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[acroodawakening]

Display Name: Just Guy
Profile Photo: Link
Notes: Set before the parasite plot kicked off. Also, other than his display name that the Alliance helped him fill in, all fields in his profile that have to be filled in are filled in with keyboard smash and emojis.

[Apparently, he can't go home for a visit right away. Something something scientists having to do dimensional something. The people doing the things with their buttons and levers and machines have to work on it. That means he's going to be in desperate need of distractions over the next few weeks. So far, he's been watching a lot of TV and trying to find things on the internet. He's figured out the voice to text and knows what field in a browser will do a search. But he's pretty much wandering around the internet aimlessly clicking things.]

[Guy is sitting on the floor of his hotel room, with his phone propped up on a chair.]

[He's doing much better than he was the day a few people saw him in the park. For one, without the plastic-ey contoured Capitol makeup, his face has a lot more character. It's freckled and his skin is a bit more weathered than the average modern 22 year-olds'. It's skin that looks well traveled.]

[He's also wearing modern clothes, some harem pants in a bright boho print, a neon pink loose tank top, and a Hawaiian shirt that should not work with the clashing pants pattern but somehow does. He's barefoot. He's also gone ham at the craft store and made himself a beaded shell necklace and has a beaded hair tie on his topknot, as well as cloth and faux leather wraps for his hands and forearms held on with beaded leather cords. He also made a beaded hair charm with bone beads that is hanging from behind his ear.]

[God help him, but somehow it all works, if you don't mind way too much color and over-accessorizing.]

[Whatever is translating for them all isn't needed here for anyone that speaks English. Guy apparently knows it already, a hold-over from the last world.]

So I'm Guy. Uh, a little bit about me...

[He starts rattling off details like this is a dating profile.]

I'm a former nomad - as in, a hunter-gatherer - current farmer, on basically the first farm ever back home. I don't know my star sign, but the internet says it's very important on a profile-introduction-thingy so let's pretend I'm the kind that's a bull. [He makes a bull's horns with his fingers at the top of his head and then shrugs haplessly.] I know it has to do with months, but I kinda can't pick one because I don't know what month I was born, because we don't have calendars back home. We just...track things from full moon to full moon and pay general attention to the seasons.

I was in another world before this that, uh... that took me from home. [He looks a little anxious mentioning it and doesn't elaborate.] I learned a little bit about technology and future things there. Some of my friends were from other worlds too, also future places, and said they thought I was probably from what would've been very, very far in the past of their worlds. "Prehistoric," they said.

This future world is different from that one, so some of what I learned doesn't apply. So I have a bunch of questions, actually.

[He starts ticking them off. None of them are related.]

Someone explained the letters on a channel I was watching and... why is it called Music Television if it never has any music?

What are influencers? Like, who - who are they influencing? When I watch them on the tiktok I just feel a little sad inside because they want attention so badly. I don't feel influenced. Unless they're influencing me to feel sad inside.

Why is reality TV called that when it's nothing like reality whatsoever? [He does not like it. At all. His eyes go wider with something between mystification and abject disgust and his voice gets just a touch emotional, but he doesn't get carried away. It's just clearly a sore spot.] And what is with future people being so preoccupied with watching human suffering?! I remain disturbed.

[He moves on.]

Oh yeah, someone helped me find a civ-vics audiobook at a library and it mentioned something. So I looked it up. And when I did voice to text it showed a map and I still have no idea how it all works.

[He points his phone at the laptop someone talked him through buying to show...a map of the US electoral college. He turns it back to his face and the flat look he gives seems aimed at the entire country.]

Explain, please.

That's all for now. I'll probably have lots of questions on a regular basis.

By the way, don't type answers back. [He mimes typing with a phone.] I can't read so I can only do video and sounds. A librarian told me there's something that's like voice-to-text in reverse called a screen reader? But I still have to figure out how to get one.

Comments

Video

[demigoth]

I can’t help you with most of that, but most phones have voice-to-text and text-to-speech built in. I can show you how to turn them on. I use them for texting.

video

[acroodawakening]

That would be really helpful, thank you. In the last world I was in they put English into my head but we don't have writing yet at home. They didn't think I'd need to read so they didn't bother with finding a way to put reading in with speaking.

[demigoth]

[ Nico laughs, but not meanly. ]

That’s because English is stupid at spelling. You can get by without it.

Are you in Central City?

[acroodawakening]

Yes. I'm at the Tri-

[His brain naturally associates "big tower I live in" with Tribute Tower. Boy, he sure hopes to break that automatic association soon.]

Uh. The new person tower. Diadem.

