Week 24, Day 7 of 113 TA

"My, you must really like your carrots! Alright, raw and whole then. And you darling wants ham and cheese omelet with a side of banana pancakes, and you know what? I'm going to get you some apple juice on the house as well, as a small first-time costumer gift. Everything will be 4 dollars and 20 cents. We also accept HPC, so 42 credits work too.", says the waitress, smiling all the time. That's a professional right there. Soon enough, she'll walk to the kitchen door and start talking to someone.

The price for both their meals was cheap. Javi remember paying double of that amount for a simpler breakfast just for one back in Sector B, one of the 'vanilla' sectors. You never went on that restaurant again while you were the one paying the bill. You hazard a guess that cultural constrains are at work again, but in some form of taxation for 'importing' food.

Javi's eyes dart around the room looking at the other customers and the decor. He even makes a little game of it trying to spot the regulars in the crowd. "So, what do you think of this place so far, Fax?"

"I think I need a cig," Fax responds roughly.  "Place jives, but gives me the creeps.  Gimme cold metal, greyscale decor, and an endless winter outside and I'll be happy."  He lets a lopsided grin return to his features.  "Though I canst complain if the eatin's good."  He flexes his fingers anxiously, glancing out of the building wondering if the rain had begun yet.

While they waited another few minutes for the food to arrive, Javi noticed a lone guy in the table at the end of the diner, a duffel bag besides him. He is wearing a marine's uniform, and it shows he's a Lieutenant. He notices Javi looking at him and immediately turn his gaze away even before confirming who was looking at him.

OOC:

As it finally starts to drizzle, you see two people entering the door in a hurry, one them you recognize as spaceman Wright, who is a bit out of breath, while the other man looks to be in a much better shape.

Wright takes a deep breath before saying, "Sorry for the delay, I've found one of the people I was supposed to show around the base today outside, while working on that jeep's roof. This is Zebedia Greenlaw, one of the engineers that's going to board the Reliant tonight."

OOC:

Fax gives a sharp grin to Zebedia, standing to his feet and giving him a too-firm handshake.  "Good ta meets ya, LT.  Name's Mateus, Fax Mateus.  You can sit with us, long as you don't snipe my carrots."  Fax then obligingly returns to his seat and schooches over to give him room, gesturing at his CO to let him do his own introduction.

Javi doesn't bother to stand and greet the new guy. No point given their ranks and all. "Nice to meet you, Lieutenant. I'm Captain Javier Toombs. Don't bother with that saluting crap while we are out here. You can save that for when we are working." He laughs. "Have a seat." However, he does scoot over to make room for Wright to join them in the booth.

Alexander is still waiting for the waitress to arrive with his order : pancakes with fruits served on top and maple syrup on the side. He looked up once to look at some soldiers who recently sit in another booth. He quickly adverted their gaze and returned his attention on his HPC, on which he was reading some entries about this food he was going to eat.

The entry:

Maple syrup seemed really rare.

Zeb inhaled deeply as he entered the quaint little diner. The place, beckoning to a time long since passed, had a odd familiarity to it. The smells of grilled meat, grease, and cheese mingling with other aromas of the stove-top variety were mixed, but almost harmonious the way they meshed together in the olfactory bulb.

He took Fax's hand firmly, and grinned slightly at the excess "shake" in the Lieutenant's handshake.

"Likewise, sir," Zeb greeted back. He balled his hand into a fist and raised it slightly, then relaxed when the captain explained that he need not bother, and took a seat. "Thank God for that," he replied, giving a slight chuckle. "And it'll be an pleasure, sir. I've paid attention to the Reliant's test runs, and she is some kinda somethin'."

He couldn't help but meet the gaze of the Lt in the corner every now and then, wondering when he'll work up the courage to say hi, or stop.

The drizzle outside soon become a fully-realized rainfall, and the sound of water drops on the metal roof gets considerably loud, although not exactly uncomfortable. All movement outside the diner seemed to have stopped, maybe except for a lone car passing by in a hurry, and even the friendly conversations inside the diner started to die down, as if everyone else were waiting for something to happen soon.

As soon as the waitress gives everyone the ordered food (Fax get a cup of milk, which was part of the burger deal), she takes a small object from behind the counter and fixates it on the wall behind her. It was an fifth generation APSL projector, that she turns on and starts to fiddle with the settings, probably intending to make the image large enough for everyone inside the diner to watch. A large bald man wearing a wife-beater and jeans under a large white apron, probably on his forties, arrives from the kitchen and starts helping the waitress setting, or at least wanting too, but fail miserably to their chagrin.

