TDM #1

[goneawaymod]

TEST DRIVE #1

So it's your first day at your new job! Welcome to the Jorgmund Family™! It's time to settle into your new workplace on the Piper 90 rig, the coziest place of employment this side of the Livable Zone. A leader in its industry, Jorgmund is excited to have you join them in enthusiastically envisioneering team-driven paradigms.  

The Piper 90 rig's mission is not only an impressive undertaking in terms of impactful customer-oriented deliverables, it's providing a vital backbone to the Livable Zone by creating a safe region for citizens to live, work, and play. Jorgmund's "outside the box" thinking means they understand the importance of wisely investing in their human capital - you! You'll soon find that you'll take pride in this vital work - and the benefits can't be beat.

Rest assured, Jorgmund's multidisciplinary approach to our world's period of recovery means we know how to keep it real when facing this opportunity for restructuring and growth. Jorgmund: Even if most of the world has gone away, we can make a world of difference!

Synergy!

USEFUL LINKS
It is recommended you check out the following links first for info on the rig, rig conditions, game mechanics, and the intro and slideshow your characters would have to endure that takes place chronologically before the Test Drive Meme: 

Welcome/Arrival  | Rig Weather & Hazards | Rig Setting Page | Game Mechanics

SCENARIO #1 - MOVE-IN DAY!

After the bewildering and unpleasant onboarding process, you've finally been unleashed on the rig. (Well. To places you're allowed to go on the rig.) It's time to get acquainted with your new surroundings, process some of All Of That™, and meet your fellow captives - err, coworkers!

a) A BIT OF A MESS
Perhaps you're hungry? The mess hall food isn't amazing, but it does the job. Characters that have higher metabolic needs than your average human might be left feeling a little hungry, though. The worst part is actually the electronic sliding door: a small sign helpfully informs you that if you want inside, you need to smile for the camera! In addition to being patronizing, this may be a problem for characters who refuse to play ball, or characters with sufficiently nonhuman faces the door sensor can't read them. Remember, if then company doesn't see people like you, it's not discriminatory -- it's just indifferent! And that isn't legally actionable!

b) GOING NOWHERE FAST
The rig's elevators are a little off-kilter today. Overhead announcements mention this, but downplay the severity and are easy to miss -- which means you and your threadmate are stuck in here, somewhere between the fifth and sixth floor. You can complain into the emergency intercomm, but it might take from a few minutes up to an hour before the elevator gets rolling again. How do you pass the time?

c) SHOULD'VE TAKEN THAT LEFT TURN
You're really just trying to get somewhere else on the rig, but you've gotten hopelessly lost. Oh well, at least you're not alone! Did you run into your threadmate here? Did you lead them astray? Are they at fault? Even worse, are you somewhere full of AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY signs, mysterious equipment, and a worrying number of security cameras?

d) NEED A HAND?
You've been assigned a room and some relatively spare possessions to put in it. Unfortunately, it seems that the staff assigned to help move in new hires are all busy at the moment. Unless you want to wait around, you're going to need to lug and assemble your new assigned foldable den furniture yourself. Do you team up with another newbie? Do you try it alone and find yourself needing help? Do you come to the rescue of someone else who did that?

e) SPECIAL DELIVERY
Somebody in processing decided to give you two a quick little errand: you're supposed to take a couple boxes of files up to the executive deck. Unfortunately, a skeptical security staffer is giving you a hard time on your way there, on account of your funny-looking face, insufficient ID or sketchy-looking package. How do you deal with this and accomplish your task?

f) BLOW OFF STEAM
You're likely still a bit sore from Jorgmund fitting you with the nanochain, but you were promised a gym and you are going to use that gym, dammit. It looks like you're not alone in deciding to try out the training area. Do you train together? Spar to let some frustration out? Or are you gonna argue about whose turn it is on which piece of equipment and resent your lost solitude? You'll also find you have to contend with the communal showers when you're done.

g) NO REST FOR THE WEARY
It's the middle of the night on the rig. You're displaced from home, it's not very warm, your door doesn't shut because privacy is a "privilege" nobody has earned yet, and occasional mysterious clanging noises ring through the rig. You can't sleep, not yet, and perhaps you're not the only insomniac wandering the crew deck?

