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Welcoming the Visitor
Among the first things you will see, when entering, are two sculptures.
These help to frame the immersive experience.
Stopwatch Time Machine
One sculpture is the Stopwatch Time Machine.
It resembles an ornate, alien-looking clock.
There's a sign on the clock. (It can be in an easily-readable comic-like format, with the lines printed in circles or ovals, connected like speech bubbles.)
It reads:
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This is the Stopwatch Time Machine.
The tiny creatures said it's okay if we tour their space station and admire their apartments.
But they prefer if we visit only one moment of their lives at a time.
Thanks to the Stopwatch Time Machine, we can do that!
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Each morning we set the Starbase Time to "Pause," and leave the Visitor Time set to "Regular."
Time passes as usual for you...
But no time passes at all for those who live here.
For them, this is all just one moment in their day. It goes by in a blink of their eyes.
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When we close for the night, we set the Starbase Time back to "Regular."
The apartment-dwellers go on with their lives, undisturbed.
So each time you come here, there may be changes.
Keep visiting and looking closely.
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(The time-pausing effect appears as a transparent film over the surfaces of the apartments.
Please don't touch it!)
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Starlight
The other statue is a creature named Starlight.
Visitors can interact with this statue to begin their experience.
(This interaction also provides a way for visitors to donate money to the exhibit.)
The creature has a slot for a mouth, and a transparent abdomen.
A similar set of signs on this statue can read:
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This is Starlight.
She's a Nocturnal Space Janitor. She helps maintain this starbase.
(She's sleeping right now.)
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We don't have to pause time for her. She doesn't mind visitors like us.
She's learned our language, and she knows most of the alien languages here.
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To help out, she uses her Telepathic Dream Powers to make words show up in English for us.
That's why you can read most of the signs on the apartments.
She's doing that in her sleep! How cool is that?
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You can thank her by feeding her coins and dollar bills.
Watch her clear belly to see where they fall.
She'll make up a name in her language for you.
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Yep, she can do that in her sleep too.
She's pretty talented.
Starlight's belly is a transparent compartment. The bottom of it is divided into 16 sections.
Each section is labeled with an alien symbol and its meaning in English.
If money is pushed into the mouth, the visitor can watch each coin or bill fall, and land in one of the compartments. Where it lands indicates a part of the name.
Visitors can put in as many bills and coins as they want, to get as long a name as they want.
On her hat, we can place 16 compartments where guests can get small paper copies of the alien symbols and translations, after they watch their donations fall. (And a tape dispenser, so that the guest can stick the paper symbols onto a length of tape to form a strip of them.)
That way, they can keep a copy of the "alien name" that Starlight gives them.
To show guests how this is done, a few pre-made strips can hang nearby.