Javi and Fax both notice that the young couple who were in their own world just a few minutes ago now seems to be locking hands in a forced and nervous manner, the young woman trying to reassure her partner (loudly enough to be heard by the both of you) that everything was going to be ok and the rumors couldn't be true.

Wherever eating or talking to each other, all five of your HPCs start to vibrate in unison, which brings the questioning look of the other costumers inside, probably because of the military uniforms four out of five of you are wearing. A simple message was sent to all of them. 'Reminder: Emergency Broadcast in five minutes', tagged 0955 hours.

Zeb makes a mental note of the broadcast with the intent to watch it in the next five minutes. Having sparsely eaten when getting ready in the morning, his stomach tightens, and he attempts to flag down the waitress to take his order. "Excuse me miss, I'd like to order now."

Alexander reads the notice on his HPC. He then looks up at the other soldiers in the dinner to see how they are reacting. One of them, older than he is, stays calm. Whatever this broadcast is, it isn't good news. Alexander immediately activates private mode on his HPC so that he doesn't need to do it when the message begins then starts to eat his pancakes in a hurry. He understands that he may not have another chance to eat anytime soon. Better be prepared to this eventuality.

Fax, having already inhaled his entire meal, hops over the back end of the seat to get out and stretches.  Giving a brief salute and grin to his two companions he promptly walks right outside into the pouring rain, one hand in his pocket to cover his cigs, his grin growing as the downpour flattens his greying hair and soaks his uniform.  He roams near at random until he finds a 'good spot' to simply stand and enjoy the rain, the visibility so poor he can't even see the diner from here.

"Hm?", the cook notices you talking to the waitress and answers for her instead, "Oh, right, sorry man can't take your order right now. Unlike yer navy folk, we don't know what the heck is going on with whatever, and people here are gossiping about aliens or something. Not that I believe in any of that bull, but there's this broadcast soon, so... yeah, I'm not missing that one... Now, I just need to get this damn projector working. Say, you know anything about them machines? I could get you something simple if I wasn't tied up with this thing right now."

Aliens. Zeb sighed at the mere mention of the word. "Oh yeah, machines are my specialty. I'll take a look at it."

Zeb walked over to the projector and looked for tools--on a stand, on a nearby table, maybe in the cook's hands. "If I fix it, promise me I get somethin' on the house? If you've got some grits and coffee ready, I'd like that in addition to...I dunno, eggs or whatever, like you said, whatever you've got onhand."

Machine-related Skills/Knowledges:

"Yeah, sure. Just... don't break the thing, a'right?", the cook hands him a toolbox, probably not used very often, and return to the kitchen. It at least this toolbox everything you needed to do your job.

This fifth generation projector was already showing signs of its age, probably bought years ago on some colony back in the solar system. Some of the micro-filaments that sent information through were a little corroded and the information got corrupted, or so Zebedia believed to be the problem. After quickly soldering off the filaments, cutting the corroded parts and putting everything back in place, the projector now didn't even turn on! Time was running out and he might have broken the thing even more. He could feel the cold sweat on his face, the idea of having to pay over five thousand credits on a new APSL projector making him visibly uncomfortable.

But before anyone could notice, Zebedia toughens up and redo all his work in record time, now noticing he let a minuscule droplet of solder fall onto a secondary circuit that received the signal to turn on the projector, and by taking care of that, the projector working again. With 30 seconds to spare.

Result of rolls:

The waitress thanks Zebedia and start working on the settings again, which quickly respond to her queries. Soon enough, a APSL window opens in the middle of the diner, ironically showing the ending of an advertisement for top-of-line 8th generation APSL projectors. Yet not one of the other costumers seems to be in the mood for a chuckle right now.

The cook rushes into the diner floor and quickly puts in front of Zebedia a tray containing grits with a side of bacon and egg, a bowl of simple tomato and lettuce salad and a mug of hot coffee, and proceeds to sits in one of booths, besides what seems to be a friend and regular.

"Members of the military. Civilians of the fleet. My friends. Today...", a clear, stern yet calm voice booms from the APSL window, which prompts for the waitress to start turning the volume down a bit. The man speaking to everyone in this gigantic ship was none other than the Admiral of the 11th Terran Fleet, popularly known as the zenobian fleet, the highest ranking individual in the fleet, military or not. His face showed a man well into of his sixties, complete with a well-kept white beard and rugged face, and yet his posture, his uniform and eyes clashed with the rest of his body, as did his voice. There were also eight men beside him, four at each side, which meant they were probably the governors of each sector of this ship, and save for two of them, all were wearing strange yet expensive-looking clothing.

