Logs:Greedy Algorithm

Greedy Algorithm
Dramatis Personae B, Heather, Scott
In Absentia Ion	2024-09-04 "If you need some infantile drama I bet I can convince my team to produce some for you."
Location <MOJ> Champion's Circle - Mojoverse
Originally this was intended as a place for the games participants to relax and hang out in between events, but that idea quickly fell by the wayside when their initial participants were all too dead and/or traumatized to do any hanging out. Still. in preparation for hosting a bunch of Earthlings they've taken their best stab at what Earthers might enjoy for a little R&R, which has led to this... place. It's looks like it was kind of a bar, once. There are tables to sit at, though half of them come pre-knocked-over; there are several broken bottles and broken pool cues lying around (no pool tables in evidence.) There are numerous guns. Several of the bottles behind the bar are filled with bullets, a couple more with gasoline; some do have alcohol but none of it is drinking grade. There is also a game of darts. If there ever were any employees there are not anymore, but a very large number of cats are in residence here. The building doesn't end so much as just truncate like it's some kind of movie set. The open back of the "bar" opens up onto, a road that for some reason has a large ramp leading to nowhere. There are a variety of vehicles out there with keys in the ignition and though it's usually hard to tell this from a look, they have the indefinable air of cars that will explode at the slightest provocation. Maybe it's the unnecessary racing stripes. Sat at one table, there are two cats and a speedster. The fat orange cat is furiously bonking over a bottle full of unmatching bottle caps that Heather continues propping back up for him to continue his purring domination, while a smaller black cat just stares blankly at her as if it has never thought any thoughts in its entire existence. Heather, meanwhile, is eating from a can of beans that she seems to have violently stabbed her way into, having not been able to find a can opener. While her eyes are not visible beneath her tinted goggles, the knit of her eyebrows and lack of progress on the beans suggest that she is lost in thought, though she does squeak an incomprehensible inquiry at Big Orange. She represents her team's colours, red and purple, somehow less vibrant than her usual preferred look. B is on the latest of many (many) tins of spam, piling up empty on the table in a neat pyramid where she's been sitting nearby Heather and the cats. She's been dismantling the overly complicated remote from the giant television set at the Brotherhood house (so sorry to anyone who was enjoying the Mojotainment), one claw fiddling with its circuitry as she tears hungrily into another lump of processed meat product. She's only half-dressed, red and purple uniform from the waist down, which leaves her longest set of gills all down her sides free as they slowly open and shut. Probably this decision was made to spare the scratchy irritation of whatever alien fabric their uniforms were made from, but B possibly regrets the choice when a small tabby creeps over to bat daringly at this curiously shifting new toy. She sits upright with a sharp yelp, eyes blinking several times, and presses her gills down Very Flat, offering the tabby a small chunk of spam as consolation in exchange for depriving the cat of this plaything. Scott comes in not through the door to the bar, but from somewhere behind one of the parked cars, swinging a pleasantly baby-blue bottle at his side in one hand; it says "Bombay Sapphire Distilled London Gin" but probably it's full of gasoline. He's wearing his own team uniform from the waist up, but he's kept his own blue jeans, maybe these pockets are just the correct amount of disgorged for the wallet and keys he's still carrying around for some reason. He goes around the bar first, to put his gasoline away, then back out past the swinging door to loop toward the supply of food, which he starts to try to straighten out into neater and presumably well-lineated piles before giving up and just twisting open a jar of baby pickles. He's there for a sort of interminably long time just crunching his pickle before he seems to decide it would not be weird to say, "Hey." Heather looks up from her thoughts, and because she does not follow through on her diligence of propping her bottle back up, Big Orange just keeps bonking the bottle until it falls from the table. Both he and the smaller black cat look down, surprised by gravity having just asserted itself so decisively. The speedster takes a scoop of beans while her recorder plays: "Punch Eyes, our mortal enemy. Do you need mystery beans? Mystery meat?" The tone in the voice that plays does not suggest any kind of hostility, just a well-practiced neutrality, as she gestures towards B's tower of spams. "Or are you here to jack my car?" "Mr. Summers." B sits up a little straighter, looking down somewhat bashfully at her stack of empty spams. "Thanks for all the foods. Not the terrible salty licorices though." She's eying Scott's bottle of "Distilled London Gin" with