trans_9

There was a lot of cleaning up to do after SHODAN and her robot armies had been defeated. Among the structural damage was parts of the Drunken Dragon Tavern: the store room and everything in it had been utterly destroyed, the pots that had rarely been used on-ship were strewn around the kitchen, and a couple of tables, one bench and a chair, and a portion of the stage needed repairs. The building next door that Kang used for half of his storage and called home had managed to escape relatively unscathed.

He had sustained some damage himself, with a few minor cuts and bruises, and a rough hole slightly larger than an orange missing from the membrane of his right wing. It hadn't healed completely yet, and the bandages didn't hide it very well at all.

He had personal matters to attend to before reconstruction could begin, though. Two draconians had been killed in the pod caverns, two that he'd known personally; they had served under him for over thirty years when he'd been Commander of the First Dragonarmy Engineering Regiment. Unlike the others that had been killed, there was nothing left of them. Vlemess, as a kapak, had melted into a pool of acid, and Urul the baaz had turned to stone, and then dust.

It was customary, because of the nature of draconian deaths, to simply place a headstone along with any personal possessions that could be salvaged. Sakura had helped Kang procure two suitable stones from the wreckage of the Great Wall, and he'd decided to place them in the little herb garden Kali had started before she'd gotten repodded (said garden hadn't been cared for since). It was visible from the tavern, and he felt that it was appropriate to have them near a piece of home.

He knelt down to clear a space on the north side of the garden, digging shallow holes for Urul's belt and one of Vlemess's bracers. He'd gotten lucky in finding their few possessions in the lockers.

[OOC: He invited/mentioned it to anyone that he counts as family or a friend, but it's cool for others to stop by too if they'd like. Threadjacking is also encouraged!]

Once Atom had read the initial comm post, he headed over to the closest place where he thought people would be -- the Vatican, once converted into a fortress against outside attack. It had since been mostly restored to its original state, but some fortifications still remained -- hopefully, some food and supplies, too. He'd heard people had used it as a safe area before, so maybe some of them would head there now. As he touched down within its limits, his rocket boosters kicked off. His footsteps seemed to echo through the tall construction as he walked along the paved stone... but for now, he seemed to be alone, in the midst of dead silence.

Or was he?

"Hello?" he called. "Is anyone there? Does anyone need help?"

[Robutts will be forthcoming 83. I'll bring some Terminators, but if anyone else could NPC some other robots, that'd be great!

P.S. I will be waiting for more people to tag in before I add robots.]

The next few hours when on without much problems for the ship. Life went on, and in fact, seem to be going for the best. Of course, the saying goes, if it's too good to be true....That's probably because it is.

Late at night IT finally made it's presence known and spoke.

( And speak it did...Collapse )

[[OOC - Planning post! :3c.]]

Deep from the dank, dark bowels of the Media Library... IT CAME! FROM THE CELLULOID!

Five terrible movies guaranteed to give you CHILLS! THRILLS! Or maybe just, I dunno, a vague sense that the universe has wronged you somehow and you want several hours of your life back.

Today, anyone walking into this particular Sensorium would be greeted by the sight of a late 20th century darkened movie theatre, playing a quintuple-feature consisting of old Earth movies that were honestly not very good. At the bottom of the seating area was some dude giving out free popcorn, candy, and drinks.

Howard, Zouichi, Allenby, and Jr. were around, and anyone else was welcome to walk in and join in.

[each of the movies is listed below, just tag in wherever you want. I put a small link in each movie's post so you can have some idea of what the movie is about, although honestly I would say that the movies themselves often do not actually know what they are about. All threads are open unless labeled 'closed'.

P.S. I'M SO SORRY I SHOULD HAVE PUT THIS UP EARLIER]

Welcome, one and all, to the theme park based on the legendary exploits and technological marvelousness of the Transmigration Nine! Inside you will find various historical and educational attractions, as well as endless entertainment!

Current attractions: The famous GLaDOS corn maze! Snot bath spa and salon, now with extra rejuvenating slime! The accurate and exciting Hall of Councilmembers! The Superman memorial!

And for the first time ever…The TAPESTRY! Come forth and see your fortune in this stunning and revelatory exhibit!

The Great Wall of China is, once again, under repair.

Closed: GLaDOS Cakes and Pastries, indefinitely.

