kitty at my foot and i wanna touch it.

[headandhand]

WHO: Open to all residents
WHAT: Your regularly scheduled NAPs event for the month
WHERE: The RoCocoa Cat Cafe
WHEN: Aug. 10-14
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, 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 juuuuust fine. But for the rest of you, the Head knows this has gotta 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 queries and receive results, or ignore the card and yeet yourself straight into a brand new friendship! 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?!

This month’s event is held at the brand new RoCocoa Cat Cafe, a sparkly new establishment that caters to children and the young at heart with iced and hot cocoa drinks of all kinds, delicious pastries, age-appropriate live music, and of course many friendly kitties who love to lounge in laps. The cats are of all shapes, sizes, and colors, including some who may look a little different from what you expect, or may look like an ordinary cat but are actually anything but ordinary underneath that adorable fur coat. All cats in the cafe are adoptable, too, if you meet a new furry friend and just can’t bear to go home without them!

So pull up a chair, get to know your new neighbors, and enjoy a sugary treat or two with the resident furbabies. You might just meet your new two- or four-legged best friend!

Comments

[notalive]

"I guess when I'm saying it's peaceful, what I mean is the androids rose up peacefully." Connor looks down at the table. "Even when dozens of them were being shot down, they refused to resort to violence. Markus - our leader - he made sure of it."

He never referred to Markus as his leader. It feels good. Markus led a revolution, and Connor was a part of that. Connor's probably the only android to have killed anybody in the course of the revolution - and even that was armed guards in self-defence.

When she recoils, Connor's momentarily confused - he's understanding social cues and how to hold real conversations with people more and more since deviating, but he knows he hasn't got it yet. So if someone says something that confuses him, he automatically figures it's not the other person's fault.

"I- didn't take it any other way, it's fine." He's stammering on that first bit, just a little. "It's true - even if androids legally have all the same rights as humans by the time I get back, we have to build lives. People's minds don't change overnight. It's a lot."

Not just human minds - Connor has nothing against humans, probably because he was never truly owned by one, but a lot of deviants do. Working android crimes, he saw that first hand.

"I didn't get your name, by the way." They just dived directly into the heavy stuff. And he's fine with that, his experience with small talk along the lines of what's expected from them here is zero. "I'm Connor."

[merged]

No violence in the face of violence. A lot of people might find that admirable. Heather just finds it frustrating—upsetting. It doesn't matter that Markus' way succeeded. An eye for an eye. Pain for pain. Loss for loss.

Connor? Huh. It could be a coincidence. It probably isn't.

"Heather Mason," She lies with such ease these days. Heather Mason may as well be her name. They do say if you say a lie enough eventually even you begin to believe it,"I, uh, hope I didn't pry too much. We don't have androids or... anything even remotely like that in my world. Plenty of asshole humans, though."

Some things are the same world to world.

It was kind of heavy for a first conversation. For Heather, though, that's often how it goes. Small talk isn't a weapon in her arsenal.

[notalive]

Connor's never had the chance to think too much about it, but he wonders how he would have acted during the revolution if he'd been involved far earlier. Decisions like whether to protest peacefully or riot, whether to kill witnesses before letting them sound the alarm, whether or not to use a dirty bomb when one was available to them. As a detective android, he's able to use violence if he needs to - but as a deviant, what's his definition of need?

"No, it's fine," he says, shaking his head. It's true, he's not great at small talk himself. "I don't mind questions. I still can't believe I'm talking to people who've never seen an android. It's surreal."

His kind were only invented a decade and a half ago but it's like a whole other era. No one human alive has never even heard of androids. In his world, anyway.

"What's it like where you're from?"

[merged]

It's not the first time she's been asked this question, and she knows it won't be the last, but every time it's asked she falters in her response. Her face crinkles in thought, lips pursed. She could be honest or she could give the answer most people desire or expect. Both are difficult.

"...I don't know how to explain it, honestly," she finally admits, brows drawn,"It's nothing special. No magic, no androids, no robots beyond the automation of some industries. It's... a lot like Dualis, just only with humans and less tech and neon."

"I hate it,"the words fall from her lips before she even thinks about it. She continues quickly,"but I've seen a side of my world other people can't. I know what it looks like after you peel the layers back; it's like a piece of rotted fruit with a perfect rind."

