dualisooc | TDM 002. WELCOME TO THE JUNGLE.

» 01. I LIKE TO PARTY AND BY PARTY I MEAN NAPS.

Look at all of these bright, shining new faces! There’s even a few less bright, less shining faces, but hey, this city welcomes all types. Chances are, if you’ve just arrived, you're seeing some pretty crazy things, unless you're used to an eye-blinding amount of neon, robots, weird-ass technology, magic, and an omnipresent police force...and hey, if you are, congrats, you're gonna settle in juuuuust fine. But for the rest of you, the Head knows this has gotta be pretty overwhelming, right?

Well, since your quaint individual processing units are probably having a hard time, why not link up with another one? By which the Head means...

Hello, new citizens of Dualis,
and welcome to your monthly Network Adjacency Protocol~!

NAPs are a monthly community networking event similar to the Earth concept of speed dating! Two citizens (new arrivals and old hands alike) are placed at a table together with a handy cue card of queries to help break the proverbial ice. Ask queries and receive results, or ignore the card and yeet yourself straight into a brand new friendship! But don't be too shy, you've only got ten minutes together, and if you just sit in silence for the whole ten, the Network Admins are likely to come supervise and try to repair the uplink through a mild shock to the ol' central nervous system. You might find yourself saying all sorts of unintended facts about yourself if that happens...probably better to just make friends, right? Who doesn’t like friends?!

This month’s event is held at the brand new RoCocoa Cat Cafe, a sparkly new establishment that caters to children and the young at heart with iced and hot cocoa drinks of all kinds, delicious pastries, age-appropriate live music, and of course many friendly kitties who love to lounge in laps. The cats are of all shapes, sizes, and colors, including some who may look a little different from what you expect, or may look like an ordinary cat but are actually anything but ordinary underneath that adorable fur coat. All cats in the cafe are adoptable, of course, for those who meet a new furry friend and just can’t bear to go home without them!

So pull up a chair, get to know your new neighbors, and enjoy a sugary treat or two with the resident furbabies. You might just meet your new two- or four-legged best friend!

» 02. TO TAG OR NOT TO TAG, THAT IS THE QUESTION.

Welcome, one and all, to a long-running time-honored Dualis tradition: the annual city-wide Dualis Marker Tag Competition! For this entire month, all participants who accept the challenge will be given a marker and set free to tag any other participant in the city by making a mark on their skin, while attempting to avoid being tagged themselves. Careful, though - the ink marks last a very long time, so you’ll have to wait until the competition concludes to wash everything off.

Markers come in all colors, even fluorescent, glitter, and glow-in-the-dark, and you can use however many markers your inner child’s heart desires. These markers will leave marks even on people who have chosen not to play, but you can easily purchase an armband, headband, or similar accessory that says NONPARTICIPANT if you so desire. Marking nonparticipants is considered extremely bad form and wins you no prizes, but "misfires" do still happen sometimes. It’s usually considered polite to offer a mistaken nonparticipant that you’ve marked a small reparation, like coffee or a more adult beverage.

Safe zones do exist! Any establishment can put out a sign that marks it as such - signs in shop windows, chalkboards outside bars, and the like; many do this, just to keep the general chaos and injury/property damage liability down. Tenants of private residences typically agree that their spaces are also safe zones, but that's up to y’all to hash out.

Have fun! And maybe try not to put anyone’s eye out, yeah?

» 03. TRICK OR TREAT, TRICK OR TREAT, THE BITTER AND THE SWEET ...

Looks like the Head’s been clued in to the quaint alien custom known as trick-or-treating. Is today Halloween? Who cares! You get free candy! Free candy for you, free candy for you, everybody gets free candy!

And rather than make citizens work for that free candy by traipsing around in costumes, the Head’s decided to cut everyone a little break and just have bowls of wrapped sugary delights placed strategically throughout the city. You never know where you’ll find them, or what types of candies the bowls will contain - chocolates, of course, and jellybeans and hard candies of every flavor you can think of, and treats you’ve probably never seen before now. Ooh, is that a snoobloo-flavored truffle? Only one way to find out! Eat it.

The treats are not poisoned or otherwise dangerous, but some do have a trick up their wrappers. Candies may cause temporary side effects: minor appearance changes, enhancing or reducing senses, sudden mild development of extranormal abilities, or loss of control over abilities you already possess. Some sweets are just regular treats and produce no effect except maybe cavities, if you don’t brush your teeth. Effects will remain until another candy is consumed that either induces a different effect or nulls the current effect and simply tastes nice. Enjoy!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Yeah. [She sasses. She can think of a lot of reasons to get to know her. But they're all based on her high self-image of being particularly resourceful. It's a legitimate self-image, she's very skilled. Just not so much at fighting and her mouth tends to land her in trouble when she starts back-talking people.] But none of them based on the fact I'm particularly personable. Seems like you're pretty much the same there, champ. But hey, it's ten minutes for a cup of coffee.

[And conversation with a bunch of braindead furballs. There aren't any cats around where she's from. These things are weird.]

[She fiddles around with a pair of fingerless gloves.] Should I at least get a name or should we call it even and I just keep calling you 'Slick' or 'Buddy' or whatever verbal tragedy I can hit you with.

Probably spiked.

[There is no evidence that the coffee is, in any way, spiked. But such is the nature of Poison's paranoia. Almost everything here, from decor to animal to fellow coffee-goer, is earning itself a wary glower at the very least, though Poison has yet to advance beyond the hostile sneer they've got going on.]

