trans_9 | We're Not In Kansas Anymore...

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We're Not In Kansas Anymore...

They might have been trying to get to the City, or another level, or anywhere else in the explored parts of Stacy. But when some crewmembers stepped into the transport tubes, they were going to find that where they ended up was not where they were trying to go.

The first sign that something was wrong was the strange electric jolt they get just after stepping into the tubes. The second sign was the unusually long time it took for them to get to their destination. And the third and final sign was the fact that when they arrived, it was in a place they would have never seen before.

To all appearances, it looked like a smaller replica of the crew quarters. If they ventured out a little further, they would find smaller versions of the mess hall, sleeping halls, and bathrooms as well. But there was one important difference.

They were completely and utterly empty.

And with any attempt to go back into the transport tubes failing, they appeared to be stuck here. What were they going to do?

[ooc: ICly this post happens over the course of a day, so not everyone arrives at the same time. If you tag into the post later, you can just assume that your character arrived later in the day. Also, your characters will not find that their omnicomms and communication rings don't work!

If you have a question about anything, you can ask on this ooc post.

Oh, and for this post threadjacking is welcome :P]

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Maxine let out a startled noise when suddenly the pink haired girl toppled into the wall nearby. A hand clapped over her mouth and she jumped literally off the floor. She even stayed there for a moment before she landed again and rushed over to the other girl who was now quite angrily cursing the ship, it seemed. Not that Maxine exactly blamed her.

"Are you okay?" Maxine said, worry edging her possibly slightly-too-loud voice.

"Fine," Sakura wheezed. "I'm fine!" She looked up at Maxine and smiled.

And wheezed.

And slowly stood, using the wall as a bracer. See? Sakura was totally fine, if still disgruntled through that smile. Slowly the pleasant, polite expression wins out, if her eyes still seem to be carrying threats against Stacy, the Warden, the multiverse, or all three.

"So, uh... where are we? Who are you again?"

"Um, okay. That's good." Maxine wasn't totally convinced that 'fine' was the right word, to be quite honest, but she wasn't about to push that point. She did, however, reach one hand out part way, ready to steady or catch the other girl if that was necessary. Which, fortunately, it was not. For the best.

"I'm not really sure where we are," she admitted. "I was trying to head back to the city just to go to Stormwind and get some work done, because some people need stuff done, but then I ended up here instead, which looks a lot like where I started only it's obviously... not." She frowned at first, but brightened somewhat when she introduced herself. "I'm Maxine! Maxine Hunkel. Or I guess 'Cyclone' works too, but that's not really necessary. It's nice to meet you, um..."

Sakura watched her talking and filed away the information like the good little ninja she was, even if her head came forward a bit and her chin tucked in toward her chest as a wave of irritable exhaustion hit and then was willfully pushed back. No time. Rest was for the dead who didn't rise.

So not Karis, poor thing.

Or Sam.

Okay so rest was for the type of Dead that also didn't get summoned back by soul binding so perhaps rest really wasn't for anyone.

Wait, names, introductions -- "Sakura," she said with a better smile. A brighter smile. She held out a hand, firmly on her own two feet again. "Nice to meet you, Maxine. You're taking over Stormwind? That's good of you."

Fortunately(??) for Sakura, Maxine had enough energy to make up for her lack of it. Enough energy for the both of them perhaps. Or more, maybe.

It probably balanced out somewhere or another.

She did however notice the expression and a brief flicker of worry flashed over her features.

"It's nice to meet you too, Sakura!" she said happil, all the same. "I am, yes. I was kind of making friends with Rein and I was starting to help her out, so once she got repodded I thought it'd be best to try and take over, you know? Because it was good work and I'd like to honour her while she's gone, too. If that makes sense."

A beat, and then. "Maybe we should try to figure out where we are, actually."

"Yes, it does. There's a few things like that I need to see to myself. Like the massage group," she said, looking around the area. "Shall we?"

Sakura started walking, thinking this looked a heck of a lot like the area at the transport tubes on level four. Crew Quarters should be just over there, and the mess hall...

"A massage group?" Maxine asked, curiously. She was clearly interested in the idea.

Following along behind Sakura, Maxine actually walked this time, though in her nerves a bit of a breeze did play with her hair as she did so. And, in her nerves, she talked a little.

"This is kind of eerie, don't you think? I mean, it's a lot like the regular part of the ship, actually, only there's... no one here. You can't hear anyone and it's totally unused. It's like a ghost town, only you can still feel Stacy around here. It's just... I don't know. Weird."

"Most the ship is empty, most the time, but I know what you mean. When no one's been around for a while, you can feel it. How someplace isn't really lived in."

What made it worse, she supposed, was exactly how much like the rest of the ship this felt like. Yet it was off, something in proportions, something in size. "Looks like we've found the mess hall. A much smaller mess hall, but," she trailed off, gesturing to the food depository. "Hard to miss some of the signs. Did the ship used to segregate crews?"

Maxine nodded. "Exactly. I mean, sometimes you can avoid people, sure, but the crew quarters are a bit of a different story. And you can really tell that there's no one here. That there hasn't been."

She looked into the mess hall, frowning in thought. It was definitely smaller, by a decent proportion. "I don't know," she admitted. "I don't think so. But I don't know. I've never heard anyone say that kind of thing, and I didn't think to look anything like that up or see if there was anything in the records. Not that we really have access to everything anyway so it's possible that there could be something like that that no one knew about. I mean, I don't think anyone knew that this was here, so if we didn't know that could we really know if it served any particular purposes?"

