test drive meme

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Test Drive Meme The Pan Pacific Defense Corps was usually offered any of a variety of local buildings to set up their testing centers. For reasons of access and availability, most testing clinics were set up in central areas for any given community. Those of the PPDC staff on hand vary in their personal intensity. Some of the men and women wearing Strike Group insignia seemed overly serious, to the point of frowning with intensity at some of the youngest checking in for this testing round. Those from the K-Science division are tight with nervous energy as they direct prospective cadets through various activities. Everything was meant to measure potential, looking for that spark that meant they had somebody who was Drift Compatible. The majority of people were turned away after the first series of seemingly random tests, officials looking in eyes, placing odd looking contraptions over heads, asking for people to play a series of short games, one even in a virtual reality set-up.
	( SCENARIO ONE ) If you are still here now, you've made it past the first cut. You'll be sat down in a room with the rest who have made it this far, then systematically led into smaller interview rooms as pairs. If you came with a partner, they're your first interview candidate. If you came on your own, all your interviews are random assignment. All who have been asked to stay are required to sit through and conduct a series of short peer to peer interviews. The questions are straightforward. What is your least favorite color? Which tool in a standard toolbox is most useful to you? What time of day do you accomplish the most? Do you have children? What do you believe the Drift is like? Peer to peer interviews last for half an hour to an hour, and each person is asked to participate in at least three peer-to-peer interviews. There is no punishment for going off script. There is a one-way mirror looking into each interview area, and one door leading into the room with a small panel of glass located on the door. There is a clock on the wall in each room. The time they report is odd, when examined. These are not digital clocks, but timers, counting up time since the last Kaiju attack.
	( SCENARIO TWO ) Congratulations! You have been judged Drift Compatible, and sent home to pack after giving a definite yes to the Pan Pacific Defense Corps. The next thing you face down is the flight into Santiago, Chile, and the subsequent drive in to Valparaíso's Shatterdome. You and the rest of the crowd of soon to be PPDC Ranger Cadets have been gathered together to wait for the old bus scheduled to take you to the Shatterdome. While waiting in the open air, those from any Northern Hemisphere countries may find the summer weather strange. Today's high is going to be in the upper 80's, and there's not a cloud to be seen that's not clinging to the distant mountains. Welcome to Chile. When the bus arrives, it's another hour ride out toward the coastline to get to the Shatterdome. Even better? The bus Air Conditioner is broken. Safe travels, Cadets!
Please set up your own scenarios as you like. The above two scenarios are suggestions. Anything goes!

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[paperbacks]

"Don't take it personally," Tenpou snorted, amused by the boy's serious demeanor. "Statistically, the vast majority of candidates will fail out of the Ranger program before they ever see the inside of a Jaeger. Still, anyone willing to even try to become a Ranger is probably crazy enough to be natural PPDC material. Ah, careful with that," he cautioned, tilting his head towards the precarious stack of old pizza boxes. "That's an extremely delicate experiment in progress."

He lead the way towards a rack of bright yellow hazmat suits, each made from a thick rubbery material supposedly guaranteed to resist a Kaiju's highly corrosive internal fluids. "Put one of those on on. Gloves and face shields are on the top shelf. I need an extra pair of hands to help me transfer a sample of Kaiju testicles - well, we think they're testicles, anyway - to the scanner. They're a bit slippery!" If the expression on the boy's face when presented with the chance to touch an alien's massive decomposing glands was anything other than pure scientific delight, Tenpou chose to ignore it.

"Hm... what was your name again? Su... Suga... Sugar?" He hadn't run screaming from the lab yet, so he name might be worth remembering.

[bushidork]

"Sugane Tachibana, sir." As badly as Sugane did want to run screaming from the lab, he was well aware that his comportment in all situations had a bearing on his advancement in the Ranger program. All he could do was grit his teeth and gingerly make his way over to the hazmat suits, carefully inspecting the rack to find one that at least looked like nothing (or no one) had died inside it. It was a shame that there was no way to put the gloves on first to avoid touching the rest of the suit. He probably would have tried to figure it out if he wasn't certain that Tenpou was watching and evaluating his every move.

"Don't you need to wear a suit as well, sir, or..." Or was he going to be taking care of the...the testicles all by himself?

[paperbacks]

"Tachibana..." Tenpou gave a bemused nod and committed the name to somewhere in the vast, disorganized library of his mind. "Japanese, then? I'm quite fond of your anime and manga! I bought Shounen Jump every week when I was stationed at the Nagasaki Shatterdome."

