well, i know i had it coming …

[headandhand]

WHO: Open to all Dualizens
WHAT: Your regularly scheduled NAPs event for the month
WHERE: Dualis Danger Lock
WHEN: Feb. 10-13
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?!

And who doesn’t like meeting friends in a cramped, high-stress environment? That’s how some of the best friendships are forged - under pressure. Like diamonds! Luckily, for this month, NAPs provides just such an ideal friendmaking environment, courtesy of the brand-new escape room mega-complex, Dualis Danger Lock! This establishment boasts six different highly challenging escape rooms, all designed for small teams of two to three apiece. Usually, the six rooms offer six different themes - jewel heists, high-stakes espionage, and so on - but this month, each escape room differs only in the layouts and clues, because the themes are all the same.

That’s right - you’re attempting to escape from prison. Good luck with that!

After you’ve bonded with your new friends over sharing your skills at puzzle-solving and exited your escape room of choice, grab a table at the food court for snacks and mildly invasive personal questions, or blow off some steam at the arcade. Or, if you have high-pressure steam that needs to be let off, treat yourself to an adult beverage at the Danger Key bar.

Enjoy your freedoms, Dualizens! Enjoy them while they last ...

Comments

[uglyminded]

"Weird idea of fun," she murmurs thoughtfully, turning now to the shelf. In her experience most people spent their free time partying, not working puzzles. But then, when your city is made up entirely of uglies you probably need a trickier way to entertain yourself.

The items on the shelf are nearly incomprehensible to her. Several sharp-looking circles with scalloped edges like thumbnail-sized bowls (bottle caps), something like a tablet with more old-fashioned push buttons than screen (a calculator), a dodecahedron made of little panels in bright colors (a variation on a rubik's cube), and other little bits and pieces that look entirely random. She picks up a bottle cap, raising an eyebrow at the word written on the colored side. She shows it to Tim.

"You guys usually leave your prisoners with sharp objects?"

[mrsarcastic003]

Tim turns to look and laughs a little. "Not usually. That tends to end up in more violence among inmates, and I have no doubt that that bottle cap could be sharpened into something completely deadly in the right-wrong hands. Not sharp enough to get through the bars, though, so that's probably at least part of a clue."

[uglyminded]

"'Bottle cap'?" She turns the object over in her hand, trying to figure out how it would work. The scalloping seems really unecessary...

"Huh. Talk about 'rusty'." For a city run by a supposed super-computer this place is really old-fashioned. People really used to love their metals.

She sets the cap back among its peers and swipes the whole lot into one hand. The labels are all different, but each starts with a large, oversized capital letter. She starts rearranging them, wishing she could ping the city interface to run anagrams for her.

"You do things like this often? Funny little puzzles?" Since she remembers him saying he's only heard about 'escape rooms'.

[mrsarcastic003]

He grins a little. "Sometimes. Not this specifically," he gestures around the room at their surroundings. "But I like having puzzles to work on. It keeps me from getting bored." He moves toward the bed and starts peeling back the blankets, shaking each one carefully as he does to dislodge any clues that might be hiding. "What about you? Do you like puzzles and things like this or nah?"

A slip of paper falls from a blanket and he bends to pick it up. "Ooh, a clue?"

[uglyminded]

"Puzzles aren't really a thing people do back home." Uglies generally preferred goofing off, and no Pretty ever took more than five seconds to figure something out. They just don't have the attention span.

"Uglies are always finding new ways to trick the city's minders, but that's usually electronic. Nothing like this." She moves over to the padlock again, comparing her findings to the shapes.

[mrsarcastic003]

Tim blinks and turns toward her. "'Uglies?'" he asks as he unfolds the paper.

Mind the guards! Someone is always watching!

He rolls his eyes. No news there. Probably not a clue, then. Just flavor for the experience.

[uglyminded]

She blinks back at him for a moment, having taken a mental step into thin air by accident. Barely a year ago a world without Uglies, where everyone looked just like nature had made them, was her dream. Now she's living it and she can't imagine not having that frame of reference.

"Anyone that hasn't had surge. Surgery," she corrects herself, remembering the Rusty magazines she had devoured at the time. They didn't have the same slang.

"Not 16 yet," she adds for extra clarification.

[mrsarcastic003]

He gives her a bemused look. "And everyone has surgery at sixteen?" he asks. That's interesting. "Is it like here--body mods? Or something else?" The question might be a little rude, but he is extremely curious, and they are supposed to be getting to know their fellow residents at these events.

He holds up the note. "Oh, and apparently we should beware of the guards. I don't know if it's just flavor for the scenario or a fail condition if we 'get caught' trying to escape."

[uglyminded]

"One big operation," she explains, turning her attention back to her bottle caps. She's on to something here.

"To make you beautiful, according to the Pretty Committee. But people are starting to be given a choice now." This is all pretty basic stuff in her book, like asking why the sky is blue.

"I'll keep an ear out for anyone coming."

[mrsarcastic003]

Her tone is casual, as though she's explaining that water is wet and and fire is hot, but it's all Pretty different as far as Tim is concerned. Though--heh. Not that different. Sure, there's no systematic plastic surgery for everyone who turns sixteen, and no actual Pretty Committee, but there are plenty of people who chose to surgically alter their bodies to fit society's standards. Maybe it's not that different after all.

"Cool," he agrees, and goes back to sifting through the blankets. Nothing else useful appears, so he moves to check out the phone.

[uglyminded]

It's a little more complicated than that, but Shay doesn't feel like explaining why she can't really afford to waste time in some halfy-Rusty city to a guy who's never even heard of the Operation. Instead she scoffs and turns to dump the bottle caps back on the shelf.

"I've got the third symbol, but that's it."