The admiral continued, "...is a day that is going to be remembered in the history of mankind and the Terran Society. Not only because we left our home solar system in the cradle that is the Zenobia, into the most unknown. Not just because we'll be the first humans to see another star up-close since the Machina era, or maybe ever. But because we have just confirmed that we are not alone in this vast universe. I present you the aliens we call 'Album'."

A extra APSL windows opened inside the diner, with all kinds of information the people working on this were able to gather until now, like for example a diagram that shows that one Strawman is about 13 men tall, images and various scan data, together with a 3d model of a Strawman made from the almagamation of all this data, a 22 meters tall elongated creature with a 3 fingers in each hand, and no fingers in the feet. Their face had no features at all, which made someone in the diner to akwardly comment on why 'strawmen' and not 'faceless', which nobody answered. This information was not really complete, or worthy of keeping under a rug, Javi gathers. The face of a few of the people inside of the restaurant go pale, probably because they don't know how to take this. It was good that he took the time for people to look at this information and get used to these unknowns.

"I'm going to make this broadcast brief. We know almost nothing about the enemy. We know they destroyed every single scouting drones we sent to the Culmen solar system in a single sweep. We understand that they were not there before, and as such, this is not their home system. We know that their numbers at the time of the destruction of our drones were around eighteen thousand. Whatever we do today, to reach a peaceful solution to this engagement or to do battle to guarantee our survival, it'll have to us, the 11th Terran Fleet, by ourselves. There's nobody to call for help, no backup plan, and whatever escape route we may not lead us to safety. We cannot turn the Zenobia back."

As if fate was mocking the purpose of this transmission as means to prepare the population for an engagement with aliens and give them time to digest it, an officer hurriedly approaches the admiral and talks to him in rushed tones. And making things even more nerve-wrecking, all the HPCs inside the diner that were from a Zephyr or military member starts to vibrate and emit an alarm, as does Fax's.

OOC:

Fax stood, enjoying the rain, one arm up so he could listen with half an ear to the announcement which, ultimately, was disinteresting.  His mind had wandered to the story he'd been writing the last few months and he began mentally laying out what direction the next few chapters would take before there was a buzz at his HPC which he recognized as an alarm.  Turning his actual attention onto it he frowned and quickly pulled up all available info on whatever was going on.

Zeb, still in the middle of his eggs and bacon, put his fork down and looked up at the monitor. As the 11th fleet admiral continued to elaborate on these "Album", his mouth started to hang open a little. He touched his coffee mug, but ultimately doesn't pick it up, and left his hand on it.

He never thought that he would be wrong on the issue of mankind's company in the universe. He hoped that if he were, it wouldn't be like this. But he was wrong, and his hope had proved vain.

When the alarms started beeping, he fiddled with his HPC, investigating the nature of the alert.

Upon tapping it once to stop the alarm, that HPC would go automatically into forced private mode and start opening multiple windows, with a single message window on the foreground, reading "Report to the SCu-F1 Reliant for duty immediately. The Zenobia is under threat of imminent attack by unknowns in jump space." Any information on the background windows lacked visuals, except for one, that caught the shape of that single 'ship' on their tail.

It was jagged and had two very long 'wings'. Usually with these 3d models, they add another model so you can have a point of reference. The choice of model this time? The Zenobia, who was roughly 200 kilometers long in diameter. That ship was a quarter of Zenobia's size, not counting the wings. And that thing looks like something made for war as well as scare anyone who ever saw it. Or at least the idea passes by your minds.

Anyone that knows anything about jump nodes and the technology and theories behind them can quickly gather how utterly ridiculous the whole situation was: Zenobia's mass combined with the rest of the 11th fleet inside it should not, under any circumstance, allow for anything to travel behind it until the fleet entered real space, and even then, there's a cooldown period before any of the jump node sides in question could be used again.

Wright started to visibly shake as he checked his HPC, and remains dumbstruck for the moment. The emergency broadcast was cut short, so all the eyes in that diner were focused on Wright's reaction to whatever happened, and now, yours.

Fax, outside, pulled out the spare carrot he'd procured and began chewing on it rhythmically.  Without much hesitation he stretched his legs back out and began jogging as quickly as he could in the direction of wherever he had to go to get to his ship.