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Podpop
[Instructions: Post your character with one post establishing them as being podpopped. Tag each other in groups of 2's, 3's, and 4's, to get some interaction to start with. If a thread doesn't already have 2 or 3 people tagged in, tag it with your character's podpop popping near the other people, rather than making a new subthread. If you would like to play out them talking to the AI, please send an email to the mods making the request--we do this only by request. Then move onto the big Newbie Meeting. Once your character has gotten the rundown from the old crew, you may start posting entrance posts and freely tagging.]
||Pod Release Protocols Initating|| Stacy's familiar voice sounds out to all the podmates through the ship.
In the Pod Caverns, there are the sounds of: Pop. Pop pop pop. Poppuhpoppoppop. KASCHUNKhiiiiiiiissssss.
There is condensation and mist spraying out from cracks in the pods, as the people inside slide out onto the floors, covered in slime.
--
There was nothing. You were going about your normal life, then there was a bright light, and then? Nothing.
Then the world lurches.
The chamber here is humid.
Actually, "chamber" isn't quite accurate. You're in a cavern, half-lit by an eerie greenish light, going on and on as far as the eye can see. The light is coming from what can only be described as pods, glistening, round greenish-yellow things, glowing with a pale inner light, outlining human -- and not quite human -- forms. Each is rooted to the floor, to the walls, with something black, twisted, and unidentifiable.
They line the walls of the cavern, go up in maddeningly high columns, curling and corkscrewing up into the darkness, until the light from them is like that of the stars, glowing pale and mournful in clusters in the darkness above. Twisted walkways and stairs crisscross, traverse the platforms in front of the pods, wending their way back and forth, up and down through the chamber.
You just came from one of those pods, broke free like a butterfly from a (slimy, nasty) chrysalis.
Now you stand alone but not quite alone, naked, not knowing how you got there, who took you, or why you were taken.
As your body heats up again, you realize the air is warm -- just a few degrees too warm to be comfortable -- and muggy; it smells acrid and organic, like freshly spilt blood and sweat. Your mouth tastes of salt.
The floors are pulsing under your feet, throbbing...
Wherever you are, this entire place...is alive.
Oh, and also you're naked and covered in alien snot.
When you call out, ask where you are, a voice speaks to you, in your head. She tells you:
||You are here.||
When you ask who she is, she tells you that her name is STA'C K'LTRRB'TXFT, but that you may call her Stacy. When she tells you who she is, there is a gush of emotion, love, maternal warmth. You are on a ship. She is that ship. Her name is Stacy and she loves you. Her voice is warm and motherly, even if these messages sound almost automated.
Glowing phosphorescent lights appear in pustules along the floor. They lead you up a massive spiraling walkway that gives you a view of what are possibly millions in stasis. At the top is a room with moving vines that clean you and clothe you in a plant-like body-suit--soft, but durable. After that, the lights lead you to a great cavernous room with a clear floor that lets you see all the holes and tunnels in the walls of it. When you reach the center, the last thing she tells you before whisking you away to gather your belongings and meet the rest of the crew is this reassuring thought:
||You have been Chosen to accomplish a Great Purpose. You have been Chosen to help fight the Ohm, a race of insectoid beings that are the destroyers of worlds.||
||You have been Chosen as champions of life, as protectors of the worlds and peoples that are left. The others are waiting for you. They will explain everything.||
||Pod Release Protocols Initating|| Stacy's familiar voice sounds out to all the podmates through the ship.
In the Pod Caverns, there are the sounds of: Pop. Pop pop pop. Poppuhpoppoppop. KASCHUNKhiiiiiiiissssss.
There is condensation and mist spraying out from cracks in the pods, as the people inside slide out onto the floors, covered in slime.
--
There was nothing. You were going about your normal life, then there was a bright light, and then? Nothing.
Then the world lurches.
The chamber here is humid.
