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

[darkart]

What-- what did you. Did you say witch's tit. Why do people speak to him. Why do people speak.

Severus turns his head - grudgingly, slowly - to look over at this new intruder with a glare preloaded. "What expert advice, thank you," he says, sounding the furthest from thankful as anyone possibly can. "Do you have any more unsolicited interruptions you'd like to get overwith before I can carry on?"

Eventually, it will occur to Severus that he can barter for cigarettes since he didn't arrive with any (protip, children: unless you want to get made fun by some dork in glasses for seven books straight over how your teeth look, don't smoke), but for now he's just about used up all his patience for rubberneckers in the lockers, and it's beyond him. It might be prudent to offer to offer to light one of those for him in exchange for a coffin nail. But no, he's going to be a jerk instead.

[dogbane]

Speaking, for William, is a chronic problem unfortunately. The glare finds its mark, and William's eyes pop slightly. "All right, all right. No need to get your," he catches himself, immediately but very tardily recognizing the enormous discrepancy between his word choice and the kind of verbiage that the other man's needling him with right now. His natural assumption is that the tit thing set him off, not the witch thing. "--feelings out," he finishes.

William puts the one box of cigarettes into his pocket but doesn't let go of it. He starts to turn away, too, but even that hangs mid-motion, his eyes sketching furtively back toward Snape. It's not optimism, exactly, that inspires attempt number two. Well, since he's interrupting already-- "If you're not going to twa--tw-- trash-- me, I was wondering if you've got a light." He prepares for further mortification by pressing his toes together inside of his new shoes, maintaining eye contact with Snape's nose, and holding the door of his own locker like he might could improvise a shield.

[darkart]

All things are currently setting him off, to be fair. (Or unfair, as it were.) Severus shuts his locker door with more force than is strictly necessary - overall the impact is lost in the din of two-hundred people showering and changing and conversing, but within their immediate area, it's awfully loud.

"No."

He doesn't actually notice if his stuttering is normal or the product of being nervous; Severus has a history of prompting that in slower students. And for now he's just going to pick his things up and walk by William, on his way out of here.

[dogbane]

"Right." Much like the kids at home, William winces when the door slams. He has only recently gotten back into a system of hierarchy where lecturers terrorize him without breaking a sweat, but he already has the appropriate reaction down. Staring at a fixed spot of his locker door interior, he listens to the other man walking by. His face scrunches gradually as the wizard takes leave, concealed by the shadow of his locker, his own head, and you know, the fact that Snape gives zero fucks.

He's left shaking his head, tipping a lone forefinger downward like a wilting phallus. "Bewww." He adds one clank to the din when he closes his locker too, glances around, before joining the flow of traffic.