It's been a long time since Howard engaged in some harmless graffiti. Two years, if not a little more. He's exhausted from a long shift in Med Bay and then hitting the Media Library for his new Leon-appointed position, but it seems like the urge to vandalize things has been pent up for so long that he has all the energy in the world to do this.

The memory-statues and painting under the giant lit-up head in the Art Hall are as good a place as any. Using permanent marker, some pink spraypaint and his knife, he starts to carve and mark things into the shifting wall.

DGIG KILLED 1ST CREW

STACY WIPES MINDS

DON'T TRUST THEM

The paintings and statues shift and mold to his memories, images both calm and terrifying, images he remembers and ones he's long forgotten. There's him playing basketball in his driveway. There's Orc's face torn open by flesh-eating worms. There's a massacre, and there's a busy cafeteria, and there's Disneyland, there's the first time he broke his nose and there's him sleeping in math class. The statue becomes a child's corpse and then an impatient P.E. coach and then his grandmother. On the wall, the images keep shifting, but the marks he's making stay where they are, black and pink and chiseled.

WRITE IT ALL DOWN

As much as he hated to really admit it, Jake was settling in aboard the ship. There was a strange sense of normalcy that followed him around - he was at war, he was trying to avoid getting people killed, he was thinking about strategies, thinking about the future - and that all seemed perfectly normal to him. He had slipped back into the patterns and the habits he'd formed over the War very easily and that bothered him, in some little corner of his mind. But the rest of him? The rest of him was happy he had something to do that he was good at.

He was wary, paranoid again, watching everyone who said they were a friend with a trained suspicion. And sometimes at night, it made him sick to realize that he accepted that as a normal part of everyday life. It was 'late'. Late being relative when there was no way to really gauge what time it was or how much time had passed, so he went wandering to settle his mind. He found his way to a large hall, filled with strange and surreal sculptures and images. It was like a twisted sort of art gallery.

That was exactly what it was, he realized as he slowly drifted through the various pieces of art, staring at pieces that caught his attention. He finally paused to stare at a strange, shifting piece that stood underneath a sculpture of a head. It didn't really look like anything, though. Just inky blackness that seemed to shimmer strangely in the dim lighting.

He was about to turn away, when it finally coalesced into something he recognized. A scene he remembered very well. Probably too well. The bridge of the Pool Ship on that last, horrible day of the war. He was staring at the viewscreen, free hork-bajir and the other Animorphs standing around him. A defeated and weary-looking Visser Three. And on the view-screen, Tom.

That moment when he had condemned his brother and his cousin to death.

But that had all changed here. They were both alive, his brother was free - but that didn't stop the memories. Or the guilt. Or the second-guessing. What if he'd been a bit faster? Or a bit more careful? Or tried a different way?

The scene changed. Now it was the Animorphs locked in combat with Hork-Bajir. And then a Howler. It changed again - the auxiliaries being shot down one after the other by the Pool Ship's dracon beams. Sharks, swimming in an alien sea. Rachel's funeral. The smoking remains of the Yeerk Pool after they'd blown it to smithereens-

He tore himself away.

He shouldn't dwell. He had the present to think about. He flexed his hands and for a moment, he stared down at them. Was this all he was going to be good at for the rest of his life? Planning for war? Fighting war?

Jake shook himself off and turned to walk deeper into the strange gallery. He didn't want to spend anymore time next to this particular piece of artwork.

"Why did I come in here?"

There were very few things Sasami regretted. One of those things? Walking into the art hall. She'd never thought it was needed to come visit here, but, after the whole thing with the Tapestry, curiosity came and bit her hard. The Tapestry wanted to show her things of the future. She'd just wanted to see things of the past. Out of curiosity, she looked at the first statue before her and gasped at what was being shown.

Herself at 3 years old, on a small platform, dead (at least in her mind). Over her was the form of Tsunami, ready to assimilate with her and revive her.