SCENARIO #2 - YOU ARE NOT AUTHORIZED TO PANIC

Around dawn on the morning of Day Two, something goes wrong. (Wrong-er?) You awake to the sound of alarms, and a voice over the speakers telling you NOT TO PANIC! A Stuff storm has caused a brief and contained leak onto Piper 90. You may encounter strange sights or sounds. Any anomalies should be reported immediately to rig security. Thank you for your cooperation!

The nature of the problem isn't immediately clear, but over the next handful of hours you find yourself embroiled in a bizarre fracas: a Stuff leak has caused numerous inanimate objects on the rig to come to life. Furniture and appliances small and large are roaming the decks. Some of them are docile, but others are aggressive (or just troublesome due to their size). Some examples:

• A rogue photocopier spewing paper and ink
• A mahogany conference table with old clawed feet and a brand new gaping jaw
• A water cooler that scuttles the halls, squirting people with jets in varying temperatures
• Small office supplies like pencils and paperclips that swarm in large numbers
• Dressers and drawers that spit their contents at high velocity
• A room's worth of folding chairs that hunt as a pack
• An emergency fire hose that attempts to ensnare crew members in its coils
• The angriest coffee pot you have ever seen

The objects can be dangerous, but are more strange, troublesome, and determined than deadly. If a foe seems to be incapacitated or "plays dead," even the aggressive conference table or hose will leave them with bruises and move on. Crew members who get in over their heads will be bailed out by security personnel as the incident dies down. Jorgmund staff stresses that the leak has been contained (so no new anomalies will appear), but after the initial surprise it's everyone's job to help hunt down and dispose of the Stuff-altered... stuff. It's gonna be a long morning, and you haven't even been properly briefed yet!

h) GOOD MORNING, PIPER 90
Rise and shine! There are alarms going off, announcements blaring, and people are scrambling around trying to figure out what's going on. You're one of them. Freak out? Spring into action? Team up with someone to shake down a staffer for more details? Run into someone new, perhaps literally?

i) INTERIOR WRECKORATING
You've been ambushed by an animate object that seems to have it in for you, or you've heard the shouts of someone who has and come running to help. What's ruining your morning now, and what are you going to do about it?

j) ON THE RUN
The folding chairs from Presentation Room B operate as a unit, harrying their prey through the halls with much scrambling of legs and flapping of seats. They're after you, at the moment. Can you escape, or perhaps lead them into a trap? Or do you stand your ground?

k) HERE'S THE PLAN
You and your threadmate have found somewhere secure (for now) and are deciding how to deal with a larger enemy. Are you hunting it, or is it hunting you? Are you planning to take it out of commission, or just how to get away from it? Or are you just gonna hide here and lay low until this is over?

l) PROP HUNT
Things are getting back under control, thankfully. Large disturbances have been disposed of, but that leaves the little things like elusive chains of paperclips, a small but vicious stapler, pens and markers that write rude words on walls, and utensils from the mess hall. These anomalies are stealthier, but must still be dealt with, and it's up to you to flush them out.

m) CLEAN UP IN AISLE EVERYTHING
The chaos has passed, and now you've been instructed to clean up a mess. Ink or loose paper from the copier, coffee from the rampaging pot, mopping up after a water cooler, scrubbing marker off a wall, etc. You might get roped into contending with the Yuck Puddle, which is a permanent fixture and not a new development, but someone's always contending with the Yuck Puddle.

OOC DETAILS
➤ Feel free to play around with powers. If your character has powers from canon you want to play around with, go for it. If you'd like to test out possibilities for game powers, also go for it. Feel free to change it up from thread to thread if you need to. This can be handwaved as exposure to Stuff making characters' powers shift a few times before settling.

➤ Potential players may use test drive threads as their log samples. However, at least one post in their thread must fit the requirements for apps, both in length (200 words) and in quality. If you do plan on using a thread as a sample, please make sure the writing throughout your threads is a good example of your writing skills and has some solid examples of the character's voice.

➤ Players can eventually count TDMs towards AC. They can only count towards comment-based AC proofs.

➤ Potential players can opt to keep these threads as game canon when they app in, or start over fresh, based on preference. The Stuff bringing them to the game universe can fog their memories, if players don't want their character to remember TDM threads when introing into the game.

