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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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.

Rhiow snorted. "Actually, Stacy lifted Grand Central along with a bunch of others to populate the city she's carrying," she said. "You can transit there if you'd like, there's no telling where the captain is and we're probably going to take a while to find him."

She laid out a string of Speech on the floor. "Use that to target the Grand Central here instead of any one of the other dozen." If any of the other dozen still existed. Would Downside still exist? Probably not, the Manhattan Rhiow knew and the Tree were inherently linked. "I'm being selfish," she assured Haku. "If I never have to speak your whole name again in my lives it'll be too soon."

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Meet-n-Greet

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Sorry about the slow! I was unexpectedly lacking internet.

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