Johanna Constantine (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
keepgodwaiting) wrote in ![[community profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/community.png)
citylogs2023-12-11 12:02 pm
keepgodwaiting) wrote in citylogs2023-12-11 12:02 pm
Entry tags:
[open mingle] I do my crosswords in pen
WHO: Constantine (keepgodwaiting) & you!
WHAT: Metaplot deciphering!
WHERE: The Welcome Diner
WHEN: Early December
WARNINGS: Probable discussion of human experimentation
Another month, another weird new building, and Johanna has been thinking. If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, then they ought to try some new things, right?
Trying to stay away from the dorms at Halloween didn't work. Trying to escape the mall had mixed results. So maybe it's time to abandon the avoidant strategy and see what happens if they approach things a bit more head-on. Starting, in her case, with investigating every open door she could find in the Science Center until she found the director's office.
(Yes, she did just get told off by several friends for running into potentially dangerous situations with no backup; no, she did not alert anybody that she was going to do this; but hey, it was completely uneventful and therefore she has not broken any promises to anyone!)
The most interesting thing in there, by far, is the unlocked computer, and with a little digging she found a very interesting email. More carefully redacted notes. And she wonders ...
So one evening -- around dinner time, after sunset, in the hopes of being available to the most residents -- Johanna posts up in the welcome diner with a stack of notebooks, pens, and her phone. She's hand-copying the redacted file from her phone onto paper, with XXXXXs to indicate the number of characters in the redacted words. It's an arduous process, and every so often she straightens up from the work with a groan to crack her back. After she gets the whole thing copied down, she picks up her phone to make a network post:
[ ooc: Feel free to treat this like an open mingle, converse with other characters, hop around, etc! I'll be making a top level with the text of the two redacted files from the newsletter, in which we can crowdsource guesses about what the missing words might be!
ETA: Feel free to put guesses in this document! ]
keepgodwaiting) & you!WHAT: Metaplot deciphering!
WHERE: The Welcome Diner
WHEN: Early December
WARNINGS: Probable discussion of human experimentation
Another month, another weird new building, and Johanna has been thinking. If the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results, then they ought to try some new things, right?
Trying to stay away from the dorms at Halloween didn't work. Trying to escape the mall had mixed results. So maybe it's time to abandon the avoidant strategy and see what happens if they approach things a bit more head-on. Starting, in her case, with investigating every open door she could find in the Science Center until she found the director's office.
(Yes, she did just get told off by several friends for running into potentially dangerous situations with no backup; no, she did not alert anybody that she was going to do this; but hey, it was completely uneventful and therefore she has not broken any promises to anyone!)
The most interesting thing in there, by far, is the unlocked computer, and with a little digging she found a very interesting email. More carefully redacted notes. And she wonders ...
So one evening -- around dinner time, after sunset, in the hopes of being available to the most residents -- Johanna posts up in the welcome diner with a stack of notebooks, pens, and her phone. She's hand-copying the redacted file from her phone onto paper, with XXXXXs to indicate the number of characters in the redacted words. It's an arduous process, and every so often she straightens up from the work with a groan to crack her back. After she gets the whole thing copied down, she picks up her phone to make a network post:
Anyone good at crossword puzzles? I've got a doozy of one I'm working on in the diner and could use some help.Anyone who cares to join her and try to decipher the redacted words, or make additional hard copies of the file to share out, is more than welcome to do so. Or just grab a cup of coffee and share theories with each other.
[ ooc: Feel free to treat this like an open mingle, converse with other characters, hop around, etc! I'll be making a top level with the text of the two redacted files from the newsletter, in which we can crowdsource guesses about what the missing words might be!
ETA: Feel free to put guesses in this document! ]
no subject
[ Constantine has, at least, gotten to the "cynical sarcasm" phase of her emotional rollercoaster. It's an improvement over "incipient panic attack," but it'll probably spiral into "existential despair" for a couple of hours once she's not around people anymore. She's trying to stave that bit off. ]
Gods, you can supplicate. Sadists playing scientist, not so much.
no subject
Those fools will learn their place when everything crumbles around them.
[ Something he's also seen time and time again. But it's not any reassurance, because that day could be long after said scientists have gotten rid of them. ]
Have you seen the personnel record yet?
no subject
Yeah. [ She sounds grim. ] If I ever meet this Sumalee person I'm going to make them wish they'd gone to art school.
no subject
[ It's not often nowadays that he threatens violence, but for this Sumalee person? For all their kidnappers? He could make an exception.
Anyway, that wasn't why he brought it up. ]
There's around 90 years between CE-09 and the years written on their employment record. If they're the one in charge of us, then that would put the length of every iteration past CE-09 at an average of a little over two years.
[ In other words, a potential estimate for the amount of time they had to get out of this experiment. ]
no subject
Why the fuck would they spend almost a century on this? They can't possibly be getting better data at this point. It's nothing but sadism at this point.
no subject
This is just what they want, isn't it. They've been pushing us to work together all this time and now they're straight up telling us that they'll kill us if we don't cooperate.
[ He doesn't for a second believe their newly found info wasn't planted by the researchers. Would they really be so careless as to leak this? Unless their was some internal discord, in which case—what's the leaker's objective?
There's still too much they don't know. ]
Your guess is as good as mine. Their experiment doesn't make sense. They want us to cooperate, but they're using heavy-handed methods to force it. Unless their objective was to test the effectiveness of said methods, nothing about any of this makes sense.
[ But what if that is the goal? To test out tools they can use to force cooperation? Building communities? What a joke. ]
Hah. I think we've got a bunch of tyrants on our hands.
no subject
Maybe we're a prison population.
no subject
[ It doesn't make sense at all, all of their actions taken together. If they were testing tools to force cooperation, they'd want to have extremely disagreeable individuals in the pool of test subjects. That way, they could ensure it worked on just about every kind of person they might encounter. He sighs with frustration. ]
None of this makes sense.