Party Poison. [Paired with a lift of the chin emulating an undeniable sense of self-importance. Pity that the name means fuck all here.] You? Or should I just call you Lizard Lady?

Sure. Been called worse. My name's Doc Yewll. [Doc is usually less personal than her actual first name.]

Well, I'll tell you if it's spiked. There's a pretty good chance I could survive it, unless they messed with that too. I hear they do that here.

[Though to her knowledge she's not been functionally decreased. She's sure she'll find out she if she is at the most inconvenient time possible, though. Screw it. Bottoms up.
She'll take the risk for the sweet non-apocalyptic caffeine.]

[Doc, huh? Don't look like anyone who's got a legit medical degree. That's just fine with them. Most doctors, where he comes from, are the sort that prescribe you a fistful of meds to deaden your emotions and mute your world. Maybe she's a doc the same way Death Defying is one, which don't seem likely but is really the best case scenario.]

Don't seem bothered.

[And that, too, is worthy of a certain level of suspicion. But that could just be Poison getting their paranoia all over the place.]

[It's probably that.]

[She is a scientist, but not by degree. By making. Which is more complicated than anyone cares for. Indogene are grown for their jobs and she's no different.]

I think you're confusing 'bothered' with 'surprised'. I'm bothered, I just don't have the energy to waste shouting about things I can't help at the moment.

[A light shrug.]

I can't think of a single good kidnapping scenario. This could be worse but a guilded cage is still a guilded cage. Plus, I'm a scientist, and it's my guess that if there are experiments going on, we're sure as hell not caged as pets. So. I hope that sets your mind at ease.

[See? She's bothered. She's just also kind of exasperated.]

Prefer my cages to be honest about the fact that they're cages.

[Poison's mind is never at ease, as a general rule. There's a whole new authoritarian structure to topple right here, and what's he doing? Sat here, stuck here, having a conversation over fucking coffee that they refuse to drink on principle because he don't eat or drink anything that they didn't see made in front of him.]

[Anonymous coffee at this too-twee, too-weird place makes the top of the metaphorical list of things that they don't have any reason to trust.]

Just 'cause you don't see it happening doesn't mean it ain't happening.

Oh no. You're not wrong. I was being sarcastic. [She clarifies.] We're not pets. We're lab rats. And I mean, it says as much on the tin. Even if the language is a bit, "Welcome to the place you weren't invited to didn't want to show up for to engage in oh-so-fun activities that relate to plagues".

[She remembers what it was like during the war. The reason she doesn't have a wife anymore is because even for something with a brain as neatly structured as theirs, her wife couldn't compartmentalize what their 'lab rats' went through.]

[She takes a sip of her coffee.]

I'll let you know if my blood starts boiling. So far, so good.

[I drink juice when I'm killing, says a line in a song in the back of their mind.]

'Cause it's fuckin' delicious? [Manages to torque it into a question rather than a complete non sequitur. Not used to being stuck in some strange place where he ain't surrounded by family, by people they know and who he don't have to explain a damn thing to.]

Plagues. [It don't sound like a question, but it is one - just couched in flat repetition to mask the fact that they don't wanna admit that it's a thing he don't know.]

Well the handy dandy info I got at the front desk of the place that spat us out was that there was a plague a long time ago. So this Head has been grabbing people with helpful DNA to try and cure it.

But it's long gone. That's the problem with plagues. Only naturally formed immunities work as cures. So unless he's talking some gene therapy- which I doubt, since I don't see a lot of humans consenting to being loaded up with alien DNA -I think we're getting taken for a ride.

[She's turned Indogenes like her into human replicas before. So she knows it can be done. But yeah, Humans are pretty big on the whole purist thing, she's noticed. They even seem iffy when consentual interspecies fucking creates hybrids, very well unwilling augmentation. They're a lot like Castithans that way.]

[Eh, whatever.]

The coffee's actually not bad though.

They ain't puttin' any of their genes in me.

[A low snarl that approximates a threat, albeit a misdirected one. Don't kill the messenger, Poison. She's the one person here giving you the information you're tacitly requesting.]

Sure. [Poison, they don't trust like that. He will take her damn word for it, but they still ain't touching any of this shit.] Sounds t'me like this place could use some shakin' up.

I figured that would be the answer. [Both that he didn't want to be the part of some immunization project, and that he wouldn't want to sit and wait. Call it a hunch. She's never met a being with hair that red that hasn't wanted to start a riot.] Be careful. You might wanna check how brutal the party poopers are before you throw a kegger.

But hey, if you can handle it? Go for it.

[If someone insists on live fire testing, she'll happily sit back and observe and try to figure out how one deals with this shtako.]

I kill all the parties.

[That's the name of the game. Party Poison. Pouring poison into their fuckin' water walls, bleeding out all the corruption from the uppermost echelons of society. Society - back home, it was easy to tell who was responsible for the sum total of human suffering in the modern age. Here, not so much.]

[It's an authority, though, and it don't seem to have people's best interests at heart. Could probably all benefit from a little more recon on that area before committing to tearing it down from its very foundations. Sure as hell don't mean Poison's gonna trust it, though. Not any of it.]

What're they gonna do? Kill me?

[Snort. As if death ain't a foreseeable consequence. As if death ain't a thing he's looked in the face before.]

TDM 002. WELCOME TO THE JUNGLE.

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