strangetrip | [GP/EP] We are programmed to receive

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[GP/EP] We are programmed to receive

Fifteen days into this particular strange trip, Kitty had redistributed alcohol supplies between the cafe, restaurant, and night club to make it possible to easily tend bar wherever people decided to gather. Today, as most days, she settled into the lobby cafe after chivvying the cook into chicken tenders and french fries (after convincing him it was a single plate meal). It was the closest she could get to "bar food" from him and someone would probably arrive sooner rather than later to make something else.

A few people trickled in after awhile, but none of them demanding. Like her, they drank coffee from the samovar she'd put out. And also like her, most of them had something else to keep them occupied. At the moment, Kitty had a notebook open (from the gift shop; she kept her school notebooks separate in case she made it home during the term) and was sketching plans to upgrade the hotel's computer technology. She needed more raw computing power to work out the energy requirements to do what Illyana did with a thought.

She lifted her head periodically to check for new customers, and had just seated herself at the end of the bar after refilling the samovar when the first new new customer arrived. Immediately, she flipped to a fresh page in the notebook and headed it "Day 15" and made a hash mark for one new arrival. Then she looked up from her notebook and offered one and all her best bartending smile.

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She pushed away the circuit board and motioned for him to take a seat opposite her. "I'll explain it as best as I can. I mean I don't have a lot of answers, yet, but I can at least answer some of your questions. Here is the Madonna Inn. I can't tell you how you got here, because we all were like you, one place one minute and here the next. Uh, at least I guess that's how you came here. If you came differently that would give us a new theory to work on."

Madonna Inn? That was new. What planet was he on and how were they blocking communication?

"That's how I came. I was in Old Town and then in the desert. Where is this? This isn't Westerly." He had no idea if he was on an uncharted planet or moon or wherever the hells.

"Nope, not Westerly." Abby shook her head. "We're all guessing that it's California. At least that's what it looks like out there, but I guess it can be any place that looks familiar." She was aware that there were a lot of different realities at this nexus.

"My working theory is that it's a nexus of time and space. Though I'll admit that doesn't explain the kind of kidnapping part. Not that there's ransom or anything which is why I said kind of, but it does sort of feel like a kidnapping or I guess a yanking."

A nexus he could understand, though the time part of time and space not a lot. Neither did California but he put it down to an area of the Quad he didn't know about. "Yanking is a pretty good description." He didn't notice a containment fence but that didn't mean the people here weren't infected by the mood control technology. Maybe here at Madonna Inn it was some kind of poisoning in the food or water.

"So no one here is a native? Everyone got - yanked?"

"No." Abby started and then paused, "well actually, I don't know. The front desk clerk and the chicken cook aren't very talkative. I just assumed that they'd been here always. The longest anyone has been here, besides the few staff, is about three weeks. We all came from different places. I'm from the DC area. They'll have a room for you and there's food." She motioned over to where some people were eating and back toward the kitchen area. "Though, it's alot of chicken. There's beer and other alcohol if you want it." She smiled slightly, "trust me, that helps a little when you're trying to first adjust here."

"Alcohol always helps." Johnny agreed with a slight smile. He wasn't sure if it would help him at the moment, beyond analyzing it. Which brought his mind back to the circuit board she'd been working on. "I don't suppose you have any more equipment like that around here, do you?" He could build something to communicate to Lucy with it. Though on closer inspection, maybe not.

"No." Abby shook her head sadly, "there isn't a lot at the hotel." She crinkled her nose, "and it's really old tech like this. I mean sure it's only about twenty years old but a lot happened in that twenty years. Man, I wish if I was going to be stuck someplace it would be at least closer to when there was Wifi and Internet was everywhere."

He assumed that Abby was stuck because she hadn't tried to leave, or was inventive in finding things to steal to leave.

"Wifi and Internet?" They were foreign concepts to him but he assumed it had to do with computers and circuit boards.

"Oh you must be from a place that doesn't have those or you call them something else. Well wifi was a play on words for hi-fi which is an old fashioned music player. Basically it lets computers talk to each other without wires or connect to the Internet without them. Since you don't know the term Internet that probably won't help you." She grinned at him, feeling like she was explaining things to Gibbs.

"Think of the Internet as this great big highway that lets computers talk to each other and visit places you can't go in person."