[Please do all your own NPCing and make it as ridiculous as possible.]

The rest of the crew assembled on the Observation Deck to meet the latest editions to their numbers. After the revelation that their worlds are gone, many of them are even more eager to see people they knew from home.

Several people are set up near the doors to provide the new people with omnicoms and comm rings. They are also told they must read information about their current situation and a survival guide with their new omnicom. New crew-mates might see a tall dragonish guy with wings (but don't call him that) and purple girl among their number. There are also several authoritative-looking figures ready to introduce themselves.

There's a lot to tell the new people. It's going to be a lot to take in.

[ooc: Only new characters and Command Staff can start new threads for introductions, to limit the number of threads. Everyone else, just tag in and have your guys greet the newbies.]

In the aftermath of the battle at Lirath, Stacy had been severely damaged. Though she still eventually managed to build up enough power to resume course, she was obviously struggling, her pace far slower than normal. She could barely even manage to directly address those who needed to speak with her, instead allowing the more monotone voice of the Warden to speak up wherever she couldn't.

Several days after the battle, however, she once again stopped course suddenly and without warning, and let out a message throughout the ship.

||Notice to all crew members, Daligig Vessel Horizon is approaching. Archon Yavek is requesting to board so repairs can begin on this vessel. Please report to the Obs deck to recieve Daligig personnel and begin briefing. I repeat, notice to all crew members...||

Those going to the Obs Deck to check out the commotion would see the Horizon just out the observation window. It was massive, nearly half as long as Stacy, and likely had enough room for over a million crew members. The ship was colored a brilliantly bright white, with sleek, smooth lines, making the ships the GIA had that the crew had seen in the battle at Lirath seem like ancient relics.

Not long after the crew had arrived at the Obs Deck, bright, crackling lights began to appear towards the far end of the room as figures began teleporting in.

The first to appear were...not the Daligig. Instead, the first figures to arrive were massive, 9-ft tall reptilian soldiers, each decked in thick armor carrying equally massive battle rifles. At their fore stood one of them wearing lighter armor, carrying a tall metallic staff. He appeared older than the other reptillians, and wore a red sash that seemed to mark him of higher rank than the others. He raised the comm unit on his wrist to speak into it.

"Situation green, Archon. It is safe come over."

At that point, more figures began teleporting over, much smaller than the reptilian soldiers that came before. In fact, they were even somewhat shorter than normal humans, the tallest among them barely six feet tall. These were the Daligig, strange looking and varied in appearance. Each of them had devices on their arms, apparently small but powerful micro computers, each with different colors denoting the rank of the wearer. At their side were numerous tiny beings, each barely 4 feet tall, who almost immediately fanned out, obsessively observing and picking at Stacy's techno-organic structure.

Suddenly, one of the Daligig, wearing a dark blue arm unit, stepped forward with a rather grim, serious expression on his face. This, apparently was Archon Yavek.

"Who is in charge here?" he demanded bluntly.

[ooc: Meant to get this up a week ago, but school got the better of me, so sorry, guys! First thread that I put up will be the main expositionary thread, but feel free to make more threads for you characters to react, talk to each other, or try and talk to the Daligig and their companions. Basic info on the Daligig can be found over here.]

 After dropping off some of the crew at Balisair, it was time for the crew to set course for Lirath. The situation greeting them wasn't the most promising.

The cracked surface of the moon called Lirath was one of its most unmistakeable features. One of the three moons of the planet Kehoe, it had been terraformed and served as a settlement for a hundreds of different species, some humanoid, some not. Despite occasional class struggles, environmental issues, and speciesism blocking their way, the darker parts of Lirath's past were largely left behind, and an era of peace and tolerance had reigned for quite some time. The only problems they'd had recently were with a terrorist group whose cause for their actions had been a mystery, but they weren't tied to any particular species or social group and had been likened to a cult and had largely gone quiet in recent years.

Now the peace on the moon of Lirath had been shattered by the invasion of the Ohm.

The capital city had been destroyed. Now, all that was left of the peoples of Lirath was evacuating from one of its smaller cities, one known as Smyteval. A desert city, existing in a valley in between a rocky range of canyons and mountains, even though it was in the low ground, the natural channels of rock served as bottlenecks for any Ohm attacking from the ground.

