ximilia | ✨ XIMILIA TOWN HALL MEETING ✨ ( video/audio/action )

✨ XIMILIA TOWN HALL MEETING ✨ ( video/audio/action )

[ some morning in the middle of the week, during their return to the station, an invitation will be taped on the door of every orber. though the calligraphy would suggest this must have been typed on a computer and printer, each invitation is actually very carefully hand-written and reads as follows: ]

[ the idea is for everyone to meet in the mess hall at the intended time, but if some choose not to attend, the meeting can still be accessed by the earpieces, allowing all orbers to watch or listen in and contribute however they wish, no matter where they are.

however, for those who do decide to attend, the mess hall features a full display of bagels and donuts, along with plenty of fresh coffee, all to help everyone wake up and feel refreshed for the meeting that's about to take place.

a makeshift little stage, arranged by stacking together a few metal boxes is at the center of the room, atop of it being the one and only rita farr herself, with a bright optimistic smile. when she sees enough people present and settled, she speaks up, loud and clear: ]

Hello, everyone! Welcome to our first Annual — or monthly, or however we decide to do it — Town Hall meeting! Thank you all for coming and please enjoy the food to your heart's content. For those who don't know me, I'm Rita Farr. Now— though my name does appear on the invitation, this is hardly about me. This is about all of us.

After our ... last mission, it became quite clear that our group could use a bit of improvement with how we approach our next missions moving forward. And I thought the best way to plan for that is to allow all of us an opportunity to discuss how we all feel about what we've done well and what we could do better. After all, everyone deserves a say in this, right?

[ she points behind her where a giant board is on display on an easel, once again, hand-written with careful and precise calligraphy in giant letters: ]

Here, I've written some sample questions we can all try to offer answers to, but the floor will also be open for any other questions and suggestions that anyone might have. Remember, there are no wrong answers! We're all here for an open forum discussion. But before that!

[ she reaches over to the board, pulling it off to reveal another one behind it. this one reads as follows: ]

Please consider the "Keys to Success", not only on our missions, but as we talk together in this room right now. We'll go ahead and take turns either stepping up here on the stage or speaking out from wherever you are. There are no microphones but the earpieces should get your voices out to everyone. Now, who would like to start?

( this post is open to all! the idea is that everyone is taking turns in each thread to speak out to the entire group (whether from within the room or from elsewhere), but thread-jacking and hopping around for discussion is the key here! feel free to run wild with ic suggestions or questions regarding mission layouts or planning or whatever floats your boat (ic complaining/protest is always an option too). though rita is organizing it, it's open to whatever people are inclined to discuss. )

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

For the first question, I think we should discuss things ahead of time, and organize ourselves. If nothing else, knowing who's familiar with advanced technology, and who has enough magical skill to identify any devices or forces we find would be very helpful.

I think that in general, we should trust the people of the worlds we visit to understand the problems they face, and their likely solutions, better than we do, and assume they are acting in good faith until we have proof otherwise. If they say that resolving things peacefully is the best path, we shouldn't be violent, and if they say that they've tried nonviolent solutions and all attempts have failed, we should listen to them and make sure we understand why, before we insist on trying again. They're the ones who will have to live in the world after we're gone, after all.

And yes, there are going to be some exceptions to that, like if everything turns out to be an orb created illusion or what we thought was an afterlife might have actually been a space ship, but in those cases, what we need to do is realize that what 'everyone knows' isn't helpful, and pursue other means of investigating, rather than trying to find the right person to tell us the answers.

As for our approach to the orb, I think our first task should always be to locate it and make sure we know if it's in a bargain or not. If it isn't, we can just take it, although getting to it won't be easy.

[If it was, someone else would have already taken it and made a bargain.]

If it is in a bargain, we should approach whoever has it and try to understand what they want. If it's something we're willing to offer, we should help them- we might even be able to solve their problem without them making a bargain, if we're very lucky. Stealing it, or attempting to take it through force, must be an absolute last resort.

[Sabriel remembers Braccia, and she does not want to repeat that experience.]

