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XOXO ❅ VALENTINE'S EVENT
One major problem with being the group that's responsible for solving all kinds of problems in the myth world is other myths can kind of be dicks about it. That's why, on Valentine's Day, Cupid shows up, quickly offloads his kid (the toddler Baby Cupid), and runs off to take care of spreading love on his holiday, with barely a how'd you do. He doesn't even say thank you.
To be fair, you can't fault him too much for only trusting the Guardians to babysit his kid in these dangerous and uncertain times, especially when children at risk against the fearlings.
Still, that means there's a giggling toddler, about 2-years-old in appearance, but maybe with the mental age of a 4 or 5 (he is definitely old enough to understand he's being naughty and deserving of a time out) flitting around the Pole causing all kinds of Valentine's related problems. Fortunately, the toddler has learned that he's not quite old enough to know the right times to help people fall in love (Adult Cupid just helps things along when they're already falling, or when they need help falling back in love, of course).
Instead, Baby C is doing what his father taught him to do and causing all kinds of tricks to try to get people to admit feelings that already exist or manufacturing ways for them to become closer to each other.
HONESTY ARROWS ♥ Baby Cupid isn't shooting magic arrows that cause anyone to develop feelings for each other but he sure is trying to make sure people talk about whatever feelings they have. Anyone hit will be compelled to blurt out various truths about themselves, their personal history, and their feelings to whoever is around them and will have difficulty stopping or drawing themselves away. In fact, if someone walks away they'll feel compelled to find someone else to confess to. The effect wears off anywhere between 5 minutes to a half hour.
TATTLETALE ROSES ♥ Vines of roses are now growing all over the Workshop. For those who are in love, they take the form of the face of the person they're in love with. The more they try to hide it or deny it from someone they're talking to, the more of them bloom with the person's face.
THORNY VINES OF CLOSENESS ♥ The rose vines have their own annoying purpose: bonding! For people that clearly need to become friends, fall in love, or fall deeper in love, thorny vines will wrap around both people, forcing them into a little cage together. The thorns fortunately won't poke them - they seem to be maneuvered in a way to just make sure there are no gaps to escape through. The vines are magically reinforced and can't be opened with any physical or magical means. After that, one of two things will happen:
1) A card will fall from the ceiling of the cage saying: Tell each other how you really feel about each other!!! This will happen if the cage thinks they need to affirm the status of their relationship, whether they need to admit they're in love, admit they've been bitten by the friend bug if they're reluctant to, or really need to talk about how much they mean to each other as friends. Only then will they be let out of the feelings shame corner.
2) If the two don't know each other, or both people could afford to get to know each other better multiple cards will drop from the ceiling with icebreaker questions, as if they're a bunch of new hires at an orientation.
How many will they have to answer before they're released? Who knows! But they have to answer them honestly or the cage won't open.
CANDY LONELY HEARTS ♥ People who are on the lonelier side and in need of support might find a candy heart on a random surface. The messages on them are on the platonic side (Like "You rock!" or "Shine on!") They'll feel compelled to eat them (even if they're on the floor). When they do, a glowing red thread will appear and tie itself around their finger. Briefly, in the air, the glowing string will form into letters that tell the person what they need to do to be release, whether it's telling someone they're lonely, asking for some kind of support, or admitting a vulnerability.
Then it'll whip out and grab someone else nearby, wrapping around their finger as well. Sometimes, two people might eat a candy at the same time and each have a string appear and they'll tie in the middle.
The strings are unbreakable, and they won't be set free until whoever ate a candy talks about their loneliness or vulnerable feelings - regardless of whether or not the other person is an eager listener.
❅ Starters: You can make up your own wildcard effects, feel free! If you do, please consider posting it to the Wildcard comment below so others might be able to pick up the same effect as well if they like them.
❅ Multiple effects: Feel free to have characters slammed by as many of Baby C's traps in the same thread as you want. No reason someone can't have the worst luck and trip three Cupid traps at once or several of them in a row.
no subject
Boimler's so jazzed that Dan feels like prioritizing his own insecurities about his ignorance would be tantamount to kicking a puppy. He doesn't know Boimler well at all, and the guy has definitely seemed more teamwork and order than Dan could ever imagine feeling enthusiastic about, but this could be a good opportunity to get to know the kid.
He follows Boimler on over. "I'm Dan, by the way. Ah, thank you for walking me through this. It's kind of embarrassing to not know stuff that folks seem to know from birth, practically."
He isn't sure why truth just seems to be rolling off his tongue - usually he's habitually, casually dishonest. But at least this is a very minor sort of confession. Everyone feels stupid and inadequate at some point in their lives, and it makes sense to Dan that when surrounded by people from all different levels of education and technology that that edge would feel a little sharper for him here.
no subject
Attention from commanding officers matters less and less. Trying to do good matters more.
Something about this place, so wildly different from his world, with people from wildly different worlds too, has been making him think about all the possibilities out there. The people, the different backgrounds they come from.
"You can just call me Boimler." He has no idea if Dan ever caught his name.
He starts drawing circles on the tablecloth with marker.
"Nobody knows things from birth. In my dimension and the time I come from, our education is great so we learn about this early. But there were also times in humanity's history it wasn't." He shrugs a shoulder. "If I'd been born at a different time, my education might have been only okay, or I might not have gotten one at all, especially during all the world wars that happened before humanity got it together."
He looks at him again. "It's all just circumstance, right?"
Besides, maybe there were other things that were more important for Dan to learn instead. These wildly different worlds probably have wildly different problems.
no subject
No amount of explaining what Star Fleet does could ever get Dan to want to do anything but run screaming from the whole concept - ranks, policies, directives, the fucking horror - but from what he's gleaned in his twenty-odd years of being a person with basic observational skills, people in these sorts of organizations feel proud of both their own accomplishments and the work they do. If Boimler earned himself a rank of sorts, then Dan wants to honor and acknowledge that.
"Well, even by my world's standards I'm a bit behind the curve, but we ain't been to space yet in my world so knowing this sort of thing ain't been a top priority for me." Dan's pretty sure they haven't been to space. Someone at a dive bar once told him that NASA was a giant federal money laundering scheme and he drank that conspiracy theory up like it was elixir from Heaven.
He looks at the circles on the tablecloth. He suspects Boimler's about to tell him about what's inside the sun, as if the solar system were the same as a digestive system, and that that's what this drawing is about to elucidate.
"But if you ever need help doing something real analog, like catching a calf or picking a lock, I'm your man."
no subject
They haven't earned the full friend "Boims" nickname yet but all his friendly acquaintances that are other ensigns call him by last name. Might as well make it so everyone else feels comfortable with that at the start.
Also, command track gets training on dealing with civilians because sometimes conflict brings you into contact: you don't earn trust and respect by getting snitty with civilians about your rank and title. It's better to relate to them as just a person.
He doesn't act surprised when Dan says they haven't been to space where he's from. That could be from any number of things: year he's from, alternate timeline where space travel didn't happen, alternate timeline where the government did it in secret, etc.
The corner of his mouth does quirk up a little at the mention of doing things in analog, even though he doesn't look up from the circles he's drawing.
"I definitely have a feeling I might need help with something if it gets real analog so I may take you up on it."
The only thing he really knows how to do in a somewhat past-times traditional way is viticulture and God help him if the multiverse needs him to do farmboy vineyard shit to save the day.
Time for some science.
"Okay, so I used a lot of toy balls because a lot of the shapes of different cosmic phenomenon are spheres or oblate spheroids - slightly oblong spheres. The sizes aren't 100% accurate because I'd have to find a lot of hugely differently sized things. So just imagine they're stand-ins."
Where does he even start?
Oh yeah, the beginning of time.
"So billions of years ago the universe formed in an explosion of energy, heat, and matter. It was called the Big Bang, it was the start of time and space, blah blah blah. Before you ask, we have no idea what caused it and we have no idea if anything came before." A shrug of one shoulder. "It's one of the great mysteries of the universe. There was nothing and then, suddenly, everything."
That part isn't the most explainable even in his time, even if they know far more about the formation of the universe shortly after the Big Bang.
"So around the beginning, everything was this big molten soup of energy and superheated gasses and molten matter. And then it started to condense in a lot of places. Just by coincidence some of it was thicker in some places and thinner in others. But the thing with mass is when an object is big enough - way bigger than we are - it tugs on the invisible fabric of reality - spacetime - and that's what creates gravity. That's why when you jump, you come back down. Earth is so big it gives off a strong field of gravity that holds things close to it. Like...magnetism?"