GIA squadrons patrolled in space, locked in explosive warfare, protecting the Bleed-gate that had been activated to see the evacuated ships to the refugee world, and a shield created by massively-powerful shield generators extended around the city and up into the atmosphere, creating a shielded tunnel so ships could escape.

Word had come that there was a vital weapon to be deployed on Lirath, one that needed to be destroyed, hence why the Transmigration 9 had been called in. Given the diverse crew, and the ships that were in its hangar, there was at least someone or something on board that could blow the weapon up if it did show.

There was no sign of it yet. Right now, there was just chaos, streams of evacuees boarding ships, armies of Ohm engaged with GIA soldiers outside the shields, and forcefields that everyone hoped would hold out just a little bit longer.

The crew would be following Leon's orders but finding themselves fighting side-by-side with GIA platoons, full of various species that were currently all getting their asses kicked severely.

[ooc: STAGE 1 is now open! Please do not tage STAGE 2 until it's announced as open as well.]

[ooc: STAGE 2 is now open!]

He hadn't done much laying around as a teenager. He'd always been too busy, one social event to another.

After the Yeerks...well, Temrash had less love for being lazy than Iniss did, but neither of them were really set on protracted periods of inactivity. And there was always something Sharing related, or feeding related, or just...something. Rank play had been a major time suck in his youth, and needing to be somewhere every three days made planning anything else a bit of a suck.

He'd flopped down on the hill next to the garden he had spent so much time losing time in, one hand gripping Bobby's leash to keep the dog from running off, but eyes closed and body relaxed.

Too much stuff was happening, lately. He wasn't used to keeping up with it anymore. Jake was back and Sam was dating Xander and Dean and Kaylee had broken up. He wasn't even sure how to handle half of that, much less all of it at once.

No wonder the garden looked so well tended, the neat rows gave him something to do, something to think about, something that made perfect sense because plants needed like...two things, water and weeding, and they weren't much on demanding an emotional investment beyond that.

Bobby shifted, licking his hand and resting his head on his shoulder, watching the chickens and their chicks poke around nearby.

Why couldn't life just be this simple?

Grif was back, and he was back with a vengeance.

Or at least, he was lounging on the Obs Deck. It was kind of difficult to pick up the vengeance with which he was doing this, but he was almost making a point out of it.

Grif was on a couch, chilling, and any ceiling voices that had a problem with that could go...

go...

go do something that was insulting to ceiling voice computers with psychological problems, anyway.

Congrats, crew, one (or the only) of your (least?) favorite pieces of orange-armored furniture has returned from the test chambers. Rejoice! (Or not.)

The rest of the crew assembled on the Observation Deck to meet the latest editions to their numbers. After the revelation that their worlds are gone, many of them are even more eager to see people they knew from home.

Several people are set up near the doors to provide the new people with omnicoms and comm rings. New crew-mates might see a tall man in green armor and snake girl among their number. There are also several authoritative-looking figures ready to introduce themselves.

There's a lot to tell the new people. It's going to be a lot to take in.

[ooc: Only new characters and Command Staff can start new threads for introductions, to limit the number of threads. Everyone else, just tag in and have your guys greet the newbies.]

Grif had better uses for the media center than seeking knowledge or bettering himself.

Forget books, or whatever Stacy had. (He didn't know, did anyone expect him to read anything voluntarily?) There were movies here, and music, but most importantly there were games.

Grif had been working slowly through Stacy's vast transdimensional video game library. He didn't know why they were considered cultural works worthy of preservation. Really? He didn't care. All he knew was they gave him something to do.

Right at that moment, the something was blasting alien ships down from behind the hard-light controls of a simulated fighter.

"Yeah, eat that!" he yelled, reducing three of them to nothing more than scattered pixels against the starry backdrop with one well-placed shot.

For once, he wasn't thinking about any of the multitude of things he hated about this ship. He was actually enjoying himself.

Stacy was never truly silent. There was the slightly audible hum of the systems, and the others in the Sensorium, to create a rather pleasing sound within the audible range of most species. But Cortana wasn't adding to that; rather she was sitting on her own created boulder, deep in thought. She'd learned quite a bit from Chief's video logs, and more still from the Library once he'd uploaded her back into Stacy's systems. It was a lot of data to process, and so she'd adopted the thinking pose some humans used. Legs pulled up to her chest, and her head resting on her knees. She looked, and felt, almost normal.

