trans_9 | Mini-Podpop for Honor and Saitō [closed]

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Mini-Podpop for Honor and Saitō [closed]

||Pod Release Protocols Initiating...||

Stacy's familiar voice sounds out to all the podmates through the ship. In the Pod Caverns, there are the sounds of: Pop. Poppop. KASCHUNKhiiiiiiiissssss.

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 save the Multiverse from 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.||

A vast chamber with countless shelves and lockers has your belongings in them. Before you're whisked off even further up the transport tubes to the Living Areas of the ship, a comm-ring and a device called an omnicom is pressed into your hands by a tentacle. A guide autoplays telling you the cold, impossible truth:

Your world is gone and your only chance to restore it may lie in discovering the well-guarded secrets of the horrible beings that destroyed it in the first place. The fate of every reality and timeline that has ever been and ever will be rests on your shoulders.

Welcome to the Meatship.

[ooc: This would likely be set after rebellion as that might be easiest but if you'd like to set it during, let the mods know and we'll try to make arrangements for you. After they get their belongings, you may post a joint IC intro or separate ones, in a more open place in the ship, like Obs Deck. Let the mods know if you need any help!]

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[According to my understanding of the disclaimer, we're speeding up the usually 'pod-pop' roleplay to start our scene right as our characters enter the observation deck: I still want to roleplay a 'what the heck is going on' bit of dialogue, so I think I hit upon a solution of sorts.

And...Hi! I'm excited to be onboard! Ooc, of course.]

[“I'm afraid we have another one, Your Grace.”

“How bad this time?” Honor asked quietly.

“Not as bad as the last one,” Brigham reassured her quickly. “And a hell of a lot better than what happen to Jessica Epps. The dispatch is from Captain Ellis.”

“He has Royalist, doesn't he?” Honor interrupted.

“Yes, Your Grace,” Brigham confirmed. Royalist was a Reliant-class ship, like Honor's own one and only battlecruiser ommand, HMS Nike. The Reliants were o long the latest, most modern ships in the Royal Navy's inventory, but they remained large and powerful units, capable of taking on anything below the wall of battle, and they'd had priority for refits and upgrades.

“He and his division were picketing the Walther System. They'd been on station there for just under five days when an Andermani cruiser squadron entered the system. As per your order, Ellis transmitted a warning to the Andies to stay clear. The two battle groups were moving into a standoff when there was a sudden emer–“]

And it was at that point that Commodore Honor Harrington, Steadholder of Grayson, Dame of the Order of Sir Roger, Fleet Commander of the Star Kingdom of Manictore, and inexplicable collector of catchy titles, as she'd thought of herself from time to time, was thoroughly and completely plucked out of her tale, instantly deposited on a living floor, puking her guts out.

At least from the perspective of her memory. And memory was a tricky thing. There were plenty of spook agencies that could rewrite it: not without wrecking the mind, but at times Harrington couldn't say for sure whether that hadn't already happened.

Impossible architecture, organic walls and floors right out of a Beowulf Exploitation horror vid...naked, alone, with not an XO or bridge officer or even an armsmen at her side, covered in slime, when only a moment ago, she was on the bridge, fretting about the rising tensions between the Andermani Empire, the Kingdom, and the Havenities.

Two things kept her from, if not a mental collapse, the mental equivalent of a gag reflex.

One was a large lump of slime right next to her that stirred, lifted itself up, and shook off the outer coating of phlegm with a soft 'bleak' noise.

Honor had instinctively reached out to her treecat companion, and Nimitz radiated waves of love and compassion through their bond.

Their long empathic symbiosis had proven to be quite advantageous even back in childhood. Among other things, Honor herself had gained a degree of sensitivity herself, and could read people's feeling quite well in close proximity.

Which is why when a moon-sized sentient living starship both told and telepathically conveyed the extent of her love...

...Honor and Nimitz had stumbled through the dressing, the item requisitions, and the transit tubes in a sort of haze, as if a hypo of pure, healthy endorphins had been jabbed right into them. There were inconsequential voices babbling off in the distance that weren't really important.

