Parker (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
nostabbing) wrote2013-03-04 12:55 pm
nostabbing) wrote2013-03-04 12:55 pm
Entry tags:
- alice can has friends plzkthx,
- basically the worst rocket ever,
- bitey mcbiterson,
- can't grift for shit,
- i need more allowance,
- literally the most generic intro ever,
- must be thiefmas,
- no stabbing parker,
- shenanigans forever,
- surprisingly unfazed,
- there's something wrong with her,
- this seems totally legit,
- what is even happening right now,
- ▶ goldenrod city
001 | Goldenrod City | Video;
It'd been several hours since Parker opened the door to her storage unit and stepped through into a dorm room that definitely did not belong to her.
She doesn't like it when things aren't the way she leaves them, and this was no exception. Particularly considering her storage unit is the home of a fair number of her important worldly possessions (bed, planning board, tools, harnesses, shelf full of cereal boxes, favorite stuffed rabbit), and messing with her stuff is an offense approaching but not quite reaching not paying her for a job — which, of course, is something she takes very personally, and warrants retribution. That's not to say she wouldn't put it past Hardison and Eliot to do it, if they figured out how to get in. There's not a lot of stuff to move, and rearranging her unit to make it look like this new tiny room, well, that's a con that any of them could do in their sleep, and probably with one hand tied behind their back while they were at it.
...Okay, well, maybe not Hardison. He always complains so much about the smallest nuisances. It's not like he's the one getting saddled with crawling through the air vents or narrowly avoiding decapitation in the elevator shafts.
(Of course, she likes air vents and elevator shafts. They're so peaceful, albeit sometimes dusty.)
Anyway, not the point. The point is, she walked into her home and stepped out into what was decidedly not her home, which meant one of a possible three things: either someone was messing with her, she'd been captured and drugged, or a wormhole had opened up between dimensions and deposited her with no warning in another universe. All equally plausible, really.
Step one had been reconaissance. Check for cameras, motion detectors, microphones; she'd swept the room and found it clean. She'd also found that unless there'd been some magnificent effort on the part of the boys, she could rule out the possibility that this was still her storage unit; the dimensions were completely wrong, and the materials used sounded different than they were supposed to. Also, there was a hidden speaker somewhere to pipe in the ambient music, but she couldn't find it — pretty suspicious in and of itself.
Step two had been to ransack the room. No identifying signs of anyone who'd previously lived here, no marks of personality; the backpack had some neat odds and ends in it, but nothing that seemed altogether helpful. The phone wouldn't turn on and it was no make or model she'd ever seen before. ID card, snacks, bottles and towels and a change of clothes with a big gaudy "R" on the front.
But then she'd found the red-and-white ball next to the Team Rocket Guide, and suddenly things started falling into place. Crazy place. Really crazy place.
Step three had covered the next few hours — stuffing the relevant useful items into her pockets, securing the money, making the room look like she'd never touched it, and then sneaking out into the corridors to find the nearest air vent and have a look around the place. The important thing was to get the lay of the land, either through firsthand experience or by finding a computer she could access for information. The place had a really nice ventilation system, too; bad for them, good for her. The security system wasn't much to sneeze at, either. Again, not that she really minded, but you'd think they could at least try to make the place seem secure. Well, maybe there'd be a safe with something capable of slowing her down longer than twenty seconds. She could hope.
Finally, back in her room after several hours of sneaking and spying, she'd sat down to assess what she'd learned, overheard, hacked, and confirmed. So she was in the Rocket Base in a place called Goldenrod City, the largest and most developed in the nation. That explained the "R" on the clothes; that was the uniform of all the grunt henchmen, which meant that they'd decided she was one of them. (They were probably in for a surprise, but hey.) The size of the base spoke of a massive operation, with a science wing, a set of training grounds, and executive facilities she hadn't been able to get near without the appropriate keycard — she'd have to figure out who one of the execs was and lift or clone their card if she wanted to get in there. They were very secretive of a couple of rooms but not particularly protective of the ones containing useful things, and as a result she now had a standard-quality harness to go with her rope, and a nice little nest egg of money that they probably wouldn't notice had gone missing for quite some time. Tools were going to be a little harder to come by, but the supply room had paper clips and super glue, so she'd make do.
Oh, right, and there was one other thing she kept encountering over and over again: Pokemon.
(Hardison was going to be so jealous.)
Speaking of Hardison, she'd racked her brain trying to remember everything she might've overheard him say in passing on the subject — something about being a master and walking around in the tall grass and your jackass rival popping up when you're five steps from a Center with five members KO'd and ten HP left on the sixth. Not particularly helpful, but hey, it was something. One of the balls would have her Pokeyman in it, then. Which meant all that was left was the cell phone.