[Rosinante turns up a few minutes early and finds himself a seat off to the side so he's not blocking anyone's view. He's got a cup of coffee to go with his cigarette, as well as a notepad and pen. As people talk, he's either taking notes or jotting down ideas of his own.]

First off, I do want to point out something everyone's mostly been doing well, which is communication. The earpieces make it easy, but it's still easy to forget. Update your teammates when things go wrong or right so we can make informed decisions. Sometimes there's not a lot of time to debate, we just have to make a call then and there. Outcome's best if we know what's going on elsewhere with other people, especially in large cities like the last one where it's easy to have no idea what's going on somewhere else in the city.

Now, with the last mission, I think it's been reinforced that we're visitors to these places. I've said it from the start, I'd prefer to leave these places better than we found them, but we do have a tendency to... cause problems. Not through bad intent, we're just a lot of people who aren't from these places. We have different mindsets, different cultural backgrounds, different priorities, and maybe it's best if we just focus on getting the orb and getting out. Even when that's hard, even when we want to help. We have to keep focused on the broader mission.

[Probably none of this is controversial at this point, right? Time to wait and see if there's still any dissent.]

That's a reasonable approach, if the orb is unclaimed, as it was in Viveca's world.

But if someone has it... We can ask them to hand it over, but often, those who have it have some goal they're desperate to achieve, and won't hand it over until they've accomplished it. 'Staying out of it' and 'Recovering the orb as soon as possible' would be contradictory goals.

And the one time we tried to steal an orb in a bargain... it was a disaster.

Edited 2022-07-28 18:55 (UTC)

Yes, and so working with them to achieve their goal still counts as getting the orb quickly and leaving. My point is that getting involved when it isn't necessary is a poor use of our time, and places us as well as the people on those worlds at additional risk.

On the last world, there was no need to side with the Fables and help them in their revolution except that people felt it was the right thing to do. We could have stayed out of it entirely once we had a lead suggesting the orb was under water.

And before anyone gets the wrong idea, I was in favor of staying and helping them remove their world's poisons, too. I still want to believe it was worth the effort, in the end, but it showed clearly that we probably shouldn't be doing that everywhere we go.

[Minimus arrives trying to hide his excitement, though failing as he takes a seat with a pile of notes and his personal datapad in his arms. ]

I first wish to thank Rita Farr for organizing this meeting in a timely and organized manner. [He stands while he speaks, his hands held together even though there is no slideshow presentation behind him.] I was worried after the latest mission that this sort of outcome was the norm, but seeing this discussion take place offers some hope that we can organize ourselves as the orb-hunting mission group we were gathered to be.

Now- [He reaches the datapad. The workings of a formal document pop up on the screen as he scrolls through his notes.] I was in the middle of drafting a sort of "guideline" document on how to interact with the native populace. I took some inspiration from my species' Code of Conduct, but that was written with Cybertronian action during wartime in mind. For those with experience in interacting with planets that may or may not have developed interplanetary travel, I wish to add language from your universe's protocol.

I wish to have this signed by the crew and submitted to Viveca before our next mission, or prior to the following, if additional reviews are to be held.

"Everywhere?" Would you say that this level of involvement lead to a positive outcome in the past?

[He hadn't been able to get opinions about prior missions, only facts, so this is one of the first opportunities to get a feel for subject measures of success.]

True. In that case, it might be better to agree ahead of time that it's acceptable to tell anyone who has an orb what their true nature and start negotiating as soon as we identify them, rather than putting it to a vote each time, often weeks after we've learned who has it. More often than not, we've had to deal with the orb being claimed, rather than unclaimed, and so far most of them have been willing to hand it over once their problems are solved.

As for last mission- I think you're ignoring the difficulties of getting enough people in and removing the orb without the government stopping us- could you imagine what might have happened, if they'd interrupted us halfway through and taken the orb for themselves?

Besides, I do not think we could have gone into that camp and ignored what was happening.

We haven't tried to be involved to this level before. There were those who took sides on Giva for their own reasons, and I won't suggest everyone needs to clamp down on their emotions and lock up their sympathies. But we still had people on either side focused on finding the orb, too.