Actually, "chamber" isn't quite accurate. You're in a cavern, half-lit by an eerie greenish light, going on and on as far as the eye can see. The light is coming from what can only be described as pods, glistening, round greenish-yellow things, glowing with a pale inner light, outlining human -- and not quite human -- forms. Each is rooted to the floor, to the walls, with something black, twisted, and unidentifiable.
They line the walls of the cavern, go up in maddeningly high columns, curling and corkscrewing up into the darkness, until the light from them is like that of the stars, glowing pale and mournful in clusters in the darkness above. Twisted walkways and stairs crisscross, traverse the platforms in front of the pods, wending their way back and forth, up and down through the chamber.
You just came from one of those pods, broke free like a butterfly from a (slimy, nasty) chrysalis.
Now you stand alone but not quite alone, naked, not knowing how you got there, who took you, or why you were taken.
As your body heats up again, you realize the air is warm -- just a few degrees too warm to be comfortable -- and muggy; it smells acrid and organic, like freshly spilt blood and sweat. Your mouth tastes of salt.
The floors are pulsing under your feet, throbbing...
Wherever you are, this entire place...is alive.
Oh, and also you're naked and covered in alien snot.
When you call out, ask where you are, a voice speaks to you, in your head. She tells you:
||You are here.||
When you ask who she is, she tells you that her name is STA'C K'LTRRB'TXFT, but that you may call her Stacy. When she tells you who she is, there is a gush of emotion, love, maternal warmth. You are on a ship. She is that ship. Her name is Stacy and she loves you. Her voice is warm and motherly, even if these messages sound almost automated.
Glowing phosphorescent lights appear in pustules along the floor. They lead you up a massive spiraling walkway that gives you a view of what are possibly millions in stasis. At the top is a room with moving vines that clean you and clothe you in a plant-like body-suit--soft, but durable. After that, the lights lead you to a great cavernous room with a clear floor that lets you see all the holes and tunnels in the walls of it. When you reach the center, the last thing she tells you before whisking you away to gather your belongings and meet the rest of the crew is this reassuring thought:
||You have been Chosen to accomplish a Great Purpose. You have been Chosen to help fight the Ohm, a race of insectoid beings that are the destroyers of worlds.||
||You have been Chosen as champions of life, as protectors of the worlds and peoples that are left. The others are waiting for you. They will explain everything.||
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John gaped a little into Sherlock's uncharacteristically-sheepish silence, before the consulting detective finally opened his mouth to answer. Then, for the first time since they'd clapped eyes on each other in this cave, John looked away, scrubbing a hand over his face and struggling to swallow around the lump that formed in his throat. That memory of That Day wasn't one he enjoyed revisiting, as much as he'd spent the last several months almost obsessed with it. The bright red of blood on too-pale skin, the darker pool beneath his head, the staring gray eyes, the hands pulling John away from the too-still body of Sherlock Holmes... John squeezed his eyes shut, shaking his head sharply as if he could dislodge the image from his brain now that the man in question stood before him.
"Sherlock, he said thickly, "you might not remember it -- God knows that I don't remember how I ended up here -- but I was there. I saw you fall. I saw your body, after...after it was all over. We buried you." He clasped his hand over his mouth, trying to hold back any other noises that might escape from it.
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"You buried a body."
In four words, the truth was laid out for John Watson, even if important things like "how" and, more importantly, "why" weren't explained by them.
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"If we're not dead," he said, changing tacks, "then where are we? The famous flesh-caves of Spain?"
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John had actually just growled. That was a minus.
"Facts before conclusions," Sherlock said idly, looking around the caverns with his usual attention to detail. "I haven't the faintest idea where we are or how such a place can even exist."
He raised his eyebrows slightly. "Which means it's all the more important that we move along and find out more about it, isn't it?"
We.
Like he expected John to fall right back into lock-step with him at his side.
Of course the way he just dropped that last sentence was somewhat tentative, as if he was dangling it temptingly in front of John's nose, as if he knew that he didn't quite deserve John falling back into place at his side like a puzzle piece gone missing snapping back where it belonged, but secretly hoped it would be that way.