➤ The game is invite-only. Players without invites are allowed to tdm since some of them may know someone in game to ask for one, and since some people enjoy TDMs just for fun in games they don't plan to app into. But an invite is required during the apping process.

➤ The game is at a starting cap at 30 players. Right now the current number of invitees is likely to not exceed the game's 30 slots, but if we go a few over they will still be allowed to app during this first round. Future apps will be rolling apps and will have a wait queue if the cap has been exceeded.

➤ The first game round will be apps only, no reserves. Apps open: Sat 4/11/20. Game start: Fri 4/17/20.

Comments

Mac | It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia

[morebetter]

1. SHOULD HAVE TAKEN THAT LEFT TURN

If these jackasses really wanted people to avoid this part of the rig, they wouldn't cover it in tantalizing "hiding something cool" warning signs and yellow tape. This is exactly the sort of thing Mac has to be aware of, as head of security at a small business; the more you advertise that there's something to hide in your secret annexes, the more you tempt people to try and find out. Mac's of the opinion that the best defense is a good distraction, that you should make your private units look boring instead of secretive, and that's why for five months Paddy's had a strip of duct tape with TAXES written on it slapped over the back office door sign.

Irregardless, Mac did go looking for whatever it is they're hiding down here, not because he particularly wants anything but mostly just because he wants to be in-the-know. His friends aren't here and apparently it's "just not in the cards, Mr. McDonald" to sit around drinking, which means that most of Mac's go-tos for killing the hours are cut off. He's an active, savvy guy, he needs something to do, and solving a mystery is...well, kind of for nerds and pretty lonely as a solo venture, but better than nothing.

Except now he's lost, having gone through something he thinks was a hangar, then an absolutely dispiriting wardrobe area of identical uniforms, and somehow through a kitchen? And now he's in an office wing with security cameras all over the place. Mac waves at the cameras, then shrugs, trying to indicate "where the fuck am I?" by facial expression and body language. He does that for maybe thirty seconds before deciding it's a loss and looking for another way to summon aid or, even better, conjure up a clever solution he can brag about later, after he comes up with a more exciting story than "I got lost".

He looks around and the answer just comes to him. He can't help it, some people are just lucky that way. He didn't ask to be a problemsolver, but heavy is the head that wears the crown.

Mac's fairly certain that it's required by law to have little exit signs that light up in case of an emergency, so he gets started on putting together sufficient tinder for a trashcan fire. He grabs papers off a desk and crunches them on into the wastebasket. He hopes none of this shit is important.


2. NO REST FOR THE WEARY

It's only that night that things feel overwhelming, as if, so long as Mac stays vertical and out of bed, his head is up over the sense of unease. Back home, if he or Dennis were having difficulty sleeping, they'd wake up the other and sit around watching reality TV and drinking whiskey straight from the bottle, comforted by the brainless shouting of unrelatable rich bitches and the presence of another person. For obvious reasons, none of that's an option here; the only show on television appears to be safety PSAs about wearing helmets in the hangar, and the voice of the actress getting hit in the head by a falling wrench is such a perfect blend of peppy and monotone that it's anxiety-inducing.

Mac slips on a robe and the rubber slippers they were all outfitted with - under very emphatic warnings about athlete's foot - and pokes his head into the hall. No doors, just open rooms and the sounds of sleep rolling out of a few of them, the snores and grunts and thoughtless farts and sleep-talking grumbles. Mac doesn't know which room to go to. The irony is that being surrounded by open doors to thirty-ish other people is much more lonely than sharing an apartment with one.

Well, no preference just means that if the first person he wakes up in cranky, he can just try numbers two through thirty-whateverish. He pops into one of the rooms and pokes the sleeping figure in the bed, who surely won't be alarmed by a guy is his forties letting himself into their room and waking them up with a: "hey, you awake?"


3. ON THE RUN

When he tells people about this later, he's going to say there were forty chairs, and that they were basically thrones. Maybe electric chairs, a bunch of forty - no, fifty - electric chairs, like some nightmarish Fantasia crap with the broom. He has to be flexible with the details here; it's hard to make "nearly killed by chairs" sound badass. Especially when it's a pack of just three folding chairs yapping and snapping at you when you're barricaded in a supply closet.