She stepped back, reeling in fear. Why did it show her that?! Of all the things she could have seen, it was that.

"Please, change it! I don't want to see this anymore!" Sasami pleaded, but it seemed like it was stuck at the moment.

Sakura figured she should probably be more annoyed than she was, crossing her arms and staring down the statue of her that was, consequentially, also crossing its arms and staring her down. Life imitating art was usually an expression she'd heard, not something she'd expressly seen. (Given the artists she knew, art wasn't even something held back to be appraised -- most shinobi artforms leaped out and grabbed you in some way or another.) She couldn't say she appreciated this particular example.

"Really funny. Can we move on now?" She unfolded her arms, clapping her hands together in the vain hope it would actually do something about the statue staring out at her.

Surprisingly, it did. The swirling inky whatever underneath the odd statue head produced another statue after a while, one that carried slightly more context than the last. Contorted awkwardly between dozens of jointed arms belonging to an unseen puppet, Sakura looked back in shocked frustration at someone left undepicted. "This isn't any better," she muttered, crossing her arms again.

[ ooc: For the curious, this is from her fight with Sasori. ]

In roaming the ship, out of an increased sense of irritation and impatience, Zetta had discovered someplace new to him.

Most of the murals and paintings and sculptures in the place, disturbing though they might be to a mortal mind, gave the Overlord no pause whatsoever. In his thousands of years, he had seen the death of worlds, the descent into madness of some truly great minds, the greatest depravities of the Netherworlds, and Mickey in a feather boa. These 'alarming' sculptures couldn't dare disturb the mental integrity of the Overlord! Hyaaa ha ha ha ha!

...What DID shock him, though, was the statues beneath a giant head-sculpture thing. Two of them, in fact: the first an obstinate Overlord, arms crossed and looking stubborn, his back to the second; the second a woman walking away, stoic despite tears.

"What the... What the HELL is THIS crap?!" Zetta demanded of the room in general and the cosmos at large.

To Buffy Anne Summers, it seemed like the only reason she'd been podpopped in the first place was to have been placed in GLaDOS right away, forced to run mazes and the like. It was an experience that had somewhat reminded Buffy of her eighteenth birthday, when Giles had secretly sedated her powers away so that she'd have to fight a vampire all on her lonesome. The Cruciamentum, the Council of Watchers had called it.

Okay, so it wasn't that unfortunate of an experience, but still. Forced testing does not a happy Slayer make.

She brushed back her hair and stared up at the statues in the art hall. As much as she did not want to be, she was mystified by them. Buffy hadn't run across them before, but she was quickly figuring out that they depicted the scenes from one's life. At the moment, it was showing Buffy when she was powerless and running away from some thugs, on the night of her Cruciamentum.

Because that's something I definitely wanted to be reminded of, she thought dryly.

Finally, though, the Slayer forced herself to turn away from the statues. Enough taunting. I need food. Or something.

Jeka had been keeping herself busy; but even the most determined of people are shooed off-duty eventually, and Jeka knows better than to overwork herself unnecessarily. Everything seemed all right now, but everyone on board knew how quickly that could change.

She wasn't tired at the moment however, nor was she hungry. Instead, she was bending her energy toward a more personal project: attempting to locate any Orandian artifacts that Stacy had rescued from the collapsing timeline.

She wasn't having much luck.

Sighing in frustration, she drummed her fingers against the dais of one of the statues. It took her a moment to realize that the inky black material had shifted from a statue of the Legion in mid-flight to one of the Orandian royal family -- a time before her mother had died, and long before her body had been warped into this shape.

"What the--?!"



[[OOC: The shifting statue is currently one of four snakes, posed like a family portrait. None of them look even remotely like Jeka.]]

Brenda hasn't slept a whole night in three days.

She gets a few hours of rest here and there, but it's interspersed with nightmares like she hasn't had since her father died. They are vivid, stressful, leave her brain plowing along at a mile a minute and nothing seems to stop it.

