[ audio ]

[signifies]

Who: Clark Kent and you.
Broadcast: Fleetwide.
Action: Aboard the Marsiva.
When: The week of his arrival.

I don't suppose I could click my heels three times. . . [ Only Clark gets his little joke. ]

I'll keep this brief. My name is Clark - I'm from Kansas.

[ He's been the new guy at work often enough to sound chill about this, but he is feeling a little shaky having woken up here in the middle of his workday. To top it off, not being able to hear his mother's heartbeat is jarring.

There's some stress baking in Clark's future. ]

What do you make of this place? I'm curious to know how it compares to where you come from.

Comments

[bi_otic]

Fairly, yeah. New, relatively speaking, but we have multiple off-world colonies, mining operations, space station, and businesses. We're not ones the waste time. It's one of the thing annoys most of the other races about us. [His smile is fondly amused at that thought, however]

[signifies]

[ Oh, good, a natural segue to aliens. He can't deny being desperately curious. ]

Sounds like it. How many are there?

[bi_otic]

Oh, uh...[A pause while he calculates, mouthing a few names silently to himself and probably counting a little on his fingers off-screen]...thirteen or fourteen, maybe, that we know of? I might be forgetting a few.

[signifies]

[ He whistles. ]

Wow. I wonder if that's the future I'm headed for.

[bi_otic]

Hard to say. I've actually met a few people here that are from a bit further down the line than me, and other than spaceflight nothing else really matches up. The Milky Way in general seems like a magnet for parallel futures.