He made the fool decision to try and crack the door open and make an escape, and he nearly lost his fingers for the trouble. He's pretty sure he's going to have to do that thing with the tape and the popsicle sticks Charlie did to him when he got his hand stuck in the schoolbus door, way back when - but home first aid is contingent on actually getting out of this supply closet. He slips the handle of a broom between the door and the doorframe, trying to spear one of the folding chairs like a fish.

"Yah! Hah! Get away, you little bitch!" The broom handle makes clanging sounds against the folding chairs, but the chairs only seem to take this as a grievous insult, as they redouble their snapping and crashing into the door. Mac pokes a squirt bottle of cleaner out and sprays one of the chairs, which doesn't appear to do anything either. "Help! Someone help!"

It's less than dignified to shout for rescue like this, but at the moment Mac doesn't care. On account of the deadly chairs.

2

[princesspower]

Adora isn't exactly a light sleeper, but she doesn't sleep heavy either. She's spent years sleeping on an uncomfortable little pad in a room full of other people and occasionally had to try and fight people for rations or who knows what else. And for a while she was sleeping with a knife. So when Mac prods at her, she jolts awake and her fist comes around automatically in a punch and a battle-cry.

Some things haven't changed. Especially since she's in a new, strange, hostile place, full of unfamiliar faces and incredibly on edge.

Sorry, Mac.

[morebetter]

Honestly? He should have seen that coming. The actual consequence, not the first itself, which just moves crazy fast.

"Aah!" Mac instinctively showed down on Adora's leg, where he was tapping her, while bringing his other hand to his face to cover the sudden spray of blood from his smacked nose. She didn't break anything, but she certainly swatted him hard enough to bring tears to his eyes and a red coppery splatter from his nostrils. He clots the bleeding with the edge of his robe, becoming dimly aware of how this all looks.

"Oh, come on!" He tugs at her mattress to flip it, because that'll improve things a bunch.

[princesspower]

Someone is holding onto her leg. And screaming. Which isn't what you want to hear when you wake up out of a dead sleep and hit someone in the face. She can vaguely feel a splatter of something warm and she's still trying to get herself oriented, right as he starts tugging at the mattress. She flails and latches onto him as she gets tipped.

If she goes, he's coming with her.

She's also still screaming.

They're probably waking up the whole hallway.

[morebetter]

So now they're both on the floor, both yelling, both flailing around in the dark. The door that doesn't lock keeps swinging into the wall as Mac tries to untangle himself from her clutches and from the mattress half on top of him.

"Get off me, bitch! I wouldn't have come in here if I knew you were a chick!" Mac isn't really listening to how incriminating that sounds, because he has other things on his mind, like trying to find the light. He paws at the wall until it flashes on, which means lighting up not only the room but this whole section of the hallway.

[reydacted]

You'd literally have to be deaf to sleep through the commotion that's happening in the rig right now. Rey hears the scuffle and it makes her bolt out of bed. She's not sure what's really happening but it can't be good.

She doesn't even bother with her slippers, just jogging barefoot down to the source of the noise and now light--

"Oi! Hey! Stop that!"

Both of Rey's hands jut out in front of her, and some unseen force is tugging on both of them, trying to pull them apart from each other.

1

[cachedout]

Cayde is playing the how-much-crap-can-I-get-away-with game. He's not sure if he's winning, or what winning would look like. Mostly, he's just seeing how far wandering while looking purposeful will let him get.

The company doesn't like him, and a lot of people here seem to be giving him a wide berth. They don't have exos here, or even the non-exo frames that fill out a lot of the Last City's workforce. He stands out, he's memorable and anybody who sees him would be able to place him here later, but it also seems to give him a kind of buffer that people don't like to cross because they don't want to deal with a robot man, especially a robot man that looks like he just fought a robot bear. He supposes he'll take this mix. It's not like he has a choice.

He's quite deep into pencilneck territory when he runs across another guy with a new hire badge, doing... something.

"...They put you on janitorial already or what?"

Re: 1

[morebetter]

"What? Oh, no, I'm starting a trash fire." Mac dumps a wad of post-its into the wastebasket as calmly and matter-of-factly as if he just announced he were taking a stroll or reheating some coffee, an underlying, generous and misguided sense of 'it's a good idea, want in?' burbling beneath the surface. It's the surety not of someone who's never wrong, but of someone who never sits still long enough to appreciate what having been wrong means.