Tucked comfortably into a corner of what was now apparently her room, she'd fiddled with it awhile — ultimately discovering that she needed to swipe her ID card to activate it, and then tooling around with the various functions to see what all she had access to with it. There were lots of new blog posts made with recent timestamps; she'd read over a few of them, and they all seemed to say pretty much the exact same thing: help, I'm new, where am I, where are my friends, how do I get home again, I was in the middle of something really important, what's this little animal with me doing.
That's what she's wrapping up right now, and as she snaps the device shut, her lips are pursed in blatant distaste. Apparently that's what all the newcomers do when they're here, and when they do, people turn up and answer their questions. And now that her ID is registered to the network (and there's no Hardison around to provide cover for her), someone might look back at the data records and note a discrepancy in her account, if she's registered but has never used the posting function. Discrepancies mean attention. And the last thing she wants was to draw attention to herself.
Her expression deepens into a scowl. That means she's going to have to blog. And that means she's going to have to grift.
(She hates grifting. Why isn't Sophie here? Sophie's supposed to do stuff like this.)
But then, a moment later she reminds herself (in Nate's voice in her mind) that it's not going to be forever. She has a team now. Her team will find her. Even if she just walked through a wormhole into Pokeymans Land or ended up trapped in a video game or whatever this all is, her team will get her out. They beat a Steranko; there's nothing they can't beat. She just has to hold on until they do.
She flicks a glance toward the red-and-white balls on the pillow, then regards the device in her hand. Okay. Two things to get done. All the people in the other blogs had "starters", so she's going to need one, too. And while she's at it, she can figure out a story, and hopefully people won't ask too many questions. She can do this. She can get it. It's going to be okay. And Hardison's going to be so jealous.
She pushes herself up and reaches for the first ball. Time to see what Wormhole World has in store for her.
~
[Sometime in the middle of the afternoon, a video appears on the Gear network, featuring one rather pretty blonde framed in standard webcam style — shot against a plain gray backdrop with her head and part of her torso visible, facing the camera straight-on and smiling just a little too perkily to be entirely unforced. Her hair is half-loose with the rest pulled into a ratty braid that hangs over one shoulder, and there's something about the way she speaks; all things considered, this is probably the third or fourth time she's attempted to film this video.]
Hi!
[Her smile is broad, and possibly a little manic. A beat passes.]
I'm Alice. This is my blog! It sure was strange when I woke up this morning, because I used to be at home but now I'm here in this really strange place! Where is that music coming from? I could really use some help. Does anyone know where the people I know are? If they see this, I hope they call me.
[There's another pause, in which her gaze drifts, as though she's going down a mental checklist and trying to make sure she's hit all the points.]
Oh, right. I can't wait to make— [Her eye twitches very slightly.] —a ton of new friends! I made one already. He was in my room when I got here!
[She leans down, out of the camera's angle, and when she returns there is a holy shit that is a nine-foot-long Seviper draped across her shoulders like a massive scaly fashion accessory. And for the first time in the entire video, "Alice" looks genuinely excited.]
This is Bitey. Isn't he great? I thought we were supposed to get a Bulbasaurus or a Squirter or a Charmyder or a Pikachu, but I guess I'm just reeeeeally lucky!
[She holds that big excited grin a moment...that turns into two moments...and then ten moments...]
...Okay so someone should tell me what's going on now or something bye.
[And the feed goes black.]
She doesn't like it when things aren't the way she leaves them, and this was no exception. Particularly considering her storage unit is the home of a fair number of her important worldly possessions (bed, planning board, tools, harnesses, shelf full of cereal boxes, favorite stuffed rabbit), and messing with her stuff is an offense approaching but not quite reaching not paying her for a job — which, of course, is something she takes very personally, and warrants retribution. That's not to say she wouldn't put it past Hardison and Eliot to do it, if they figured out how to get in. There's not a lot of stuff to move, and rearranging her unit to make it look like this new tiny room, well, that's a con that any of them could do in their sleep, and probably with one hand tied behind their back while they were at it.
...Okay, well, maybe not Hardison. He always complains so much about the smallest nuisances. It's not like he's the one getting saddled with crawling through the air vents or narrowly avoiding decapitation in the elevator shafts.
(Of course, she likes air vents and elevator shafts. They're so peaceful, albeit sometimes dusty.)
Anyway, not the point. The point is, she walked into her home and stepped out into what was decidedly not her home, which meant one of a possible three things: either someone was messing with her, she'd been captured and drugged, or a wormhole had opened up between dimensions and deposited her with no warning in another universe. All equally plausible, really.