Sherlock wanted things to be like they were, especially now, in this horribly squelchy, unfamiliar, exceedingly alien place. Especially after three months of John thinking he was dead.
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And, most importantly, did he really want to just sit here in these creepy caves and risk encountering Mycroft wearing naught but ooze?
"Let me guess," he said dryly. "'Could be dangerous'?"
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Well, alright, he was starting to enjoy those fuzzy sorts of feelings like the ones he got when Mrs. Hudson hugged him and clucked at him in a motherly way or when he and John were laughing over something, but he didn't like the negative ones like guilt in the least bit.
More than anything else, he wanted things to be the way they had been, so when John said that, the corner of Sherlock's mouth tweaked up.
"At the very least, it won't be boring."
Look at this place, he seemed to be saying. The walls were made of pulsing organic tissue. There'd been a horrifyingly intrusive voice in their heads. They were probably in some kind of deadly peril.
It was brilliant.
Sherlock finally met John's gaze more than fleetingly this time, and all it took was seeing how tired his eyes looked for that smile to fade as quickly as it came.
"I'm sorry."
The words came out before he even realized he was going to say them.
It was something he did not say often, but it needed to be said and the growling, the angry sarcasm, the way John's leg had collapsed under him, the way he'd had to hold a hand over his mouth as if to hold everything in, the way he looked like he was restraining himself from physical violence--all of it made it abundantly clear that John needed to hear it.
The rest spilled out of Sherlock in a rush like his deductions often did, only this wasn't measured logic being rattled off, him eager to impress, eager to show off his intellect, this was...something else, something that had not been there when John had first met him or at least had been buried down very deep.
This was hardly cold and logical. It was the opposite, in fact.
"The hired killers--they were for you, Mrs. Hudson, and Lestrade. I had to make it real, you see. I had to make sure even you were convinced or you would have been shot, and then I had to make sure there weren't measures in place that would lead to your deaths if I was discovered to be alive again."
It's not the how, and he really, really wants to explain the how, because the "how" was extremely impressive, in his not-remotely-humble opinion, and he was dying to see John's "I'm impressed. You're a git, but I'm still impressed," face again, but the "why" seemed more important and for once he cared more about someone else's feelings than showing off how smart he was. It was a tangible sign of how much influence John'd had on his life that he'd even make that choice.
"I'm sorry, John."
He certainly didn't think this was how it was going to be. Naked in some sort of squishy living cave, with a voice in their heads, covered in slime, but it was still a reunion and after thinking about what he was going to say during it time and time again, "I'm sorry" seemed the most important to say. Even someone as absolutely horrible at human interaction as Sherlock realized that.
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When Sherlock stopped speaking, John let the words sink into the bog-thick silence between them. Then he nodded -- once, sharply.
"We should--" He stopped and swallowed until he thought he could speak without sounding as though he'd been strangled, "we should get going, probably. Find out what's going on."
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Still, there was something he didn't like in the way John's jaw and shoulders were tense. He also didn't like that he didn't even get a response to his apology, not even a "We can talk about this later."
The silence had been very heavy and what followed after sounded very cold and that was...not good.
Sherlock noticed all the little details, as usual, and he wasn't quite sure how to put them all together, wasn't sure what meaning could be discerned from them because he sometimes had trouble with the human end of things, but he was sure there was something wrong.
"Right. Yes. Of course."
Funny, but rather than being afraid of their situation, of the strange voice, of the potential horrors awaiting them, he was instead far more afraid he'd broken something very important in a way that it could never be fixed.
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And even so, he wasn't sure if it was because he wanted to verify that Sherlock was really here or make sure that Sherlock -- an apologetic Sherlock, one who felt guilty about what John had gone through -- didn't unfold into some kind of enormous preying mantis and rip him to edible pieces.
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Sherlock wasn't hungry.