...well, normal as an AI passing as a human could get. Oh, the plant suit she'd chosen to appear to wear went a long way to making her blend in compared to her normal holographic form, but the violet tinted blue hair and bright blue eyes didn't help her to blend in. And she honestly didn't know why she'd chosen those. Nostalgia, perhaps? No, she could return to her simple AI form at any time she wanted. And it wasn't as if Stacy didn't carry some different looking people, so it wasn't to stand out. Maybe it was becuase it just felt right to look this way. A mix between a human and the AI she was.

But it didn't really matter. Even with all her processing power, sorting all the information she had taken in over the past few days would still take some time, and that time would be much better spent on figuring out just what the hell had happened then moping about why she had chosen to take this form.

The rest of the crew assembled on the Observation Deck to meet the latest editions to their numbers. After the revelation that their worlds are gone, many of them are even more eager to see people they knew from home.

Several people are set up near the doors to provide the new people with omnicoms and comm rings. New crew-mates might see a tall man in green armor and snake girl among their number. There are also several authoritative-looking figures ready to introduce themselves.

There's a lot to tell the new people. It's going to be a lot to take in.

[ooc: Only new characters and Command Staff can start new threads for introductions, to limit the number of threads. Everyone else, just tag in and have your guys greet the newbies.]

Stacy's voice speaks over the whole of the ship. What she has to say has become very familiar over the the podlings have spent here.

||Pod Release Protocols Initiating,|| she says. ||Please proceed to the Observation Deck to meet your new crew mates.||

Those crew members that don't head to the Obs Deck on their own are hurried there via gentle but insistent tentacles. A few people stop by Engineering to help bring and pass out omnicoms and comm rings to the new crew members as well.

[ooc: Only new characters and Command Staff can start new threads for introductions, to limit the number of threads. Everyone else, just tag in and have your guys greet the newbies.]

Samus has decreed that Grif exercise and hopefully, through some act of god, become less of a slob than he currently is. Part of this is getting him to do something besides laying around on the Obs Deck whining about everything under the sun and several things that aren't.

The sensoriums are set up like a gym, a not uncommon thing considering some members of the crew. One of the treadmills is running, but there's nobody on it. Grif is sitting on a bench off to one side, playing what might be some sort of species of gameboy with the sound muted. He listens in case of approaching footsteps as he waits on the distance to rack up.

What? He's not running a couple miles. Not in this or any universe!

Grif is in the brig.

He's not a happy guy right now, but then again he's in the brig. The cot isn't comfortable but he's lying out on it on principle, boots up on the wall because the space is a tad narrow for him. Grif still has his armor, but he's been disarmed and his omnicomm has been confiscated. His comm ring is on one of the fingers on his right hand (he finds it creepy how it adjusted over his gauntlet) and honestly he feels pretty lucky. Nobody tried to superglue it to his forehead.

So for now, Grif is about as bored as he is physically capable of being and in fairly grumpy spirits as he lies on his back, hands folded on his chest, and tries to decide what the ceiling is made out of.

Tex was, by this point, pretty sick and tired of being intangible. It wasn't like it was the first time she had done it-Blood Gulch had given her practice-but that didn't mean she had to like not being solid for a long time. It got in the way of actually being able to do things.

Fortunately, there was a solution besides trying to hijack Grif or Doc.

Tex opted to pop up in the Sensoriums, calling up what looked to be like a lot of snow, rocks, and not much else. She shifted a little as she settled into solid form, checked her gun-also blessedly solid-and started to lope off through the rocks, her posture alert. She was looking for something.

Grif's been having a hard time sleeping, but that's not news. Everbody's been having a hard time sleeping. It bothers him, because the more time he spends awake the more time he spends thinking about it and the more geeked up he gets over it, and the more tired he is and the worse the dreams are. It's a vicious cycle, and he can't figure out a way to deal with it. It's hard to not stress out over things that are impossible to ignore.

The simple solution is, of course, to drown out his brain.

If anybody goes into the media library, they'll find Grif in front of a screen playing some kind of first-person shooter. Futuristic from the look of it and familiar in the "this is an FPS screen" sort of way, but not identifiable on sight. Whatever it is, he must have the difficulty cranked fairly high because there are monsters swarming out of everywhere and they're not going down very quickly.

Still, it seems he's actually pretty good at it.