Step one had been reconaissance. Check for cameras, motion detectors, microphones; she'd swept the room and found it clean. She'd also found that unless there'd been some magnificent effort on the part of the boys, she could rule out the possibility that this was still her storage unit; the dimensions were completely wrong, and the materials used sounded different than they were supposed to. Also, there was a hidden speaker somewhere to pipe in the ambient music, but she couldn't find it — pretty suspicious in and of itself.
Step two had been to ransack the room. No identifying signs of anyone who'd previously lived here, no marks of personality; the backpack had some neat odds and ends in it, but nothing that seemed altogether helpful. The phone wouldn't turn on and it was no make or model she'd ever seen before. ID card, snacks, bottles and towels and a change of clothes with a big gaudy "R" on the front.
But then she'd found the red-and-white ball next to the Team Rocket Guide, and suddenly things started falling into place. Crazy place. Really crazy place.
Step three had covered the next few hours — stuffing the relevant useful items into her pockets, securing the money, making the room look like she'd never touched it, and then sneaking out into the corridors to find the nearest air vent and have a look around the place. The important thing was to get the lay of the land, either through firsthand experience or by finding a computer she could access for information. The place had a really nice ventilation system, too; bad for them, good for her. The security system wasn't much to sneeze at, either. Again, not that she really minded, but you'd think they could at least try to make the place seem secure. Well, maybe there'd be a safe with something capable of slowing her down longer than twenty seconds. She could hope.
Finally, back in her room after several hours of sneaking and spying, she'd sat down to assess what she'd learned, overheard, hacked, and confirmed. So she was in the Rocket Base in a place called Goldenrod City, the largest and most developed in the nation. That explained the "R" on the clothes; that was the uniform of all the grunt henchmen, which meant that they'd decided she was one of them. (They were probably in for a surprise, but hey.) The size of the base spoke of a massive operation, with a science wing, a set of training grounds, and executive facilities she hadn't been able to get near without the appropriate keycard — she'd have to figure out who one of the execs was and lift or clone their card if she wanted to get in there. They were very secretive of a couple of rooms but not particularly protective of the ones containing useful things, and as a result she now had a standard-quality harness to go with her rope, and a nice little nest egg of money that they probably wouldn't notice had gone missing for quite some time. Tools were going to be a little harder to come by, but the supply room had paper clips and super glue, so she'd make do.
Oh, right, and there was one other thing she kept encountering over and over again: Pokemon.
(Hardison was going to be so jealous.)
Speaking of Hardison, she'd racked her brain trying to remember everything she might've overheard him say in passing on the subject — something about being a master and walking around in the tall grass and your jackass rival popping up when you're five steps from a Center with five members KO'd and ten HP left on the sixth. Not particularly helpful, but hey, it was something. One of the balls would have her Pokeyman in it, then. Which meant all that was left was the cell phone.
Tucked comfortably into a corner of what was now apparently her room, she'd fiddled with it awhile — ultimately discovering that she needed to swipe her ID card to activate it, and then tooling around with the various functions to see what all she had access to with it. There were lots of new blog posts made with recent timestamps; she'd read over a few of them, and they all seemed to say pretty much the exact same thing: help, I'm new, where am I, where are my friends, how do I get home again, I was in the middle of something really important, what's this little animal with me doing.
That's what she's wrapping up right now, and as she snaps the device shut, her lips are pursed in blatant distaste. Apparently that's what all the newcomers do when they're here, and when they do, people turn up and answer their questions. And now that her ID is registered to the network (and there's no Hardison around to provide cover for her), someone might look back at the data records and note a discrepancy in her account, if she's registered but has never used the posting function. Discrepancies mean attention. And the last thing she wants was to draw attention to herself.
Her expression deepens into a scowl. That means she's going to have to blog. And that means she's going to have to grift.
(She hates grifting. Why isn't Sophie here? Sophie's supposed to do stuff like this.)
But then, a moment later she reminds herself (in Nate's voice in her mind) that it's not going to be forever. She has a team now. Her team will find her. Even if she just walked through a wormhole into Pokeymans Land or ended up trapped in a video game or whatever this all is, her team will get her out. They beat a Steranko; there's nothing they can't beat. She just has to hold on until they do.
She flicks a glance toward the red-and-white balls on the pillow, then regards the device in her hand. Okay. Two things to get done. All the people in the other blogs had "starters", so she's going to need one, too. And while she's at it, she can figure out a story, and hopefully people won't ask too many questions. She can do this. She can get it. It's going to be okay. And Hardison's going to be so jealous.
She pushes herself up and reaches for the first ball. Time to see what Wormhole World has in store for her.
[Sometime in the middle of the afternoon, a video appears on the Gear network, featuring one rather pretty blonde framed in standard webcam style — shot against a plain gray backdrop with her head and part of her torso visible, facing the camera straight-on and smiling just a little too perkily to be entirely unforced. Her hair is half-loose with the rest pulled into a ratty braid that hangs over one shoulder, and there's something about the way she speaks; all things considered, this is probably the third or fourth time she's attempted to film this video.]