(Also, he wasn't a carnivorous bug alien in disguise, or a pod person.)
For once, he didn't like the quiet, maybe because he was more used to being the source of it by being in one of his quiet moods, so Sherlock spoke to fill the silence as they walked.
"What do you make of all this? You've seen more science fiction than I have, and this seems to fall more into the realm of that than anything else I've ever seen."
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"Hard to say," he answered. "If we're talking about the science fiction, it could be anything. We could be walking on a tongue." He glanced around at the walls. "Apparently, people are kept in these pods for one reason or another. Could be anything from preserving the human race to using them as a power source. Also, the voice -- Stacy -- doesn't seem to want to do us any harm, unless she's leading us into a trap right now. She's also probably connected to whatever we're in, if not the thing itself, since she could make the lights come on."
Oh great, now he's deducing things again. He doesn't want to look around and see if Sherlock is giving him an approving look.
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And yes, he was giving him an approving look at the back of his head.
"Harvesting biolectricity or converting body heat into energy is difficult to do efficiently," Sherlock said. "The pods we came from seemed more geared towards preservation--a form of stasis."
Sherlock shook his head slightly as he looked around, not that John could see it because for once John was the one marching forward steadily with Sherlock tagging along after him, as they went up what appeared to be a long ramp.
"The technology necessary to bio-engineer all this would have to have been on a massive scale."
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The lights are still leading them upward, which John hopes is a good sign.
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Couldn't get to the more complex stuff until they saw more.
And in the meantime, there had to be something filling the silence, warding it off.
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He'd briefly -- briefly -- considered falling silent after that little exchange, but he couldn't quite bear to bring himself to do so. Not because it was childish or because Sherlock would simply refuse to be ignored, though that played some part in it, but because where ever they were in whatever state, it was still...good to have Sherlock here with him again. The stress hormones were sloshing around and confusing everything of course, but, and the situation was too dire for the moment to sit down and work out exactly what he was feeling, but every word out of the detective's mouth just made the situation seem less stupidly overwhelming. At least they were in it together. At least he wasn't here alone.
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They were bickering a bit, or at least John was doing it on his end and Sherlock was being unusually conciliatory. It was good to bicker just because they were talking and it was familiar, but at the same time, it wasn't the friendly bickering he preferred. It was very tense.
"Your input is still contributive. Even the smallest tributary feeds into the main stem of an indomitable river."
The only reason he knew about hydrology was because sometimes people disposed of corpses in bodies of water.
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"Well then, what have you figured out about this place?" he tossed back over his shoulder. Christ, how far away were their clothes being kept anyway?
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"I told you, I still need more data. That said, my initial analysis is--"
They were at the top of the spiral walkway now, and it appeared there was a room there. A strange, bare room with vines dangling from the ceiling at the center.
"--inconclusive."
This was just weird and it kept getting weirder.
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"I think 'Stacy' perhaps has a different definition of clothing than we do," he said as he edged forward into the room, prepared to leap backward at any sign of an attack.
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There was no way in hell they were walking right through the center of that under the vines.
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"All right," he said, staring unblinking at the tendrils hanging from the ceiling. "This is supposed to be where we get clothed, right? If Stacy were going to...eat us or something, she'd have digested us in our pods probably."
With that, he takes a tentative step forward.
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"John!"
If there was any chance at all of Sherlock not getting dragged in, it was dashed by the fact that he rushed forward, tugging at the vines, trying to get John free. For all they knew, it was some sort of carniverous plant...thing, given how dangerously unpredictable this place was.
That meant he was swept up in the vines, too.
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Just because they were (possibly?) dead didn't mean that John wanted Sherlock to come jumping into whatever this was with him. He lashed out with a foot to try and kick Sherlock back out of range of the vines.
Several dizzying moments later, John found himself back on his feet, fully clothed in a soft and bizarre jumpsuit. With a pulse.
"...Yes, definitely a different definition of 'clothing'."
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