a mildly amused curiosity. "If you're planning on doing any kind of Fast and Furious reenactments out there, Ion would be so down. Hardly even notice a few more pieces of him missing, probably." Scott just shakes his head to decline mystery beans or meat, tugs one corner of his mouth into a wry, slim smile -- "Someone's car, maybe," he says. "No, not my plan. Though I guess it'd make great TV. They all seem a little -- fragile." Heather's eyebrows raise slightly when B addresses Scott with such formality, though only for a moments. "People watch cars to see them crash. Possibly explode," she agrees, "I do not think Ion will mind some explosion. He is an enthusiast." She shakes her head, "Do you think they are watching out there? In here? All the time? Some of this is bad TV. There is a type of people who want to watch people eat beans and spams. But it is not a wide audience." "A couple of them might not start anyway," B admits unapologetically. "I took out their computer systems." She takes another bite of the spam and licks her claws clean. "Pretty sure cameras can see us all the time. Not sure what that means about who's actually watching, though. Can be a pretty big gap between collecting data and -- anyone actually processing it, and I don't know if it's all surveillance or part of the show." Her brows furrow. "Or both, I guess. -- Their TV sucks, I feel like they'd watch a lot in this. Earthmania phase." Scott bites out a slightly smothered laugh midway through his second pickle. "I keep thinking they have no idea who they're picking on," he says, shaking his head. "Anything good? Are they actually Earth cars or are they --" he tilts his chin at the remote control B is taking apart. "Alien? I guess if aliens independently evolved to have reality TV, they might have independently evolved to have NASCAR." "Is their TV that bad?" Heather's voice sounds a little bit thoughtful here, and she adds, "They probably watch the cameras. Figure out who is the least boring. Focus on that. Cut away when they find something less boring." She tilts her head slightly and picks up the fallen bottle for the cats, who now watch this object warily, fearing its newly revealed physics. "A greedy algorithm? I do not think we can watch our own show. I cannot confirm?" She looks to B with a quirk of her eyebrow. "Not yet we can't. ...I have no idea what they think is boring. I feel like we should a/b test this somehow. Try acting up and see what they think needs intervention. So far talking about plenty of plans hasn't -- really mattered so either nobody's watching that close or they know all our plans are really pointless." B just shrugs. "Earth cars. Some of those stands out in, um, Times... Square? Are manned by robots and those are definitely not earth robots though. But I'm hoping I can jury rig something hooking up the car's systems into those to figure out more about where they go at the end of the day and where all the security systems are connected to." Her eyelids blink sideways again, quick. "Whatever they did to mess up the teleporters, you can't have a system this complicated in an actual vacuum." This sounds confident, though, she sounds a little less sure, only dubiously hopeful with her shakier assertion: "... alien code is still just. Code." "If you need some infantile drama I bet I can convince my team to produce some for you." Scott makes this offer completely seriously, though there's a wry twist in the set of his mouth. "If this whole thing was in an actual vacuum they'd have had no way to snap us up in the first place. And I'd wager the food is coming from Earth." A pause, before he adds, "Cats, too." "No. These are space cats," says Heather, pointing to the moon eyed black cat, who looks at her finger and then generally around at such an accusation, but only manages to respond with a 'prp?' "Dimension cats? These beans are from earth though. Unless the USA they refer to on the can stands for United Space of Astronomy." She puts the can down decisively, and says, "Yes. Make some drama. Wear something recognizable. Check the cosplays in the stands." She tilts her head towards B when her recorded voice continues, "What do you think their coding language is called?" "These beans are also from Earth." B is pointing to the tabby, now licking at her paws, small toe pads spread wide. "Mojo, probably. They're not very creative. ...That is an Earth language, actually, but it'd be too much to hope for any overlap." One of her claws is clicking idly against her most recently emptied can of Spam. "Drama. Trouble. Boredom. When do we get kicked off the show. When does security get worried." She's collecting her partially-dismantled remote and then ducking under the table to grab another armful of gutted electronic parts, before she turns to go. "Hopefully if I can get us into some of what they're seeing we can plan better." "Mojo++," Scott is proposing at the same time B guesses, a little tongue in cheek. He screws the lid back on the pickles, very slowly. "Hopefully," he says, not like he's agreeing but like this started as the beginning of its own sentence, and was truncated in favor of, "Well. Good luck."