your heart out, and remember - anything’s competitive if you try hard enough!

Comments

[hobocop]

The traffic light flickering away at Connor's temple betrays the same thing his tone does.

DRAMA — One can protest too much, my liege.

A pinch of guilt wriggles in Harry's gut as he focuses in on that blinking yellow and realizes how he sounds right now. Stumbling on his words, it's like he's giving a desperate objection worthy of Chester McLaine. Like the very idea of being romantically involved with Kim is worthy of scorn, somehow.

He doesn't know how to correct himself, though. His ears still feel like they're radiating a coal furnace worth of heat, and if Kim's reaction is anything to go by, nobody really cares about all the hours he's put into questioning his own sexuality recently. Bringing it up certainly won't win him any points, anyway. He clears his throat.

"Kim—"

EMPATHY — Wouldn't appreciate you outing him to a stranger, either.

Another aborted sentence. Great job, Harry. His hand finds the bottle of Pilsner again.

"Sorry," he says, finally, punctuating with a generous swig. "...It's good you got each other." He risks eye contact. "Really. I, uh... I'm not too good at the whole romance thing."

[notalive]

It's honestly fascinatingly how red Harry's face has gone. He's seen people flush, but to this intensity? This is new. It makes Connor feel a little miserable to look at it. He's caused genuine discomfort and he didn't mean to, not at all.

"Oh…" he says, trying to process this. "That's OK. I didn't think I could be good at it either."

Right up until it happened. Even when he was trying to work out what sexuality and romance were to him as a functional person, he hadn't realised he was already falling.

"Anyway…" He decides maybe they should change the subject, before blood starts popping out of poor Harry's orifices.

"What division did you work in?" he asks. "You and your partner. Hank was in homicide when I got assigned to him."

[hobocop]

Somewhere deep inside of Harry's mangled brain, a set of folders was just being laid out, ready and waiting for him to unpack. Mister Pain Threshold sat there sweating excitedly, summoned by the topic of romance, full of phrases like scarred for life and gaping emptiness.

And just like that, it slips away again.

"Major crimes?" he... asks. He doesn't mean for it to come out as a question, but shit, who's he kidding at this point? "Everything from Arson to Zzzzz—"

ENCYCLOPEDIA — Zoning? Zap. Zealous... crime? Zealous murder, maybe?

"—To murder." He frowns and takes another drag of Pilsner. Huffs a sigh into the rim straight after in a way that makes it toot like a shitty instrument. "The 41st cover a lot of ground. I mean, way too big an area for the numbers we got." The hand he swings by his head carries a breezy air of c'est la vie. "So we police a little of everything. I'm a, uh, Lieutenant Double-Yefreitor over there. Kim was with the 57th... but now he's looking to transfer over." The grin that sprouts up at that is a textbook version of the Expression. "Spend more time with the big dog!"

[notalive]

Connor remains blissfully unaware that he just cut off an emotional outpouring at the pass as he takes another sip and and listens to…zzz

He can't fill that mystery Z-word in, but major crimes is understandable enough. It's what Connor would have been doing if he weren't a prototype, rolled out in extenuating circumstances for one specific case.

"Lieutenant Double-Yefreitor…" He repeats, testing the unfamiliar sounds on his tongue, partly to distract it from saying anything about that Expression. Because he thinks he knows that Expression and it's downright sad to see it on someone so uncomfortable with what it means. "I've never heard of that rank, only Lieutenant. I guess it's a higher rank?"

He considers a little more, then decides that just asking an innocent question isn't picking into anything too uncomfortable - right?

"How did Kim end up being your partner if you're in different divisions?"

Maybe he just wants to see Harry talk about Kim some more.

[hobocop]

First things first: "Yefreitor means you got offered Captain, but turned it down. Double-Yefreitor—" he holds up two fingers "—you turned it down twice." And, oh look, he's turned the illustrative two into another little finger gun. He's fired a lot of those tonight.

"Okay, so..." A sigh. He leans on the bar to push himself more upright. Like whatever disgustingly lengthy explanation he gives will come out better from a higher vantage point. "So in Revachol, the RCM's... reach, I guess, only goes so far. Huge presence in some parts, nothing in others. The bits we got, we divide up between stations. The Coalition can only give so many fucks, right?" Cue the dramatic eyeroll. "The Martinaise is one of those nothing places. Legally we police there, but, uh... it's de facto policed by the Dockers Union, you know?" He goes for another swig, waving his other hand as he does so as if to say he's not done talking. "...All's well and good until there's a big Union strike, and suddenly one of the strike-breakers is found hanging from a tree."

The bottle clinks loudly as he goes to set it down again, hitting it against the edge of the counter. Attempt two comes seconds later, with exaggerated care. "So, uh, problem is, someone calls the RCM. Then dispatch calls up both the 41st and the 57th, because, y'know, Ms. Martinaise is sat between us both. Then Pryce and... whoever the fuck is in charge of the 57th - they decide to have a cop-off! Battle it out with a big ol' joke of a pissing contest to see who wouldn't get stuck policing the Martinaise."

