Hey Everyone!! :-)
I've got a little more of Alyce's adventure to share with you, today! Enjoy! :-)
Excerpt from Answers From Alyce:
The exhibit consisted of a large room that had been shrunk to what appeared to be 1/4 scale. The robots within the room had been made to the same scale and there were a lot of them. Hundreds, it looked like, at least. And they were all talking at once and trying to shout over each other. I put my hands over my ears, the noise was doing nothing good for the pounding in my head, and looked at Yax.
The tall alien grimaced apologetically. "This exhibit was so loud we had to put a sound blanket over it to contain the noise so that it wouldn't disrupt the rest of the exhibits," he yelled. "It can be a bit jarring when you first cross the barrier, but hopefully you'll be able to acclimate, soon."
I shook my head and shrugged my shoulder, keeping my hands over my ears. Tears were starting to stream from the corners of my eyes. Yax opened his mouth like he was going to respond, but before he could say anything, Squid-boy waddled up and let out a gurgling honk loud enough to be heard over the racket from the exhibit. He punched at his clipboard a few times, and the noise level dropped to something that didn't feel like it was trying to liquefy my brain.
I blinked the tears from my eyes and stretched my jaw until my ears popped. "What in the name of all that's holy is that?" I gasped.
"From the media sources we've been able to review, that is our best guess as to how your government functions," answered Squid-boy.
It took me a moment to process what he said, I think my brain was still vibrating from that unholy din, then I turned and looked at the exhibit again. Looked at in a certain way, the room portrayed in the exhibit did sort of look like a weird combination of the Senate and House Chambers. And was that a small replica of the White House with an itty bitty President waving his tiny little hands standing on top? Astonished, I turned to stare at my hosts.
"Is it not accurate? Your government seems to be contained in so many different buildings, we had a hard time discerning which were the most important, and which were merely ceremonial in nature. Did we not guess correctly?"
I turned back to the exhibit. "Well… I… Sort of? I guess," I hedged.
Yax stepped forward and said, "It's clear we got something wrong. What is it?"
"Um… Well, not wrong, exactly. Just not…quite…right, either," I was still having a hard time dealing with the shock of seeing how they had somehow turned our government into a Presenaouse. For some reason, the picture of a turducken kept trying to pop up in my head, but the combination of the two images was anything but appetizing. Especially, with those tiny, orange fists still waving around in the air. Shaking my head, I tore my eyes away from the strange tableau and looked at my hosts, instead. "There are some things that could be more accurate," I managed.
"What things?" asked Squid-boy.
"The reason we have so many buildings for our government is because we have different parts of our government. There are three main branches of our federal government: the executive, the legislative, and the judicial. Though, you only seem to have two branches represented here. The legislative branch is divided into two parts, the Senate and the House of Representatives. The White House, where the President lives, is the head of the executive branch of our government. But you've sort of jammed them all together here, so it's a little…odd to me."
"We were trying to simplify and streamline the concept so that museum visitors would be less likely to be confused by the minutia and more able to focus on the overall concept we were trying to convey."
Now Out:
