etrayamemes | TDM 001

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TDM 001

⏵ arrival⏴
Arrival goes as anticipated. Characters awaken in the pristine, new hospital, greeted by Aurora and potentially getting a rundown of what's happening depending on their approach to being dropped somewhere new. The door to their room opens, and new arrivals are left free to explore their new environment.

Or what exists of it anyway. Exiting the hospital will show that there isn't much of anything just yet. Generally, Echo can build new facilities before new arrivals awaken, but it appears that this time… well, it didn't happen. The apartment complex exists, standing just beside the hospital, and there are a few facilities that are half constructed, companion bots carrying around rebar and other necessary bits and pieces, but they're not quite ready. Oops. But maybe, just maybe, one of those half-built facilities is familiar - a childhood home, a favorite supermarket, the run-down garage they worked at as a youth, a grounded spaceship in the middle of one of the massive bridges connecting land over rivers.

The companion bots will offer quiet apologies if approached; they were expecting new arrivals to touch down, but not quite this early. They'll be ready soon! A few more days at most, they promise. In the meantime, do not stray too far from the hospital. While most of Etraya looks habitable, they have not finished verifying that it's safe for its new inhabitants.

The apartment building and hospital are safe, and the land directly around them is fine, but beyond that? Stay away. But hey, the hospital's cafeteria is fully stocked with cuisine from across the multiverse! Please feel free to settle in, choose an apartment, and get to know your new friends.

⏵ water you doing?⏴
Decide not to listen? Well, the companion bots had offered their warnings.

Etraya is a new establishment, one that received newcomers before it was ready. And as such, the land has not quite been prepared for their arrival. Wandering off the land the apartment building and hospital are settled on comes with very, very poor results. Take a step down into the river below, and you'll find yourself uncomfortably hot. Or cold. Or hot and cold, because whatever that 'water' is, it wasn't meant to be played in. The only way to resolve the temperature regulation issue, as Aurora informs, is finding a buddy to cuddle up with. Those who are lucky may have a nearby friend they're familiar with and don't mind leaning a shoulder against. Those that don't? Well. . . have fun having a very uncomfortable conversation with a stranger, asking them if it's alright if you lean into them or hold their hand for a bit. Any physical contact will do, as long as it's directly skin-to-skin.

Except that's not where the contact stops. Characters will find that, for the next several hours, they'll feel everything that their companion feels. Frustration, anger, amusement, homesickness that comes from being so far away from their families and friends - all those feelings? They're not your feelings, they're our feelings now.

No explanation is given for how the empathy bond and the temperature regulation are related, but it may have to do with how since they had decided not to listen, it was time to test how well they could cohabitate with their new friends.

⏵ bonding bingo ⏴

Maybe it feels a little too much like Obi-Wan had when receiving Leia's message, but all new arrivals are their universe's only hope. Except they're not the only ones arriving, and not the only ones who are trying to keep their worlds safe. Instead, they've arrived with several others who carry the same weight on their shoulders. And they aren't meant to go through this alone. The people they've arrived with are both their new companions and their competition. Both comrades to fight beside and enemies to battle against, depending on what the specific mission of the month is. But currently?

They're here to bond. It's important to get to know those who they'll be spending the next unspecified but lengthy amount of time with, isn't it? To that extent, Aurora's hologram waits just inside the hospital's front doors, offering bonding bingo cards to those willing to participate. It's not necessary, but she does specify that this is one way to get ahead: cooperation is important, especially given what they're going to face together. Bingo cards are three long and three across, and offer a multitude of activities you can do to check each box off.

Some examples include:

Learn someone's biggest secret

Get into a fight

Tell someone something that you've never admitted out loud to

Throw a drink on someone

Win a game of pool in the apartment building's recreation room

Cheat on a card game without getting caught

Hug a new friend

Get stabbed

Steal something important to someone

Pull off an elaborate prank on a stranger

⏵ matchmaker ⏴

When the earpiece is put on, a nice green HUD(head-up display) lights up in front of new arrivals. It asks them for their name, which is fairly standard for these.

Except it seems it wants them to put together a profile to help pair them off with other new arrivals. For some, this information may autofill with what Aurora was able to discern about them from watching them in their home worlds. But some lucky individuals may catch their profiles before they're posted live, and have the opportunity to edit out information included in fields, even if they're not able to clear it out entirely.

Welcome to Aurora's idea of matchmaking. Have fun getting paired off with a buddy or four, with your profiles exchanged between one another. Maybe they're the perfect match. Maybe this is a nightmare in the making.

⏵ OOC ⏴
Welcome to our first TDM! We're excited to have you here. For more information on character arrivals, click here. For any questions relating to the TDM please reply below. All other questions can be directed to the FAQ.

⏵FULL NAVIGATION⏴

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[ Krouse stares at her like he's waiting for a punchline, and then, unexpectedly, finds a trace of a smile briefly touching the corner of his mouth. ]

Was it the married, the housewife, or the sad part that got to you?

[Hey, she made him smile! ]

All of it. Thankfully, we weren't there for too long.

Lucky.

