tushanshu_logs | Can you feel the love tonight?

Entry tags:

Can you feel the love tonight?

Characters: EVERYBODY
Date: 14 February
Location: Anywhere
Situation: It's VALENTINE'S DAY! Flowers, candy, love notes, dancing, and dates... Maybe you don't have Valentine's Day on your world, but plenty of the foreigners do, and those who have found love on the turtle will be happy to tell you all about the holiday. Some of the more enthusiastic foreigners may even try to play matchmaker with their unattached fellows...
Warnings/Rating: Lovey-dovey nonsense, smooching, romance, and maybe people getting a little frisky. It is Valentine's Day, after all. Further warnings will be added if anything gets really steamy.

No plans for the big day? Feeling a little lost? Well, why don't you:

• Build a snowman together! Embrace your inner child.
• Give your lover a big box of... chocolate? Well, there's technically no chocolate in Keeliai, but maybe a kedan confectioner can whip you up something close enough. Or if you're feeling adventurous, you could go to a candy shop together and experiment with the local sweets.
• Go dancing and engage in some pan-galactic cultural exchange. Teach your partner one of the beloved dances of your home universe, like salsa, or the foxtrot, or the electric slide.
• Baby, it's cold outside. Maybe you should stay in for the day. Cook a meal together, light some candles, drink the most expensive alcohol you can afford, and take some time to appreciate each other's company. Nothing says "romance" more than fancy wine and a candlelit dinner for two.
• What better excuse to take a chance on romance? Ask out that person you've had your eye on.
• Set up your friend. You're satisfied with your relationship or lack thereof, but somebody you know is pining, so get out your bow and quiver and cupid wings and find them a potential sweetheart. What's the worst that can happen? ~~Don't answer that.~~
• No date? Grab a friend and go out to a fancy dinner with each other to celebrate Singles Awareness Day. Platonic love is important too!

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"Well I don't know about that. Your hint about prime numbers was what led to my solving his puzzle. Don's mathematical progression puzzle wound up being much more complex than the simple substitution cipher that had been broadcasting on the radio, the one that hints at something important relating to Kerro Rarris.

"Now, however, I'm trying to work on these glitches appearing on the console. I'm convinced its not just a glitch."

She showed Sokka some charts she was working on on her phone.

"This one seems to be a bit more insidious."

"Wait... you mean I actually had the right idea with that thing?" Sokka exclaims as he grips the table with a little bit of annoyance. "Man, he must have felt pretty bad about himself after that. Now if only I could have knew that weird language, I might have actually went and solved it myself."

Yeah, that's a way to get Sokka on your side. Stroke his ego... even without having stroked his ego entirely.

But Sokka takes a look at the charts before him, and immediately he starts nodding. "Oh yeah, I've seen these shapes on the consoles. Flashing in a pattern. It... wasn't something that I could make heads or tails out of right away."

"It's not completely random; each sequence starts with a different shape, but two of the sectors end with the same one. Fire and Water sectors both end with the Orange Hexagon, Earth and Wood both end with the Red Square. Each sector leaves one of the symbols out. It means something, I just don't know what."

She signs and starts to put her phone away.

"Anyway, I have no idea if it has any relationship to the Kerro Rarris puzzle. No one knows anything about blue eyes, or a caldera."

It's at this point that Sokka just starts thinking about the puzzle in front of him, not really concerning himself about the other bits. "I don't know anything about Kerror Rarris or blue eyes or a caldera, though someone else here might. But as for the shapes..."

He pulls out a pen and takes one of the napkins from the table and starts drawing on it. "So there are these six shapes, each of them coloured differently, right? And each of the five sectors are missing one of them." He leans back against his chair and taps it against his cheek a bit. He might actually leave a small blue mark accidentally once. "If the puzzle is related at all to the previous one, then it might just be letters again. So that could mean that the message is five words with five of your English letters... OR it could be a single five-letter word by taking the symbols that are missing and somehow replacing them with letters."

"Hmm, I hadn't thought of that angle..."

She looked at the numbers missing shapes. "Orange Hexagon is the only shape that isn't missing from any of the sequences. But if its a substitution there are far too many possible combinations without being able to use a large text for frequency algorithms. There are no repeating numbers in the sequence."

"But..." Sonja follows Sokka's lead and starts charting out everything.

"Fire and water have only a two letter difference."

