trans_9 | Meet-n-Greet

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Meet-n-Greet

The rest of the crew assembled on the Observation Deck to meet the latest editions to their numbers. After the revelation that their worlds are gone, many of them are even more eager to see people they knew from home.

Several people are set up near the doors to provide the new people with omnicoms and comm rings. New crew-mates might see a tall man in green armor and snake girl among their number. There are also several authoritative-looking figures ready to introduce themselves.

There's a lot to tell the new people. It's going to be a lot to take in.

[ooc: Only new characters and Command Staff can start new threads for introductions, to limit the number of threads. Everyone else, just tag in and have your guys greet the newbies.]

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Shock stilled his tail, and he stared at her all the more. "Has someone been messing with your head or something?" Or Someone, for that matter. "How could you forget that errantry? The whole 'worldgate turning randomly into a timeslide-'" He stopped himself, then licked his nose once. "As the Whisperer for the description of the errantry. She'll tell you faster'n I can."

Arhu took the opportunity to turn around and begin a bout of he'ihh, the composure-grooming cats did when they needed a moment to themselves. And he definitely needed this moment.

'Messing with her head' sounded ominous. "Stacy," Rhiow said flatly. "She removes the memories of the Ohm attacks - I suppose it's plausible she would have removed the whole errantry, especially knowing I wouldn't let it go if I had the beginning but not the end."

She laid her ears back in disgust, cocking her head and listening to the Whisperer breathe the details into the back of her mind. Her fur started to prickle, and she unconsciously echoed Arhu's gesture, beginning with her front paws. "...I still don't remember, but I have the outline." She shivered. "Rough errantry."

He finished grooming, then turned back to settle down and wait for her to finish. Once that was taken care of, he flicked his tail yes. "It wasn't fun. But I learned a lot from the Ravens, and I found Sif."

Arhu started searching through his memories about the Ohm attacks then. "That's- I don't like that, not knowing." He put his ears back again, then settled into a loaf, tucking his paws beneath him, and half-closed his eyes to better see and be seen by the immaterial. Then he opened his Eye, looking for that-

Well, he would have gone looking for the events that surrounded the ending of his world, if he hadn't ended up falling over onto the living decking with a squall of pain.

"Arhu!" Rhiow said, jumping to her feet. "What happened? Are you all right?"

She glanced around - nothing that she could see could have hit him, and he had been, to all appearances, in the same place the whole time. Stacy was temporally strange, but not that temporally strange.

"Everything at once," he groaned, trying to squeeze his eyes further shut. "Everything at once, all at once." There weren't words to describe what he was trying to say. "I See everything, and I'm trying to See certain parts of it, but they're all happening now here."

No, language was not well-equipped for what he wanted to say.

It took Rhiow a minute to parse her way through that - she was used to Arhu babbling relative nonsense, but this sounded like it actually had a point.

Well, and the connotations for temporal 'at onces' in his sentences were a little different. "Oh," she said. "You've discovered Stacy's temporal... strangeness. I can't even explain it all the way, but suffice it to say that time is weird here."

"I figured that part out," he groaned, slowly propping himself back up. Ow. "That's...ow. That's gonna take a bit. Even Seeing like a Raven is hard. Will be hard." He shook his head, ears flapping.

"I can't See it for you, but we need to get those memories back. And I want to know what happened to our world. She can't just go and take those away!" Not when memories could be important. What if it had useful information in there, information about the Ohm?

Rhiow felt blindsided. Of course. How could she have missed this? "My wizardry has been... acting up pretty bad ever since I podpopped," she said. "I chalked it up to the way Stacy traveled - she's interdimensional, and she exists in multiple times and realities simultaneously. I've been trying to compensate for it-"

She'd been agonizing over compensating for it. The Whisperer wasn't making any sense - She kept referencing a point Rhiow didn't know!

He tilted his head after another shake to settle the aching in his brain, and then cleared the area around them of stray hyperstring influence. Then he paused, and eyed the hyperstrings in a bemused fashion, distracted from what he'd been intending. "That's weird."

Setting the behavior of the strings aside, he lay out a few graceful, glowing characters in the Speech. Namely, their current coordinates, as best he could determine from the Whispering. "Okay," he muttered, "I see what you mean by that." One paw rested on a number of characters. "Way too many 'changing constants' in here for me." He frowned, then stared at Rhiow. "Wait...she's traveling through it all? Wouldn't that make..." An astonished look all about him. "...doesn't that mean that Stacy's almost like a living worldgate?"

