trans_9 | What you say is reasonable, logical, justifiable...

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What you say is reasonable, logical, justifiable...

Simon Tam was utterly, completely, and irrevocably lost.

It wasn't as if the day started out any differently than all of the others - breakfast with the crew, arguing with Jayne, trying to talk Mal out of some job that he wanted to use River as bait for, trying to tell Kaylee why it was a bad idea in the first place, and then finally ending up in the cargo bay as Inara tried to play mediator. But after that? He couldn't quite figure out what happened. He remembered something green and strangely organic... humidity pressing in on him from all sides... then darkness again...

And now he was standing in a hall (was it pulsing?), with no idea how he got there, where anyone was, and absolutely no idea which direction to go in.

"Tain xiode... I've got to be dreaming."

That was a perfect explanation. Completely logical, of course.

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There was a young man coming down the other side of the hallway, with a globe-sized, spherical container of water balanced in one hand. Several small fish swam around inside, darting back and forth in streaks of red, orange, and white.

Zouichi paused as he spotted Simon. "Are you all right? There's a map on your Omnicomm, if you're lost."

"I could pinch you if you want but you look pretty awake to me."

Standing behind Simon in the hall is a guy in a lab coat, tie and black and grey balaclava, a stethoscope slung around his neck. He smiles a little and waves. "You must be new."

This guy carries himself like a wealthy person. Trust a (supposedly) reformed pickpocket to notice.

"Did the Quest for Cakelot just spit you out?" Howard asks, sizing the taller guy up.

Janet was flying around the ship close to the ceiling, far away from human height. Ever since her experience from popping, she decided that the best way to prevent herself from being swatted was a decent distance above eye level.

She saw the guy standing alone in the hallway, looking rather lost and returned to her human form while standing behind him. "Are you okay?"

"Pretty sure you're not," a young man said as he rounded a corner. "Unless this is some shared hallucination. Which in my experience don't last for years."

He'd only recently woken up from the pods, but he still knew the ship's layout. He was actually heading back down to the lockers to find his suit and update any maps in it if he had to.

"You're new, aren't you?" He had things he needed to do, but he was willing to help out a new person if they needed it. It's just what Batman does.

These words gave Clef pause as he walked down the hall in the opposite direction. He wanted to be concerned about the man, who seemed confused and must have been new, but all he could think was that this guy just jumped to the conclusion that he must be dreaming without pursuing other theories first. It kind of bothered him when people did that, even though he understood that it was really just because they were having trouble adjusting to their surroundings.

He stopped as he passed the man, took a breath, and turned to him.

"I'm afraid that is not the case."

Simon wasn't sure exactly which side of the hallway would take him to answers so he stood at the nonexistent fork, knowing that with his luck, he'd end up walking straight towards Alliance soldiers who would recognize him immediately and place him under arrest. Truthfully, this didn't look like an Alliance ship he had ever seen, but the threat was still there.

Unfortunately, someone else found him first.

Simon blinked uncertainly at the dark stranger who approached - first, it looked as if he was holding a globe of water in one of his hands (but obviously that must have been an optical illusion or hologram of sorts because honestly - no one could just cause water to float) and second, his words.

"My... come again?"

While she still felt anxious for River and Simon to wake, Kaylee was content enough with having Zoe and Shepherd Book join them. She knew the other two were down there somewhere. It was just a matter of when they would finally be released.

Work had continued full swing after the podpop. The mechanic had found herself thrown back into repairs quickly enough, but that was okay. She had a ship to go home to at the end of her several shifts, and an almost-complete crew to laugh with. It was much better, in her opinion, than the several months she had spent alone on Serenity.

And then she rounded the corner.

She almost walked on by, but the motion of a poor lost soul at the other end of the hall was enough to draw her attention from her Omnicom and make her stop completely. Kaylee blinked, once, twice, trying to decide whether or not this was GLaDOS and her tests again, but it couldn't be. It just couldn't be.

With an excited bounce (and a somewhat high-pitched noise coming from the back of her throat), Kaylee took off running down the hallway. "Simon!! You're back!"

The sudden closeness of a voice nearly sent Simon into a spiral - he hadn't been sure if he should run away or punch the unseen threat in the face and then run for it. Not this aim would have been any good - the conflicting decisions instead froze him to the spot and he only managed to turn his head to glance at the man behind him. Oh, no - that person didn't look like much of a threat at all.

Despite his confusion, Simon concluded that some answers were better than none.

"New to what?"

This was ridiculous. There were no clear directions in this place (a cave? A ship? It was very poorly constructed, in his honest opinion), and with the option of wandering about in a circle for hours being extremely unappealing, Simon was coming to the conclusion that his best option was just to wait.

It didn't take long for someone to find him.

Too bad that someone immediately started spouting off nonsense.

"I'm sorry but I don't know what Cakelot is." Was. Would be. It sounded like a terrible name for a ship, at least.

Where did she come from? Simon could have sworn that the hallway had been clear (but it was all terribly confusing and maybe the fact that the walls pulsed had thrown him off). But now he was standing face-to-face with a wide-eyed young woman who had apparently materialized out of nowhere and there was no feasible way this day could become any stranger.