It's also someone who isn't taking the time to truly, deeply, meaningfully process that they're talking to someone clearly not human. It's not that Mac doesn't notice, it's just that, well, he can only keep track of so many concerns at a time and this entire experience has already filled slots one through twelve in his dozen lanes for concern, and "this dude's a robot" doesn't quite pass muster to overthrow "where the fuck am I?" and "who's going to tell me what's going on?" and "where can I get a drink around here?" and "when do I go home?". It's something Mac intends to put time and thought into L A T E R.

"I'm just trying to set off the alarm so the secret emergency exits light up. I've been stuck down here for hours, dude." It's been about twenty minutes, but Mac hasn't owned a watch in years. As with money and transportation, Mac's made an adult habit of mooching his sense of time from the people around him.

"You got anything that'll get good and smokey? Or, dude, do you have something that lights up in all that..." He gestures at Cayde's entire body. "You have a cigarette lighter or something?"

[cachedout]

"Oh, huh."

The casual delivery means it takes Cayde a second to process what this guy just told him, and he has replied before it hits. It's just so given, like starting trash fires to find exits to buildings is something you do.

He's rounding that corner and opening his mouth for the wait, what? when he gets caught upside the head with the question.

"No." He's more bewildered than offended, really. That takes longer. Should he be offended? It's such a new stupid question to be asked that he has to decide, and he decides that yes.

"What do I look like?" he blurts, posture opening up and gesturing at himself in an echo.

[morebetter]

"Like you might have one of those car ports that you can plug phones into or set a fire with." Mac makes a clicking sound and a hand gesture like he's talking about a handheld Bic lighter, which just confuses the imagery further. It's clear he doesn't see why his question was ridiculous and thinks, in fact, Cayde's response is overblown and actually a little rude. Like look, dude, you clearly look kind of like a Subaru. "Ah, whatever, forget it, I'll find something."

He takes a ream of printer paper and starts ripping and crumpling pages, because he's well aware of what kind of things burn in a trashfire and knows you have to separate the tinder out, give the flames more room to breathe and spread. Otherwise you just end up with little whispers of smoke and useless sneezes of sparks, which are neither fun nor effective.

"You could help out, you know. Unless you know the way out, that would simplify this whole project out a lot." Although he'd be a little sad to abandon this project now.

[cachedout]

Before arriving here, Cayde had just been through a lot. This morning, he went through an entirely different breed of a lot, but there is something about the absurdity of this particular situation on the tail end of all the others that just makes some of his gears stick.

You know, metaphorically.

"Of course I know the way out, I just got here. You can nix it on the smoke signals."

[walkingballpit]

He hasn't been on the Rig long enough for being nudged awake to be alarming. Robbie's been living with teams for ages - waking up to trouble usually involves alarms blazing, people shouting to get to the hanger bay, accusing each other of using the last of the coffee without replacing it.

'Are you awake?' is much more mundane. You awake? I got late night pizza. You awake? I think Suzie's going to breakup with me. You awake? I can't shake this bad dream. He will always wake up for you awake.

So Robbie sits up, expecting Brainy or Doreen. He blinks owlishly at the too large frame silhouetted in the door. His first thought is Kaine, but no - too small. He cycles through the shapes of his friends and teammates as he rubs his eyes clear. The guy's way too old for all save the Avengers, and mercifully, he's not them either. It's no one he really knows in this or any other universe, but he thinks he saw the guy in a hallway earlier. "Yeah, kind of. I'm going to need the who what where when why and hows."

[morebetter]

Oh, good. Mac's nose is still smarting and starting to go red from being punched earlier when he, equally benignly, tried to wake someone with a much more pronounced startle response. Still, the first thing Robbie says is way too fast for Mac to put together. "Huh?"

This isn't a particularly planned request, just the guileless, undirected wandering of someone who hasn't slept without at least one friend in easy reach since childhood, so the barrage of questions goes about a mile wide. There are no whos, whats, wheres, when, whys or hows, there's just: "I don't know, dude, I couldn't sleep and your door was open. I figured if you were awake we could go try and break into the mess hall and find out where the good snacks are."

