academyooc | test drive meme

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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Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"Sometime's it's all we've got." Her voice goes dry, much like her humor appeared to be in the moment. Hope had been a dream behind the Jaeger program, leading from schematics to the first working versions of the Pons up to the breakthrough in the dual piloting system, and the success of the first Jaeger Ranger team against the Kaiju. Hope is what kept people cheering when the Jaegers were causing only acceptable levels of collateral damage in cities, when the Kaiju weren't stopped outside the miracle mile.

She shook her head, pushing back on her chair. "Make it through the first three months and you'll know firsthand."

It wasn't a promise, but it was a fact. Simulations ran after getting through basic training. It wasn't a true Drift, but the real deal had several tons of mechanical body linked in. Nothing was like a true Drift in a Jaeger.

"Have you worked with teenagers before?"

Now that was a question. His brows raised as he started to lean back. "Depends on what you mean by 'worked with.' I mean, I was one, and I stayed over holidays at school so I ended up hanging out with some of the... uh." He paused, then motioned to himself with a wry twist of his lips. "The problem cases. And it seemed to help. That's about the most work with teenagers I've done."

He hadn't exactly been a humanitarian. He hadn't been a volunteer. He'd just been a guy. Same as everyone else. He was nice, sure. Nice enough. Tended to stand up for the little guys, which was what had gotten him in so much trouble to start out with. But he'd not really gone out of his way.

It's about what she expected, and really only relevant looking at the kind of reinvention the Valparaíso Academy was looking at making possible. She flicked her fingers outward, rolling her wrist so her hand ended up resting on her knee, palm-side up. "Charles Hansen's success with his father's opened up the volunteer ranks to teens fourteen and up. There's a good chance we'll have our fair share coming in on the ground level."

She was switching gears, talking about a different kind of logistics. "That's walking into a maelstrom of hormones and emotions they're not going to know the half of how to handle. I'm sure you remember," she said, her own expression hinting toward sardonic amusement, "What it was like at that age. Especially if you hung around some of the problem cases."

There was no hint of censure in her voice. Problem case teens were a commonplace occurrence, no matter where one was in the world. If her highschool years hadn't been littered with friends and peers spanning the whole spectrum, than her early college years certainly had been.

"Feel prepared to handle that too?"

"Yeah, that's no problem." He nodded easily. "I mean, hormones, the mood swings, the thinking you know a hell of a lot more than you do - I remember all that for sure. I think I can handle it, as long as I'm not expected to adopt somebody or something." There was that caveat. He wasn't ready to be a father, or a pretend father, or even a father figure. Cool uncle, maybe. "I mean, I'm not exactly Disney material."

That was just honesty. He wasn't Nani. He wasn't Jo March. He was rough around the edges, rough in the middle, and not exactly appropriate for people under the age of seventeen, if not eighteen.

"But..."

But.

"But I remember that a lot of the other guys I went to school with... No matter how bad off they were, they were usually there because of what someone else did. The root cause, I mean. What their mother or father or some other family member did, or a teacher, or older students, or... well, pick a person. Kids don't grow up to be jerks in a vacuum."

He was talking about the basic tenant of what Andrea believed in people as a whole. No one grew up in a vacuum. People are a result of themselves and their environment. It was good to hear Mike was aware of the relationship between people's behaviors and the places they came from.

"Disney tends to put the smooth edges on some ugly truths about the human condition," she said in a mild tone of voice. "We don't need Disney. We need real people, which means the kinds of people who're flawed and understand flaws in others. Those kinds of observations," said with a vague roll of her wrist, "Are the ones to keep in mind when you're working with teams spanning generation gaps. You'll be good to have in there at the ground level."

There wasn't any way to promise end results. There was only the anticipation for those who might be geared to succeed, and those who might have greater difficulties.

"What do you say we call this interview over, and I look forward to meeting you again someplace further south?"

Andy leaned forward and got to her feet in a fluid motion, holding a hand out to Mike once again.

Mike took her hand and gave it a firm shake, a smile on his face. He felt more confident, this discussion having happened. Funny how that worked out sometimes. "Sounds great to me," he said, "and I'm hoping to see you down south, too. And maybe sneak a look at that jaeger of yours. It'd be a hell of a thing to see in person instead of just on a TV screen."

That was the most he was going to say about her position. He'd recognised her, sure. Who wouldn't? But he also knew that, if he was going to someday pilot a jaeger, there was no use in being starstruck. They were all just people, and that was the important thing to remember.

Her smile then was brief, almost sardonic. "You won't need to worry about sneaking a look at her. She keeps all of us busy dusting her down and oiling joints."

There's a degree of a jest in what she said, but an underlying sentiment she acknowledged and accepted. Until Jacqueline was back, Hydra Corinthian and Andrea were both decorations. She didn't enjoy the feeling, but it was a portion of what made her ideal for working on this project as a whole.

She turned on heel, opening the door. "Until then, Mike."

"Have a good day." He gave her a nod and polite wave. There were, as far as he knew, more interviews, and that meant he'd stay planted right where he was until the next person came in. But he was grateful he'd had the chance to really talk to someone who knew. It put at least part of his unease to rest.

test drive meme

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