Never before has most of the group apparently decided they wanted to work with one political faction to topple another when doing so wasn't related to getting the orb, and we certainly never stuck around for weeks afterward before. I don't think we even considered that a realistic option. I had asked Viveca about it before and she said once we had the orb, we would have to be immediately retrieved.

I assumed that allying with the Fables was our best option for getting the orb. We would have the numbers on our side to distract the guards while a team investigated the lake. It would be difficult to bring everyone with the power to purify the water or to enter the contamination zone via guard disguises.

[It felt like the obvious solution. Minimus does consider the obligation to join the rebels considering that it is the home planet of the ship's leader.]

I was also under the impression that taking the orb would bring us back to the ship. What changed this time?

No arguments from me over starting negotiations quickly. It seems to work in our favor once we open up and discuss with people.

As for the last mission and the government, we had options. Send people in who can teleport or make themselves invisible. Joining a revolution was pretty damn risky, in my book. A good way to get most of our team imprisoned or killed, if it had failed, and then how would we get the orb? We'd instead be here lamenting we hadn't gone straight for it and mourning our losses. We got lucky.

It was an option. I'm not convinced it was the best one, but maybe there's information I'm missing, and I should take back my comments about everyone keeping us all well-informed.

[He gives a wry little smile at this. It's true, after all, that he still has mostly no idea what happened outside the first couple of circles during everything that went down, but he doesn't blame the people out there for not speaking up over the network, since his impression is they were trying not to die.]

As for how we stayed, I don't know. I haven't seen an explanation for that. Viveca could probably shed some light on it better than I can.

Agreed. Lets put it to a vote before the next mission, and see if enough people feel the same.

As for sending in people who could teleport- didn't people try that in another camp and get captured? Every choice carries a risk of failure. Not that there weren't other options- we could have tried infiltrating the camp independent of the Fables, passing ourselves off as guards and prisoners.

But there would still be the risk of discovery, and there's no way we could have ignored the suffering of the prisoners. And to be honest, the Fables understood more of the world and had a better plan for handling the camps than we would have if we'd just gone in and reacted to what we saw.

... Honestly, I don't give a crap what everyone decides on in the end, as long as I can do decent work where I'm at... but I think people need to understand one thing: we're not removing these orbs from worlds 'cus they're only sometimes bad for the planets they're on. The whole reason we're extracting them in the first place is because they cause harm and feed on chaos. People keep talking about respecting the societies they're in by giving them the choice to use the orb, but that completely contradicts why we're even there in the first place. If you think they have a say in that much, then we shouldn't even be allowed to step foot on their planets to disrupt anything. We gotta accept that we're idiots immediately disrespecting these worlds by being there for the sake of removing something in their possession.

I get it, okay? 'Why do we get to use the orbs to fix things and they don't?' Well, for one, they did use the orb once before we arrived. And generally, it ended in people getting hurt, or screwed over. There's no safe way to implement the use of the orb on a planet, and we're there to ensure people don't use the orb on their planet. They don't have safeguards to use it like we do. We pay for our debts by collecting the orbs and completing goals. You've all seen how fucked up our payment methods can be, too; the orbs are just as cruel to us as they are to those people.

So I gotta say, from this point? I think we shouldn't ever allow the orbs to make choices. Because that's what it's gonna be, if we hand over the orb: it'll be the rogue orb, making a brand new shitshow for that planet to endure.

[He hesitates, because he doesn't want to talk about it. The incident wasn't very long ago, but he'd be a fucking moron not to admit where a large portion of his decision stems from. Sure, the other orb bargains, they were pretty bad too, but. But...]

... Hell, I don't have to be the one to remind you of what an orb's capable of without even having a deal in progress. [He quiets, biting his lip.] Most of you remember the fact that an orb sought out the genocidal aliens living in my head, right? They found the most violent member of our crew on that train, and they gave them a way to try to murder you all, just for the possibility of conspiring with them to make a new deal. One that would have ended in the total destruction of that planet we were on, guaranteed.

I can safely say, I don't even trust the orbs aboard this station, let alone ones that have been thriving on destruction all this time out there in the distant corners of the galaxy. At this point, I'll be honest — I feel trapped by it some days, and it's just something I live with now that I'm this deep in it.

