The City was no good; you didn't just wander around there alone, especially in the sort of mood John is in. It would be just his luck to actually run into something, someone, and end up in a confrontation. Since he wanted to do some damage? Seemed like a better idea than not.

Truth be told, he might have tried to lose Allison. Only for a minute or two, but still. Then he stopped being an ass (but didn't stop feeling like one).

Sensoriums were out. John still didn't like the idea of a false reality being thrust on him, especially when true reality was biting him in the ass. What would he make there anyway? Home? Mexico, Arizona, LA? He sure wasn't going to conjure up some AI version of his mother. Nothing felt like home because nothing was home, no place was safe, nothing was permanent. Everything changed.

Everything changed all the time.

But he didn't want to be around people. So that left...the media library. Specifically the one room everyone seemed to avoid but John actually liked. Three O'clock Blues isn't a bad song, all told, and sometime between leaving Kyle and Allison and holing himself up in this room he found a nice, long jacket left behind in someone's possessions locker (so at least he feels a bit better about that).

The images don't bother him, few that they are. He knows history and he's studied war, and while the door isn't closed and locked, it's currently half-cracked open state isn't exactly inviting to visitors.

Good luck talking to John, if he doesn't know you. Good luck getting him to admit what's wrong if you do.

While Khel didn't exactly have anywhere he needed to be, he did like knowing where he was going. That wasn't really possible in his current situation, so he continued to wander the city for a bit before finally sitting down in front of a large temple. "The irony is not lost on me," he muttered to himself, waiting. He had been told that "Sheeana" would meet him in the 'city', but finding the city had been hard enough. Now he had to hope that Sheeana could find him. Still, he had waited for decades with nothing before. He could wait five minutes.

Of course, five minutes was not how long it took, and soon the skeleton was sure he had been there for hours. He paid it no heed, however, and continued to spend his time waiting, watching the fake sky, and wondering how it was all done. It was a remarkable magic, to be certain; he had not seen a blue sky in quite some time, and the sight of it made even the undead warrior feel nostalgic.

She'd been careful at covering her tracks, but sometimes you can be too careful--sometimes someone notices you taking great pains to not be noticed. Leela slips around a building in the city, and slips out of her Cloak of Disregard. Which was her normal cloak, mind you, but even here she could still do the occasional blood-weave. It's just magic is a time-consuming process, and she isn't fond of relying on it in general so she doesn't make a habit of trying to use it on the ship, but now--right now, it's an ace up her sleeve.

Or was, at any rate.

She's nowhere near where they hid Sam at the moment, but the fact that she's skulking about is enough for the observant onlooker to realize she's sneaking around for some reason.

After a little while, without time, without the sun and the moon, days wandering through the halls, eating only when necessary, hydrating only when one could not get out of it, and most definitely not sleeping in cubbies, the corridors looked all the same. It was easy to completely lose track of time.

Stepping out into sudden sunlight and air is shocking, but welcome, despite his misgivings about daylight. Something natural was better than endless corridors of a living machine. This was, of course, some sort of trick, but it was one of the AI's more pleasant ones. A level of his stress already began to drain from him as he wandered through it. He was fairly certain Connor had mentioned--might have even shown him it--but he couldn't say for sure how many days it had been.

So he wandered, and explored. Because Sergeant Kyle Reese had never been very good at sitting down and relaxing, even when he was arguably somewhat exhausted. He moved until he couldn't. Then he found somewhere hidden and less than deadly to sleep in. He still had quite a while in him before then.

Plenty of time to explore the city.

Move one muscle in your face. Stop. Do it again. Slow your heartrate. Now speed it up. Return to normal. Move each toe independently. Tense and contract tendons. This was Sheeana's 'warmup'. Whereas the archetypal martial arts teacher prepared for practice with a series of exxagerated stretches, touching their toes, kicking above their heads, for Sheeana the first thing was to enter into the total bodily awareness of the Weirding Way, to practice moving all the muscles, even the normally autonomous ones and those that couldn't move except with others. The tiniest fascia was under her control.

From the lotus position, she hopped up, tucking a foot under her, in a deep squat with the other leg pointed out straight, like a Russian dance frozen in place. Slowly she came to her feet, turning on her standing leg and curling her leg in until she was standing.

Then she dropped back into lotus and repeated the procedure on the other side.

Soon enough her two human students would arrive. She looked out across the park, over the purple grass, around diamond trees.

Grif settles back into the fleshy couch, having just posted a message on the omnicoms, re: his empty stomach. He doesn't want to get up and go get some crappy food from the mess hall himself, even though he is hungry. He doesn't feel like it. And he's comfortable here. Why not make somebody else do it? Grif's long since figured out that if he wants anything in life, all he usually has to do is complain about it until people get sick of hearing him whine and go fix the problem.

