||Attention, Attention. The following crew members must report to the Observation Deck...||

All over the ship, Stacy's voice continues to repeat the announcement until the summoned crew members have reported to the Orbs Deck. Once there a dossier appears on the screen, and a mission that many of the crew members have been waiting for - one that can save the people affected by the Melting Clock.

Planet Designation: Era
Status: Terrestrial, T-class.
Non-sentient life: Medium levels of flora and fauna, most of which are partially comprised of clockwork.
Semi-Sentient Life: No.
Sentient Life: the Time Dragons
Water: 15% of the planet's surface.

Climate: Similar to Earth's Mediterranean regions. [Click here for cultural equivalents for non-Earth cultures.]
Landscape: Mostly comprised of metallic, industrial-like landscapes, with various clockwork-based flora scattered over it.
Air: Normoxic concentration: 28% oxygen, 61% nitrogen, 3% xenon, 8% trace gases, such as hydrogen, krypton, and argon.

Air Pressure: 15.021 pounds per square inch.
Sky: Rust coloured, with pale clouds that mysteriously arrange themselves into the shape of clock faces.
Sun: A class E5K, yellow star.

Mission: Negotiate with the Time Dragons and convince one of them to destroy the Melting Clock.

[[ooc: The OOC post for this is here! Keep in mind that due to the Time Dragons messing with time, all of the threads with them will happen simultaneously]]

From the surface of a small planet, uninhabited by any sentient life and given only a cursory name by a single deep space exploration team before they moved on to chart bigger, more study-worthy phenomena, a signal pulsed forth at intervals. Like the heart of a hibernating animal, it was faint, slow, and unheard. For many years, it waited.

Until one day, by chance, a large ship, itself possessed with a kind of strange, alien life, found itself within range of that heartbeat.

Saturnus IV was a planet that supported life, though none of the sentient variety; animals roamed its forests, plants grew lush and green. But the area that the signal had emanated from was in the middle of one of its largest strips of barren land -- a place where little grew but scrubby alien brush, and little moved but small, unimposing invertebrates.

It was this vast expanse of rock and sandy soil that the away team would be sent to investigate.

[If the current thread consists of more than 3 or 4 people, don't sweat the order too much and just post as it makes sense. Feel free to make up details about the holosimulation setting, like... idk, lizards or alien skeletons.]

Honestly, Ildraniath was rather relieved that she was finally finding others who shared her views on how this war ought to be run. Being trapped on a ship full of idealists was not high on her list of things to do while fighting a war. Idealism had its place - but not when your survival was on the line. Still, nothing to be done. She had lost and she had gaged them correctly - they valued experience over idealism, but only by small margin. And even then, that experience had to be couched in terms they could rationalize as fitting within their own rather narrow moral viewpoint. Rather dull, but that was what she expected of mon-keigh. 

She was waiting in the park, hands folded into her robe's sleeves. She was supposed to be meeting Iniss here. An interesting sort and if his sordid past was to be believed, a not altogether "good" person. At least by human standards. He could be a useful ally, however. She was, after all, rather short on allies.

"And hear this, woman: your tyranny will be brought down some day, as all tyranny should!"

That's being broadcast into the immediate air by the Chancellor's transmitter as the dragon-man himself suddenly finds himself deposited back into the normal passageways of the ship.

After returning from Avania III, Fletcher was feeling down. He'd survived... everyone had survived... but that didn't undo the fact that he'd been tied up, trapped in a cave for three days, and almost sacrificed to some false religion. And he'd taken a life. Even if it had been in the defense of someone else, he couldn't get it out of his mind.

Now that he was back on the ship, he went back to his usual routine -- working in Hydroponics, reading up on science in the media library, eating in the mess hall, wandering through the City, and of course babysitting Russel, but it was much more forced than it had been before. Clearly, he needed someone to talk to.

Conner didn't get out of bed that morning. That was the first sign something was wrong. He didn't run in and jump on Rory's bed to wake him and Amy up, he didn't run around all noisily in the TARDIS, exploring, he didn't do little boy things in loud, little boy ways.

He stayed in bed, quiet as can be.

The second sign that something was wrong was the way he couldn't seem to stop shaking.

It was a little hectic in Medbay. Though there were only a few patients, they weren't in the best shape. Still, there was the best life support technology that could be built or grown in the Medbay, and the problems were being dealt with.

For the moment.

That moment would soon be over, only to be replaced by sheer chaos.

[ooc: Tag away!]