"Let's have a quick look around and see if anyone's home. Maybe they all went out exploring or something."

"Sure!" says Jade.

"Okay." says Dave.

"Works for me."

The kitchen cabinets are stocked with enough food to make it look like a shopping trip has occurred.

"Let's check the library."

As they're walking through the third floor lobby towards the ramp down a slavic man emerges from the bathroom in a bathrobe. He startles a bit on noticing them. "Hi there, I don't recognize all of you."

"Hi there. We're from the Black complex. We figured out how to use the elevators to move between complexes."

"I'm Milan. I should get dressed if you don't mind waiting a couple minutes."

Alex chuckles. "Of course not."

Milan walks quickly to one of the bedrooms and emerges clothed a minute later. "So, have you turned on the news?"

"Yeah, the neutron star thing is awful."

"Yeah, I'm glad I don't have to break that news to you."

"Yeah, we had to break that news to some people. It sucks."

He winces in sympathy. "Finding out was bad enough. I'm guessing that you drew the connection between the news and being here too?"

"Yeah."

"A few of us are planning to get up early tomorrow morning and watch the news as it happens, but most of us think that's a bit too morbid. We're mostly from a sort of intentional community group so we're trying to settle into the new reality. Do our best in this new environment."

"That seems like all we can do."

"Yeah. Not all of our group knew each other before but luckily we seem to get along okay."

"Yeah, the people who didn't come with our group are settling in alright too. We got lucky it seems."

"Yeah, so far of the groups we've found only the people in Green have had problems with personality conflicts, and after you there's only Yellow still to visit."

"Huh, that is lucky. So, any wisdom you have to share? The secret to how to get the elevators working maybe?"

"Oh, your elevator will work now that we've visited. They're contagious like that. Linda here was able to turn ours on when she took the Janitor position offered by the computers in the Library."

"Huh, we'll have to check that out. Do you want to meet everyone, well everyone that's not on the shopping trip?"

"Sure, sounds great."

Milan leads them down the ramp and pokes his head into the various doors saying variations on "We have guests from one of the other parties." A few minutes later about fifteen people are gathered together on the landing. "Well, we're all together a bit earlier than planned, but how about we each share our updates."

There's some general nodding and by unspoken agreement a woman speaks first. "Hi, I'm Karen. I've been investigating the computers. It looks like they have a mall directory on them, and so I got kinda distracted looking through that. There's some stores I really wouldn't expect, like there's a pet store."