And it was now, dressed in her Mancitorian commodore's uniform, white beret dangling from her left hand, a Pulser pistol somehow tied on at her waist, and Nimitz resting in her arm baby style, cooing softly to himself, that she began to properly articulate her thoughts.

“...That's a rather strange statue.”

Saitō Hajime had hardly had a moment to think since the cannons began firing in Fushimi.

Since that moment, though, it had been one long test of endurance with no time to second-guess, no time to mourn or even process the deaths of the men he'd lost in the forest below Ryuun Temple. No time to wonder if Inoue and Yamazaki had managed to make it out of the magistrate's office before it was lost. And certainly no time to wonder if he'd just made the mistake of a lifetime fighting Kazama; the gunfire may have calmed on his path to rendezvous with the rest of the Shinsengumi, but it hadn't stopped, and he still had a duty left to fulfill -

- a duty he was going to have a rather hard time fulfilling from the floor of some strange, pulsing cavern, with the person he'd been ordered to protect nowhere in sight.

He'd never been a man predisposed to panic, however - and so Saitō held his head high, patiently listened to the voice echoing inside his mind (though exactly how that worked was rising high on the list of questions he was going to have to find answers for), and moved down the walkway with an even icier calm than usual. He was willing to play along, hear out whatever explanations there were, and do what he had to until he could retrieve his swords.

(He wasn't entirely convinced by the time he managed to locate his weapons, but at the very least, he was sure that there was nothing prudent about taking action until he had more information.)

It was hardly the most presentable he'd ever looked; the blue haori of his Shinsengumi uniform had been waiting with his swords, exactly as he left it - which was to say, stained with the blood of who knew how many of Satsuma's soldiers, and probably even more of it was his own. But blood or not, he was still the captain of the 3rd Division, and if the rest of the Shinsengumi was truly gone...

...all the more reason to wear it, as far as he was concerned, blood or no. Enough of Kyoto had feared or even hated them, anyway. It was nothing new.

He stopped as he reached the entrance to the obs deck, and simply...stared.

This? This was definitely new.

Shinsengumi, meet strange woman wearing a double-breasted black-blue naval uniform with gold-red trim over her plant suit, carrying what looks like a cat in her arms, looking as confused as heck, with her back turned.

Honor hears his footsteps from behind.

*Ship. I'm on some sort of new ship...in a different universe...and this must be another crewman. Just another crewman Pull yourself together, goddammit.*

She pauses, and shakes Nimitz awake. The good-humored treecat blinks his eyes opens, then scurries onto the shoulder of her Manticorian commodore uniform....

Oh. It's not a cat. Cat don't have that many legs.

She inhales, and turns around, cool eyes ready to regard the newcomer with the steel glint of hard-won authority.

Oh Dear Star Christ, he's covered in lots of blood.

She draws her Pulser, pointing the gun downward, not raising it...yet. Unless the crazy bloodstained Japan-ethnic fellow decides to go berzerk.

If the scenery is completely beyond anything he expected, the person standing in front of him is no less surprising. Nothing familiar about the uniform, but it's certainly western - but even the westerners don't employ women in the military, do they?

- and wait, how many legs does that cat have?

His hand goes to the hilt of his sword when she draws the...probably a gun (but definitely not a kind he's ever seen before), but he doesn't change his stance. He knows exactly what he must look like right now, after all.

"I'm not here for a fight."

It has lots of legs, Saito. LOTS OF LEGS.

On a more serious note, it has three pairs of aboreal legs with a refined tactile series of paws. And it's glaring at you from Honor's shoulder

Honor notes his stance: classic pre-Meiji Japan-ethnic Kata, good footwork, a clear descendent of the Kurosawa style of Grayson.

She stares at Saito intently, then holsters her Pulser pistol.

"I was hoping that would be the case." She replies with a brief arch of her eyebrow. She clicks her feet together and salutes, white beret dangling from her off hand.

"Commodore Honor Stephanie Harrington, Her Royal Majesty's Navy!"

He straightens up, hand dropping away from his sword. The military etiquette is definitely western, nothing he knows well enough to actually match, but it's something that wouldn't be out of place if he saw it back home.

If it weren't coming from a woman with a six-legged cat on her shoulder. That part's a little harder to reconcile.

But all things considered...is it really the strangest thing he's seen today? Probably not. So he keeps his posture proper (even if that just...makes him feel even shorter), doesn't comment on it, and answers in kind.

"Saitō Hajime, captain of the Shinsengumi 3rd Division."

*Shinsengumi. Wasn't that a Pre-Disapora Japanese police force?*

Honor looks down at Saito Hajime...literally, not figuratively, what with the height variation.

"Pleased to make your acquaintance, Captain."

She gestures to the treecat on her shoulders.

"And this is Nimitz. He's also pleased to make your acquaintance."

'NImitz' extends a limb politely.

"Now then..."

Harrington pulls out the freshly offer omnicomm and picks at some functions. It's similar to the datapads back...'home'.

"According to this, the ship construct we are in...is quite large. several levels, and the total volume nearly equals that of a small moon–damn, this craft is practically a megastructure."

And then stumbles across the crew survival guide. She reads the beginnings of it and goes very, very still.

"Captain Hajime," She continues calmly. "What was your last memory before arriving here?"

Right. Western names go the other way around, don't they? "Saitō is the family name." He's not snappy or rude about making the correction, but it seems less awkward than letting it pass.

She seems much more comfortable with the omnicomm than he would be, at least, so he's content to wait and see what she gets out of it. (Figuring out the greater mysteries of this place is going to be hard enough, but he can already tell that he's going to have to figure out a lot of minor things along the way...)

"We were losing ground to the imperialist forces at Toba-Fushimi. My division was moving to regroup with Commander Hijikata." Or what was left of his division - after the resistance they'd encountered trying to take the cannon at Ryuun Temple, however, that hadn't been much.

Honor mentally smacks herself across the head. Hard.

"Apologies, Captain Saito Hajime." She replies.

There's a moment of silence.

"We were in the Sidemore cluster." She said finally. "I was at the bridge, receiving a report of Andermani Empire provocations, and then I was suddenly here. I'm going to go out on a limb and say the same happened to you."

*Which means...dear god in Gryphon Heaven...*

She leans down and peers closely at Saito's face. Nimitz does the same (he's a little miffed that you didn't shake his hand) in a gesture that has thought and consideration in it.

"You feel like a sane reasonable person." She says to herself slowly, rubbing the bridge of her nose. "Which of course, means that you actually are a native Japanese from the Meiji Restoration era on old Terra. You're quite healthy for a man who should be 5000 years dead relative to my time."

She throws up her hands in frustration.

"Which means that what this communication device says might be true, and we have both been pulled from different universe into this ship, despite that being utterly impossible. And if that's true..."

All emotion leaves her face, making it a stone-like mask.

"Then the rest might be true as well." (http://trans9.rpwiki.info/tiki-index.php?page=IC+Survival+Guide)

(Sorry, Nimitz, nobody's taught him about handshakes yet!)

"...five thousand years?"

As impossible as it sounds, it would explain more than it wouldn't. He takes a long look at the omnicomm in his own hand, considering it. (Although the use of words like "interdimensional" and "AI" only makes some parts more confusing, really.) And then takes a look around them, at the obs deck, at the view outside as they hurtle though - through who knows where...

"I will be blunt, Commodore Harrington: nothing about this makes any sense to me. However impossible anything they tell us may sound, there's nothing I could come up with that seem any more probable."

He's willing to take almost anything seriously, at this point.

(NImitz reluctantly forgives you. She also wishes to know if you have celery upon your person.)

"Mmmm." Honor says distantly.

And then she reaches a personal conclusion.

