[open] plot clue club meeting

[coolerjunpei]

WHO: Junpei coolerjunpei and You
WHAT: Secret Info Club Meeting and general Plot Clue mingling
WHERE: a conference room. with snacks!
WHEN: roughly DECEMBER!!! 12 this never once said nov
WARNINGS: tba

network preamble

[Having come into some fascinating information, Junpei—

obsessively studies it for a solid day

—and then un: junpei posts something very short and simple to the network for once:]

hey, it's junpei. i'm in the 5th floor conference room in the district 2 building by the bowling alley if anybody wants to know some *big names* and read some pages that aren't half blacked out. you know, for fun.

i've got some chips too. come check it out if you want.

log part

[The conference room is all decked out for some frantic information sharing, or rather:

Junpei has hastily set out some snacks, that is: some bags of chips and a few soda bottles, mostly what he could grab as quickly as possible from the nearest convenience store. He's also tossed some pens and notepads kind of randomly onto the table.

On the wheely whiteboard he's pushed up to the end of the room, the head of the conference table, he's written in big ol' letters:

INFO CLUB MEETING
TAKE A DOCUMENT SHARE A DOCUMENT
IDEAS???

DON'T SPREAD IT AROUND TOO MUCH YET, WE MIGHT GET PHANTOM ARRESTED OR WHATEVER

The most orderly thing here is the stack of ✨✨Documents✨✨ up by the whiteboard. These, he has put in the effort to not make a frantic mess of. Welcome to the club.]

OOC: this is a mingle for the ✨plot clue✨ junpei has received and it is open to anyone who might be interested in the information! if you have cr with junpei or have talked to him even once about The Mysteries, you're welcome to handwave that he sent your character a personal cryptic text about something important, come see. otherwise, seeing his network message and showing up is just fine too.

Comments

[fussiest]

[ hey shoes that light up

one cinnamon bun down, kaveh slides the rest of the tray onto the sole corner of the desk that hasn't been entirely covered in paper. he considers this. ]

Oh, I agree. But you also have to see this from the perspective of a research institution. There already is a built-in bias for an information hierarchy, the ones who excel in that environment typically foster a skillset for control, and there is an inherent disparity between research subjects and the researchers involved. Simply put, there isn't just a lack of trust - there isn't an environment that can easily foster that trust.

[ kaveh's fingers skim the edge of the table. they begin to tap. ]

Consider their perspective: they can either bring in a group of disparate individuals from wildly varying worlds and cultures, somehow get them onto the same page, somehow obtain their buy-in, somehow explain and answer all their questions in perpetuity, deal with miscommunication, mismanagement and mistrust, and somehow get them to either generate a new idea or to go along furthering their current idea of how they want things done. Or, they can set up a blind experiment, extract the data and value while operating under their own parameters, testing for the way forward based on hypotheses that is built on hundreds of years of their own research context that they think they understand better than anyone else, with people that they actually do trust. I know what I would choose.

[coolerjunpei]

[Don't mind him going for another bun as soon as he finishes this first one, hmhmhm...]

This is why I dropped out of school...

[Ha. Jokes. He dropped out for completely different reasons.]

Anyway, you think they don't have enough people of their own out there to volunteer? I'm saying they shouldn't need us at all, if they're doing this to ultimately help themselves. I don't think you're wrong or anything, fucking with us the way they already are is definitely less of a headache... for them.

[But also. The other thing. Come on, Doctor(s).]

The only thing I can think of that'd necessitate people like us from all over the place—'cause again, I don't think we're helping the citizens of Phoenix solve their own problems—is if they keep us around when our "version" is done. Maybe that's where people go when they disappear; Phoenix.

[Shame. He shakes his head.] Or this is just for someone's fiftieth PhD, and the whole climate crisis thing isn't that involved at all. I doubt it, though.

[fussiest]

[ kaveh shakes his head. ]

I've ruled that out. A work like this couldn't be purely academic. Oddly, it's because it's too sloppy. Someone supervisor their work intending to give them a grade wouldn't find it particularly impressive. I wouldn't at all be surprised that this were the kind of work they would put out because they are at the end of their rope trying to deal with a problem larger than they can feasibly contain.

And still - I'd challenge the notion that the only reason why they'd need individuals from other worlds is to keep them around after the experiment is done. This is a disposable population of experimentees, a population that you don't need to get ethics approval for, and a population that has traits varying enough that you can set your baseline in ways that a homogenous population wouldn't. Turning it around: do you think they'd keep around a population that they'd essentially emotionally tortured for months? Why? The easiest way to mitigate the risk of retaliation is to ensure that this population doesn't survive, and that's why they can do what they have chosen to do.

[ kaveh's eyes narrow. ] Still, this is not just sloppy work. It's likely incomplete. If we're the experimental group, Junpei, where is the control group?

[ ... ] Could there be another group out there like us, but don't have these experiments applied to them? Or could their own people be the control group?

[coolerjunpei]

[Okay--good points about how disposable they all are, but Junpei still wants to believe that people go somewhere pleasant when they disappear, if it isn't just back home. He makes a face, like, that's so sentimental of him and that's gross, but ugh-]

I was just thinking it could be the case that they keep us around somewhere else... I get that we're basically living in a big, slow-acting meat grinder here, but...

[Well, but. He shrugs; there's nothing else he's got for that one. He misses the people who are gone? How much more grim would it be to know that they get super-deleted from the city and then just tossed out in the trash? Mm.]

But if we're worthless materials, then yeah, there has to be another group. They'd give a shit about their own people, right? I bet they wouldn't have to get locked in the mall or anything.

returns from trip to japan... thank you for your patience! o/

[fussiest]

[ meat grinder, junpei says. kaveh winces, as if the very sound of it permeates the words. but there's nothing inexact about that description, the way the grinder has taken all of them and reduced them down to their primordial parts. cracked open bone and heart to reveal the marrow and the blood.

kaveh is furious thinking of it, but that is not an odd state of affairs, for kaveh. ]

If this experiment were to be viable, technically they ought to compare us to another group of outlanders. That's the only way to set a proper baseline. But given how few of us are actually in this experimental city, wouldn't it make more sense for them to draw from their own population? Well, if they have enough left.

[ kaveh tips his head up in thought. ] So? Still want to have a giant banner pointed to the sky to wave them down?