After having his shoulder and Achilles tendon cared for in the medbay, Sam--under armed guard--had been brought back to the precinct and placed back into detention. Laying back on his cot, with his hand tucked under his head, he was lost in thought. Questions flooded his mind. Second guesses. Things he should have done differently at different moments. Wondering why he didn't see the decoy for what it was, a ploy to flush him and the rest of the conspirators out into the open. He'd missed it. He'd missed it all.

Now, not only was the Yeerk still alive--meaning that Sam and others had failed--but people had gotten hurt. He hadn't been able to see any faces, not until they'd taken him up to the medbay to treat him. But, when he got their he saw three people, two he recognized. Chaucer, the innocent author from way back in Earth's history. Stature, the girl who had stood between him and the person Schmuz was infesting when he reappeared. The last woman he didn't recognize. But, given the way Leon was hovering over her, she was clearly important to him.

At least three people were seriously wounded, not counting Jo who Sam had shot mid-range with a round of rock-salt, and not only did Sam have nothing--no dead Yeerk--to show for it, but they were all his fault.

After healing up and making sure Yuri is reassured, Jaime leaves her to seek out Leon. He has some apologies to make, possibly some bones to pick if Leon doesn't seem to understand his own contribution to the disaster (but Jaime intends to leave him alone about it if he gets it) and also needs to see about getting Khaji punished for what he's done. Jaime, seeing himself as Khaji's sort of...keeper, regarding morality, is willing to suffer the same punishment, if that's what it takes.

He doesn't have to go very far.

Leon's right there in the MedBay next to some young woman that Jaime vaguely thinks he's seen hanging around him before.

Yeah, so the 'bone to pick' thing is dropped completely. His boneheaded 'let's flush out the conspirators--whoops, civilians!' plan was indeed boneheaded, but Sam was an idiot, and he didn't help by jumping in, and Khaji didn't help by making it worse--and above all else, Jaime is not the type to kick anyone while they're already down.

"Is she going to be okay?" he asks in a voice full of quiet concern.

"Hey, Robin. You awake?"

Having spent the last week or so exploring this odd vessel, Roy is hardly surprised when he finally manages to get to the Sensoriums in one shot. Getting lost has become a part of his routine, but out of sheer determination he has figured Stacy's confusing hallways out.

He allows himself a small smile, a miniscule quirk of his lips in recognition of this small triumph against his captor. Pulling his gloves from the pocket of his greatcoat, he exhales steadily, loudly, his eyes narrowing as the room summons a series of moving targets in the shape of various creatures. He eyes one, internally forming an alchemic equation suited to large explosions, and dodges out of the way as it lunges at him. A snap is barely heard over the sounds of running feet, snarling, and the nearest set of targets explodes in a ball of flame directed from Roy's index finger.

As the room continually summons more targets for him to singe, his equations shift from explosions to slow burning flames to lakes of fire to something akin to lightning, a technique he was still perfecting.

A smirk blossoms, his telltale cockiness showing through as he incinerates yet another target.

Brainiac 5 hasn't been outside of his area of the labs much of late, preferring to keep working if at all possible and finding it easier than most others since he doesn't need to break for food or rest nearly as often as organic crew members do. Not to mention that the last few times he'd ventured outside, he'd gotten caught up in an altercation and, earlier, run into a particularly irritating girl who'd compared him to a vegetable of all things.

Therefore he's determined to stay in here where the company is infinitely better and continue working on his experiments in power sources. He's not, despite what others might think, sulking. He's simply working on something that requires a lot of concentration and--

His sensors beep faintly. Apparently his work requires slightly more attention than he's been giving it, because it's about to overload.

"Oh," he says. He has just enough time to throw up a forcefield around the device, his work station, and, by proxy, himself, so that nothing else in the area is going to get damaged. And then it explodes.

He thinks that the forcefield contained the worst of it before it gave out, but he's not entirely sure because he's busy describing a near perfect arc through the area before colliding heavily with the door. Which promptly opens and dumps him out in the hallway.

"Ow," he mutters. This really isn't turning out to be his day. Or week.

Luis had already been all over the medical bay, poking and prodding at things, messing with the tools and generally trying to get a sense of what all new toys he'd have to play with if the opportunity arose. The presence of patients made him feel guilty and he ended up stepping out after the wounded from the little skirmish had been brought in (besides, Leon's one friend was extremely hot and Luis felt like leering at her while she was unconscious was extremely creepy.)