All the talk about how their universes have been irrevocably destroyed...

She rejects that as ABSURD!

She'll allow for the moment that there may be a multiverse-conquering, omnicidal insect menace. She'll also admit that her belief in what's possible needs elaboration.

But she won't believe that her home and kingdom are gone. The energy required to reduce an entire universe to complete entropy, the complete collapse of a brane structure...even if a multiversal civilization had that power, it would be *wasteful* . You don't destroy what you don't have to, or what you can use. Ergo, universes still there.

And more importantly, she believes in her comrades. In Brigham and Harkness, McKeon and Yu, Mayhew and White Haven. And her valiant enemies, Prichhart and Theisman, Foraker and goddamned Tourville.

They wouldn't go down like chumps. She knows that in her bones.

She reaches up and sets her captain's beret on her head, straightening.

"Even if this situation is a grand illusion, it is our duty to move forward regardless, and fufill our oaths for as long as we draw breath."

She folds her arms and regards the lawkeeper with intent eyes.

"[i]Can I count on you as an ally in that spirit, Captain Saito[/i]?"

(Sadly, no.)

Saitō doesn't know about multiverses, or alien threats, or entropy. He just knows his duty, and knows the orders Hijikata left them with, when the gunfire started: Kondou put me in charge when he left, and I think he wanted us to still be around when he came back.

He just knows that if there is any way possible, any way at all to find his comrades again, then he'll take it no matter who he has to plow through to get there.

He's left enough of them behind on the battlefield at Toba-Fushimi.

"You can." Only two words, delivered with an even icier calm than usual, for him, but that's all it takes, because at this point, that's all that matters.

Honor nods, and then smiles.

"Excellent! I'll be relying on you completely, Saito-san!"

It's a rather sudden shift from her steely personality before.

Nimitz suddenly raises his front forelimbs and begins making several gestures that remind you vaguely of daoist hand seals. Honor observes them, then nods.

"Nimitz seems to trust you as well, though he recommends letting go of all that inner tension–pardon me for a moment."

She turns and jogs out back the way you came. Less than a minute later, she returns, buckling on a long curved sword with gold trim, matching the profile of your katana, but with a cross-style guard hilt.

"If this ship is bringing swordsmen onboard," She remarks. "Then there must be a use for such things."

He straightens her uniform jacket, then folds her arms behind her back, in the calculated poise of a officer of the Queen's Navy.

"And now, Captain Saito...Let's be about it."

[Do you want to roleplay a bit more, or jump over to the Billy Cranston pod-pop?]

It's impressive how easily her demeanor can shift from reminding him of Hijikata to reminding him of Chizuru - especially with the way she can say something and then take off, come back, and start on a completely different line of thought before he has the time to respond.

(Though really, anything he's about to say in response to his internal tension is likely to begin and end with "my internal tension is nobody's problem but mine," so maybe it's better that way.)

And while he'd like to think that she's right, and there's a point to bringing swordsmen here...he can't help but wonder if his perceived value to whoever's in charge lies entirely in how difficult he is to kill. It's not a thought he wishes to dwell on, though, so he simply nods.

"Right."

[I am cool with jumping on over there!]

Honor nods quietly.

Nimitz peers over her shoulder and 'bleaks' softly at you.

And so the two recent pod-popees stride off, towards their destiny...of trying to find someone who knows what's going the heck on.

[See you there.]

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Mini-Podpop for Honor and Saitō [closed]

Pod Pop of Honor!

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Oh Hey

sssssup sorry about the period-appropriate sexism...

salright...Honor's dealt with plenty of sexists. A WHOLE PlANET OF THEM.

and lord i just wiki'ed and saw how tall she is. he's...only 5'6", haha.

Heh. And she's a heavy-worlder, so she's probably stronger than you...except for the 'demon' thing

He's a speed demon....literally, now.

...That's rough.

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Congrats! You're now Honor's new personal Armsman! :)

it's an hono--wait.

No Take-backs!