[ He actually means that; another surprise. ]

How did it happen?

[ The multiverse hopping, not the sad marriage. He can guess at that one. ]

We, my friends and I were on the run from an alien that was taking over our parents. Not that my dad wasn't already a super douche, but it was a whole thing with aliens and magic gone wrong. So, we had to jump around until we could fix things.

[No big deal, she shrugs. Just another get together of the Young Avengers.]

An alien was taking over your parents.

[ He repeats after her with raised eyebrows, but not disbelief. ]

That's a new one to me.

[ His burger is getting cold. He should give it another shot, so he does, taking a dutiful lukewarm bite. ]

So you and your friends, I'm guessing you're not just a volleyball team or the student council, are you? [ He sets the burger aside and picks up a fry, but gestures with it instead of eating it. ] I'm probably going to sound like a fanboy, but - are you a cape?

It was something.

[It was a mess of their own making, but they did fix it in the end, and Mother was vanquished.]

Oh please, you sound the least fanboish. You'd have to meet Billy to understand the level I'm used to. No cape, but I am an Avenger. [West Coast Avenger, but whatever.] Which probably doesn't mean much if you aren't from the same world.

If you have heard of the Avengers, I'm Hawkeye. The better one.

[ Krouse lets out a quiet breath several steps below a laugh as he drops his eyes at the quasi-compliment. Least of the fanboys is something. ]

I haven't heard of you or your team. [ He looks back up, the line of his mouth crooked, wryly apologetic; so it goes with alternate universes. ] But I'm glad I'm dealing with the better Hawkeye.

And sorry. 'Capes' is just what we call people with powers, back where I come from. Most of them don't wear actual capes.

[ He finally eats his fry instead of underlining his words with it. After he swallows, he folds his arms on the table behind his lunch tray. ]

Were your parents okay? [ He asks, lowering his voice. ] After.

[Not the first time someone hadn't heard of her. At least he's not asking for Clint, which wouldn't be bad if he were here right now. ]

Superheroes. Not all of us have powers, some are just awesome humans.

[His next question has her munching on her fries for a bit before answering. There's a sigh before she spills.]

My dad wasn't actually part of the trouble, but he was already causing issues before then. And after. My mom died when I was a kid.

[ The apologetic look Krouse gives her isn't wry anymore. ]

I'm sorry. That was a shitty question.

[ His shoulders curl forward further as he stares down at his plate, then draw back as he gets himself together with a shake of his head. ]

Family's complicated.

[ He says, like that sums it up. He thinks it does and it doesn't: at least it lets her know he gets it. ]

Maybe it's better if we stick to the fanboy stuff.

Dad's tried to have me killed a couple of times, and I've ruined his plans. It's all good. Not like you could know.

[About that or that her mom is actually a vampire that worships the sun. Better just to think of mom as dead. She does.

Kate brightens up beaming at him.]

Tell me about your fanboy crush.

[ Whatever carefully couched response Krouse was going to try to have to 'my dad occasionally tries to kill me, but it's no big deal' dissolves instantly at Kate's request. Krouse stares at her, temporarily stricken, with a cornered, goggle-eyed expression common to teenage boys being asked unprompted about their crushes. There's only a faint edge of a deeper, more unsettled reaction, something teetering between guilt and shame. ]

Uh.

[ He coughs into his fist, looking away. He doesn't have an answer. A normal guy would have an answer - but there's only one person, first and only real crush past middle school flutters, and he can't say her name. ]

Dragon.

[ Not his crush, but someone else's. ]

She's a tinker. Best in the world. She makes these mech suits, and a hundred other things. Most of the frontline PRT tech is her design, or something she improved on. It's not just her power - she's actually a genius. That doesn't happen with tinkers as often as people think it does.

[Kate's an expert on unsettling people with unprompted questions. ]

Oh, so like a female Tony Stark. Hopefully she's a lot nicer.

[After everything with the Superhero Registration Act, she's still not his biggest fan. When someone has to be the smartest person in the room, they forget there are still things they don't know. Sometimes that thing is how to listen to other people.]

To play fair, mine was Hawkeye. Not myself, Clint Barton, the original Hawkeye. I thought it was so cool that he was just this guy with a bow and arrow when everyone else around him was super powered in some way, or used an armored suit, or was an actual god. And there he was just risking his life to save everyone else.

[She was one of those people he saved, which is how she started on her life of superheroing.

She stops to smile, grabs another fry to pop in her mouth.]

And then I met him and found out he's a total mess. One of my best friends, but still a hot mess.

[ More real names. Exceptions to the unwritten rules, or does Kate's world just not have them? Multiverse travel mentioned like it's crossing a border, not a law of reality. Aliens and gods and capes who work without powers.

Even when he's unsettled, Krouse is good at extrapolating from limited information. He has to be. He's listening to Kate's personal story, but at the same time, he's trying to build out an idea of where she comes from, how things there operate. How she operates.

It's a decent distraction from thinking about whether Dragon is nice. ]

They say never meet your heroes. [ He smiles back at her, the whirl of his thoughts visibly levelling out now that they're back on firmer ground. ] It sounds like it worked out for you, though.

