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Not long after the last pod-pop, the more observant among the crew might have noticed a rather slight change in the ship's decor:

Spider webs.

In the dark corners of the rooms and underneath some of the "furniture", there were several fairly unassuming webs.

Perhaps the strangest part about it, though, is that while one can find these webs all over the living area, there seem to be far more in the areas people frequent more often: The Obs Deck, the cafeteria, the sleeping areas...in all of these places, one could find webs in almost every corner of the room.

If you were lucky, one might be able to even catch a glimpse of one of the spiders who spun said webs, though as soon as you saw them, they'd scurry back into the darkness, almost as if they knew you noticed them.

Now, however, no matter how hard you looked, nor how much you scanned, you wouldn't be able to find the spiders anymore.

Instead, there is a man, standing in Obs Deck, staring out the window. He certainly wasn't among the recent wave of new arrivals...so who could he be?

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Brenda emerges into the obs deck looking tired and vaguely nauseous.

Her first few nights in the sleeping quarters haven't gone well and she's pretty sure she's NEVER going to get used to the slop they call food here. The rest of the crew assures her it gets more tolerable but she has yet to believe them fully, about that and many other answers to her questions.

She's still memorizing names and faces, trying to keep track of everyone, so she's not surprised to see someone she doesn't recognize on the obs deck.

She strolls up to his side and leans on the window rail a little, looking out for a moment before speaking.

"Hey, uhm. Is it usually this quiet up here or did I miss peak hours somehow?"

The man turns to look her. He gives her a rather friendly smile.

"I wouldn't know. I just arrived here."

He holds out a hand.

"Victor. You are...?"

Brenda she takes his hand and gives him a firm shake in return.

"Brenda. I'm new too. Nice to meet you." She sighs. "You look really... calm for a new guy. Still shell-shocked I guess?"

Victor chuckles softly.

"I suppose you could say that. It certainly is a lot to take in."

"I've encountered aliens AND spontaneously ended up on another planet once before but this is right out of the weird ballpark and into the surreal neighbors yard with the 'bizarre ten foot fence and nightmarish rottweiler' combo pack."

Edited 2009-03-30 02:59 (UTC)

"That was...imaginative," he says with a smirk.

"Well, at the very least I can rest ever so slightly easier knowing there are at least some here with experience in these sorts of things."

"After this I might as well get my degree in alien negotiations or something like that. My work experience going into university would be amazing."

She smiles awkwardly. "So... what's the world like where you're from?"

"Oh, fairly normal, I'd say. No aliens or any other such nonsense. Just normal humans running around on a normal earth."

A complete lie, though Victor is very good at lying. Not a single tell on his face.

"Yours?"

"Mostly normal but with a touch more evil alien invasions than I'm comfortable with as of late, and probably way more mystical crazy stuff floating around than I care to be aware of."

Brenda crossed her arms over her chest with a touch of a huff.

Edited 2009-03-31 05:59 (UTC)

"Well," Victor says with a grin, "At least it sounds like your life is never boring."

Tobias had definately noticed the spiders. Had tried to catch them, mostly out of desperation for something fresh and non-gooey. But they were too fast, even for him.

Victor turns and sees the "bird" flying near him, and for just barely a moment, a disgusted look comes across his face.

Let's just say Victor isn't all that fond of birds.

After that moment, however, his face goes back to looking calm as he turns back to the window.

He's not, after all, going to go out of his way to talk to a bird unless he knows it talks back.

Javert, having spent most of his time skulking around the ship, seems both used to the spiders and heedless of their webs; Though it appears he makes a conscious effort not to walk through them. He approached the window casually.

"A pity one cannot determine the time of day, with this sudden in-rush of spiders about." He's quite probably being vague and esoteric again with some private purpose.

Victor turns to look at Javert, giving him a curious look.

"Oh? Why's that?"

"The old sayings, and all.
Araignée du matin--chagrin;
Araignée du midi--plaisir;
Araignée du soir--espoir. Good luck, every time but the morning." Javert looks at Victor, appraising. "I've not seen you before."

"Because I've just arrived," he says simply, holding out a hand to Javert.

"Victor. You are?"

"I see." Javert looks at his hand."Inspecteur Javert."

Hmm...over-inflated ego, perhaps? Victor thinks to himself as he silently retracts his hand. This one may be fun...

"An inspector, huh? And where is the good inspector from?"

"Paris, France, 1832." Javert, on the whole, dislikes touching people. He also has very bad manners.

"Other eras, too? Intriguing."

Victor turns back to look out the window once again. After all, question someone too much, and they might get suspicious. Better to simply observe and let the information come to you.

Penelope has noticed the spiderwebs. She been keeping track of who is and who isn't new, however.

Victor gets a nod of greeting as she enters the Obs Deck. Her gaze soon goes to the splendor of space and the much eerier splendor of the Deck itself.

She remembers that this is a perfect opportunity to be social a moment later.

"It takes the breath away each time I come here." It's a touch too stilted to sound like a casual remark.

Victor notices the odd tone in the woman's voice as she speaks, but says nothing of it. He prefers a somewhat...laissez-faire...method of information gathering.

"Indeed." he says casually. "I can certainly see why that would be so, even though this is the first time I've witnessed it."

Chris had tried to catch a few of the spiders, out of sight of anyone else—scrambling in at the dark corners, absolutely without the normal fear of creepy-crawlies most people might have. Not successful, likely, without a sharp stroke of luck, though his hands strike out rather faster than one might expect from his frame.

It's more recently that he encounters this odd fellow on the Obs Deck, though at the moment Chris is more focused on fiddling overdedicatedly with the tuning of his twelve-string guitar. The neck is warped, just a tiny bit - the instrument's been left sitting with those strings on too long. But that must be a long time, thinking about it...

"You've got it wound too tight," Victor says without looking back at Chris. "Second string on the left, I think. I can never remember how they're named."

He's...shall we say...observant.

"I know," Chris says with a bit of a pout, still focusing on some of the other strings. "The problem—" —he strums once, experimentally— "—is that the neck is warped, and it's not all even..." He keeps going back and forth indecisively in his tuning. "I can get close, but not close enough it doesn't keep bothering me, and only if I favor once side over the other..."

His face is twisted in a classic (and somewhat cliched) look of concentration.

Victor turns around to look at Chris, giving him an amused look.

"Your face'll stick like that if you keep that up."

Chris rolls his eyes at Victor, the boy's face straightening out some. Annoyedly, he tries a little of the repeating chordage of a particular song (http://www.mediafire.com/download.php?2g3iyiwxngn), then cuts off, fiddling with the tuning more.

The little distortion caused by the physical damage to the guitar is audible, if probably not by much, but... the boy's pretty good, to judge by the brief sample.

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