For a second, Rhiow froze, retreating into her mental workspace to spread a mess of calculations and hypotheses on the floor. Then she lashed her tail. "If she's a gate, where's the catenary? And how do you suggest we live here, some kind of contained pocket dimension-"

It sounded ridiculous when she said it aloud, but Rhiow would have to be stupid not to recognize that it was a decent hypothesis, no matter how insane it was. "It just doesn't seem likely."

"And a living ship that can travel through universes and times with the ease of stepping through a worldgate is likely?" He gestured all around them at the ship with a wave of his tail.

"I don't know where the catenary is. I haven't had a chance to look through at her power sources yet. If I could take a look at the schematics, that would help a lot." His ears dropped a little. "Urruah would love this. Are you sure he's not here?"

Now that Arhu was here, Rhiow wasn't sure of anything - not that she was going to say that out loud. "He hasn't been here so far, but with you getting released, who knows?" She waved her tail in a shrug, her mind more occupied by the problem this posed.

"There are a lot of places in Stacy we either haven't mapped yet or that the ship won't let us into. She's very effective at keeping crewmembers from going places she doesn't want them to go. I don't think there's a full schematics anywhere, although you could ask the ship for them." She twitched her whiskers at him. He hadn't expected this errantry to be easy, had he?

"Yeah, yeah. I'll make sure to do that. That and to ask for my memories back." There was a touch of an annoyed hiss to his voice, but otherwise he just dismissed it all with a wave of his tail. Clearing the ground of the symbols in the Speech, he turned and peered out the window at the Bleed.

"You said you were having trouble with wizardry. Maybe it's because of the constantly-shfting temporospatial coordinates?" It would be hard to define the where and when of a spell if both elements were shifting constantly, and you didn't know what way they were going to shift.

"I wonder if you would tie a spell's definition of where and when into your own perceptions," he mused, already turning inside to ask the Whisperer.

It seemed ridiculous that the solution could be so simple, but as Rhiow tilted her head to listen to the whisperer, she found that the hundreds of variables that she couldn't even hope to keep track of had been pared down to a handful. "It's funny," she said. "Because I've been wondering why my shields kept collapsing - and it's because the moment I ended the spell and the moment I was perceiving were happening simultaneously, so I already had released it."

Thank goodness for the Speech. She didn't think she would be able to get so specific regarding co-existing patches of time if they had been speaking Ailurin. Which, come to think of it, she had hardly spoken after podpopping. "If you added a clause right before your definition constants-" Rhiow perked her ears forward, and now her own feet were littered with pieces of spells. She hooked a claw in a bit of Speech that couched the spell in terms of her direct perceptions, attaching her name to the end of it and pushing it into her personal shielding spell.

Its ends hooked in easily, and Rhiow bundled the whole thing up and packed it away. No sense wasting the energy in testing it now, when she didn't really need it. "We'll see what happens, next time I need that. Which is pretty often around here - you should already be carrying that one constantly but if you weren't before, do it now." She got to her feet and stretched, tail waving in some excitement. "Come on, I should take you around to meet the important people."

Speaking of which, Haku, dragon-form as always for these events has spotted his favorite cat, and her new friend. It was convenient to have the height a long neck provided, in this scenario— though having to bull aside the crowd always made for slow going.

Haku dislike shoving. He wasn't human, after all; even among spirits he had a certain rank, that could afford at least a polite space be made for him.

"Dai Stiho, Rhiow," he murmured, putting his head down to look at the little one more closely, "Who is this?"

He made careful note of the phrases used archiving them firmly in his mental workspace. At the mention of the shielding spell, his ears perked up again.

"Even just around the ship? What's been going on, here?" Normally he wouldn't really need to ask, but he didn't feel like falling over again as he tried to work out how to use the Eye in a place like this. So for now, it was the old-fashioned way.

Even as he was in the middle of mentally reciting the shield-spell, new parameters attached, a large shadow fell over them. Arhu paused, then looked up with wide eyes for just a moment. Then he recovered his aplomb, licking his nose once.

"Dai stiho, Elder Brother," he murmured after a moment. "I'm Arhu."

"Arhu was on my worldgating team on Earth - assigned permanently as part of our group of wizards." Permanent teams weren't exactly common, but then that was worldgates - every rule of wizardry had an 'except' that usually revolved around the gates.

"I take it you've been barred from the City as well?" she asked Haku dryly. "I've been doing short-transits all day evacuating - you caught us in the middle of a crisis, kind of," she said, now explaining to Arhu. "Apparently some kind of pathogen got loose on Stacy's city level, and it started infecting the crew. We had to quarantine the whole thing off, although I think they've figured out a cure for the pathogen by now."

"They're afraid I'll become tainted again, but I'm just as vulnerable as if I were there, so long as I'm separated from the river," he confided. It was on his tongue, the words, 'I'm worried,' but there they stayed, unspoken.

It was obvious: no one else was going to break quarantine for him, not on his say-so. He covered his hesitation by inhaling Arhu's scent by way of a less formal greeting.

"Peace, little one," Haku sighed.

Pathogens - not his specialty by a long shot. "Can we create bubbles of immunity, or something? So that even ehhif could go in and look for people without being at risk of getting sick." He thought it over. "It'd be like the shield-spell when you go off-world, taking your own air along with you because it's a hostile environment."

And then he glanced up at Haku again, and felt almost shy, though he covered that up quickly too. "What's a Power doing onboard this ship with the rest of us?"

Tact, Arhu. Learn you some.

And that lack of tact was going to earn Arhu his very first swat upside the head aboard the ship. Rhiow pulled her paw back and twitched her tail at him. "The Powers have just as much concern about universes disappearing as anyone else," she said. "You think they're just going to sit around and let us take care of it, with something of this magnitude? Haku isn't the only one aboard the ship, either, and some of them have less patience."

She looked back up at Haku. "It's passed by fluids at this stage, right? So unless someone bleeds into the river, the contamination shouldn't pass." It was a big 'unless' though, especially if the Captain didn't know to be that wary of the river.

Haku snorted; Amaterasu was hardly without patience; someone like Arhu would delight her, in her current form. Canines knew no impropriety, and goddesses decided their own.

"It is my experience that humans have very little difficulty pouring all manner of filth into rivers," Haku murmured, "I do not ask that you move me there-"

Someone trod on his tail, and the dragon interrupted himself to crane around and glare greenly at them. The girl skittered off nervously, holding up both hands to ask forgiveness. Haku sighed and the scales melted away to a more human shape, which knelt to meet the cats on a more companionable level.

"I know the price is high, for you. I need you to speak on my behalf, if you are willing."

He did his best to dodge, but with his Sight not working as usual, he still took the brunt of the swat.

"Ow!" Arhu gave her an injured, annoyed look, but didn't protest the smack further. "It's just that usually, the Powers seem to leave interventions like this to wizards like us. Unless They're being us," he added in a mutter. "Or we're being Them." Language was so inefficient sometimes, like when it came to the Sight, or to expressing the oddness that was at once being yourself and one of the Powers That Be.

My claw is Their Claw upon the neck of the Old Serpent, indeed, he thought to himself. Or in his case, his eye was Their Eye, viewing the worlds. It was just hard to See right now.

When Haku shrank down into the seeming of an ehhif, his eyes went wide. "Wow! Can you be a Person, too?" Rhiow would be able to talk to whoever needed to be talked to; or at least, she'd know who to talk to.

Rhiow's whiskers twitched in a direction that might have been forward, but she didn't want to encourage him. Truth be told, she'd missed having his unique way of being around. "Whole universes being obliterated is a little bit outside the normal realm of errantry," she said dryly. "You can either drain the rest of the multiverse of wizards, or you can have a few Powers involved to hopefully speed things along."

Then she curled her tail at Haku. "You know you have but to ask of me, and I will always. I'm running a bit short on... oomph for short-jumps right now, but I might have something in a claudication I could use." She flicked her ear, trying to remember whether she'd kept that thamaturgical battery she'd acquired during the Nightmare King. "The Captain will be in the city, of course."

Haku blinked at Arhu and thought about it. He'd really never tried looking like a cat— a fish, once, but never...

"I don't know," He informed Arhu gently, and despite himself gave the little cat half a smile, "I've never tried it before."

Rhiow's patience was funnier than it should have been, but the situation was hurried, and there was little enough time without brushing her fur the wrong way and watching to see if she decided it was improprietous to groom it back or not. He simply nodded as deep a bow as could be polite by way of thanks.

"Please."

"You should try it, then! Well, some day, when things aren't as busy." Because right now didn't seem to be the best of times, from the sound of it. Especially with the discussion of jumps and the like.

"If you want me to pull off some transits, I can do that, no problem," he offered. "I feel ready for a good day's work. Gonna be kinda weird not going down to Grand Central, though." Especially not without Sif there to help play battery for whatever was needed when everyone else was wiped out.

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on_errantry - 2010-10-14 05:56 (UTC) - Expand

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Meet-n-Greet

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Sorry about the slow! I was unexpectedly lacking internet.

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