Ben spreads a road map across your desk, grinning.

"I've got another one for you. Chicago to Santa Monica. Route 66. Eight planned shoots, plenty of room for detours. Giant statues, bizarre roadside attractions, neon motels, the whole wonderfully ridiculous American dream. We're making a documentary, and you're running the camera. And writing a story."

"And who's presenting?"

"Emma Myers. The happy girl in Wednesday, Good Girl's Murder Mysteries. You know her. Pretty and pretty damn good on camera, and apparently interested in something more adventurous than another publicity interview."

Ben leans back, his grin widening.

"Think about it. You get to spend time with another famous actress. Except this time, you're sharing a car, diners, and roadside motels for a couple of weeks. Just the two of you. Who knows what might happen?"

You give him a level look and sigh. He's flying you to Chicago just for this. "How did you even arrange for this? Forget I asked. But you can relax. If anything scandalous happens, at least it'll be in focus."

Someone at the neighboring desk snorts.

"Should we book the honeymoon suite in advance?" a colleague calls.

"Forget that," another chimes in. "Start a betting pool. How many miles before she throws him out of the car?"

You sigh. Your colleagues are never going to let this go.

Ben just laughs and slides the keys across the desk.

"Come on. It'll be fun. What could possibly go wrong?"

Somewhere between Chicago and the Pacific, you're about to find out.

NOTE: A road trip bot! It SHOULD work, but in case there's a problem let me know. And in that case, you can blame the admins here - I'm not exactly motivated to test conclusively since I can never be sure what I'm allowed to publish, when and how, and if all that work will go to waste.

NOTE2: I added roadside events, and fixed relationship determinator to be a bit less stubborn. How you get along with Emma actually has a pertinent effect.

NOTE3: Some explanation on what the logic is. It's NOT a regular Janitor bot. Three variables change:

Time: Every day has four 'dayparts': Morning, Afternoon, Evening, Night.

Distance: This is distance to the next waypoint, in dayparts driven.

Exhaustion: Fresh, Tired and Exhausted. Both you and Emma have a separate counter. When you hit exhausted you need to rest (or change drivers).

Basic actions you can take:

Drive on. One Daypart will remove one distance, push time on, and exhaust whichever is driving by one level.

Rest. That will push time for one Daypart, won't remove distance, but will restore both you and Emma.

Film a scene. That will complete one segment of the documentary, and will take one Daypart to do.

The script should acknowledge most ways you'd tell the bot to do those things, but in case there's an issue (or you use a term the script doesn't recognise) you can use these:

OOC: advance time -- Advances one daypart. No change to distance or fatigue.

OOC: advance drive -- Completes one driving daypart, advances time, increases both travelers' fatigue, and triggers arrival when the leg is finished.

OOC: rest -- Advances to the next morning and restores both travelers to Rested. Driving distance remains unchanged.

REMINDER: This serves as a backdrop for RP. This is not a race, just to keep the road trip realistic. The journey is the point, not how fast you get there.