He probably knows about magnets, right?
"It's not the same type of field, but it's a similar thing of an object giving off an invisible force."
He waves the marker around in a twirly gesture.
"The clumps of mass started to become big enough to give off gravity and that pulled in even more molten rock and it made all that matter tighten together into spheres, like if you squeezed a bunch of loose clay together in your hands. So the solar system is the local cluster of spheres that formed at the beginning of time, Earth and the other objects in the same system, the planets and the moons."
He points to the basketball at the center of everything.
"The Sun is at the center of it all. That's our local star. Everything else, the Earth, the other planets, fields of asteroids, all of it, rotates in circles around the Sun."
Well, not circles given the sun is moving too but that's definitely not a lesson 1 kind of thing.
no subject
Dan isn't religious anymore. He was raised on a diet of Bible stories and isolation, and his faith was always casual, a result of his life circumstances rather than any genuine piety. Losing his religion was easy; he thinks of Christianity as like a local accent he picked up from proximity to true believers, his parents, and then something that flaked off him when he was without them. It's something that makes him feel wistful, but not sad. Sometimes he prays still, but he isn't expecting anyone to be listening, and that expectation doesn't make him feel any sort of emptiness or abandonment.
But he's seen how important faith was to his parents, and he's seen it many times in his travels with humans and monsters and ghosts, the way belief is so sincerely-held and precious to some people, and far be it for Dan to correct Boimler on matters of spirituality. If Boimler believes in the Big Bang, Dan will respect that.
"Ah, alright, I think- well, where I'm from the world is flat." That doesn't sound like challenging Boimler's beliefs, he doesn't think. He's couching it as his own world. "Otherwise we'd fall off."
no subject
"Iii won't discount that as a possibility because the multiverse is infinite so who knows what the laws of physics are like in other places - but a planet doesn't have to be flat for people to not fall off. Think about it this way..."
He throws the Earth ball up and nearly drops it when he tries to catch it because he can't look casual and cool while doing anything. Still, he carries on.
"If a version of Earth was genuinely flat, wouldn't there still need to be some invisible force pulling us back to the ground? If there wasn't, everyone would just fly or float off every time they jumped."
He shrugs a shoulder.
"If there's an invisible force tugging everyone and everything to the ground anyway, that makes it so the water in the oceans doesn't float in the air, why would a planet have to be flat for that force to pull things to the surface? It wouldn't need to be flat, it'd just need to radiate out from the center of the planet into every direction at once so every surface of a sphere would have the same no-floating force holding things to it."
no subject
Really, it's not that different from other dogma about plagues of locusts or speaking in tongues; it requires faith in something that Dan finds just objectively insane. The idea that the Earth's a giant ball held together by some mystical sideways-gravity that also, somehow, tricked everyone into thinking they were standing upright even when they were upside down is ludicrous on its face.
"Do you think that's how it works in this world?" he asks, keeping his skepticism very suppressed.
no subject
It takes his brain a little bit to catch up to the question.
"And as far as I can tell, yes. I've looked over everything online about NASA, about space exploration here, tons of available data from radio telescopes, footage of Earth from space, footage from the moon landings... it's all the same as back home."
He goes on, "And back home, where most of the history of space exploration is the same as it is here - the same so far, anyway - I've taken shuttles from the ground to the atmosphere of planets. Lots of times."
He nods.
"I've seen it. When you get high enough up, higher even than Mt. Everest, the view curves. And when you get even higher, even far enough away, it's a sphere. Every planet I've ever been to is a sphere. You can fly right around them and see it out of the viewscreen."
[mild conspiracy theories]
But Dan's looked at the horizon and he is well-aware that it's flat. He's been in tall buildings and on boats on the ocean and on vistas in the Rockies, and the horizon has always been flat. It's been one of the few comforting constants wherever Dan's gone, like the sun rising each day. The horizon is always flat.
(He can't wait to gossip about this with Bunny, who will definitely agree with him that the Earth isn't a weird ball with magic powers that pulls things sideways and upside down.)
"Where I'm from, they only pretended to go on the moon. Pretty sure it was a scam to get folks to give their tax dollars to another government money-laundering agency. Nassuh*, I think. It must could be different on your world."
*Dan isn't aware NASA is an acronym. Or what an acronym is. Or what NASA is.