Grif is sprawled out on an Obs Deck couch, this may be one of the biggest signs of the return to normalcy on the ship. He's wearing his armor and... playing with some kind of handheld game system he found.

Occasionally a plume of smoke gusts out of his helmet's air filters.

Yes. He's smoking. In his helmet. It's a talent.

She's mad. She hasn't stopped being mad for the last few days.

She was mad when the zombies hit, mad when she found out what happened to Paco, madder and madder and madder for B5 and Jaime and Querl and no matter who she's talked to or what she's done she's frothing and nauseous with how USELESS she feels to change any of it.

She's barely slept, can't stop thinking, can't stop herself from lurching her way through little crying jags every time a bad thought or memory seeps in. Her oldest scars ache like they're new again... Her new bed in the crew quarters is so comfortable but she ends up back in her podsleeper some nights just for the close warm security of feeling shut away in a bubble for a while. She still can't quite drop off to sleep but it's better than feeling so exposed.

Brenda's had about enough of not sleeping though, she just wants to REST, and working herself down to exhaustion seems like a way to get there. So she's been camped out in one of the sensoriums, plowing her way through beating up opponent after spectral opponent, working already aching muscles into a mass of cramps and pain. Another hour or so of this, a hot bath, and with any luck she would be too tired to stand much less resist a comfortable bed.


[ooc: Will you mentioned wanting Leon to thread with Brenda some time? Feel free to hit this one. Sair, the Luthor thread I asked you about yesterday exploded in a whole other direction so maybe DSP can hit this one? He and Brenda should talk. ANYONE ELSE PLZ FEEL FREE TOO! ♥]

In spite of the success of the newly pod-popped at staying alive in the zombie-infested Pod Caverns, there were plenty of zombies left to go around. The Extermination Team had their work cut out for them -- and they'd better be sure they got them all. There were billions of sleeping people in their life-support pods, as vulnerable as low-hanging fruit as far as the zombies were concerned. They'd have a little trouble, since Andromeda had triggered the safety protocols that hardened the pod walls into something more like shells.

The zombies might be able to shatter them if they had long enough, though. Best to deal with them quickly.

Especially since some of these zombies couldn't be taken out by just a shot to the head...

...Okay, so maybe that movie was about vampires and not zombies.

But as the battle in the Vatican dragged on, it might feel like it had been going just that long.

And it showed no signs of letting up just yet.

A mass of zombies has laid seige to the Vatican.

Time to fight for your lives!!!

The Vatican had a lot of ground to cover. Normally covered in expansive gardens (just empty plots on the ship) and comprised of a multitude of buildings, holing up there meant holing up in simply a part of the Vatican. The group was therefore in St. Peter's Basilica, which had had most of its entrances sealed off. Now they had to work on small windows and a few other entrances left neglected, but overall, it was a very defensible position. There were no exits other than the ones leading to the sacristy and treasury--which was their main avenue of escape, and heavily guarded. The prisoners were being kept in this area, and guarded by the rear guards, as leaving them in the prison was deemed too dangerous for their safety. As bad as they'd been with the Yeerk conflict, they were crew, and no one wanted them to die.

The courtyard was a chokepoint. Gunners could sit on the roofs of the buildings running alongside the courtyard to strafe St. Peter's square from the sides.

The various chapels and vestibules along the sides made excellent areas for food, medical, and weapons supplies to be gathered, and most were clustered in the middle of the basilica. The Medical area was in the Chapel of the Column, the main weapons and ammo caches, and Food storage areas were in the two Transepts, respectively, to the sides of the Papal altar. Pews all in the main areas had been converted to sleeping areas, right in the center of the whole place.

There was still work to be done, before the other group could leave. Last minute barricades, blocking more windows, moving the last of the medical supplies, inventorying the food, and so on. Then it would be time to hunker down.

So push up your sleeves and lend someone else a hand, folks.

[ooc: Read instructions for these threads here!]

The Chief's got the sensoriums up with a shooting range. It's not the one he's called up in the past, this is an outdoor range. There are several different target distances, including the long, long rifle lines for things with considerable scope to them, at the end of the range are some somewhat chewed out hills deep enough to catch most impacts. There's plenty of open space off to one side with some practice dummies for melee training, and plenty of open space in general. It's relatively sunny and the air is fresh, but the weather's an after thought. They needed a range. Chief called one up.

