Meet-n-Greet

[cityship]

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.]

Comments

[i-saw-myself.livejournal.com]

"Just use the omnicoms. Kang and some other guy run training, but that's...kind of advanced. I'm training with someone else first and trying to, you know, not be a bunch of sticks stuck together to closely resemble a teenage boy. You can usually find people to teach you to defend yourself over the omnicoms, though. Just ask around," Hiccup suggested.

Surely, they could teach her some powder puff moves or how to use some kind of light weapon, just in case.

"As for the leg, someone made it on board for me. My old one false leg was a little too clunky. And my real one kind of got exploded off."

[hit-girl-mindy.livejournal.com]

"So Kang is the guy to go to." She'd been eying the guy ever since Beastboy had mentioned him, and was slowly starting to get used to the idea that a big, over-sized dragon might be the perfect person to get training from. I mean, who would turn that down? It was strange, but no stranger then meeting comic book heroes on a ship.

If she could only hear Hiccup's thoughts: she wouldn't be able to stop laughing.

"Explosion huh? Tough break. What's your line of work anyway?

[i-saw-myself.livejournal.com]

"Blacksmith's apprentice," he said. "And I guess part-time dragon...trainer. Although I trained the other villagers more than the dragons? The dragons were all pretty calm and used to their new riders, but the rest of the village needed a little extra instruction on how to fly them and care for them. Before...you know...the Ohm thing."

[hit-girl-mindy.livejournal.com]

Blacksmith? Man, he was old school. Were there even blacksmiths anymore? Well somewhere she guessed, but not in her world, that was for sure. And dragons!? He actually knew them before Kang? Where exactly did this kid come from?

"The Ohm thing," Mindy said darkly, clenching her fists. "Yeah, I actually REALLY wanna know more about the Ohm. What I'm heating is a little too vague. I wanna know what they look like, if we have any way to beat them, that kind of stuff."

[i-saw-myself.livejournal.com]

That was where Hiccup's face fell, and his expression got a little blanker. There came to him, as if from a great distance, the sound of sharp claws rending through metal and as their crawling drummed on metal lockers.

"They're, uh. They're..."

Visions of them glanced between gaps in broken buildings as he was carried, the skittering skittering of millions of feet, like little pattering drumbeats punctuating the screams.

"The Ohm are...bugs. But not like any single bug you've ever seen. For one, their average size is the size of a cart-horse, but they can be smaller and incredibly bigger. They're like all the ugliest parts of the ugliest bugs crammed together in different combinations. Some can fly and cut things in half with lines of fire shot from their eyes. Some are the size of buildings, some spew fire, some just cut and slice at--at things--" Read: People. "--with their bodies, and disappear from site. I didn't see all the types, so I'm sure there must be more that--that do even worse things."

That gaze is still distant.

"Last time, we ran. It was shore leave. We all thought we had a break. I was new to--to the whole thing. The planet was terrifying enough before they showed up. I actually attacked some kind of flying car thinking it was a monster."

He raised his eyebrows.

"But then the real monsters showed up. All the crew could do was get everyone onto the ship, help evacuate as much of the planet as possible, and I think there was some mission where a group gathered to attack something of theirs that was vulnerable something coordinating their attack. They left on their own--everyone says that's the only reason we got away."

Hiccup shook his head. "I wish I could tell you that the grown ups have it all handled and that everything will be okay, but people don't...do that where I come from. And I don't think lies will help when the truth is probably going to run up, get in your face, and try to claw your head off at some point. We have no way of beating them--at least if anyone on the crew has thought of a way, they haven't told the rest of us. Supposedly, defeating them might give us a way to bring back our worlds, but it actually seems, um, pretty hopeless that we'll even survive."

There was a reason this kid was not an inspirational speaker.

"Not to be a downer or anything."

[hit-girl-mindy.livejournal.com]

Mindy was pretty attentive to the whole speech. It actually reminded her of a books he picked up once on (now destroyed) Earth called Ender's Game, with the Buggers and the army and all of that. This situation was different though: the things he was describing made the Buggers look like little babies in comparison. In fact, if she'd been anyone else, she would be pretty freaked out, hating Hiccup for destroying what little vestige of safety she thought she had, and would have gone off crying about a world she was taken from, never to see it again. That's the kind of thing, she figured, that a ten year old girl couldn't handle.

But she was Mindy Macready. She already knew the world was shit long before she was taken from it, and to be honest, there hadn't really been much left after that day. They were outnumbered, running scared, hopelessly doomed.

Good. There was at least a challenge, something to work for. Before it was revenge, but compared to THIS, that revenge looked petty. This was planets they were dealing with, no, the universe really, at stake.

She turned to Hiccup. "You made things pretty bleak, so much that I have to believe you're telling the truth. In a way, that's more helpful than trying to paint a rosy picture. Anyone with half a brain on this ship ought to be feeling despair, fear at our situation. But where I'm from? Fear is a good thing: you temper it with a little violence and some brains and brawn, you have a shot."

She liked this kid, really. He reminded her of Dave, minus the curses. "What's your name anyway?"

[i-saw-myself.livejournal.com]

This kid...well, she actually kind of sounded like the kids from home. Maybe a little more focused, maybe a little more unphased than they would be--Hel, he'd spazzed all over the place when he first arrived here. But giving it a shot despite the odds? Tempering fear with brains and brawn and fighting as hard as you could?