"We should check and see if it's still functional, on the other hand. Stuck here without supplies would be low on the list of things I was looking forward to experiencing anytime soon."

She made her way toward the actual food dispensary.

"We could make educated guesses," Sakura said. "You pointed out how it's hard to avoid people around crew quarters. What if you needed someplace to house a smaller group temporarily on ship? Or what if everyone in the pods were awake all at once? Smaller sections like this might be easier to handle, giving people a sense of general community and cohesion."

"That's probably a good idea. That way we at least can take stock of what we do or don't have, which will be important if we might be stuck here for a little while. Hopefully we aren't, but better safe than sorry, right?"

She nodded as she followed. "That could be it. For example, it could be a segregated area based on health reasons. Like, what if part of the crew was incompatible with the rest due to a difference in biological needs? Kind of like allergies, only I get not exactly, since the food is designed to suit everyone's individual needs, so that's kind of a bad example." She paused, and then said, "Though yeah, with a larger group splitting them up could possibly have helped. Like setting up teams. Teams who work for specific tasks and understand each other and their abilities well, and then can work as a cohesive force with specific tasks when they need to work together with other sections of the crew."

"Better prepared than otherwise, yeah." Sakura grinned, hoping to impart some general sense of levity into what struck her as a potentially serious situation.

It was an attempt!

"Then you have the other extreme. Most the pod-popped crew, and how very few we are in the face of what even our usual spaces can handle. Interesting to think about, in a way."

"Right!" Maxine said happily, pleased to get the confirmation. Because this was a situation that could be easily frightening or make her anxious. She'd rather avoid that. So she was perfectly okay with Sakura's attempts.

"That's true. It's kind of weird that we're not using smaller quarters, when you realise that the ship has that option available. I wonder if maybe Stacey had her reasons for that? It could be like-- kind of like free-range? Giving us space to make us happier. Only I guess that makes us sound like livestock which isn't exactly a pleasant thing to think about and in fact I think I'll just stop talking about that now."

Sakura's laughter was light, but some portion genuine. "We'll leave the cattle where they are in Hydroponics, thank you."

She looked around once more, sighing inwardly. "May as well see what there is to see around here. Feel up for walking around with me?"

"I think that'd be best, yeah," Maxine agreed, with a faint snicker.

"I am!" She said, with a faint spring in her step to emphasize the point. "We should try and figure out what we can, right? I mean, they always say that you're supposed to stay where you are when you get lost, but that's kind of more for children, and this situation is kind of different, anyway. We can probably try to find some clues or something, or at least see if there's anything useful we can use."

"Staying put is best for kids," she said, amused. "When you're someplace you don't recognize. Past eight or so, it's a toss up between hiding close enough to spot someone familiar, or getting out of there if it's too dangerous to stay still."

They moved down the hall, and she found herself frowning. "The layout's really familiar. Not as long as it is around crew quarters, but I swear I'd expect to see the mess hall up ahead."

Maxine nodded. "But if you can be proactive and it's safe to be, it's usually better, I think, unless you know for sure that someone will look for you some place. But since we didn't know about this place, I somehow doubt that the rest of the crew would be able to come look for us here? I mean, technically they could, I guess, but it seems kind of unlikely."

With a nod, she glided a little further to peek into another doorway, and confirmed aloud that it was the mess hall. "They really are a lot alike. So it's just a smaller version? So it's probably right that there was just a reason for segregating the crew into separate parts, for space reasons or something else." A beat, and then, "You don't think there's anyone else down here, right? Like, we'd know if Stacy had a second crew on board or something, wouldn't we? Not that it seems used down here, but. What if there's a third crew quarters. Or more?"

Letting Maxine continue talking, Sakura nodded as appropriate and kept her sense open to anything to tell her something in specific was up, or off. So far Maxine had the right of it: this did appear to be a scaled down version of crew quarters. She angled off, making sure Maxine stuck with her, seeing if she could find the other hallmarks of crew quarters here as well.

"We wouldn't know, necessarily. I don't think there is. Too much has been focused on us getting things done," she said with a reassuring smile. "Another operating crew other than the Daligig should have and would have come up by now. There have been prior crews, but you can read up what's known on them in the Media Library in the proper quarters we use."

Maxine was careful to make sure to keep close to Sakura, even while she rambled a little incessantly. At least Sakura was listening and nodding. Not that her not listening would probably have stopped the teen hero from talking her nerves away.

"I guess you're probably right about that. I mean, they seem to be keeping a lot from us, but I don't think that they'd keep something like that from us, especially not when it would be really beneficial to know. And we'd have seen some sign of them, even something like Stacy making a stop for them of some kind. There's no way we'd not know. Right? So maybe this was just used for former crews. Maybe the old crew was too big for just one set of crew quarters?"

"Sta'c might have mentioned them to us as a matter of making sure we play nice and get along. It has that sort of tone most the time," she said with a shrug, by way of explanation for her logic.

"Or the crew was divided between Daligig and GIA forces, or Daligig and podpopped forces, or any number of things. There's countless possibilities. Figuring out the most likely one would be nice."

"Yeah," Maxine agreed. "I think she'd be trying to make sure we all work together, instead of hiding something that big from us, which would be kind of hard anyway."

Maxine nodded as she followed. "Yeah, I think it'd be good if we could try to find some clues here. There's probably an explanation, at least, and it's probably not a big deal or at least I hope it's not. But we should definitely look around."

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We're Not In Kansas Anymore...

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