[demigoth]

I know where that is. There's a park around the corner. Meet me there now and I'll fix your phone so it works like mine.

[acroodawakening]

Thank you! I'll be right there.

[He's fairly short but easy to spot when he arrives, what with that colorful clothing and those accessories. Since he was going out, he added neon sneakers to the mix and a belt over his waist made of a mat of feathers, faux leather, and faux fur.]

[When he spots Nico, he waves.]

[demigoth]

[ What he spots is pretty much the exact opposite of his style. Black jeans, black shirt with skulls, skull ring, Doc Martens, and a big old spiked belt complete with seat belt buckle.

But he does wave back. He's not too cool for a wave. ]

So your name's really Guy?

[acroodawakening]

[Guy nods.]

I know that's a word in English but I guess since it's one syllable it was bound to pop up again and be used in language in the future.

[He places his hands on his hips.]

Strange how it has the same meaning in my language, though.

[But maybe that was inevitable after enough time had passed.]

[demigoth]

It's more weird that English makes it "Guy" like a guy, instead of Guy or Gui?

[ Some things only work phonetically, Nico almost hits the French pronunciation and nails the Italian. ]

If they said it right, it wouldn't be so confusing.

dn: Otto Octavius | video

[doctopoda]

Don't feel bad. I'm only from about twenty years back, and I don't know the answers to most of those questions.

[He's not even on Tiktok to find out about the influencers in the first place! But really, this is fascinating...though he can be polite enough not to just launch into questions about prehistory.]

But that map is of the electoral college. It's there to cheat the popular vote, because our political system is fundamentally broken! [thanks that helped]

video

[acroodawakening]

[Guy points a finger at the camera and makes a clicking sound with his mouth, a gesture he picked up from a friend. What with not growing up somewhere with guns to know what fingers guns are and only being exposed to them rarely, he doesn't actually know what it's referencing.]

Got it. Good to know that's the same everywhere in the future. [Ugh, systems,] I'll readjust my expectations accordingly.

Now how broken are we talking? Should I expect public executions for people disobeying the ones in charge or no?

[There is a tragedy here. In someone so far from the past having any utopian visions of how the future might be better become utterly dashed. In making it so they think modern civilization was a mistake.]

[It was perhaps inevitable, though. The dawn of humanity was clan-based, community-based. Life in its future can be distant, impersonal. The world he was captive in took that to its farthest extreme. This world is better but only so much.]

[doctopoda]

People are the same everywhere, I'm afraid.

[An actuator, hanging over his shoulder, clicks its claws back! Otto ignores this entirely!]

No, no, nothing like that. They might arrest you and throw you in prison, depending on what you do, but things like that shouldn't happen here.

[Can't happen? He wouldn't say that. Of course these things are possible. But the public wouldn't just accept it, flock to it like an afternoon at a public hanging, and at least that's something? It sort of has to be something.]

[acroodawakening]

[Guy's gaze is briefly directed away from his phone. Distant.]

People are the same everywhere in the future. Not everywhere everywhere.

[He looks back at his phone.]

Still, also good to know.

[So far, this place has established itself as firmly "not as bad." Not great, but... different enough to be a slight relief.]

[However, some things are still confusing. And slightly alarming. Like, uuuh, whatever he's got going on there.]

Uh. A question, though. What - what is that? That is, right now, hanging menacingly over your shoulder?

[doctopoda]

Come, now. We didn't just start being born evil one day, you know.

[Slightly nettled! Not on his own behalf, so much, but there's so many good people out here trying their best. Lips pursed, he exchanges a glance with the actuator in question.]

That is...think of it like an artificial limb. Their eyes are better than mine, especially for screens.

[His glasses are tinted a little bit red in the light - unusual, but considering Guy just came from Hunger Games Land that could probably come off as actually a rather tame fashion statement!]

[acroodawakening]

[Guy doesn't think future people are born evil. He thinks they made a bunch of systems and social structure that reward it. But that is some heavy philosophical conversation and Guy's views on it are heavily informed by trauma.]

Also the tentacle is just infinitely more interesting right now.

Wait, so it's an extra arm and eyes? How does it work? It's attached to your body?

Are you the one moving it? Is it controlled by your brain somehow?

[doctopoda]

[Well, Otto would probably agree with all of that. But, anyway - ]

Yes, they are. They weren't intended to be permanent additions, but here we are. ["They", because - oh, look, here's another one.] I can control them consciously, but they also have A.I. - artificial intelligence. That's what's moving them right now. It helps them compensate more naturally for my own movements.

[Which is not the primary reason they have A.I., but it's a reason! Mostly, Otto doesn't love explaining the whole accident to strangers in the first place, and doing it when the other person wouldn't know what a nuclear reactor is just sounds agonizing.]

