Hail the Conquering Heroes

[cityship]

Things can happen without Stacy knowing, that much is apparent now. The damage to her sensors is significant. But the fighting clued her in.

After it's all over, after those captured have been rescued, after the injured have been tended to, only the nest is left, and Stacy takes care of it.

||Infestation of Cluster 42, Level 4, Sector 7, Sublevel 12, Zone 37 has been detected. Triggering internal defenses. Decontamination commencing.||

There is a pause.

||Decontamination complete.||

Simple as that, once she knows the problem was there. Her internal sensors are damaged, especially in the city, and so are some of the systems monitoring them. You have to know what's broken to know to fix it.

Such a simple thing and it only took one man dying to make it happen. (His body is gone, by the way, ripped to shreds and eaten. There's not even a spot of blood on the floor. That's the bugs' doing. The bugs' bodies are gone too--that's Stacy's doing).

||Any injured personnel that still have not received medical attention, report to the nearest lift, and you will be transported to the MedBay. Any uninjured personnel, report to the Living Area, to the restroom facilities to undergo decontamination of xenobiological material. Then report to the Obs Deck to meet your new crew-mates.||

Said crew-mates--and the Doctor, who'd skipped out and miraculously ducked and weaved his way to the lift when he'd realized the Master was there--are there and waiting, and just a tad confused.

[ooc: read this first]

Comments

[ihatefire.livejournal.com]

"Guess Stacy wants more people up and about so they can get eaten by alien space bugs."

[thenameissam.livejournal.com]

"Yeah, well, they came to the right place," Sam answered, looking over the crowd. "Especially the way that almost turned out."

[ihatefire.livejournal.com]

"One life was one too many. We need to tighten up ship after this. Search the ship and make sure they're all gone--and there's nothing else like them. Then see about getting the hell out of here and back home."

[thenameissam.livejournal.com]

"If you ask me," Sam said.

She didn't. But oh well, she was getting it anyway.

"We need to set-up some kind of training sessions. If we're gonna get outta this alive, we're gonna have to work together. And, after what just happened down there, I get the feeling a lot of these people are used to working on their own."

[ihatefire.livejournal.com]

A nod. "You're right. Obviously, we don't know what we're going to wind up facing. We need to be more cohesive and the people that don't know how to fight need to learn enough to at least defend themselves."

[thenameissam.livejournal.com]

Sam returned her nod. He leaned back against the sofa and let the gooey mass of tissue hold all his weight as he relaxed his muscles. "You know, when we first got here...or woke up or whatever...I've got to admit, I wasn't all that sure you were up to this."

[ihatefire.livejournal.com]

"'Small-town cop' doesn't usually make for a great resume for leader of a ragtag space crew of interdimensional kidnapees," she said with a slight quirk at the corner of her mouth.

[thenameissam.livejournal.com]

"No, no it doesn't," Sam said with a firm nod, his mouth turning up into an amused smile. "Then again, neither does 'Stanford Law School' drop-out. By all rights, I should be some uptight prick in a suit arguing about summary judgments and exculpatory evidence...and you should be out givin' parking tickets to jerks like me who park in handicap spaces."

[ihatefire.livejournal.com]

"I guess for both of us that there was that little something dark that got in the way of boring and damn well devoured it."

[thenameissam.livejournal.com]

"Yeah, I guess so," he nodded again, still smiling. After all, this was the first time since he'd woken up covered in slime that Sam had allowed himself to relax. "So what's your story, anyway?" he asked. "I mean, you're way too cool with this whole 'getting abducted by an alien stomach ship' to be just some ordinary small-town cop."

[ihatefire.livejournal.com]

"There was a town not far from Brahms--old mining town, called Silent Hill. Something bad went down there. There was talk of a cult, a little girl caught in a fire. Nothing was really clear about what happened, but a fire started in the town and move down into the coal mines underneath. There were quite a few didn't make it out. After that, the town was abandoned and the road cut off."

She shook her head, arms crossed, leaning back against a fleshy wall.

"We had a few calls of people going missing there--usually dumb teens and college kids looking for a thrill. Sometimes we'd find 'em, shaken as anything,. Most times we didn't. We usually wrote it off as them falling down one of the cracks all over, or into sinkholes into the burning mines--it was an easy accident to happen and the only thing we could think of to explain it when we never found 'em."

[thenameissam.livejournal.com]

Sam's smile disappeared and listened intently, his brow furrowed, as she recited the story of Silent Hill. "What do you mean you usually wrote it off? What changed?"

