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.]

The Person: Aang, the Avatar, master of all four elements, truly an individual to be reckoned with.

The Place: The Lounge. Right now, he was in the kitchen practicing his Airbending via the highly deadly art of--

Making fruit pies. What? It took some very precise Airbending to get the fruit fluff all fluffy on top. Good practice.

And eating the fruits of his labor was, uh...exercise for his jaw, yeah. And stomach.

Okay, so he was just hankering for cake after all that time with GLaDoS. It was still good Airbending practice, though.

And he brought the rest out to be served to whoever had a hankering for confectioneries.

"Hey, do you want a piece of fruit pie?"

Come and let me bake you the pie of my people.

Stacy's voice speaks over the whole of the ship. What she has to say has become very familiar over the the podlings have spent here.

||Pod Release Protocols Initiating,|| she says. ||Please proceed to the Observation Deck to meet your new crew mates.||

Those crew members that don't head to the Obs Deck on their own are hurried there via gentle but insistent tentacles. A few people stop by Engineering to help bring and pass out omnicoms and comm rings to the new crew members as well.

[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.]

Samus has decreed that Grif exercise and hopefully, through some act of god, become less of a slob than he currently is. Part of this is getting him to do something besides laying around on the Obs Deck whining about everything under the sun and several things that aren't.

The sensoriums are set up like a gym, a not uncommon thing considering some members of the crew. One of the treadmills is running, but there's nobody on it. Grif is sitting on a bench off to one side, playing what might be some sort of species of gameboy with the sound muted. He listens in case of approaching footsteps as he waits on the distance to rack up.

What? He's not running a couple miles. Not in this or any universe!

Grif is in the brig.

He's not a happy guy right now, but then again he's in the brig. The cot isn't comfortable but he's lying out on it on principle, boots up on the wall because the space is a tad narrow for him. Grif still has his armor, but he's been disarmed and his omnicomm has been confiscated. His comm ring is on one of the fingers on his right hand (he finds it creepy how it adjusted over his gauntlet) and honestly he feels pretty lucky. Nobody tried to superglue it to his forehead.

So for now, Grif is about as bored as he is physically capable of being and in fairly grumpy spirits as he lies on his back, hands folded on his chest, and tries to decide what the ceiling is made out of.

The effects of the Nightmare King have faded, the battlefield is gone. Stacy is rebooting her systems, and will be online again soon. It's over, it's finally over at last. They've won. They're all alive!

Except that it's not over.

Through the city, a wave of destruction spreads out from where a teenage boy rockets out of what's left of Escherville and floats in the air. A shockwave of air shatters the glass in nearby buildings; the stone foundation that serves as the overlay of Stacy's flesh that most of the city rests on cracks where he passes over it. Eyes and tattoos glowing, long hair whipped around by the winds he's creating, Aang is a force to be reckoned with--and not one to be reasoned with.

This is the Avatar in his full fury, angrier than his comrades have ever seen him, nearly thoughtlessly so.

He's overwhelmed by such senseless rage, the world breaks down around him--at the whims of the elemental forces under his control--stone cracking, water condensing out of the air and freezing over surfaces, wind whipping rubble around in a deadly, gouging tumult, fire crackling through the air.

Aang's voice is many voices, old and young, thousands of them all intermingled, as he cries out:

"WHERE ARE THEY, STACY? WHERE IS THE CREW? ANSWER ME!"

Stacy tries to reason with him. Some of her systems are damaged, she is awake and aware, but her security measures are not back up yet. And even when they are, what then? She can't hold him down forever. In this state, he needs to be calmed, and the AI knows that's something she is incapable of.

So she tries reason. ||Avatar Aang, the original crew is dead. Only refugees from podsleep are awake--||

A building is swallowed up by a sinkhole that appears in the stone.

"YOU'RE LYING!"

He doesn't remember what Leon and the others told him in the dreams, about the original crew being dead. His consciousness had been separated from his body for a very long time, and to have it snap back so suddenly to a physical form at the height of an adrenaline surge, that had been trapped in the Avatar State for more than a year...

A whole year trapped as he had been is enough to unsettle his mind, to make him angry. Now that he's free, everything contained over that time--kept stuffed inside so that he could maintain composure--is bursting free in a frenzied maelstrom of emotion and destruction.

Not that most of the crew will know this--for all they know, if they didn't hear his words, he could be the Nightmare King.

"THEY'RE NOT DEAD! THEY ABANDONED US! THEY LEFT US TO HIM! WHERE ARE THEY?!"

||They are dead. Avatar Aang, you must calm yourself. You have been forced to endure a tremendous physiological and psychological strain--||

She isn't answering the way he wants. She isn't telling him where they are, so Aang reacts by destroying her city. A wave of his arms and there's a blast of air that destroys a temple. He's going to continue until he finds them, finds someone to direct his rage at, or until something manages to calm him down first. The latter is entirely possible, given some time--but at what cost?