That brought him to the special weapons division down the hall. An engineering department... seemed there were no general science labs. That was a shame. Oh well, he'd have to make do with two massive rooms full of fun and interesting scientific tools that he had no idea how to use, but very, very much wanted to learn.

You could find the self-proclaimed Spanish Stallion of Science putting his hands on literally everything in the special weapons division this afternoon, highly engrossed in his work of doing nothing productive but dreaming of all the science he could be up to in here.

About a full day had passed since the Yeerk mess, when Leon called all of Security together for a debriefing. He wanted to give everyone a chance to get their wounds treated and to rest up. To say that it had been a rough day yesterday would be an understatement. He also wanted to give his people a chance to get their heads clear. Emotions run high after a battle, so he wanted to let everyone cool off and let some of the things the Captain said sink in.

Leon himself, though, wasn't able to take advantage of the time off, though. He looked like shit, less from the physical injuries than from the physical and emotional fatigue wearing on him. With Claire still out cold from emergency surgery, he hadn't slept at all, and likely wouldn't until he knew she was all right. Even now, his thoughts didn't drift far from her.

But with his team assembled in the briefing room, Leon stood front and center to address them.

( Read more... )

Vega's bummed out by being treated like a kid, true, but the worst of it is the general atmosphere on the ship is pretty grim. Vega can do grim, but... this is just depressing. He doesn't even really understand what happened, he hasn't really asked. It's probably something miserable, so he's okay with not knowing the gory details.

But this kind of sucks, so he's turning to the sensoriums to cheer him up.

His footsteps echo on the floor of the empty hangar as he heads toward the berth at the end. A pair of slitted red optics light up as he approaches, a hulked figure of black body metal and pale armor shifts a little. The Berserk Fury. His Zoid. Forty feet tall at its full height, 127 tons of tyrannosaur-shaped warmachine.

"Hey, buddy."

The Zoid responds with a low, bass rumbling noise but does not move otherwise. Vega walks up to it, placing a hand to its lowered snout and sweeping it across the metal.

He misses the Fury. He really hopes that the ship's got it here for real, too, but pretend helps a little bit.
He plans on taking it out to fight.

The Major was waiting in Leon's office when he arrived.

It was...an interesting place, the city. She hadn't taken the time to really explore it thoroughly, though she knew one end from the other well enough to navigate. It was as normal a place as could be expected in this madhouse, not that that was saying much. Interesting, at least.

She turned her head to face the door, leaning on the wall aside his desk and thinking as she waited.

Interesting. That's what she hoped Leon himself would be. Otherwise, this would just be another fact-finding fishing game, like spelunking deeply hidden chatrooms on the net for Laughing Man tidbits: mostly boring and generally only good for killing time.

To say Lyta Alexander is annoyed would be an understatement. Like the rest of the crew, she wasn't happy with what had gone down in the city. She had hoped, prayed even, that things would not have come to such a violent head. All during the trial, she had sensed the anxiety, dissension, and division that had begun to split the crew. She'd kept her opinion to herself through it, needing time to turn over the rightness of killing the prisoner Schmuz compared to the rightness of respecting all life, no matter who it might belong to.

But when it came down to the final moments, she found she couldn't stay silent any longer. She couldn't sit back and let both sides start shooting at each other without trying to convince the security team that the conspirators were not the enemy, that they both had the same goal: to protect the crew. The only difference between them was the way they each thought was best to do that. And now she was in jail for it.

She'd been so certain that the jury had made a mistake. She still was. She still believed letting the Yeerk live was one of those pivotal moments that could mean the death of everyone on board. That was what had compelled her to argue the conspirators' point. There had been too much easy dismissal. The Yeerks had been and could possibly be a threat. It seemed like the entire crew had forgotten that they were, in effect, prisoners themselves. Prisoners to Stacy. Prisoners, possibly, to the people currently running the ship on which they were trapped.

It was like they had forgotten that someone--or something--had brought the Yeerks there. And someone--or something--had set them free. Yet they were convinced that the someone or something that released the Yeerks in the first place wouldn't do so again? Just because they, the crew, willed it?

She paced back and forth in her cell--newly reinforced following Sam's escape--with her arms folded over her chest, her head a flurry of thoughts. Cursing Leon for having her locked up. Worrying that, if Sam and the others were right, the security team that had been formed to protect them may have just killed them all.