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[fracturedsoul]

So, from what I've been able to figure out, it looks like people arrive in this city pretty regularly -- once a week exactly.
We have to play along with this place's rules and fight each other or we'll be punished, we have to go to school or we'll be punished, and so forth.

Since I'm new here, naturally I'm rather out of the loop, so there's a lot I have yet to learn.
For now I'd like to get to know my fellow prisoners, if that's all right with you.
So if you don't mind, tell me -- What is your name, which school are you at, and where were you before you came here?

I'm Dirk, at Fortitude, and I'm from Houston. Pleasure to meet you all.

Comments

[alwaysoutspoken]

Oh, you make robots? That's pretty cool. And they sound pretty advanced... are you from the future? Relatively speaking. I'm from 2012.

Oh, that's true. I wonder how that works...? Maybe it's been no time at all... it's kind of like Urashima Taro.

[fracturedsoul]

Oh, yeah. I'm from about four hundred years after you.

[ Keeping that hidden? Why would he ever do that? It's not like anyone from his world isn't from that point in time! Oh, memory loss. ]

And hell yeah, it's pretty cool.
I'm basically a genius.

I suppose the only way we could know for sure would be for somebody to arrive from the same world as another person here, having noticed that they'd gone missing.
Which means the only possibility we can verify while trapped here ourselves is "Time continues moving". If it doesn't, we won't know until we return home.
After all, even if that aforementioned somebody hadn't noticed their acquaintance's disappearance, there could also be the possibility of those two people having come from slightly different instances of the same universe.

[alwaysoutspoken]

Wow, that's a pretty long time. Yeah, robots in my era are pretty much just toys, or toasters.

[She smirks at the "genius" bit.]

Modest too, I see.

Ohh, I hadn't thought of "slightly different universes". I guess it could seem like the same universe but "a universe where I disappeared" and "a universe where I didn't" could be like parallel worlds, couldn't they? I should have read more science fiction.

[fracturedsoul]

Well, in the end, science fiction is still fiction.
There's not really any precedent for this situation in real life. Not to my knowledge, anyway.
All we can really do is go with the flow and figure out what's going on.

[alwaysoutspoken]

That seems to be what everyone is doing... even the headmasters and mayor don't know anything except that we have to play the game if we ever want to go home.

[fracturedsoul]

Is that what they say? Thanks for letting me know, I was wondering.

[alwaysoutspoken]

There's always the chance they're lying, but we can't really confront them about it. Through the disciplinary system or whatever, they seem to be able to inflict pain on students at will... though that seems more common in Conquest than Fortitude, I've heard.