[notalive]

He watches the expressions flitting over her face, and initially it doesn't sound like something worth what seemed to be so much consideration. Dualis, or Connor's own world as he remembers it - only maybe twenty or thirty years ago, before androids, before everything was automated and mechanised into glass and neon.

But the outburst - that, he doesn't expect, and his eyebrows draw in.

"What do you mean?" he asks softly. He's conjuring ideas in his head based mostly on his own experience - a bright and well-functioning society hiding an angry, impoverished workforce displaced by slaves; the desperation of those in power to keep that status quo - but nothing based in his experience has been very on the mark here so far.

Maybe he's being nosy, maybe she was being vague on purpose. But if he doesn't ask...

[merged]

He doesn't really know her. She doesn't really know him. One day, secrets like that build up a dam and it's always matter of when it breaks. She takes it well, though, expression like cool iron but her body is still, her brain rushing through a thousand possibilities.

She places a single hand on the table. Not a thing happens but it wasn't supposed to; as if she'd do that here, not until it was necessary.

"You see this table as it is here but this table exists in multiple.... realities. For us, right now, it's just a normal damn table, clean inspite of the cat air. But in another reality... it'd be crumbling away, as if the city had have been abandoned a long, long time. The walls would peel away, some doors are made of flesh."

And then,"That's where the monsters exist. In a ghost town they can't ever escape; their prison."

[notalive]

Her hands touches the table and Connor’s eyes follow it the entire way. For an absurd second, he thinks she wants to take his hand, but that isn’t it, she’s focusing on the table itself. A perfectly harmless table, but if she’s to be believed there’s something beyond that, which nobody can see because it doesn’t exist. Not here.

It sounds like nonsense. It sounds like something Connor back in Detroit would try to pick through for a metaphorical meaning, or anything he could discern about her psychology from the plainly impossible story she’s weaving. But within the past couple of days he’s had to start to accepting that nothing he knew to be true is fixed anymore. And that goes for things he would assume are false, too.

“And you’ve seen them,” he says quietly. It’s not a question.

[merged]

The way Heather speaks on these subjects is almost always purposefully vague, usually allowing the other person to take of it what they will. Not only is it easier to play off when they express doubt or fear but years of having to hide what she's seen and who she is and where she's from has made her protective of that knowledge, hesitant to share with just anyone.

That's changed some here but not much.

She nods her head very slowly as if admitting it is a touch difficult. She's well-aware just how insane it sounds but what is it in comparison to what they're dealing with now? Or the stories others have told? Hers is just a drop in the bucket; nothing.

"I spent my life running from them, pretending I saw nothing, that they were just nightmares that leaked into my reality somehow," She hates it. She's glad to be away and then that guilt comes in and how dare she be glad. She shrugs her shoulders like it's nothing. No biggie,"It doesn't really matter here now, though."

She seems to realize what sorts of things she's given away, looking away,"It'd sound crazy, wouldn't it, if we all weren't currently here, huh?"

[notalive]

Connor's expression is troubled as he looks at her, but not disbelieving.

"Yeah," he acknowledges, nodding. "It would. If I was at home, I'd think you were disturbed."

It's definitely disturbing enough. He's got protocols for this situation - a suspect showing signs of mental illness and not being fit for questioning or testimony. But protocols and standard programming and even a lot of the empirical data his senses are giving him... He can't trust any of it. He has to rely on feelings.

And those are pretty new to him as it is.

"But we're not there. I can't disbelieve anything. And I have to say, you seem pretty sane."

He glances down at the table again, then back up. "But you don't see anything like that here?"

[merged]

Disturbed, huh? Heather doesn't think that's really too far from factual despite the fact that everything she's said has been the truth. Nobody lives through that kind of hell and comes out with all their marbles in the right place and Heather knows she hasn't. A trip to a psychiatrist would likely do her wonders, then again, they might just send her on a one-way trip to a nuthouse.

Is that something Dualis even has?

The fact Connor thinks she seems sane is oddly comforting. She's never felt sane and, as a social outcast, most people never saw her that way. At his question, she shakes her head,"Not really. In my dreams, sometimes, but not here."

"Not yet." These words are whispered, full of fear. Dread. As if it were some inevitable nightmare. It won't happen here, that's what she likes to tell herself, but that fear. That fear dominates her thoughts some days, like now. Because what will she do, then?