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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[protagerrant]

"Duct tape," he said immediately. "That's about as handy as I get."

It was just a fact that something was always falling apart in his old neighborhood, but anything more involved than hammers and screws was beyond him. He'd always joked with the old lady who'd raised him that he just wasn't a very constructive person. Trying to pick things in the two years after the kaiju attack on Telluride, he'd wished he'd been wrong.

He shook his head a little to clear it--was the whole interview going to be like this, constantly bringing his thoughts back to his hometown? He could blame that on the company, at least.

Still, he'd like to avoid it. He tilted his head, looking at the list without really reading it as he pondered his return question. "... What about you? Find yourself doing much home improvement around base these days?"

[doubleshot]

"I leave the home improvement to the ones with a talent for it." Andy'd never had the mind for domestication, and when it came down to being a handy-woman, she alternated between the wonders of the internet as a go-to manual and calling in the professionals before the situation escalated. Still, she allowed herself a halfway smile. "Usually all I need on hand's an Allen wrench."

Most of what she needed to do with her mountain bike needed little more than a few good hexagonal wrenches.

"The really impressive toolkits are what the engineering and maintenance teams lug around. I'm not even sure when they get around to sleeping."

Speaking of... "Would you consider yourself a night owl?"

[protagerrant]

"I think those are a little too big to be called 'kits'," he mused. "Definitely wouldn't ask one of guys to tighten the sink faucet." They did tend to carry around a lot of tool that looked like they'd hurt to be hit with, or have one 'accidentally' dropped on your foot.

He gave his next answer with the same immediacy as before. "Nah. I'm used to waking up early." Even before the academy, he'd liked running in the mornings.

The questions were starting to get a little boring; time for something new. "Are you here to participate in the program, too? To see if you can Drift with another person?"

[doubleshot]

"It's not impossible," she said with an amused quirk of her lips upward into a lopsided smile. She doesn't believe his question was any more serious than some of the ones on the short list. "Why else send half a Ranger team in to participate in interviews for a whole new program?"

She turned the half joke into a question right back at him.

[protagerrant]

"There's a lot of rhetoric about Drift partners comparing them to soulmates and stuff like that in popular media." He took a moment to shift, dropping his folded leg to the floor and bringing up the other to rest his foot on his thigh. "And even if the official literature discourages that view, you can't exactly undo years worth of movies and tv dramas and all that. The idea if Drifting with more than one person is practically synonymous with adultery to the general population." He paused, thencontinued in an easy drawl. "So it looks good to us wide-eyed cadets to see an established co-pilot going through the motions, even if nothing comes of it. Otherwise, you get the same mentality they have over at Alaska, where you hit it off with one person and don't look much further."

She could have been asking rhetorically, but just to be on the safe side.

[doubleshot]

She preferred his answer as it was. "Everyone needs to make the effort," she allowed, continuing to watch Yuri. "Which includes those of us who have made it to the cockpit." Those who still were piloting, who hadn't been in the Mach I's and suffered through the exposure to radiation causing sickness in so many of the original pilots in the Jaeger Program.

"All in all, not a bad guess. Though the story today's much more straightforward. Odd numbers in the interview schedule."

At that, she smiled.

[protagerrant]

"Or that." He shrugs, unconcerned. Now seemed a good a time as any to ask what he was really after. "You're probably sick of hearing questions about the Drift, but I can't help asking... Is it really just like that--" He snaps his fingers demonstrably. "And someone knows everything inside your head? All the embarassing childhood stories? I can see why people would want to do that with more than one person. "

Yuri wasn't generally a person who put a lot of thought into schooling his expression, but he did his best to look blandly curious. It was only a little undercut by the anxious tenseness in the way he held his body.

[doubleshot]

It isn't an unusual question. Andy considers Yuri while she contemplates what to say, knowing she can fall back on the stock options if she wants. They're the easiest, the kind of canned answers she remembers when pulled out in front of a live studio audience.

Without an audience here, she's more at ease. "Yes and no," she says at last. "The more you don't want something coming out, the more likely it will. So if you've got things you want to hide, they're the first thing your partner will know, and it's the make or break it of the deal. I'm sure you've heard stories about the blow-outs between friends, family, lovers? Drifting takes you and someone else to a place you've never been before. You can't lie, you can't fake it without the other person going along with the pretense. It's not easy. Being able to Drift with more than one person is even harder."

Yet that was the entire reason for the second Academy, one that was going to ask people to do the improbable. Not only do the improbable, but do it well.

"If that puts you off, I suggest you walk out this door right now. Unless you're looking to work within the PPDC, surviving the first three months of the Academy puts you on the line for exactly that kind of denuding in front of one, two, three other human beings. They'll know you, and you'll know them. Neither one of you may like what you see."

The goal wasn't to keep people who might take issue like that working together, not through all the testing and the observation, but there was always that chance. Even people who got along most the time would have falling outs under the right (wrong?) kind of stresses.

"But if you think you can handle that, then stay. The kind of people we need in this project are the ones who can hear all that and not immediately turn around and run for the hills."

She see saws her hand, waggling it back and forth. "Now, three months down the line, on the other hand...!"

She may be joking around. Or she may be serious. It's difficult to tell from how she's holding herself, or how she speaks.