They all have a lot of work cut out for them.

The Chief is in full armor, doing a little quick rifle maintenance before anybody shows up. It's holographic, but it serves his purpose for now.

[OOC: This is a FULLY OPEN post. Subthread all you want. Tag each other, teach each other, ask questions, branch off. It's like a big social thread with guns!]

([Also OOC:] If you need to talk to the Chief, just warning you that I'm a bit swamped right now. I'll get back to you but it'll be a slow process. @_@)

Coffee. Coffee, coffee, coffee.

Lois couldn’t remember the last time she had REAL coffee and it was driving her up the walls. A few hours before arriving here? Was that it? She’d been so busy freaking out and running around the city and looking for her missing cousin that coffee had taken a backseat that day, and she wished she had.

Everything in this place would be a lot better if she had caffiene in her system, and that’s why she was sitting in the Sensoriums, in a nice little Metropolis coffee shop, with a copy of the Daily Planet on the table in front of her, enjoying fake-coffee at her leisure. When life gave you fake coffee, the only thing to do was take it and privately grumble about nothing in particular.

She uncapped a conveniently provided permanent marker, and blackened out the header (“CITY TO EXPAND BUS ROUTES PAST SHUSTER AVENUE”) and marked in her own words in big block letters.

STAR REPORTER LOIS LANE KIDNAPED BY ALIEN SPACESHIP.

(Okay, so it was a bit cramped.)

Lois sat back in her seat, taking another sip of coffee, and contemplated opening lines. Probably something to do with “taking it in stride, once again punching life in the face”, but that seemed a bit unprofessional.

So she wrote:

Witnesses battle over a football, finds a death pen, scottish boys and medeival m Medivel nights and Smallville’s meteor freak cousin and lives to tell the tale

She chewed on the end of the marker for a sec, and then slammed it down in frustration.

“Who am I kidding? They won’t run this. I’m going to be shoved in Belle Reve the second I open my mouth.”

Grif settles back into the fleshy couch, having just posted a message on the omnicoms, re: his empty stomach. He doesn't want to get up and go get some crappy food from the mess hall himself, even though he is hungry. He doesn't feel like it. And he's comfortable here. Why not make somebody else do it? Grif's long since figured out that if he wants anything in life, all he usually has to do is complain about it until people get sick of hearing him whine and go fix the problem.

While he waits for an answer (and most likely an argument, he looks forward to that), legs over the back of the meatcouch with his head hanging just off the edge of the seat, he keeps an eye out for anyone passing by so he can possibly recruit them to the food-getting effort.

Really, it would just be easier to go get it himself. But where would the fun in that be?

For even the busiest of workaholics, there's a limit to what a single person can accomplish in a given time frame without burning out. With the help of the rest of the Engineering department, Billy Cranston has finally come to accept this.

Which is why any visitors to this particular Sensorium will find themselves at the edge of an in-ground swimming pool surrounded by lush trees, a warm breeze drifting through the air. The pool itself is shaped like a bean, simple and efficient.

From the end closest to the door, the only sign of life immediately visible is a small pile sitting a short distance from the water's edge: a white shirt, a towel, and a few scientific instruments set parallel to the water's edge, humming with activity. Because the pool's occupant is here on science-related business. He's definitely here to collect data for water-based experiments. Yup.

The Blue Ranger is floating aimlessly at the far end, clad in blue swim trunks. There's something strapped to his wrist measuring the water's temperature and chemical composition, and if anyone asks, the device needs to skim the water's surface to collect the most accurate data. There's a very practical purpose for his swimming. He's certainly not relaxing. Nope.

Luckily for Billy, no one's here to catch him in the act, right?

If nothing else, being on the good ship Stacy has taught Tex something. Namely, intangibility sucks. It certainly makes poking into things-and beating the crap out of Grif people who deserve it-that much harder.

Which would be why her hologram's popped up on the obs deck, watching things with a decidedly cranky stance. Someone has to have gotten into something she can snark at them for.

The sensorium appears deserted. It's taken on the appearance of a box canyon, the ground mostly orange and dusty with some particularly stubborn grass eking out an existance. The hills are steep enough to cut off your view of anything distant, and the sky above is a blazingly clear blue. It's also very hot here. Very hot. The sun does not love this canyon.