Hi!
[Her smile is broad, and possibly a little manic. A beat passes.]
I'm Alice. This is my blog! It sure was strange when I woke up this morning, because I used to be at home but now I'm here in this really strange place! Where is that music coming from? I could really use some help. Does anyone know where the people I know are? If they see this, I hope they call me.
[There's another pause, in which her gaze drifts, as though she's going down a mental checklist and trying to make sure she's hit all the points.]
Oh, right. I can't wait to make— [Her eye twitches very slightly.] —a ton of new friends! I made one already. He was in my room when I got here!
[She leans down, out of the camera's angle, and when she returns there is a holy shit that is a nine-foot-long Seviper draped across her shoulders like a massive scaly fashion accessory. And for the first time in the entire video, "Alice" looks genuinely excited.]
This is Bitey. Isn't he great? I thought we were supposed to get a Bulbasaurus or a Squirter or a Charmyder or a Pikachu, but I guess I'm just reeeeeally lucky!
[She holds that big excited grin a moment...that turns into two moments...and then ten moments...]
...Okay so someone should tell me what's going on now or something bye.
[And the feed goes black.]
[Private Audio]
He wishes] Like I said, it's something we're trying to figure out. Everyone has their own theory.All we know for sure is that this is nothing like where anyone comes from, and its adherence to the laws of physics and logic is... well, weak at best.
[Private Audio]
[Aradia said there was a whole group of them. And this guy is pretty smart. And if he's one of them then maybe there's more she can find out from him.]
...What do you mean, physics doesn't work like it's supposed to? What's different?
[Private Audio]
[He takes a deep breath. Oh, where to begin?] Well, ignoring for a moment the biologically implausible animals, there are some really strange rules to this place. Rules that say you can't ride on a flying animal unless you have a specific piece of plastic clipped to your jacket, or that you can't climb up certain ledges even if they're only as high as your waist. And then there are more fundamental things like people being able to be electrocuted midair, or animals surviving firestorms that should cause at least third-degree burns, if not fourth.
Things like that.
[Private Audio]
[So that's how she'll find somebody who has a bunch of badges — look for the people who can fly. Good to know. Makes spotting a mark that much easier.]
What kind of stuff are you finding out?
[Private Audio]
Well... [He's reluctant to share too much information in case she's a Rocket, but he can be vague.] Mostly things having to do with medicine and how these animals work. Like I said: I don't have the equipment to test something as big as whether or not this is a separate dimension. All I know is that we're on a planet the size of Earth and there are other land masses that, while mentioned by natives, are apparently inaccessible from here at the moment.
[Private Audio]
[Whoops. Turns out mumbling to yourself is a bad habit that never quite goes away, regardless of whether you're on the earbuds or chatting with someone on the Gear.]
You mean like finding out how a horse can be on fire but not get burned? It looked like it was going to set me on fire if I touched it, so I put it away and just kept Bitey out instead.
[Private Audio]
Welp, good thing he thought to be vague. She's probably a new Rocket. Do Rockets just wake up as a Rocket the way other people wake up as breeders or trainers? And what's that about two starters?]
Yeah, you must have gotten a Ponyta. I have one too, but mine has unusual coloring. It's really unsettling at first, yes, but they seem to be able to control the temperature of their fire. Which also really shouldn't be physically possible, but it... apparently happens anyway.
[Private Audio]
[She pauses a minute, debating whether or not this would be the right time to advance another piece of the story she's trying to maintain, and just how much of "Alice's" experiences are going to be her own, too, and whether or not it'd be useful to — oh, cripes, this is why Sophie is the grifter and not her. Honesty it is.]
I saw a horse kill somebody once.
[And now she has one as her starter.]
[Private Audio]
[He can't help but think it's cruel irony. Just another example of Johto's awful sense of humor.]
Horse-related fatalities are very uncommon. There's really only about one hundred each year, compared to around seven million people riding horses in the United States alone. That's about one death per seventy thousand riders.
[Private Audio]
[No, really, man, SHE SAW IT, THOUGH. Also here she goes making a pretty transparent attempt at shifting the subject.]
I like Bitey better. Everybody's afraid of him because of his fangs and tail, and 'cause they think snakes like him have bad tempers. But that's not how he really is. He only looks nasty.
[Private Audio]
[But okay. Changing subject. That works.]
Well, it's true that most pre-captured animals are relatively easily handled, but I still suggest being careful with the poison. If he feels threatened, it's possible he'll lash out.
[Private Audio]
You're just full of good advice, huh?
[She meant it to come out snarky, but it turns out surprisingly genuine.]
I'm Alice.