John was sure that his jaw had dropped open at that explanation. That was archaic. He knew computers had wires but long before there was AIs and ships. Hundreds of years. What kind of ass end of the J had he been transported to?

"Uh,yeah, we have what you call wi-fi. I talk to my computer a lot." He meant that literally, but he was gauging what kind of technology Abby was used to.

"I know, right? No a lot of people get that. I talk to my computers all the time." Abby agreed easily. "I even joke that I want to marry my Mass Spectrometer and have little Mass Spec babies." If it was physically possible, she probably would.

Johnny chuckled at that. Something that he didn't think he was capable of any more. "You know until recently I would have said the same thing about Lucy. My ship." He didn't bother hiding anything since he was still under the impression that he was on a distant moon somewhere.

Abby had been in the hotel long enough and seen, if not met, enough people to know that there were different worlds, different times and different realities. However, she hadn't met anyone that had a ship, that she knew of. She was also pretty sure that it wasn't a ship on the seas type just from how he was talking about her.

"What kind of ship is she?" There was curiosity in the technology but also if he'd mention more.

"Lucy is a small class spaceship but she can outfly anything out in the Quad." Johnny said with a lot of pride in his girl. "I'm going to miss her." There was truth in his words as he spoke of Lucy.

"Oh my god, that is so cool!" Abby began to get excited, or technically, more excited at the prospect of a space ship that wasn't connected to NASA. "So you're a pilot or does Lucy fly herself?" There were probably a million and one questions but she also realized that he would have more questions about his situation. "And what's a quad?" That would at least take care of some of her curiosity as well has be a good segue into the present situation.

Johnny was about to answer about Lucy when he was blindsided by the question about the Quad. "Uh, you've never heard of it?" Now, even if she'd been on the backend of a far moon, everyone knew what the Quad was.

"Well sure I know that quad stands for four or there is a quad at universities, but hardly anyone would call them that. Besides you made it sound like a place big enough for your ship to fly and college quads aren't even close to that big." Abby began, "but I can guess maybe it's made up of four planets?"

"Four planets is close enough. Please tell me that you've at least heard of the RAC and Killjoys." Even if by some weird shit, Abby had been in a cave on the other side of the J Cluster, she had to have heard of the RAC.

"The Warrant Is All?"

"Yeah, no idea. I mean sure I know about warrants, I'm a Forensic scientist but that's not what you meant. Look this will be easier I think just to rip the band-aid off. It was for me. The hotel is out of space and time. We don't have a lot of answers to all the questions that you have but we're working to figure it out." Abby nodded toward the bar. "Alcohol helps but it's only temporary."

"The hells!" Johnny couldn't stop the word from forming if he'd tried. "I'll take the temporary fix. And you're saying what, that we're cut off from everyone and everything?" Which at the moment was not a bad thing for him, but hells if he would accept it. It was one thing to take off so what he'd done didn't touch Dutch it was another to be taken.

"Let me grab a couple of beers and I'll be right back." She didn't want to tell him the answer to that question without a beer handy for him. It didn't take her long to get the bottles and return. "Here you go and yes, that's what it means. At least for the time being, we haven't figured out a way to reverse whatever it was."

"See? News is never good when you preface it with, it needs a beer." Johnny took a really long drink out of the bottle. "This just proves my point, but it does help and I'm going to guess from your reaction earlier there aren't AIs to help with this."

"No, but that would be so cool if we did. Sorry about this, but we're kind of stuck in 1990s Earth." Abby said sympathetically and pointed toward what she'd been working on. "Stuff like this. it's not very advanced. I mean for it's time sure, but now, not so much."

Johnny felt the muscles in his hand go slack and he almost dropped the bottle. He'd heard about Earth but in an ancient astronomy class that he'd failed. What the hells is this? He looked into her eyes to see if she was lying or crazy or both but didn't see any indication of it.

"1990s? That's ..." John was having a hard time wrapping his head around that. "A very long time ago for me." Was all that he could get out.

Abby could see the shock and reached out to pat his arm. "I know, it's a lot to take in. And if I had to go back a long time I would have freaked out way more than you're doing. But on the bright side at least we have indoor plumbing and technology, such as it is."

[GP/EP] We are programmed to receive

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