"Wô hên hâo." Perhaps that was a bit of a stretch. "I'm just lost."

"A shared hallucination?"

Simon eyed the walls again - that still unnerved him. There was something very base about the organic nature of the hallways, and he couldn't shake the feeling that he had been transported into the stem of a giant flower. It wasn't a very helpful mental image nor was it conducive to working around the fact that this may not have been a dream.

"I can honestly say I've never been here before," Simon finally admitted reluctantly, giving the youth a wary look.

Eventually, Simon realized that there was a good chance that he had long since passed the part where this could be a dream - mind you, he didn't have to like this fact. But the more he stared at the walls and edged along the hallway, he had to admit that even spending the past several months with the crew wouldn't have given him such an idiotic nightmare.

"I was afraid of that," he finally admitted to the short young man (boy?) who approached him, pinching the bridge of his nose.

He didn't see her at first but he knew her voice as well as he knew any of the crew's, but from experience, knew and felt it was a much more welcome sound. It was that voice that brimmed with laughter and optimism, so full of both that he could never help but smile whenever he was around her. To hear that voice now was a relief that he wasn't alone here and better yet that what this strange place was, she wasn't hurt.

He had to admit though - he didn't know what she meant by being back.

Still, he smiled as she raced towards him - a genuine smile that lacked all of his usual brittle politeness. "So it seems."

"It's a maze and the computer tells you there's cake at the end, but she's full of crap. Sometimes she kidnaps people when she thinks their souls are falling out." At the very least, Howard's aware of how completely insane that all sounds.

He puts his hands in his pockets and tries for some approximation of friendly. "I'm Howard, from medical. Who're you?"

"Yeah, but like I said, they usually don't last this long. At least not the ones I've experienced. They're also not this solid," he said, rapping his knuckles against the wall.

Terry's brow furrowed a little. "Okay," he said, "did you wake up from the pods? Or did you just... wind up in this hallway?" He was starting to worry about the stranger. If he'd woken up from the pods, shouldn't he have been directed to the obs deck, and given the run down? Terry was hoping he'd just gotten lost on his way there.

"Is there a place you need to go? The map on your omnicomm should help." Janet replied as she took hers out as a demonstration.

(OOC: Kind of weird that I have to make Janet pretend she doesn't understand Mandarin when I know it well. XD)

That smile of his was a rare enough sight back home that Kaylee couldn't quite help but beam back at him. She slowed as she reached him, but just enough that she didn't completely knock him over as she barreled into him.

Real, just like Book and Zoe. He really was back.

She tried not to hug him too long, she honestly did, but there was a moment where she had to decide between Simon's immediate comfort or her expression of relief and reassurance. He was just going to have to deal with a slightly-longer-than-normal hug.

"Wasn't sure when you were gonna be," she said when she finally pulled back. "How long've you been here?"

The fish were merely housed in a thin, clear container designed to look as though the water was maintaining its shape on its own. Sorry, no magic, Simon. They were pretty cute fish, though.

"Your Omni... oh." Zouichi fished around in one of his pockets, producing a small electronic device that he tossed to Simon. "Here, I had one left over from this last pod release. It's got a map of the ship, an introduction to what's going on, and you can use it to communicate with everyone else. I'm guessing no one's gone over what's happened with you?"

Fuu was having a better time of navigating. Admittedly, she was consulting her map quite frequently, but she was doing her best to memorize where everything was on the ship.

She looked up when she saw the lost-looking man and smiled politely. "It does seem very unreal," she agreed.

"To Stacy? Or maybe just to this part of her?"

Doc tilted his head at the look on the other man's face, concern furrowing his brow.

"You okay? You look a little shook up."

"I'm sorry," Clef offered a little bit awkwardly, leaning to one side slightly. He really meant it, it was just that there was something incredibly wrong about being sympathetic before actually knowing what the situation was. It seemed less than genuine, to him.

"Unless you are normally a solipsist," he added. "In which case I am most vehemently not sorry at all."

As this clarification seemed to cover all possible scenarios, he was satisfied.

Despite being irritatingly flabbergasted, Simon managed to catch the small device before it hit the ground. It was too much to process - who was everyone else? What did he mean 'what had happened to him'?

Most importantly, if he was here, where was River?

First things first - Simon looked around at the pulsing walls, trying not to let it show that he felt completely over his head.

"This is a ship?"

"Stacy?"

A ship then. Maybe. Simon resisted the urge to pinch the bridge of his nose as a headache began throbbing somewhere in the region. It sounded like one of Mal's schemes went completely wrong.

"I'm just... a little confused."

Understatement.

There really was only one reaction to that explanation - Simon stared at the young man and then slowly raised his hand to his face, rubbing at his eyes in the familiar exasperated motion. Wherever he was, he must have ended up in the psych ward. His confirmation that he was from "medical" didn't help at all.

"Dr. Simon Tam," he replied cautiously. It was risky, of course, if there were Alliance soldiers anywhere nearby, but if River was also somewhere around here...

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