Yeah, that was Viking sentiment right there. Maybe not so much with the brains part, but fighting to the last against impossible odds.

Brave kid. A Viking-like kid. Color him impressed.

"The name's Hiccup." He held out his hand. "You can feel free to laugh. Just keep in mind I'll probably think your name is weird, too."

[hit-girl-mindy.livejournal.com]

Mindy DID have to laugh, actually. Whose parents took that many drugs to call their kid Hiccup and actually keep it like that? But he was well meaning enough, and he'd been way more truthful than probably more than half the adults would have been on the ship. Apparently, the truth was only going to come from the stranger looking people.

Not that he was strange, aside from the name. The leg didn't count either: hell, she was lucky SHE didn't have a metal appendage. Not that it would have stopped her if she did.

"My name's common in my world, so even if you don't think its funny its still lame. It's Mindy Macready."

She looked at the outfit a good minute. "Um...call me crazy, but you don't look like the average guy on this ship, if an average guy even exists. I know you said you were a blacksmith, and well, in my world those don't exist anymore. What are things like in your era?"

[i-saw-myself.livejournal.com]

"Well, let's see... I grew up in a little village called Berk that was in the middle of the part of the ocean that likes to horde most of the Northern ice in the winter. There was hunting, trading, farming, fishing, and sooometimes raiding and pillaging, but usually that was from other raiders and stuff--stealing from people who already stole from somebody else, and only if we were really desperate. Part of why our forefathers settled on the island was to avoid the old ways of life and provide enough for everyone to get by and have a good living, not just the firstborn sons."

How to explain Berk.

"Other than the whole dragon problem--now solved with the making friends with them thing--we lived a pretty typical lifestyle for our time. Not the easiest way of life, but not the hardest. Good winters and bad winters. Nothing like the level of technology on the ship, though. I mean, I didn't even know technology was a word until I got here. We're still at the ox and cart stage of transportation, and I read about penicillin being all the rage in the future, but we still have, you know, charms. This whole tiny-bugs-in-your-body-that-make-you-sick business is...I'll just say 'illuminating.'"

A shrug.

"I'm a Viking--but my tribe isn't really your typical Viking tribe. Most of the, uh, usual aggression was reserved for the dragons. Rather than...you know, funneled into murdering the innocent and stealing all their stuff."

Middle Ages, Mindy. Everyone tried to steal your stuff or you were so badass they didn't want to mess with you, and you were lucky if you survived to age 10 without dying of smallpox.

[hit-girl-mindy.livejournal.com]

Viking. She's talking to a Viking. A pretty specific Viking, one definitely not glamorized in history books and stuff, but still a viking. That was actually one of the cooler things to find out on the ship: with all the tech and supercomputers and libraries and shit, there were actually people who lived out the old ways. True, no way she could actually live that way unless she was forced, and with a name like Macready she was more likely Celtic in origin, but she still had respect for the myth of them.

"Sounds like a place back in my history," Mindy said with a smirk. "I mean, we actually HAD vikings once upon a time, and they were pretty glamorized: mostly people who have Nordic ancestry and shi-stuff. They don't ever talk about how hard it must have been back then though, everyone taking each others stuff and the constant battles. Everything is 'Valhalla' this or Valkyries' that. Must be pretty hard trying to get caught up with the way things are here. I mean, I'm from a fairly advanced part of the world and I'm still struggling with the idea of living in a living ship that thinks its my mommy."

She was glad Hiccup was not into murdering the innocent, as she was in the business of murdering the not so innocent. By comparison, they sounded petty similar.

"Are any of your friends on this ship?"

[i-saw-myself.livejournal.com]

"Ha. Haaa, glamorized? We are so not glamorous, there's--you fight, you live well, you die and hope it's a cool death and not, you know, plague."

He went on, "And the tech's...not that hard, actually, but then I'm the crazy guy in the village that was building a bola-thrower while everyone else was just...throwing bolas. I'm better with mechanical stuff than understanding the--you know, like the insides that you can't see? The program-things. Or the inside parts, with the little metal bits. I can still use them, though."

He raised his eyebrows. "My friends still don't use them much--and two--three of them are here."

He'd mention his dad but his dad was with GLaDoS right now, so he didn't remember him.

"And I just...I see the ship as a big, crazy, maternal dragon. That we're inside of. And its skin protects from the nothing-stuff that's in between the stars, past the sky."

[hit-girl-mindy.livejournal.com]

"Hey, I never said I thought it made sense," Mindy laughed, a little surprised to hear it coming out of her mouth. She really should have been freaking out by now, not laughing on the ship of thought, but hell, what would be the good in freaking out over stuff she couldn't control? She's rather be laughing than curling up in a ball and whimpering. "I just said people tend to make it sound better than it actually was, probably because it was that long ago."

She had no clue what a bola was-she'd have to ask later. Sounded like a catapult or something, she wasn't sure. "Yeah, that's more of a techie job or an engineer, I guess. We're probably not meant to understand that just know how to use it when we need to. Hey, long as it gets the job done, you use whatever you can, right?"

Lucky. "I pretty much hope there's one other person that comes on the ship," she said. "The rest are probably all dead."

Here Mindy couldn't help but laugh. "It doesn't quite work that way, but I guess it works. First time I ever had to thank something for abducting me though. Didn't think the end of the world would come so abruptly though."