[acroodawakening]

Ey-ai. That's...

[He tries to grasp it but it's hard to understand when he still doesn't quite understand computers. Still, the words themselves are a clue. Intelligence but artificial. Manmade.]

[The idea is exciting.]

Does that mean they're alive? Or partly alive? They can think?

[doctopoda]

They can think, but not like you or I. They're very advanced computers, like these devices we're using.

[He's not trying to be condescending; he literally has no idea what has or hasn't been explained to Guy!]

[acroodawakening]

People explained computers to me. They have a language and if you write rules for how they act in their language, they do the things you want, right? Within limits.

[He's able to vaguely grasp it.]

I have something like your arm at home, but I had to use something alive.

My pet Belt is a sloth but he's smart enough to understand language. I usually wear him around my waist and he's always willing to lend an extra arm and hold things for me.

[It's a simplistic attempt at what Otto's done but a creative use of his environment and one that worked.]

But making that out of metals and computers... I wish things were far along in my time that I could try things like that.

[doctopoda]

[...wild, but he's in no position to question someone else's hyperintelligent sloth friend.]

Well, it isn't very common. This was my own invention, but devices similar to this are usually used if someone actually loses a limb. That's what I've been doing for work here - developing better prosthetics.

[acroodawakening]

[He smiles at that, at the thought of replacing a limb. It was rare that someone could lose a large limb and survive but he'd sometimes seen people (temporarily) survive amputations in the arenas because of all the doctors.]

[Fortunately, those that actually got revived usually got revived whole, but if they hadn't, an artificial limb would've been a wonderful gift.]

I invent things back home but they've mostly just been things to make it easier to survive. I like that there are some people that invent things to make things better. That's...that's what all the technology should be for.

[Because unfortunately, he's seen inventions that just made things worse.]

[doctopoda]

It should be.

[From his expression, it seems like Otto probably has some complicated experiences with that sort of thing as well! He does not elaborate!]

But what are inventions for survival, if not tools to make things better?

[acroodawakening]

[Guy's used to having his intelligence downplayed by now. Even the expose the Capitol had done, that played him up as someone dreaming of human progress, had emphasized how simple and "primitive" he'd been.]

[Having someone play them up, especially someone smart enough to make prosthetic robot limbs clearly means something to him.]

I guess so.

Thank you? Back home, I'm considered pretty smart, because of the things I've figured out how to make. I've invented lots of things?

But in the world I was in before here, sometimes people acted like I wasn't that smart, sooo...

It's kind of nice to hear that. I know things like shoes and camouflage and snare traps aren't that advanced by some worlds' standards but we're starting a bit farther behind.

[doctopoda]

Science is a collaborative effort! We like to pretend it's all the work of...lone geniuses. [it's fine he's not bitter] But we're always building off the discoveries and advancements of those that came before us. People from the future aren't inherently more intelligent, we just have a wider array of knowledge available to us from the beginning.

video;

[beatscissors]

[Prehistoric man meet seemingly prehistoric rockman.]

Ooh, I can answer one of your questions!

I play games online and sometimes people like watching me play and that makes me an influencer. If you have fun sometimes people want to join you and that's why you're influencing someone.

Re: video;

[acroodawakening]

You can play games online? Nuh uh!

[He has no experience with this. None. If the Capitol'd had internet games, he'd never seen it.]

[Guy loves games.]

What kinds of games? How do you get them?

[beatscissors]

I'm playing a lot of battle royales lately, put a bunch of players on a map and the last person standing wins. I'm not very good at it, but I'll get there one day. The internet has a lot of games and if you're new you get an infinite money card so I used that to buy them.

[And now he just asks Loki how to spend his donation money.]

[acroodawakening]

[Guy's expression flattens out when he figures out what a "battle royale" is from the context of "last person standing."]

[(Rock!bestie, please, he fought in the Hunger Games.)]

[Guy steeples his fingers for a moment, breathes in through his nose, then breathes out.]

Are there any types of games that aren't that?

[beatscissors]

[Korg thinks about it for a moment.]

Well, what do you wish you could do? I like those kinds of games because you can have everyone playing together and no one actually dies like in real life.

[acroodawakening]

Anything but that. I don't care if no one actually -

[Guy's eyebrows furrow.]

Wait, what do you mean by "in real life"?

Did you come from a place like that? Where everyone had to fight each other to the death?

[beatscissors]

If it was to the death all the time then you'd run out of people pretty fast and then the audience won't be happy. We usually got away with hitting each other a few times.

I had it easier than most because as you can see I'm made of rocks.