Nothing bonds people like a scheme, in Mac's opinion. Even people he didn't like to start with and continues to despise become friends through a good scheme, a break-and-enter or a roleplay where they pretend to have authority or a public theater performance or some other friendship-by-fire of transgressing the rules and making poor decisions comprehensible only to the participants. So Mac figures if he's going to meet people he wants to continue spending time with, he should give them something to do together, and that's what he comes up with.

"I'm Mac. Who are you?" with all the etiquette of a tractor in a dining room.

[walkingballpit]

He isn't sure how he'd been unclear, given that Robbie is the one who just woke up. Rolling it over in his head - nope. He definitely made sense, and they're both speaking English. This isn't his problem, but for the stranger in his room.

"You... couldn't sleep," Robbie begins slowly. His left eyebrow is creeping higher on his forehead as he digests this new information. "So you thought you'd wake up a rando - hi, I'm Robbie. Nice to meet you - and then you and me would break into the mess hall, the one that belongs to the people who basically implanted Tasers in our necks, just so that we could - "

He breaks for the air quotes for effect. "'Find out' where the good snacks are. For future reference, I'm assuming, because I know you're not actually suggesting that we compound breaking-and-entering with theft because, and I can't stress this enough, there are shock collars in our necks, Mac."

This is starting to make Robbie doubt reality. Like... there is a level of stupidity in this story that's either a sign of a truly terrible liar, or else this is someone who's going to need to be babysat to make sure he doesn't bring the pain on the entire crew by pissing off the conglomerate. It's a joke, right? This is one of those Japanese prank shows where the "floor" falls out from under you in an elevator.

[morebetter]

Mac gets a sinking sensation that maybe he didn't luck out this time, and he's ended up rousing some rule-abiding nerd. There are worse categories of people than nerds, but Mac isn't sure if there's any class of people as straight-up boring as nerds.

"Bro, I thought of that. The sandals we get for walking around at night are rubber, they'll ground us and stop the electricity." There's a eye-rolling confidence that's bulletproof to the point of condescending with the way Mac says that, a complete and utter lack of even a scintilla of doubt that the world works the way he thinks it does and, failing that, at least works to his convenience. Robbie's attempts to jog him into sensibility by repeating his own idea back to him doesn't hit the mark at all.

"Look, if you're going to be weird about it I'll just go find someone else to go break into the kitchen, but I don't know, the next person I wake up might be upset and cranky." He gives Robbie a look in the dim light like it would somehow be Robbie's fault if Mac were forced to go harass some other poor soul. "By the way, it's not theft if they were going to feed it to us anyway, it's just early-birding."

[walkingballpit]

The thing is, Robbie isn’t capable of dealing with this kind of wantonly ignorant accidental anarchism. He’s perfectly capable of innocent rule-breaking, when the stakes aren’t as high, but this rush to make a shitty situation worse makes him want to pull the covers over his head and belatedly feign sleep.

But Robbie, too, has always had a certain compulsion to poke things. Sometimes, he even dabbles in pushing buttons. Ignoring this much idiocy isn’t in his nature. He can’t help himself.

“That isn’t how electricity works, dude. That is literally the opposite of how it works, because the slippers are going to keep the current inside your body.” Robbie swings his legs out of bed and sits there, staring incredulously, because it just. Keeps. Getting. Worse.

“You can’t keep waking people up until someone agrees with you! Who does that?” He can’t let Mac head off to break into the kitchen with whatever stupid schmuck he talks into helping him with his Fox News safety sandals. Dammit. Robbie stands up and pinches the bridge of his nose. Fine, he’s involved now. “Let’s just go see if there’s any open, sanctioned, late night break room or something. Your munchies can wait til mañana, and FYI: even with that logic, it’s totally stealing unless you’re eating breakfast food and you skip breakfast in the morning.”

He slips on his own rubber sandals and gestures to the hallway. “Come on, if we can’t find anything better, I’ll kick your butt in suey.”

3

[scavengineer]

A plunger, tied to a length of twine, hits one of the chairs and sticks there.

With the twine anchored to the chair, the crossbow-armed mouse on the other end of it runs in and starts wrapping it around the legs of chairs. They're tangled up together in short order and unable to move without stumbling over each other.

"You can come out now," Gadget says, "the chairs are a little tied up at the moment. Or a lot tied up, actually."