[ She's one of the real do-gooders, it sounds like. People who get into the cape life genuinely wanting to help - and it sounds like she's doing it without powers. If nothing else, that means she's brave. ]

So is that how you got into it? Being a superhero? This first Hawkeye took you under his wing, if you'll excuse the pun?

Not exactly. He was my inspiration mostly, but I got together with some others and we formed our own team. After we proved ourselves, Captain America sent me Clint's bow and suggested I use the name. Clint was going around under a different name at the time.

[He was thought to be dead at the time since he had actually died but had been brought back to life after someone messed with the timeline. ]

I had to prove myself to him eventually, and then became the adult in our relationship keeping him out of trouble.

[More often getting into trouble with him.

She's definitely a do-gooder though. Not wanting to be a victim again as well as wanting to keep others from being one. ]

[ Out of the mix of his reactions to that, Krouse lets being impressed rise to the top, his eyebrows lifted to show it. Brave and ambitious - or just driven, which can pass for ambition to an outsider.

He knows a thing or two about what that's like. ]

So it's more the other way around. [ He dredges a fry through ketchup. ] You picked up the legacy, and he came back to it once you'd made it your own.

[ He chews the fry, a ripple of wryness crossing his expression as he processes one more little off-hand detail. ]

Captain America. I'm guessing...mildly patriotic?

It's a little more complicated than that, but that's more second or third date level of info.

[There's a wink to let him know she's teasing about the date, but her taking up for Clint really is complicated. Her life is a mess.]

Just a little, but it's understandable since he became a superhero during World War 2.

[ The wink helps curb the jolt of apprehension that fills his eyes at date. It's not that he even thought there was a chance she could be serious. Just a leftover reflex.

Except even thinking about it like that, the raw nerves hanging disconnected in his chest burn. He looks down at his still barely touched plate, unfocused, and reminds himself to breathe. ]

World War Two, huh?

[ He picks up the folded paper napkin he dropped next to his plate and unfolds it, digs his fingernails into the edge to feather off a thin strip of fragile tissue. ]

We only started getting capes in the eighties. [ Historical trivia. Shop talk. Impersonal, safer. ] Since his name is still Captain America, I'm assuming we still won that one?

[There would be a large amount of disappointment going on if she thought he was anxious over the idea of a date with her. Like, what's wrong with her? ]

Yeah, Cap got his start punching Nazis. The other Avengers came along years later, after Cap was defrosted. It's a long story. But there are a lot of heroes now. A lot of out in the open villains as well.

[So many more than just the Nazis Cap fought in the past. ]

[ Krouse nods, tapping his index finger against the table. ]

Too bad we didn't end up with more of that.

[ Punching Nazis, that is. It'd have been nice, not having to deal with those assholes. Sounds like heroes in Kate's world managed to get at least one thing right. ]

It doesn't sound that different from my world, that way. Lots of capes. Lots of long stories.

[ Which she's been giving him for free, for no apparent reason other than trying to be nice to some civilian. ]

You can stop me if I'm asking too many questions. [ He dredges up a faintly self-deprecating smile. ] I don't want to be that kind of fanboy. I'm sure you get enough of that.

[ It's a guess. If he were her team's PR, he'd be putting her on meet and greets. Friendly, down to earth, photogenic. Hawkeye action figures probably sell like Vistas. ]

Nah, you're good. Like all of this is common knowledge at home so it's not a big deal.

[There's a laugh at the idea she gets fanboys, or fans of any kind. It's usually people looking to harm a Hawkeye rather than cheer her on.]

Not really. Most people tend to expect Clint when they hear the name Hawkeye. I've gotten used to it though.

[ Being charming has never been Krouse's speed. That this has kept going so well is something he has to credit to Kate's good humour, and he could keep letting that be the case.

But an opportunity like the one she just handed him seems like something he'd be stupid to pass on. ]

Now that I find hard to believe.

[ It helps that he's being honest. ]

Didn't you say he picked up a new name when he got back into the game? Maybe you need to get some press on it. Clear up the misconception.

Edited 2024-03-16 01:19 (UTC)

He was Hawkeye and an Avenger, first. And longer.

Yeah, he did, but that wasn't really him. [Ronan was him hiding he was back from the dead from everyone.] I offered to come up with another name, but he said the world was big enough for two Hawkeyes. The world just hasn't figured that out yet.

The world's loss.

[ Krouse shrugs slightly, filing 'wasn't really him' away. He's still not sure what the dynamic between the two Hawkeyes is. Anything he could guess would be more about his personal assumptions than anything he knows.

But he sounds decent. For Kate's sake, Krouse hopes that lines up with reality. With her dad, she's been disappointed enough by one person who was supposed to have her best interests in mind. ]

Where I come from, most capes try not to double up on names. It sounds like you're all a little better at sharing.

[ So one assumption he might want to walk back is the amount of friction there'd be over something like that on Bet. Most heroes wouldn't be that gracious. Maybe not having powers helps with that. No parahuman reactivity. ]

And your PR teams are okay with it?

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

TDM 001

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