ataraxionlogs | SIXTH WAVE

Entry tags:

SIXTH WAVE

CHARACTERS: Everyone
LOCATION: Gravity Couch Room
WARNINGS: Possible swearing, possible violence, implied (and possibly explicit) nudity.
SUMMARY: Another month, another jump, another round of new faces.
NOTES: Yep, we're continuing the tradition of re-hashing the game premise.

---

You wake up in darkness.

There's a breathing tube jammed down your trachea, and you're suspended in a tube of clear blue fluid. Upon registering your level of consciousness, the gravity couch drains the fluid surrounding you and retracts the breathing apparatus; the doors in front of you open, and you're deposited on the floor of a stark, sterile medical bay.

You are not alone.

There are others who have come before you, others who are awakening beside you. Some may be familiar to you, perhaps even friends. Others have much less amiable plans. Some are merely alien and inexplicable, but there are always those who might mean you harm.

After you catch your breath and your vision returns, you notice a number on the inside of your forearm. Maybe it's a familiar number. Maybe it means something. Maybe it's just a number. But the number—completely unique to you—is a tattoo, and it does not come off.

If you enter the room adjacent to the medbay, you will find a small locker with your number on it, surrounded by rows upon rows of identical lockers. Inside, you will find a few of your personal items, a communications device, and a ship's uniform in your exact size. The comms device is fully powered and connects directly to the ship's network; it's your only means of communication beyond physical conversation. Upon turning the device on, a neutral, automated voice will say, "Please take the blue lift to the passenger quarters." Any other attempts at communicating with the rest of the network are met only with static.

This is your welcome party.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

How many times had it been now? Asato's beginning to lose count, or at least to stop caring about counting the number of times he wakes up like this. It's still uncomfortable, and when he stumbles out of the stasis tube in a flood of goop he's still no more certain on his feet than the first time or two. What's missing these times is the sense of fear, the defensive snarling and clawing. Instead he takes as long as he needs to steady himself, then shakes himself off from nose to tail before turning to make his way to the locker rooms.

He needs to shower. Being this dirty is enough to make any cat finicky, and while Asato doesn't seem to care a whole lot about his appearance as a whole, the sensation of the stasis fluid drying on him--and in his fur, that's the worst--is enough to make his skin crawl. A towel was enough to get the worst of the damp, sticky goo off of him, but it's definitely not enough to have him feeling at ease in his own skin, so he wraps the towel around his waist and tries to get his belongings together as quickly as he can. Luckily, he doesn't own much at all.

For a long moment after he closes his locker again, the Ribika can be seen closing his eyes and tipping his head back just a little, his ear turning as if he's listening for something. He inhales deeply and holds it, going still, then releases that breath in a sigh. Whatever he was searching for-- something that he himself can't quite describe either, but somehow recognizes when he feels it--he seems to have found it.

Maybe things will be alright on the Tranquility still. He smiles and makes his way towards the showers, keeping an eye out for familiar and new faces alike.

Edited 2012-05-08 05:42 (UTC)

Buffy had found the lockers and she hesitated a moment in front of them, attempting to determine if she was really supposed to use the ones that matched the number on her arm. When she did she found unfamiliar clothing and a few objects that were actually hers. She couldn't decide if their presence was reassuring or damn disturbing.

She stood still, staring at them for a moment, when she felt her arm jostled slightly by someone else around. She jumped, not used enough to being around large amounts of people to be able to deal immediately with someone in her personal space unexpectedly. She bit back on a squeak, but just barely. She did take a step away, which brought her straight into someone else. That time she did squeak, and stare widely at the person -- with cat ears? -- that she'd bumped into.

"I'm sorry," she said. That's what people did in old television shows and movies when they bumped into other people, right? Buffy knew that they didn't panic, and that doing so wouldn't help her now.

"Sorry--" Asato mumbles it before he even gets a good look at who he'd accidentally bumped into--or who had bumped into him, but he's not about to argue responsibility for something that trivial. Right upon arrival, the locker rooms did tend to get a little crowded, but he isn't one to try and deliberately muscle his way through the crowds. In fact, in previous jumps he'd waited a little for the crowds to thin before heading up to fetch his stuff. It was easier that way. Less chance for confrontation. Fewer people ogling him as he worked to groom his ears and tail.

"I didn't mean to bump into you. Are you alright?" By now, he's facing her, and he doesn't recognize her at all. A newcomer? Or perhaps just someone who's a little more reclusive; they have that sort of people on this ship too.

It'd be harder to think what sort of people they don't have here on the ship, at this point.

He's a solid six feet tall, so he towers over her, and still he doesn't actually look all that intimidating. But then, he's not trying to be.

It wasn't so much the size of him that was intimidating her as the potential he had to die and then come back as a zombie as a result of Kellis-Amberlee. Still, Buffy likes people, usually, so she's quick to respond with a reassuring smile.

"Just a little bump. I'm fine" she replied. An injury that drew blood -- no matter the amount or other severity of it -- would cause her to freak out quite a lot, but that wasn't even hard to cause any sort of bruise. It was just everything else that didn't make any sense and wasn't really okay.

"Although... Do you know how to get into contact with the supervising doctor?"

