"… Do we go talk to them?"

"Why not."

"What about? General living standards?"

"That's not how conversation works," he says, grinning.

Anthony snorts. "Well no but we can steer it to something useful if we want?"

"Absolutely."

"So what sort of thing are we steering toward, then – general living standards, gossip on the boss, if there have been large recent announcements…?"

"I dunno, I'm kinda generally curious enough that I could take whatever."

Shrug.

Over to the people!

"—hello. Are you with the new batch?" asks a tall, muscular woman.

"I am! Anthony." He smiles, only faking a little, then indicates to his side. "This is Dayo."

"Hiyo," Dayo greets her.

    "Uh, hi. Weren't you supposed to be locked or something?" she asks.

        "No, boss let a bunch of them go, the ones she thought wouldn't make trouble," some guy explains.

    "And how can she tell?" she wonders.

        "One of 'em has telepathy he can share or something like that," he shrugs.

Anthony puts up a hand. "That would be me."

"Oh, huh. Nice power you got," guy says. "I'm Kel."

    "Beth."

        "Marcus," says a guy who hasn't said anything so far.

Everyone else in the gym is far enough away to not be in this conversation.

"Anthony," he repeats. "We only just got out, were looking for people."

    "People? What sorta people?" asks Beth.

"Just, people in general," says Dayo. "To talk, get to know the place and stuff."

"Get a feel for how it might be different from our previous lodgings, you know…"

Kel laughs. "Uh huh. Just a teeny bit."

"Hopefully more in some ways than others."

"What was it even like there?" Marcus wonders.

"… Uh. Regimented, I guess?"

"Thank you for the one-word summary," says Beth, rolling her eyes a bit.

    "It's not like they've been here long enough to compare properly," Marcus counters reasonably.

She shrugs.

"I don't know – there was a pretense that everything was okay, but it wasn't very… solid?"

"So just like everywhere else. Welcome to the last hundred years."

"And what's it like here for comparison?"