There's an uncomfortable pause. It clearly wasn't in either station's interest to send their greatest detective, and Harry's absolutely aware of this.

"I ended up being the 41st's man, and, uh... and Kim volunteered to be theirs." He smiles despite himself. "Figured the whole pissing contest was immature bullshit, and that he'd ruin it by working with me instead. Can't win or lose if we both solve it, right?"

So long story short, Kim isn't officially his partner. Not yet, anyway.

[notalive]

Do people often turn down Captain, Connor wants to ask. But talking to Harry makes him feel like that's a very redundant question: does Harry look like the kind who would want to have responsibility over others?

Most of Harry's further explanation of his partnership with Kim is all incomprehensible terms, but Connor's good at reading between the lines and picking out the basics.

So his next silent question becomes: what takes a cop from turning down two promotions to being the fall guy?

What, short of losing everything. There are surely only so many ways Connor can be reminded of Hank during this conversation.

"I think I like the sound of Kim," he comments with a wry grin. "So did you solve it?"

[hobocop]

"He's an unrepentant spoilsport. The fucking worst," Harry replies, the faint smile and short, quiet huff betraying the fondness in those words. Who doesn't like Kim? Even Jean was stammering happily at the prospect of him joining them.

"And... yeah. We did." He hesitates, seemingly studying Connor for a moment. There's a naked vulnerability in that stare—the kind that only comes soaked in alcohol. "It was a shit-show, man. We started with one body and ended with..." The fingers wrapped around the pilsner twitch, like he's tallying up. "What, eight?"

SUGGESTION — This isn't your Lazareth, Harry. You don't need to give him a rundown of all the ways you fucked up.

He clears his throat. "But we found the killer. Got the motive, the murder weapon, a confession..." He peters out for a moment. "Kept a whole bunch of people alive, too." Sometimes you get handed a time-bomb. The fact that the inevitable blood-bath didn't end with more Union dead is a minor miracle, and he knows it.

Doesn't stop the guilt, though.

"Hey, so, uh..." The halting start of a man wanting to move off yet another sensitive subject. He nods down to Connor's leg. "That happen here or back home?"

[notalive]

Kim reminds Connor a bit of himself- and with Harry reminding him of Hank, this is a bit of a strange conversation to have. And he finds himself oddly wishing he could see the two together. How they interact, if that's like him and Hank too.

But he understands screwing up a case. He's definitely done that before. In a sense.

"I've had two cases," Connor explains, figuring it won't hurt to share some. "First was a hostage negotiation, they were testing out my capabilities." And it was a success, technically speaking, although he went through a phase of guilt for condemning the android perp to death before realising it was the SWAT team using him to kill the android that was really at fault. Connor was as much a slave as any other android.

"Second, I was assigned to my partner to investigate a series of homicides and assaults - the common factor was that the perps were all like me, machines." He adds, a little grimly, "technically when I say I was assigned, I mean I was loaned out to the police department as equipment. That's how they thought of androids then.

"But we kept screwing up." He drinks a bit more Baileys. "I didn't get anything useful out of our first perp and he wound up killing himself in custody. The second one got away because I stopped to help my partner. The next two… We let them go. I don't regret it, but looking back on the whole case, we didn't do great."

As detectives. As people with morals, by the end of the case Connor was doing better than a few of the humans he'd met.

"This?" He taps his crutch, and this time his grimace is genuinely angry. "I got jumped. Six of them. One of them shot me through the knee, another one kicked me in the head. My, uh… My blood's made of a substance that can be converted into a recreational drug. It's pretty valuable."

And hell if being jumped on like a walking dispensary didn't aggravate the hell out of him, then and now.

[hobocop]

So the takeaway of the night is back where Connor's from, androids are (or at least were) second-class citizens. Hell, equipment implies something much darker, and even more void of empathy. Part of him wants to say something about that. To gather up his opinion and throw it up into the wind, welcome or not.

The rest of him is still too busy listening. And that remainder is present enough to catch the we let them go and stutter on it.

REACTION SPEED — That's...

LOGIC — Like what Hank said! Weird!

He frowns against the rim of his bottle. Gives a hiss of sympathy when Connor says he was shot through the kneecap.

ELECTROCHEMISTRY — Drug blood, huh? Definitely not making a note of that — no sir!

"Fuck," he says, stretching out the word like it's made of two syllables, not one. "Glad you, uh..." A beat as he searches for something approaching the right word. He huffs again. "I'm glad you scraped through alive." Not that it sounds like they'd have cared too much if he lived or died. They wanted him bleeding.

This is normally where he'd reach over to give a conciliatory shoulder pat. And he's thinking about it, but he's not certain he wouldn't unseat himself in the process. There'd be leaning involved, and balance isn't his strong point right now. There's a reason he hasn't gotten up to go smoke in the last half hour. He'll have to show his deep well of understanding in some other form.

Which is why he begins fumbling at the buttons of his disco shirt.