Thanks to certain linguistic limitations, Sokka has no concept for how difficult of a scenario he's suggesting. He's used to tons and tons of symbols that pictorially describe words, not these abstract symbols that don't mean anything by themselves. Frequency algorithms are beyond him; he's merely suggesting the possibility.

And so with Sonja's analysis, he does frown a bit; she'd be much more the expert at that than he would be. Though the second conclusion is rather striking. He peers over at the analysis of the symbols again, and he sees things in a much more different light.

"Well, that's not the only thing. The second symbol in each of the five sequences is one of two different symbols. Which seems significant enough for me, but I wouldn't know exactly what that might mean."

He just keeps thinking about it, not sure where else to go. "Unless somehow the symbols are referring to sectors of the city. But then that wouldn't really give you enough to really say anything. If they're not letters like they were the last time, I'm kind of stumped."

"Hmm, the sectors - give me a second."

Sonja messes around a bit and shows Sokka the resultant graphic.

"No, no it doesn't tell us anything. Unless you see something that I don't."

Sokka looks at the blinking images, but then there's an immediate frown. "This just makes me see different combinations of symbols now!" he says almost dejectedly. "Like this one here... with three stars and two crosses that appear at the same time. But if they're not letters, then... I don't even know where to go."

"Hmm, maybe we're trying too hard to find a code, when what we should be doing is finding a source," Sonja said.

"Who manages the consoles in Keeliai? I saw metalworkers installing consoles in the Hotel. Do they control the entire network?"

Sokka looks a the code for a little bit longer before he just gives up and pushes it all away. If Sonja didn't think that there were words in it, then maybe, just maybe there weren't actually words in it. "Well, if it's not a message like last time, that's certainly another possibility. Though you'd think they'd be a little bit more obvious about it.

"As for who controls the consoles," Sokka says with a bit of hesitation before coming to an awkward stop. "Actually, I don't know. I mean, obviously a lot of them pre-exist the whole Dreaming episode. I'm guessing originally that the Emperor had some amount of control over them, since they were the ones to install consoles into all of our Emperor-provided apartments. But now... seems a good guess since the Emperor isn't really around?"

Sokka leans back in his chair, placing his hands at the back of his head. "Still though, if we're looking for a source, shouldn't it be much, much easier to just pass a note to someone while they're not looking? Why go through all of this clandestine complexity just to tell someone that he or she loves someone? And if it were the owners of the consoles doing it, wouldn't it be obvious that it were them sending the message?"

"No I don't think its a message to one particular person - or if it is, the person sending the message doesn't have an easy way of controlling the message being sent.

"And its not the owner of the console that would be sending it, its the owner of the network - the infrastructure that binds all consoles together. The brain of the network would be a Server - a very large slime computer that controls all of the slave consoles. If the emperor was in charge, would the Server be in the palace? Or was it contracted out to the metalworkers? A question for Zanru, perhaps. Something Zanru wouldn't lightly admit to owning, however, especially if the metalworkers are the ones sending the message."

"Okay, so maybe a message sent to an entire group of people? To coordinate things? Something that we're not supposed to be able to break? Because it's not in a language we can even read?"

Sokka almost looks put out by that. It's such a disappointment if that's the case. But still.

"Well, I... don't exactly know. It's not like I've ever bothered figuring out how these... things work, just how to use them. It never seemed relevant at the time." He still just looks at Sonja, a little bit dubious about the whole thing. "But still, even if it was a message sent to a whole mess of people, why does the message even change depending upon where you're at? Wouldn't that defeat the whole purpose?"

"Not coordinate, I think...

"See, let's think of a few scenarios: if it was one person sending a message to another person that knew where to look and was expecting to find it, then the message would play for a very short time, and that would be it.

"Instead, we have a message that's been playing for days, weeks even. That implies that whatever this message is, there's either a lack of control or a lack of certainty on the part of the sender or the receiver.

"Scenario one: The sender has control of the message, but doesn't know who, or where the recipient is, or when the recipient might see the code.

"Scenario two: the recipient is known, but the sender has only partial control of the message - perhaps enough to broadcast it, perhaps in a flawed or limited way, and therefore it is available to more people than the intended recipient.

"Scenario three: both are true. This last case could be called a 'message in a bottle' scenario - the sender is sending a message with the hope that someone can solve it and come to their aid or solve a problem they cannot. In this scenario, its possible there is nothing to translate; the irregularity itself is the message. An incentive to find its source."

