Session 1

TBD enters the room on Hariette's heels, scanning corners, the floor, ceiling for anything that might be a danger. He's about to interject when she and Cass approach the figures, but by the time the words are starting to come out, they're already there, so he merely holds his ground a quick step away from his comrades.

"Trophies, you think?" he asks quietly.

Leda follows the others into the room with a small degree of trepidation which is quickly replaced by fascination. These beings if that's what they are appear harmless based on their lack of any discernible reaction to the others. She thinks that they might be engineered entities made entirely of alien circuitry. Now she is no longer concerned with how their group got there or why, and becomes entirely fixated on these creatures as she walks around them in a circle, tilting her head this way and that, examining them without touching them.

She too feels the mask might be of some importance but in what way she had no idea.

"Should we touch them?"

Cass reaches out, not touching but tracing some of the lines in the mask from a few inches distance. "I think this mask is spiritual in function, perhaps sacred to them. It would be unkind to take it from them."

She reaches into her pocket, retrieving her secret weapon. She spins it in her fingers; a touchscreen stylus.

"Maybe we're in a zoo."

"Mmhmm," Dayton mumbles as he makes a circuit around the space examining it for any irregularities or signs of surveilance. "Or in an IQ test. On our homeworld, humans once used to put rodents in mazes to see if they could figure out how to find a treat. Anybody smell cheese?"

"Are they statues?" Hiro says as he also moves into the room. "Or beings... caught in some stasis field? Be careful, ladies."

With everyone else fixated on the figures in the middle of the room, Hiro examines the ceiling, checks the room they just left, then moves to examine the new door.

Hiro. As all the group enters the new room safely, so do you but you glimpse at the previous room just before entering the new one completely. You realize that the dead man is no longer there. The room is completely empty, and just as you realized these the door shuts down with a loud thud. When you lay your fingers on it, you again get the feeling when you first done it, like the door displays a resistance under your hands, an uncompromisable feeling.

After the door shut down and you've all entered the room, without having time to process what was that, creatures start moving like somebody has unpaused them. They show signs of realization regarding your presence in the room and one doesn't need to be an academic to figure out the surprise on the woman's face or the surprise in their body language in general. Without having chance to speak to them (or them speaking to you) they vanish, without a trace, just erased from existence in front of your eyes, leaving nothing behind, like they were never there in the first place.

Mysterious events follow one by one, this time you hear the red door on the other side of the room opening, revealing another, much larger looking room from where you stand. It seems to contain lots of things but none of you can see it properly from your position.

Leda's analytical engineer's brain kicks in as she watches the strange scene unfold before them. "Could it be that we are caught in some kind of fluctuating time compression dilation situation?

She chews on her lower lip for a minute and continues in mid-thought. "And the creatures .... they weren't frozen at all. They were just moving very, very slowly. So slowly that their movements were imperceptible. Then time sped up again in a similar but opposite fashion."

Chuckling, fully at ease now, deep in the throes of theoretical science she adds, "We are stuck in an oxymoron!".

"We're here as friends--" and they're gone. CC narrows her eyes and looks around. Are they cloaked some how? But other things have changed too.

When Leda speaks, she turns and looks at her clever friend. "Is that possible? To freeze people and not others? That is pretty advanced. Perhaps we're dealing with a very technologically adept species, one that maybe exists in time differently than we do. That sounds like superstitious nonsense, doesn't it?"

"No, not nonsense. Not really. It could be oscillating. The time flow, if that makes sense. Fascinating!" Leda is clearly in awe.

"Maybe just because it's not my field, but interesting isn't the word I'd use. Horrifying? Anyways, how do we avoid getting caught up in it?"

"I'm not sure. If the ship is causing this effect then there might be a controller somewhere on the ship. We just have to find it. Failing that, you got me. The creatures themselves might be manipulating time to serve their purposes. But I have no solid answers."

"We might be in it already. We wouldn't know right?" Hiro says as he moves towards the other door. "We might be stuck in some slow-motion time trap ourselves..."

Hiro. You peek into the room and boy, isn't that a wonder? Compared to previous ones, this can't even be described as a room since its large enough to constitute a whole floor in a big building. The room is filled with stuff. Stuff like you've never seen before. Even the decoration of the room is different, compared to others' simple design this one seems like its carved by a sculptor herself. You see a table nearby, filled with all kinds of food, some of them making you think "is that even edible?", others making your stomach rumble. There are exactly five chairs around the table. Even the smell of the room has softened when you got closer, accompanied by a chilling sound coming so low that you could also have imagined. At the far end, there is another red room present, barely noticible because of the distance but your sharp eyes recognizes them with the help of the vibrant color. There are three doors to the right and two doors two the left, all of them similar to that smaller door in the first room. It seems like there are some letters written on each of them. You can only clearly see the closest ones to you, one on the left and the other to the right. The one on the right reads H.M. and the left T.B.D.. The room is lit with a sophisticated lamp with a complex edsign and in the ceiling this painting is present:

Cass looks around. She picks out the familiar initials on the doors. When she sees the painting, she tries to recall her studies of valuable relics from history.

Cass. The painting does seem familiar from one of your old studies. Though you cannot recall the name of it, you remember the painting being about something not even properly represented in it. As you inspect it a bit more, you remember that there is a figure in the bottom right, sinking to the sea. That’s what the painting was about, or rather the insignificancy of it as nobody notices it, continuing their everyday life.

Cass points that out. "This painting, I remember. This spot here is the main element, the rest of the painting obscuring the tragedy with overbearing mundanality. All in all, I take the prominence of this work as being A BAD SIGN."

"This shit just keeps getting weirder," Mandalesi mutters as they make their way into the next room. There's a lot going on there; it's hard to even take it all in with the doors and the food and the chairs and the ceiling mural.

"I'm gonna pass on the grub, but what's next you think? Keep going through these red doors, or try the ones with... our initials?"

Dayton steps through the room cautiously, trying not to be distracted by all the shiny things. Never take your eye off the ball, Theo. The words come back to him, along with the the recollection of the bean ball from his old man that followed. Still, sound advice, he thinks to himself.

Reaching the doors on the far side of the room, he says quietly, "Well, whoever or whatver it is that's doing this is clearly trying to communicate 'something' - whatever that might be. I'm leaning in to the idea of an IQ test." Turning back to the group he adds with a wry look, "Just wonderin' what the smart choice is here."

"I think Hiro is right. Anyone that has a personalized door ought to go in through it. So HM and TBD why don't you go see?"

Leda couldn't make head or tail of the painting. She never had time for art.