"I got shot up, too," he mumbles, a good two buttons down and only now bothering with an explanation. The necktie gets a hard tug, both lowering it and causing its knot to become some tight, impossible lump. It's enough for him to pull the collar aside though, and that's... seemingly all he's bothered about right now. "See?" Yep, beneath the thicket of hair, somewhere between shoulder and chest, there's an angry sunburst of a bullet-wound, stitched, but not yet fully healed.

Before he can finish with the exhibitionism — he got shot in thigh, too — something clicks upstairs.

LOGIC — Okay, bear with me, but...

"Hank's your partner? Hank-Hank?" He lets go of the shirt collar to better mime a combination of a beard (hand at his chin, pulling motion) and height (a horizontal wave above his head).

LOGIC — It makes sense! The shared references! The letting the suspects go! The fact that he mentioned his partner's name as being Hank!

ELECTROCHEMISTRY — Fuck yeah! Case closed! Booze does make you smart! Have some dopamine, brother.

[notalive]

"I nearly didn't," he says, and there's a tension in his voice for a moment before he relaxes again. "We're still working on the case, but I'm not involved as much as I was, for obvious reasons."

And for the reason he didn't mention, that he was ratted out by a mole on the force as having a drug component for blood, and after that, given everything, he wants a break from that case. He's taking his relegation to desk work with very little complaint.

And then Harry starts to strip, and Connor's hand stutters with his glass half way up to his mouth. This is decidedly not what he expected, and he races through something to say to this - tell Harry he's flattered, but--but Harry was utterly horrified at the very thought that Connor might have thought he was involved with another man; it can't be that. So what--

This is all over the course of a second or two, so that Connor's thoughts are cut off by Harry revealing the livid still-healing bullet wound in the meat of his shoulder. It seems to be in a location where it probably didn't do permanent damage, but that doesn't make it less painful-looking.

He's about to ask how it happened, but before he can Harry's drunken brain makes another gargantuan leap into something Connor said minutes ago now, and--

"You met him?" The number of tall, bearded Hanks in the city can't be that high. "Yeah, Hank Anderson, he's my partner."

He casts a very brief glance at the glass in front of Harry. Maybe he should think about switching to water.

[hobocop]

"Yeah!" Harry can't help it - he's grinning from ear to ear. There's a self congratulatory party going on in his skull, and it's hard not to feed off that. Especially not when Connor's glancing at his beer like he's planning on offering the next one. "Hank, Detroit cop who likes whiskey aaand—" his eyes dart across the counter a moment, before he jabs his thumb toward the beer taps "—Metal. Cool guy once he, uh..." He motions towards his mouth. "Once he gets talking, you know?"

His eyes narrow then, myopic squint back in full force. He's picturing the two side-by-side. And he can kinda see it. If Mclaine and Torson qualify as a dynamic duo, Hank and Connor certainly do, too. It's all about contrasts, right? That's why Jean kept snapping at him— you take one depressed old man and you pair him with another, decidedly more depressed and even older old man, and... yeah.

"You're okay, too," he says, features relaxing into something approaching a normal, neutral expression. He can do those.

[notalive]

Harry seems so proud of himself for having remembered anything at all about Hank in his drunken state that it makes Connor grin a little bit to see it. "He is," Connor agrees with a grin, although he doesn't like metal and doesn't think Hank's been called cool by anybody since before androids were invented. But he understands the sentiment, and in the current given sentiment of, 'someone the speaker likes', Hank's the coolest person on the planet.

But then, after an odd moment of being stared at, the...compliment?... coming his way makes him raise his eyebrows some.

"Thanks. I guess." Then he nods at the beer. "I'll wait and find out if you still remember me tomorrow morning to take that as a compliment."

Then something occurs to him.

"Did they make you a cop here, too?"

[hobocop]

Harry lets out a grunt, following Connor's nod to the beer. If the pull of the muscles around his eyebrows are any indication, the memory comment seems to have sent him stuttering into something akin to looking in the mirror in a dive-bar's bathroom. Suddenly the proverbial music is a dull thump and he's just now realizing that he's drunk-drunk.

VOLITION — And now would be a good moment to stop.

ELECTROCHEMISTRY — Stop what? Being at home? C'mon, man, fuck-all-borough's still a good ten stations away!

Before he can overthink it, Connor's next question registers, and Harry blinks back over at him. Shakes his head slowly. "I got eighteen years in the RCM. I reckon another five, s-s—eight as a gym teacher, too." He begins to signal back to himself as if this should be self-evident in his appearance. Said gesture is aborted, however, when he realizes his shirt is still hanging open. He frowns down at the Judas beginnings of a paunch on show, and goes to fumble at his buttons again.

"Anyway," he says, not yet looking up. "These guys, they took one look at the week I helped some cryptozoso—"

RHETORIC — Fuck. Slow it down..

"Some crypto-zoo-ol-oh-gists—" a quick bow of the head, to indicate that, yes, second time's the charm "—out, and now I'm the animal guy. They got me working at the zoo." He's done-up all of one button. Onto the next. "Which is fine by me. I like animals. You don't get nationalistic goats, y'know? You don't get..." He continues with that next button one handed, as the other makes a general waving gesture by his head. "What, two hours of race theory from an elephant, right?"