Sokka frowns at this at he mulls it over. He taps his fingers against the desk as he absorbs all the information, just pondering and seeing what's likely.

"Okay, well that is all well and good. Pretty likely, though I can't help but wonder if some of those options are less likely than others.

"The second option seems iffy to me. We've already got these things," Sokka says, holding up the radios. "I doubt we're the only ones that can make these since all these were from Stark Industries before they got taken over by the Metalbenders. So I don't see why we can't assume that they'd go to some... very elaborate mechanism of transmitting a message when they could do it so much more simply... and keep the world clueless that there even was a message!"

He scratches his chin. "I'd say that the third option sounds less likely as a result of that, but I wouldn't think that would hold water either. Unless they were trying to prevent certain people from hearing about it first. But it's been playing for so long that... if they still need the problem solved, it's clear that whomever they want to solve it hasn't. Which means they haven't been successful yet except perhaps in keeping their enemies from discovering it. Still possible... but it just... feels wrong."

"The most likely scenario is that this really just a glitch in the console systems. We're operating with the assumption that something unlikely is occuring.

"But I think we've reached the boundary of what we can figure out just idly speculating. I think I'm gonna make a meeting with Zanru and find out what she has to say about the consoles and the shapes."

Sonja silently wished that other metalworker wouldn't be around. She regarded Sokka.

"Was there something you wanted?" She recalled now that Sokka approached her, and the consoles were a subject change.

"That's probably not a bad idea, in all honest," he says in reply. Though really, his heart isn't into his words. Because really, he's still chewing on the earlier bit.

A glitch in the console systems...

A glitch...

That wasn't a possibility that Sokka had thought about. Nor was it an idea that he really wanted to think about. The previous message hadn't been just random happenstance. Why would this one be random happenstance?

It's only after she speaks again that Sokka is pulled out of his sudden focus and left blinking at Sonja with a bit of surprise.

"Sorry?" he says before suddenly his brain catches up, having subconsciously processed the words she had said. "Oh oh oh, right. I... I guess I was going to say that... well, you're not as bad a gal as I originally thought you were."

"Oh! Well, thank you," Sonja said. How bad of a gal did he think she was?

Well, first impressions were admittedly coloured by a smattering of things that definitely undercut an entirely positive impression, but...

Even he had to admit that he was wrong.

"So... I don't ordinarily do things like this," Sokka says, somehow looking a little uncomfortable in his own skin, "but would you (ahem) be interested in having dinner tonight? I know it's this Day of Love thing and all in everyone else's worlds, and I'm not really interested in doing anything for it specifically, since I've got a girlfriend back home and all, but...

"But it seems better having dinner with someone else than dining alone."

"Day of love...?" Sonja pulls out her phone to check the date. Valentines day! Shoot, she hadn't bought any courtesy chocolate!

"How embarrassing, I never remember these things till they've already snuck up and bitten me," she says, smiling wryly. "Dinner sounds like fun, but certainly you can find someone to have a platonic dinner date with that you actually have a positive opinion of?"

Edited 2015-03-04 21:07 (UTC)

"Don't look at me," Sokka says with a bit of a shrug. "My world doesn't have any sort of holiday like this, though maaaaaaybe I should introduce it back home when I go back." He chuckles a bit, kind of joking how he should have a reason to celebrate love.

"As far as someone better, well, the kedan are pretty much off limits, and there are only a handful of Foreigners who are girls, and a good half of them are already in relationships, one of them is a robot, one is my sister, and most of the rest of them probably would say no or otherwise not be interested."

There was Alayne, and he would jump at the chance if he saw her, but as of yet, no such luck...

"So I figure, might as well spend the opportunity getting to know someone that might actually be a nice person better?"

Sonja actually laughed. She hadn't laughed in awhile. It felt good to laugh.

"Okay. Did you have a place in mind?"

Sokka actually hadn't expected that laugh. He hadn't put an intentional joke in there, so if there was something funny, it was something entirely... unintentional.

But he'll take it. Making someone laugh always ended up being its own reward, really.

So Sokka's inevitable response is to smile. The situation could be far from worse. "Oh, I've got a good place in mind." To be truthful, he didn't entirely. There were a few decent places in mind, but he hadn't been in the habit of taking girls out to dinner here that wasn't somewhere that totally catered to his own palette from home. "How about, what, six o'candle? I mean six o'clock... is how everyone else says it. Meet you then?"

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Can you feel the love tonight?

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And then fade to black?