[morebetter]

Mac wasn't expecting Gadget as his savior, and he very much is the type of person to look a gift horse in the mouth. When he finally pokes his head out and sees the...person....who's rounded up the chairs with a crossbrow, his reaction is an automatic:

"What the shit?"

[scavengineer]

Gadget's eyebrows furrow in slight confusion.

"Was I unclear? I may have been unclear. The chairs are tied up. Literally, I mean, not in the sense of being busy. Although I guess they are busy being tied up."

The cursing seemed unnecessary, although perhaps understandable. Humans, for the most part, couldn't understand animals. Suddenly hearing one talk to you had to have been at least a little distressing.

Pondering this, Gadget had the strangest feeling she was forgetting something. There was something she was supposed to do. What was it?

"Oh, right. Introductions. That's what I forgot. Hi, I'm Gadget. What's your name?"

[morebetter]

"Uh...Mac." No, she was not unclear. This entire situation is unclear, in that it feels like one of the weird dreams Mac has when Charlie talks him into huffing turpentine instead of good old glue and gasoline. This is a scenario with violent folding chairs and a talking mouse going all Robin Hood on them, and Mac's ability to accept weird needs a moment to calibrate.

He's taken it all well so far. He's not about to stop that now.

"I totally could have done that. Incapacitated them, I mean."

[scavengineer]

"I'm sure you could have," Gadget says cheerfully.

She is pretty sure he couldn't have, otherwise he would have. Bringing that up would probably be rude, though.

"It's nice to meet you Mac. Need any other help?"

2

[bringinghopewithme]

The attempted poke doesn't land before Bunny twists in his bunk and grabs Mac's wrist in midair, pulling him just slightly off balance.

He is not a deep sleeper even on a good day, and no day on the Rig yet has been a good day. Footsteps outside his door wake him up all the time. Footsteps coming into his room had him tensed to strike, snaring whoever was encroaching with the thin blanket he and his fur coat dont need -

Fortunately Mac revealed his identity by speaking and Mac is just too stupid and uncoordinated to dignify with any more of a counterattack than just a wrist grab.

"Who said you could come in here?" He questions in a hiss, sliding sharply to his feet in a defensive crouch atop the thin mattress. "You trying to get your face kicked in?"

The one time he doesn't just hunker down in the garden ....

[morebetter]

"Jesus, dude! Ow, stop, that really hurts." Mac jerks to pull his wrist away and rub it, not injured so much as just surprised, dismayed and ticked-off. What is with everyone here and being a world-class asshole when they're woken up? That's a privilege Mac tries to reserve for himself and his mom; he doesn't like other people laying claim to the right to get defensive and fighty when roused.

"The door's open, dude. There's a floor-wide," Mac gestures with both arms, as if at every one of the rooms and all its denizens, "don't-bother-knocking policy. If you want privacy, just put some caution tape up or something."

He knows he's heard the bunny speak before, but somehow it's still always a trip that the guy 1) is a rabbit and 2) sounds Australian. Nothing against Australians; they're boisterous and charming and down to wrestle alligators, after all, and it's less individual Australians and more the concept of Australia that's riddled with poisonous spiders and jellyfish that shoot harpoons and shells that spit acid. The combination of looking adorable and sounding like a dapper rogue gave Mac what he realizes is now an incorrect assumption that Bunny would be a chill person to shoot the shit with while waiting for the sun to rise.

"You don't have to be a bitch about it."

[bringinghopewithme]

Bunny lets Mac go but doesnt move out of his defensive crouch. "I dont have to be a what about it?"

He has low expectations that linguistic boundaries are going to mean anything to someone who doesn't see the inherent boundaries in 'I'm sleeping, in a room, that's not yours, and I dont know you,' but they're still his boundaries to reinforce. He makes a mental note to find some of that caution tape, whatever that is.

[morebetter]

"A little bitch. It's not like I broke in and started clubbing you with a bat or something." He steps away from Bunny, giving him a guarded look. "Do you know if these people have a suggestion box? Maybe they could hand out Do-Not-Disturb door placards so this kind of thing happens less."

'This kind of thing' being 'Mac pissing someone off by wandering into their room', which is clearly not something in his realm of control whatsoever.