He watched Sugane struggle into the hazmat suit as if he were observing some interesting alien organism being swallowed by a rubbery, neon yellow foe. The suits were safe enough, having been power-washed with disinfectant and heavy-duty surfactants after every use, but the boy's efforts to avoid touching the equipment were both amusing and probably a good survival trait. After all, if he did become a Ranger, he'd have to carefully avoid exposure to both Kaiju toxins and the radioactive dangers of the Jaegers themselves.

"I'll be manning the robotic arm from the workstation, so I should be fine," Tenpou continued, gesturing to a large mechanical apparatus next to the sample tank. "Your job is simply to make sure that none of the attached ganglia fall off. And, well, if they do, try to get them off the floor before a lab supervisor notices. They're still good. Five second rule, you know?"

[bushidork]

To his credit, Sugane didn't scream. He may have squawked a little, but it was easy enough to muffle it. Hopefully Tenpou didn't even notice. But...five second rule? They weren't going to eat them. Though judging by the semi-dissolved state of a few of the takeout boxes, he felt that he probably shouldn't rule that out as a possibility for Tenpou.

He took a position next to the sample tank, his arms awkwardly held at his sides, and tried not to look too hard at the specimen. It wasn't that it frightened him. After all, he was going to have to get used to Kaiju soon enough, it was more that he wasn't how he'd react if it decided to look back at him. It wasn't the most rational fear, but it would certainly reflect poorly on him if he were to start screaming like a little girl, a tendency he knew full well he had.

"Is there anything else I need to know, sir?"

[paperbacks]

"Sir? There's no need to be that formal. 'Ten-chan' is fine." That was a drop of several levels in formality, but Tenpou didn't seem concerned. His ever-present cigarette dangled from his lips in defiance of lab anti-smoking rules as he sat at the command console and began typing. The sample container was taller than himself or Sugane, so a large industrial robot took care of releasing the catches that secured the metal lid.

"And don't worry - you're doing great! Experience is the best teacher, you know." For a moment, Tenpou almost sounded like a competent mentor... and then he opened his mouth again. "Or at least that's what they said on Dragonball. I'd advise that you try not to die quite so many times as the characters in that anime, though."

[bushidork]

"Understood, sir."

Sugane wanted to point out that it wasn't some sort of Japanese cultural obligation to watch Dragonball or read Shounen Jump, but he'd never speak in such a way to superior officer, especially not to one in a position to drop a tank of Kaiju bits on his head. He'd long since given up, anyway. Saying he'd been raised on tokusatsu usually just drew blank stares and when someone actually did know what he meant, it was like they attached like barnacles that wouldn't detach until they knew his exact opinion on Showa versus Heisei.

Considering the toxic materials he was going to have to be dodging, that really wasn't a conversation he wanted to having at the moment. Instead he just watched the sample warily, not really certain what else to do unless pieces fell off.

[paperbacks]

Unfortunately, Tenpou had already latched onto Sugane. Diligence and sobriety were traits that Tenpou did not himself possess, and so they were therefore a constant source of fascination. "I think Jump was at its high point during the late 1980s and 90s, really," he mused out loud. "Did you know that Saint Seiya is still popular here in South America? I like this country already."

Despite his wandering attention, he manipulated the robot's controls with surprising dexterity. A three-fingered metal claw snagged the bulbous mass of grey-blue alien tissue and lifted it free of its ammonia bath as if it were nothing more than an oversize UFO catcher prize. The overpowering vapors were largely handled by the lab's powerful air filtration system, but the smell was still strong enough to sting the eyes and throat. Tenpou didn't seem to notice, though. He let the sample drip over the tank for a few moments before he slowly began to transfer it to the bed of what resembled an oversized MRI scanner. A few unidentifiable fibrous blobs broke off and hit the floor wetly.

"Just scoop those up and throw them in the scanner!" Tenpou ordered gleefully. "Now you can tell your friends that you've seen a real Kaiju up close - or, well, bits of it, anyway. Isn't science cool?"

[bushidork]

Sugane tried not to think too hard about just what it was he was picking up and carefully lifted the blobs one by one and put them on the scanner. Up close, the smell was a little bit too much. The combination of ammonia and Kaiju bits well past their expiration date was going to be burned into his nostrils for the rest of the day, possibly longer, and he wasted no time retreating from the scanner and the tank once his task was finished.

"Anything else, sir?" He wasn't going to call him "Ten-chan" and he wasn't going to be giving his opinion on science at the moment. It was pretty exciting, actually, getting to handle pieces of a Kaiju, but the excitement was overridden right now by the smell. Maybe if he could retreat a bit and watch what Tenpou was going to do with the sample, he might find it all a little more enjoyable.