None of that is the case, fortunately. He answers her smile with one of his own, small but definitely there, enough to assure her he means absolutely no harm.

"Doctor? I don't know about doctors. But there's a place called the medbay here where you can go to have your wounds looked at."

Which brings him to the next questions--

"You're not hurt, are you?"

"No, I'm not hurt," she reassures quickly. "I don't have any wounds."

"You mean this whole place isn't a medical facility?" Buffy studies the walls, considering it. She can believe it of the CDC and nowhere else, but then, he doesn't fit.

"Who are you?" she asks.

"There's a medical facility here. But this whole place is a ship. It moves through the sky, very high up. Between the stars and planets."

In space. The way he talks about it makes it abundantly clear that he's not from this time period and isn't completely comfortable with the terminology--or the concepts themselves.

"I'm Asato." Her question is answered after a long pause.

"Wait wait wait," Buffy says. She'll get back to the rest of this in a moment, but the first part is very important.

"We're on a spaceship?" Space exploration had been given up after the Rising, not much point in spending a lot of money just to have one of the astronauts eat his crewmember.

"How did we get here?"

"Through the pods." He points down to the hallways leading to he bay where the pods are all lined up. "I don't know how they find you or put you there. But you get here in the pods. Every time we go back to the pods, we wake up after and there are different people on the ship."

People gone, too. That's the hardest part.

"You came out of one too." She smells and looks like it, at least.

Her nose wrinkles. "I think how they found me and put me there is a pretty important part of this whole thing. But since you don't know, I guess it's a missing piece for now."

She smiles at him again. She doesn't offer out her hand because it's best to avoid casual touch, in a culture like hers. "I'm Buffy. It's nice to meet you."

She pauses a moment, then shrugs. "I was actually asking, though, because of the...ears."

"I don't know. No one knows."

Or no one will say. Either way, he's yet to find someone who isn't completely in the dark about all this and why they're here. When she introduces herself, he echoes her name and nods. The lack of casual touching it just fine by him; he's only just beginning to figure out how that works, and he's perfectly content to be friendly but keep his distance.

"Ears." He looks up. "They are my ears. Ribika ears."

"Great." If Buffy were more driven in the way that George is she would probably start relentlessly searching for the truth right then and there. Her motivations were different.

"Ribika? I'm afraid that the name isn't familiar with me. And, uh. How is it here, generally?"

"That's alright. No one here knows what Ribika are except for other Ribika."

He's not angry about that in the slightest. In fact, it's kind of fascinating, seeing so many different species from different worlds here.

"It's alright here. There are a lot of friendly people. But sometimes strange things happen, so you have to be careful. Be careful of the red smiling face. Something bad happened with that earlier."

"The red smiling face?" Buffy asks, her mind immediately going to the part of his sentence that's a warning. "Do you mean, red like a mask, an alien, or just someone who's very sunburnt?" She offers a smile with the last suggestion, but her heart's not in it yet. Maybe if she keeps smiling it'll go back to being so.

"And with 'something bad', you're going to have to get a lot more specific."

"A red smiling face. In writing. Dot dot half-circle."

He draws it out in the air as he says it (what are colons and parentheses?) to help illustrate what he means.

"That face was there when we were stuck in a room with skeletons. I don't know who the skeletons were, but the writing on the wall had the red smiling face. A lot of people saw it. That's the bad thing, too."

Let her get this right. "You were stuck in a room with skeletons? On the ship? Where did the skeletons come from? Where are they now? Has an analysis been run to figure out who they are?"

She's not even going to address the fact that the red smiling face seems to be some kind of...signature, rather than how people should be referring to whoever's behind it.

"I don't know. I don't know where they came from. I don't know if anyone looked at the bones to see who they belong to. They were there when we came into the room. And it was always one person in the room."

His tail curls pensively around his ankle.

"Since then, things have happened. But there's always been a way to fix them."

"I see. Are there any people on the ship who are particularly suspicious?" She doesn't know how people are selected to be taken here, but it seems unlikely that they'll all be people who are motivated by what is best for society.

"And when you say, a way to fix them, could you perhaps explain a little more what you mean? It's just that I don't see how to fix something like a room filled with bones."

"A few. Like the one named Megamind. He tried to take over the ship."

But for the most part, it seems like the good guys far outnumber the bad guys, and from what he gathered the recent demon infestation wasn't even started with completely malicious intent, either.

"We couldn't fix the room. But they could make the demons go away."

Megamind? It sounds like a stereotypical villain name if ever she's heard one. But she thinks she can take it that he didn't succeed, then.

"If I can...demons how? Demons like story demons or demons like...some scientific technobabble that corresponds to what you're calling demons?"

"Demons that took over people's bodies. I don't know anything about science, but it was a little bit like the ones we have back home. The kind you summon."

Were they religious in nature? "Did you get rid of them with exorcism? Did crosses or bible verses work against them?"

"I don't know what bibles are. But I think I heard mention of exorcism over the network."

"You don't... Oh." She supposes that it might not mean as much to him as it does to her, but not to have heard of it at all... It's just a momentary surprise.

"Ah--" He shrinks back a little, ears lowering, and he bites his lip with sudden uncertainty.

"Is that bad?"

SIXTH WAVE

Asato | OTA

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