ataraxionlogs | forty-second jump;

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: There's a strange sense of contentment that greets you as you wake from the jump. Deep and certain, it doesn't warm you or cloak the unpleasantness of the stasis fluid on your skin and the disorientation spinning in your head. It feels disconcertingly distant, instead, a sense as though an answer has been decided on - and that you won't much like to experience it coming to fruition...

New arrivals will find messages spraypainted across their lockers telling them not to follow their tattoo numbers, and instead to find a room on Floors 001-010.

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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.

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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.

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Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

[Levi has not told Cole to go away, and he has proven in the past that if he wants Cole to leave he will tell him. So, Cole follows Levi. He's got a new knife with him. Along with the two daggers he used when he fought alongside Levi before, there's now a third. The hilt is shaped like a dragon. It looks old.]

You think that if you want it that it'll make it happen somehow. That it'll be another bad thing you're responsible for, like them dying... but it isn't. It's out of your hands. You aren't responsible, and you can't do anything to change it. Your wanting won't make it happen, your feelings aren't wrong. You aren't alone here.

[It's not so much that he believes his wanting anything will make it so- since he's has nothing but evidence to support the precise fucking opposite circumstance- as it is that he hates how even after so long he just doesn't learn. That isn't how it works and he knows it, but times like these when he wants to turn it off and can't are when he realizes just how little control over himself he really has. That bothers him.

And unfortunately, as the one who seems intent on poking at precisely that, Cole's earned himself a scowl... Though somewhere under the too-familiar grief of losing more people Levi knows his intentions are good... And that he's right.]

...I need a drink. [He slams his locker door shut with more force than is necessary, wincing at such an obvious display, at how clear it must be that Cole's struck a nerve.] Don't follow me.

[He turns, then, begins to head toward the lift, but while he doesn't stop he does call out over his shoulder:]

And fix your damn shoes.

[You wrangle those laces, Cole!! Levi has faith in you.]

[There it was, the dismissal. Cole stays where he is as Levi storms away, watching with the watery blue eyes that don't blink anywhere near as much as they should. He looks down at his shoes when Levi comments on them. But... they're tied, isn't that good?

He's back in the shadows between real and not real before Levi is out the door. He's got other things that need taking care of. He can find Levi later. When he is less angry.]

forty-second jump;

u brought this on yourself brosef

;__; also wow sorry for the screeching halt in tags jfc

your tags are worth waiting foooor