Tex was, by this point, pretty sick and tired of being intangible. It wasn't like it was the first time she had done it-Blood Gulch had given her practice-but that didn't mean she had to like not being solid for a long time. It got in the way of actually being able to do things.

Fortunately, there was a solution besides trying to hijack Grif or Doc.

Tex opted to pop up in the Sensoriums, calling up what looked to be like a lot of snow, rocks, and not much else. She shifted a little as she settled into solid form, checked her gun-also blessedly solid-and started to lope off through the rocks, her posture alert. She was looking for something.

Grif's been having a hard time sleeping, but that's not news. Everbody's been having a hard time sleeping. It bothers him, because the more time he spends awake the more time he spends thinking about it and the more geeked up he gets over it, and the more tired he is and the worse the dreams are. It's a vicious cycle, and he can't figure out a way to deal with it. It's hard to not stress out over things that are impossible to ignore.

The simple solution is, of course, to drown out his brain.

If anybody goes into the media library, they'll find Grif in front of a screen playing some kind of first-person shooter. Futuristic from the look of it and familiar in the "this is an FPS screen" sort of way, but not identifiable on sight. Whatever it is, he must have the difficulty cranked fairly high because there are monsters swarming out of everywhere and they're not going down very quickly.

Still, it seems he's actually pretty good at it.

Grif is sprawled out on an Obs Deck couch, this may be one of the biggest signs of the return to normalcy on the ship. He's wearing his armor and... playing with some kind of handheld game system he found.

Occasionally a plume of smoke gusts out of his helmet's air filters.

Yes. He's smoking. In his helmet. It's a talent.

She's mad. She hasn't stopped being mad for the last few days.

She was mad when the zombies hit, mad when she found out what happened to Paco, madder and madder and madder for B5 and Jaime and Querl and no matter who she's talked to or what she's done she's frothing and nauseous with how USELESS she feels to change any of it.

She's barely slept, can't stop thinking, can't stop herself from lurching her way through little crying jags every time a bad thought or memory seeps in. Her oldest scars ache like they're new again... Her new bed in the crew quarters is so comfortable but she ends up back in her podsleeper some nights just for the close warm security of feeling shut away in a bubble for a while. She still can't quite drop off to sleep but it's better than feeling so exposed.

Brenda's had about enough of not sleeping though, she just wants to REST, and working herself down to exhaustion seems like a way to get there. So she's been camped out in one of the sensoriums, plowing her way through beating up opponent after spectral opponent, working already aching muscles into a mass of cramps and pain. Another hour or so of this, a hot bath, and with any luck she would be too tired to stand much less resist a comfortable bed.


[ooc: Will you mentioned wanting Leon to thread with Brenda some time? Feel free to hit this one. Sair, the Luthor thread I asked you about yesterday exploded in a whole other direction so maybe DSP can hit this one? He and Brenda should talk. ANYONE ELSE PLZ FEEL FREE TOO! ♥]

In spite of the success of the newly pod-popped at staying alive in the zombie-infested Pod Caverns, there were plenty of zombies left to go around. The Extermination Team had their work cut out for them -- and they'd better be sure they got them all. There were billions of sleeping people in their life-support pods, as vulnerable as low-hanging fruit as far as the zombies were concerned. They'd have a little trouble, since Andromeda had triggered the safety protocols that hardened the pod walls into something more like shells.

The zombies might be able to shatter them if they had long enough, though. Best to deal with them quickly.

Especially since some of these zombies couldn't be taken out by just a shot to the head...

...Okay, so maybe that movie was about vampires and not zombies.

But as the battle in the Vatican dragged on, it might feel like it had been going just that long.

And it showed no signs of letting up just yet.

A mass of zombies has laid seige to the Vatican.

Time to fight for your lives!!!

The Vatican had a lot of ground to cover. Normally covered in expansive gardens (just empty plots on the ship) and comprised of a multitude of buildings, holing up there meant holing up in simply a part of the Vatican. The group was therefore in St. Peter's Basilica, which had had most of its entrances sealed off. Now they had to work on small windows and a few other entrances left neglected, but overall, it was a very defensible position. There were no exits other than the ones leading to the sacristy and treasury--which was their main avenue of escape, and heavily guarded. The prisoners were being kept in this area, and guarded by the rear guards, as leaving them in the prison was deemed too dangerous for their safety. As bad as they'd been with the Yeerk conflict, they were crew, and no one wanted them to die.

The courtyard was a chokepoint. Gunners could sit on the roofs of the buildings running alongside the courtyard to strafe St. Peter's square from the sides.

The various chapels and vestibules along the sides made excellent areas for food, medical, and weapons supplies to be gathered, and most were clustered in the middle of the basilica. The Medical area was in the Chapel of the Column, the main weapons and ammo caches, and Food storage areas were in the two Transepts, respectively, to the sides of the Papal altar. Pews all in the main areas had been converted to sleeping areas, right in the center of the whole place.

There was still work to be done, before the other group could leave. Last minute barricades, blocking more windows, moving the last of the medical supplies, inventorying the food, and so on. Then it would be time to hunker down.