[ihatefire.livejournal.com]

"One night, a few years back there was a perv that kidnapped a kid from a gas station on the highway. When he caught me following, he dumped the kid down a mine shaft. My radio went dead, for some reason, and the kid was fading so I had to get him out of there myself. I wound up wandering underground with him on my back until--I guess I found us a shaft that led to the surface, because it's all still a blur. Somehow we were on the city limits, the opposite side of the town. I have no idea how we got there."

Her eyes grew distant.

"Just a little while before I wound up here, I caught a woman with a kid in her car at the same gas station as I was refueling my bike. Kid seemed upset about something, so my instincts were going crazy. I just knew something wasn't right, but she claimed she was her mother, so I let it go. I was up the road a bit behind her when I saw her veer off onto the street into Silent Hill--so I followed. It's trespassing and I was afraid it was like before. She sped up and there was a chase and we both wound up crashing."

A deep breath. "Her name was Rose DeSilva and it was her daughter, adopted, but she'd been having nightmares about the town, and Rose brought her to try to see if that helped her work through whatever had happened to her, figuring maybe she'd had some kinda childhood trauma there. When Rose and I came to, her daughter was gone from the wreck of the car, and we found out the town was cut off. Sheer cliffs when there weren't any before, my radio was dead."

She shook her head.

"There were...things in that town. Dead things. Demons. Monsters. I don't what to call them, because I've never seen anything like 'em even in fiction. Acid-spewing, fleshy monsters. Things that tore the skin off people. But the worst monsters were the people left--some were the original townspeople, trapped since the fire. A cult. I came from that to here. I never got to find out what the entire story was or if anything could make sense of that, and I doubt I will."

It was almost as if the fire was flickering in her eyes.

"Hell isn't supposed to make sense."

[thenameissam.livejournal.com]

Sam's confusion disappeared as Cybil continued to tell a story that, while the details were different, would be more than just a little familiar to him. "You've been to a cursed town," he said, almost as if he were merely thinking aloud. "Well, no wonder you're so together. Cursed towns are black. They're these places that, for one reason or another, were tainted by the people that lived there. It's usually something they did, something so heinous that the echoes of it hang around and fester and start corrupting everything, the land, the air, the buildings...the people. Shit, if the evil festers long enough, it can grow and actually become a gateway straight to hell."

He paused, eying the captain for a moment with a look of understanding that said that he was even more impressed with her than he had been before. "If you survived that, I'd have to say you're definitely cut out for this. And I definitely under-estimated you."

[ihatefire.livejournal.com]

"I'm impressed you have a name for something like that," she said. "Come across them often?"

[thenameissam.livejournal.com]

"Umm...Actually," Sam said with a pensive look on his face. "I was in one a few months ago. This demon took me and a few other people and stuck us in this cursed town in South Dakota. It was one of those old ghost towns that look like they'd died a century or so ago, completely surrounded by trees and everyone's forgotten it was even there. That kind of thing."

A pause, followed by a deep inhale.

"Well, he stuck us all there and basically told us we had to kill each other or he'd kill all of us. If any of us tried to leave while the others were still alive, he'd kill us. And, if we all tried to leave together or if more than one of us was left standing at the end of the day, he'd kill us."

[ihatefire.livejournal.com]

Ho-ly fuck.

"Ho-ly fuck. I'll bet it sure as hell wasn't Brigadoon. What happened?"

[thenameissam.livejournal.com]

"Only one of us walked out alive," Sam answered dead-pan.

"One of us turned on the others, whittled us down until there were only two us left. And then he severed my spinal cord and walked out."

[ihatefire.livejournal.com]

"Did you wind up here after? Is that how--wait, no. You said it was a months ago."

She shook her head. "You were wrong saying I survived earlier. I was burned alive by the cult, and I wouldn't be surprised if they were the ones that'd cursed the fucking town. Survived the fucking town, survived the fucking monsters, but it was the fucking people that got me in the end. I remember burning--and then I was here. What saved you?"

[thenameissam.livejournal.com]

"Nothing. I died," Sam said. "The only reason I'm here now is because my brother summoned a crossroads demon and traded his soul to bring me back."

[ihatefire.livejournal.com]

"Did he get it back?" she asked, "or am I being too goddamn optimistic by asking that question?"

[thenameissam.livejournal.com]

Sam's shoulder sank and his head dipped, his eyes focusing on a spot on the floor in front of him. "Not yet," he answered, his tone slightly defeated. "And if what that Rommie girl...computer...girl...thing...whatever...if what she said is right and we've been here six months, then Dean's got about three more months before the deal comes due."

He paused.

"Which is why I gotta get outta here."