Though there's no one around, a soft whirring becomes audible. Then it turns into the full engine-whine of a warthog jeep as one comes flying up one of the hills, catching air off the top. There's a man in orange armor at the wheel, yelling.

"WHOO! YEAH!"

Grif is not happy, but that shouldn't be news to anyone that's met him. He doesn't like being here, he doesn't like the people he's stuck with, and he really doesn't like his team assignment.

So what's a guy to do? Go work on building some actual muscle tone so Samus' training from hell won't hurt so bad next time? Ask around and see what he can do to help toward the goal of going home? Find a way to be otherwise useful?

Heck no! This is Grif. He'll be in the media lab, playing Tetris in an effort to push all this out of his mind for a bit. It seems to be working.

He's actually pretty good at it, if you watch him. Though those bricks are starting to pile up, and they're moving faster and faster and faster and...

"Dammit!"

Grif scowls at the screen, smacking a couple buttons furiously to get a new game to load up.

For the newbies, there are people waiting for them in the Obs Deck. A whole gaggle of people. Behind them is the nasty statue, and the beautiful sight through the windows of the stars streaming past and the swirling vortex of collars that was interdimensional travel.

There are more questions than answers, but the crew is willing to help, especially the Command Staff and greeters.

Samus crossed her arms looking over the set up she had created. Well, more remembered. Creativity was not the hunter's strength, so her course reflected her latest mission. However, the Sensoriums had done an excellent job recreating it. Samus was impressed at the details when she had run it the first time. Perfect for her team.

It was a complex maze of a space station. Platforms and hidden passageways spread throughout it. It's also crawling with bipedal aliens. If the subject made it to the end of the course, there was a surprise wait for them.

Samus got on her comm and contacted the rest of her team.

Team Golf, report to the Sensoriums immediately.

((ooc: Don't worry if you can't tag :P Samus will hunt down just find your character later))

There are a few constants in life. One of those is 'diagnostics is boring'. This is a fact that Tex has picked up on very quickly-and so she's eager to get away from it for awhile. Her hologram appears on the obs deck, and she glances around briefly, looking to see who else might be around. There's got to be somebody to vent her snark and frustration on, right?

Right?

Samus was on a mission.

More specifically, she was on a mission to find one of her team members. She need to teach him a little lesson in respecting authority. She and Grif had a slight altercation on appropriate ways to refer to her. She was going to correct this in the quickest way possible.

Which Samus thought was with her fists.

Earlier, somewhere in the Vatican's outbuildings:
Carefully, Murphy poured a little of the precious liquid into a dish, then placed the bottle far, far away. He nodded to his brother who then, with great ceremony (and from a safe distance) lit a match and tossed it in.

The flame burnt fast, bright, and blue.

The twins grinned.

******

The next flame burnt a decidedly different color, and distinctly higher. The boys jumped back, laughed, and Murphy pointed at his twin.

"You're trying it first!"



( Now, nearly everywhere...Collapse )


[ooc note]

If anyone's passing through the Obs Deck, they might notice a man stretched out on one of the flesh couches with a rifle across his lap. He's fast asleep and seems perfectly relaxed, considering that this isn't where he should be sleeping and is a psychotic meat ship besides.

But that's not stopping Grif.

He's had a long, stressful day full of strangers and bad food. And he intends to seep as much of it off as he can.

It might be interesting to wake him up.

[ooc: Read this bit.]

Something happens outside the ship. There's a concussive noise like something docking, and then the doors to Obs open again, to reveal a mostly intact, but somewhat bedraggled away team. One of them is injured, and part of the group works to get her down to MedBay, some of the others look stoic and a touch upset with what they've learned.

Some look pissed off that their various morphers and power suits have been stolen away from them again by Stacy's tentacles or dampened.

Something happens INSIDE the ship. A handful of individuals are released from their pods after quite some time of running imaginary mazes.

[[OOC: Read this before tagging.]]

It seems like things around the ship have been getting rather lively lately.

And now, it's about to get even more lively.

||Pod Release Protocols Initating|| Stacy's familiar voice sounded out to all the podmates.

In the Pod Caverns, there were the sounds of: Pop. Pop pop pop. Poppuhpoppoppop. KASCHUNKhiiiiiiiissssss.

There was condensation and mist spraying out from cracks in the pods, as the people inside slid out onto the floors, covered in slime.