SIXTH WAVE

[theguidinghand]

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.

Comments

[walksonrooftops]

"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.

[blondeandperky]

"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?"

[walksonrooftops]

"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.

[blondeandperky]

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."

[walksonrooftops]

"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."

[blondeandperky]

"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?"

[walksonrooftops]

"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."

[blondeandperky]

"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."

[walksonrooftops]

"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."

[blondeandperky]

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.

[walksonrooftops]

"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."

[blondeandperky]

"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."

[walksonrooftops]

"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."

[blondeandperky]

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?"

[walksonrooftops]

"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."

[blondeandperky]

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

[walksonrooftops]

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

[blondeandperky]

"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.

[walksonrooftops]

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

"Is that bad?"

[blondeandperky]

She didn't mean to do that, and she offers him a tentative smile. If it's a gap of knowledge, those can be fixed.

"It's fine...Have you heard of God? Jesus? Mary?"

[walksonrooftops]

"No. I haven't heard of any of those."

But now he sure does feel like he should.

[blondeandperky]

"No..?" She still sounds skeptical, as if he might for some reason be lying.

"I suppose it wouldn't be too late for you to. But please don't say that everyone here is similarly ignorant."

[walksonrooftops]

"No."

His ears lower and he avoids her gaze now, definitely beginning to feel uneasy.

"No, I'm not sure. Maybe some others know what those are."

[blondeandperky]

"I guess," and Buffy's smile brightens incidentally, as if she's forcing herself through it to feel more cheerful, "That I can ask them about it myself. I'll find it out."

After all, it didn't look like they were all cat-people.

[walksonrooftops]

"I'm sorry I don't know more about it. But a lot of people here are humans, so they probably know."

He backs away a little. Well, he wasn't able to help her as much as he'd like, and that kind of troubles him.

"Just be careful."