... So, uh. anyway. Guess it doesn't matter if I end up outvoted on this someday, but. That's just my two cents. I'll try not to shriek about anyone else's opinion. I think we're all kind of tired of yelling over each other anyway.

Always risks, no matter what we do. Maybe it's just that I was surprised by how quickly people seemed to personally want to join them, and not just for the sake of the orb. Our efforts could have been focused a little tighter.

[But, shrug. It's the nature of gathering together a bunch of untrained, disorganized people who keep coming and going and trying to get them to do something unified. There's a lot they need to work on and talk about here today on how to improve all of that.]

Have you or anyone else asked Viveca why we were able to stay so long this time? I thought once we had the orb in hand we'd be brought back no matter what.

I think that's reasonable. However, there's one complication- we cannot take the orbs while a bargain is active, and they're frequently in a bargain when we arrive- it's what they do, after all.

So while the last two missions have involved unclaimed orbs, most of them haven't, and we need to be clear on what we'll do not just if an orb is unclaimed, but if it's claimed.

Many of us have seen suffering and injustice, and worked against it in our worlds. Expecting people to just sit by and watch while a group was trying to help stop that was bound to lead to disorganization.

As far as I understand? Because we recovered it without touching it, and hid it away somewhere others couldn't reach it, until we decided to leave. Physical contact seems to be what sets off the teleportation, so we found and exploited a loophole.

[Sabriel had been at the reservoir during the initial recovery effort, using an air bubble spell to help the orbers involve minimize contact with the water.]

[he reaches over from where he sits in his wheelchair to touch Newt's forearm in some show of commiseration.]

Given when you endured... You'd not be wrong to shriek. [but it's good of him to not. y'know. for the sake of everyone's ears.]

Your mistrust was earned. And...we have yet to see proof of anything better. Save for Giva. [and even then...there were costs. and that prompts a furtive glance toward wherever Yzak's gone and mulled about.]

Unfortunately... [he looks over with a sympathetic frown.] That just leads us all in circles. If-this, if-that... All speculation, even when limited data is given us.

There is...so little time to take in information...let alone prepare contingencies...for contingencies. Even...based on experience.

[he frowns at...............UH IS HE PEOPLE-SHAPED OR ROBOT-SHAPED....................well whatever HE FROWNS AT THIS PERSON.]

"Guidelines."

What does it say? More specifically.

True. Every mission has been very different, and what worked in Gyeonje would not have worked on the next mission. We're going to have to make choices with limited information, every time.

[Sabriel frowns.]

But... Still, based on what we've experienced, I think our first course of action should be to try to negotiate for the orb, if it's claimed. Most of the time, people who have it have been willing to hand it over, if we help them with their problems.

[Blue's not quick to speak up here, rather listening and trying to glean the temperature of the room telepathically from his wheelchair.

eventually, though:]

...I don't know...if I find...anyone directly in the wrong. For our faults. [besides himself of COURSE.] Unless the goal is to...compromise morals and means...to mold everyone's wills into a more singular form than what already stands...

Because unless we are given...more time, more detail...to plan. To study...before we make landfall. Then...much of what we do...can only be the fruits of our efforts in the moment, I think.

Is that...not what we have done? When it was viable. Or is that...not even incontention here.

The basis of the Tyrest Accord forbids Cybertronian technology from falling into the hands of planets that do not have access to it already. We avoid impacting the local societies and opt to be non-intrusive as possible.

[He scrolls to a second that outlines that in detail, in full legal language.]

Of course, there are exceptions, especially when the planet is in danger from another alien group, which in this case can be substituted by a rogue orb damaging their ecosystem, as we've seen in our last mission.

[...]

I don't believe...any among us had intention to be overly intrusive in the first place... What would additional guidelines provide?

There's been disagreement. Sometimes, people argue that whoever has the orb cannot be trusted, although they never offer a suggestion about what we should do instead. And instead of waiting, and having a vote about it each time, we should just negotiate as soon as we know they have it.

Threaded | Top-Level Comments Only

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✨ XIMILIA TOWN HALL MEETING ✨ ( video/audio/action )

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