While he waits for an answer (and most likely an argument, he looks forward to that), legs over the back of the meatcouch with his head hanging just off the edge of the seat, he keeps an eye out for anyone passing by so he can possibly recruit them to the food-getting effort.

Really, it would just be easier to go get it himself. But where would the fun in that be?

Shadow Link was already making a list. City: Avoid at all costs. Sunlight was a painful, painful thing and yet another place that nearly blinded him. Media Library: Only when it was nearly empty. He could take the lighting, but his powers were far too depleted there. He checked the Med Bay just to know where it was and really, he was only going there for emergencies for others because going there with it's 'good lighting' would just be dumping salt on whatever injuries he had.

He was pondering getting to know a doctor. Find one that was trust worthy because there was no way in hell he was gonna tell them all that lovely little weakness of his.

He decided maybe the lockers would be a good place to waste time. Not so annoyingly bright and he might find some useful stuff. He even some a hat in a few he looked in, so he at least deemed it fine to make his own hat again. He still had to decide whether he wanted attention by getting rid of the plantsuit, but maybe if he found that clothing WAS somewhere in those lockers. Of course, he still had more of the ship to explore. He just had to be careful of entering rooms so he didn't get blinded again. Having that happen twice was enough and he really didn't like hurting his eyes.

So he kept wondering the halls, pondering if he should check out this 'engineering.' Supposedly it had something to do with all the weird....things here. Like the device they gave out at the meeting. He was still trying to figure out how a box let people talk to people.

Robert had taken it upon himself to gather and check over the physical evidence at the jailbreak. It infuriated him, really, that someone would be so callous and selfish as to flaunt the (albeit crude) justice system they had in place aboard Stacy. There were rules, and rules had to be followed. Even if you didn't like what happened. He knew there were a few cases where the creep had gotten off, and he hadn't liked it any better then anybody else, but you didn't go out and try to kill the guy because the system failed. It was just wrong. And why you would do so was a mystery to the former police officer.

He paused outside Leon's office to check on the information he had with him, flipping through the files on his omnicomm (locked of course) to insure that he had everything. Leon was a good guy to run the ship's security, Robert thought. Good head on his shoulders and seemed to know what he was doing in regards to police work and keeping the peace. He raised a hand and knocked quietly on the door before stepping inside.

"Leon, hi. Just got done organizing all the the evidence we found down in the cells. Thought you might wanna take a look at it."

There is a clandestine transaction going on near the Media Library.

"It's just... I don't feel right without it, y'know? Like everything's wrong inside. I get all weak. Shaky."

It's a sad, sad thing when someone becomes a slave to some outside force, has to rely on it for their strength.

"I just--I just need a little of the white stuff..."

Oh, to be brought down this low, to have to rely on someone else for this, but this ship doesn't let him have access to enough of what he needs, so he had to find someone else to provide it. Originally he'd seen her only every so often, but now he's weak, in withdrawal, he's a slave to it, reliant on her to function as he's been functioning.

"Just one more hit? To hold me for the week? That's all I need, I swear. Just one hit. I promise I won't bug you for it again this week."

It had taken Nanoha some time to explore the ship, and she still hadn't managed to see everything - or even close to everything. Still, she managed to find a bit of seclusion - an untraversed little corridor - where she could communicate with her Intelligent Device at length and find out just what powers she had available to her.

"Raising Heart," she said quietly to the red jewel she held in her hands. "Activate Barrier Jacket."

And the jewel spoke, in a synthetic-sounding female voice: "I can call only the base forms, my Master. Barrier Jacket - Sacred Mode, unavailable. Aggressor Mode, unavailable. Exceed Mode, unavailable.

Excelion Form, unavailable. Exceed Form, unavailable. Blaster System, unavailable. Axel Fin, Unavailable."

Still, she wasn't about to give up entirely. "Axel Fin, huh? But what about the Flier?" In response, the device spoke again: "I can call it, my Master: Flier Fin!" In the next moment, two small magenta wings sprouted from Nanoha's ankles, lifting her a foot or two off the floor. Well, it wasn't much, but it was at least something.

So yes, anyone who happened to come by would see a girl talking to a piece of jewelry, hovering off the floor. Nothing strange at all about that, right?

There were many things Yuri was too young for that she'd been forced into. Being a teacher was only the latest in a string that had started when she'd put the Borg on for the first time.

She felt a dry tongue, moist hands as she waited for Red Snout. These reactions never went away. She thought they would after a while, in the same way it had taken her years to get used to Borg's presence. No. Her heart rate always refused to calm down.

What was worse was that she felt as if the creature could somehow sense it. He would take big sniffs of her sometimes and she always felt as if she were giving something away.

Still there was a small consolation. He was learning. She'd introduced him to katakana and surprisingly the Velociraptor had found that the sudden facility extended out so he was equally clumsy in all languages. It was probably the same mechanism that let her read stuff in English like it was her first language.

Currently she waited in an unused conference room, children's primers spread out in front of her on the table white and knobby as bone.