twenty-eighth jump;

[ataraxites]

CHARACTERS: Any and all.
LOCATION: Gravity Couches and beyond.
WARNINGS: Maybe some swearing, or even some violence, and more than likely some implied (and possibly explicit) nakedness.
SUMMARY: Another month, another jump, another round of new faces.
NOTES: It could just be the standard sensation of air on wet skin, but if you bother to check, you might notice the steam rising from your body, barely there and gone within a minute. By the time you get to the showers, it will be clear that it's not just taking you time to adjust. The room is cold — colder than usual, but no worse than the last jump. While it's nothing dangerous, it's certainly motivation to hurry through the usual routine and get dressed quickly.



It's getting closer.




YOUR EYES ARE OPEN.

KEEP LOOKING.

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.

Comments

[salvatus]

It's not every day a vampire comes back from the dead.

[Like it's an appropriate answer. Like he's just processing and accepting and soon he'll be thrilled. Soon he'll reach out and place his hand on her arm and ask her how she is. Because he failed her and she died, and he'd been unconscious for the whole thing- but she'd left her humanity on. And it was Jenna. She'd been scared.

And now she wasn't dead, and she knows that- knows she had, if she's asking him these things. It's a lot to deal with. But he should be doing a lot of things, that he just skips over now, and so he doesn't do anything but let her come closer]

I did. [He skips the first question, because what about this situation is supposed to be fine? Even if everything he's heard wasn't true, he's still in space and Klaus and his coffins are not. It's the only thing he can allow to matter.

But she doesn't know where he's from. This might mean she's worried about the vampire secret- or something else entirely. If he's concise, not elaborative- perhaps she'll fall into her habit of overtly talking to fill in the silence and spill it]