So push up your sleeves and lend someone else a hand, folks.

[ooc: Read instructions for these threads here!]

The Chief's got the sensoriums up with a shooting range. It's not the one he's called up in the past, this is an outdoor range. There are several different target distances, including the long, long rifle lines for things with considerable scope to them, at the end of the range are some somewhat chewed out hills deep enough to catch most impacts. There's plenty of open space off to one side with some practice dummies for melee training, and plenty of open space in general. It's relatively sunny and the air is fresh, but the weather's an after thought. They needed a range. Chief called one up.

They all have a lot of work cut out for them.

The Chief is in full armor, doing a little quick rifle maintenance before anybody shows up. It's holographic, but it serves his purpose for now.

[OOC: This is a FULLY OPEN post. Subthread all you want. Tag each other, teach each other, ask questions, branch off. It's like a big social thread with guns!]

([Also OOC:] If you need to talk to the Chief, just warning you that I'm a bit swamped right now. I'll get back to you but it'll be a slow process. @_@)

Coffee. Coffee, coffee, coffee.

Lois couldn’t remember the last time she had REAL coffee and it was driving her up the walls. A few hours before arriving here? Was that it? She’d been so busy freaking out and running around the city and looking for her missing cousin that coffee had taken a backseat that day, and she wished she had.

Everything in this place would be a lot better if she had caffiene in her system, and that’s why she was sitting in the Sensoriums, in a nice little Metropolis coffee shop, with a copy of the Daily Planet on the table in front of her, enjoying fake-coffee at her leisure. When life gave you fake coffee, the only thing to do was take it and privately grumble about nothing in particular.

She uncapped a conveniently provided permanent marker, and blackened out the header (“CITY TO EXPAND BUS ROUTES PAST SHUSTER AVENUE”) and marked in her own words in big block letters.

STAR REPORTER LOIS LANE KIDNAPED BY ALIEN SPACESHIP.

(Okay, so it was a bit cramped.)

Lois sat back in her seat, taking another sip of coffee, and contemplated opening lines. Probably something to do with “taking it in stride, once again punching life in the face”, but that seemed a bit unprofessional.

So she wrote:

Witnesses battle over a football, finds a death pen, scottish boys and medeival m Medivel nights and Smallville’s meteor freak cousin and lives to tell the tale

She chewed on the end of the marker for a sec, and then slammed it down in frustration.

“Who am I kidding? They won’t run this. I’m going to be shoved in Belle Reve the second I open my mouth.”

Grif settles back into the fleshy couch, having just posted a message on the omnicoms, re: his empty stomach. He doesn't want to get up and go get some crappy food from the mess hall himself, even though he is hungry. He doesn't feel like it. And he's comfortable here. Why not make somebody else do it? Grif's long since figured out that if he wants anything in life, all he usually has to do is complain about it until people get sick of hearing him whine and go fix the problem.

While he waits for an answer (and most likely an argument, he looks forward to that), legs over the back of the meatcouch with his head hanging just off the edge of the seat, he keeps an eye out for anyone passing by so he can possibly recruit them to the food-getting effort.

Really, it would just be easier to go get it himself. But where would the fun in that be?

For even the busiest of workaholics, there's a limit to what a single person can accomplish in a given time frame without burning out. With the help of the rest of the Engineering department, Billy Cranston has finally come to accept this.

Which is why any visitors to this particular Sensorium will find themselves at the edge of an in-ground swimming pool surrounded by lush trees, a warm breeze drifting through the air. The pool itself is shaped like a bean, simple and efficient.

From the end closest to the door, the only sign of life immediately visible is a small pile sitting a short distance from the water's edge: a white shirt, a towel, and a few scientific instruments set parallel to the water's edge, humming with activity. Because the pool's occupant is here on science-related business. He's definitely here to collect data for water-based experiments. Yup.

The Blue Ranger is floating aimlessly at the far end, clad in blue swim trunks. There's something strapped to his wrist measuring the water's temperature and chemical composition, and if anyone asks, the device needs to skim the water's surface to collect the most accurate data. There's a very practical purpose for his swimming. He's certainly not relaxing. Nope.

Luckily for Billy, no one's here to catch him in the act, right?

If nothing else, being on the good ship Stacy has taught Tex something. Namely, intangibility sucks. It certainly makes poking into things-and beating the crap out of Grif people who deserve it-that much harder.

Which would be why her hologram's popped up on the obs deck, watching things with a decidedly cranky stance. Someone has to have gotten into something she can snark at them for.

The sensorium appears deserted. It's taken on the appearance of a box canyon, the ground mostly orange and dusty with some particularly stubborn grass eking out an existance. The hills are steep enough to cut off your view of anything distant, and the sky above is a blazingly clear blue. It's also very hot here. Very hot. The sun does not love this canyon.

Though there's no one around, a soft whirring becomes audible. Then it turns into the full engine-whine of a warthog jeep as one comes flying up one of the hills, catching air off the top. There's a man in orange armor at the wheel, yelling.

"WHOO! YEAH!"