She wonders if Jeka is sleeping well, if snake-aliens even dream, but never remembers to ask her. Instead she gets up in the wee hours and wanders the ship just to keep herself moving and to not give in to that chill that keeps crawling down her spine whenever she stands still too long.

Tonight she ends up in the queer little art gallery room, with the statue at the center that shifts according to her thoughts. Tonight none of her ideas are pleasant on their own so she tries to force something a little nicer.

She's watching her mother make pancakes, long hair down her back and a smile on her face, when she realizes she's not by herself anymore.

Well. At least it'd been quiet since the attack.

Christian (he hardly ever considered himself Adam any longer. He'd changed identities too often to become attached to one) did not even bother to determine how long that was. The lack of a solar cycle did not prevent him telling time, but he imagined the scale of traveling residence on this ship doubtlessly entailed, made the tracking pointless.

He had managed by luck more than skill to avoid the latest diversion, fortunately enough, it had been some inane holiday world. Christian may have been mild-mannered, but he was still not about to go and 'save Christmas' for a strange world he knew nothing about. He would save his own Earth before worrying about others.

Now, he could do without the disturbing dreams--vivid and uncomfortable even by his own standards...and after four hundred years, a mind could become extraordinarily creative--or the spectres of his past that accompanied them. Their persistence alone would have given him a headache, were he capable of such things any longer. Clearly, his mind was unsettled, but how? Aside from the obvious placement on this ship, and the claim that his world was lost. He had long overcome any disappointment or chagrin he felt at those revelations. Yet, he knew of nothing else that could cause such nightmares.

Perhaps he simply needed action. Perhaps it was time Christian met the population of the ship on a more personal basis. Christian was friendly, if quiet. Surely, it was time he came out of his shell somewhat, and befriended some of the crew. Undoubtedly, he would need to. Certainly, if Petrelli meant to blackmail him into submission, with his limited knowledge.

Now, he contemplated just how he might achieve that. Clearly, a change of tactics was required. To be unnoticed would not serve his purposes any longer. Thus, rather than lurk where his suit would blend into the ship's walls, he donned the simple dark slacks and suitably tacky blue pull-over, and went exploring in tighter corridors.

Presently, he found himself in front of the painting which enjoyed shifting. As the image settled on a gruesome battle scene--much of the damage undoubtedly done with abilities, judging by its depiction--Christian stumbled backward in outward shock. "Oh, God, why doesn't it warn someone when it does that!"

That, at least, ought to be cracked and loud enough to draw attention.

Jack's skulking around the art hall. He's figured out that not a lot of people come in here, so it makes a great place to get away from it all, relax, and fiddle around with his omnicom. He's just told Leon where he is and expects him to show up any moment now, and he has a feeling he's not going to like how this ends.

Selene was used to weird. After a year of what she had thought of 'extremely lucid dreaming,' she had started to become accepting of most things. It'd be why she thought she might have had a mental problem when she had problems with college when, as she'd later find out, she left her body at home. It probably also helped her when her doctor posed the idea she was leaving her body. After another five years of wandering other dreams, her definition of what was 'weird' was hard to reach.

Not even Stacy was weird to her. The tentacle stuff was creepy, but again, something rather common. The suit was new and it took a bit to adjust to that, but not what she thought was long enough for a 'normal person.' Which she was posing to be. She didn't know what was going on for sure and having this ship being an ORGANIC ship, she couldn't get through the walls. She didn't know why she could go through tech, go through living people, but when it's combined into an organic machine, she can't get through. Probably something with it's mental frequency being like that. She'd tried it a few times, but it was a no go.

So she'd explore the ship she could go to first, alternating between reality and the dreams of the pod sleepers. At least she was pretty sure it was their dreams. It was a bit hard to determine where she ended up relatively as her body was always moving with the ship.

She did find this place though. The art hall. The statues would have been disturbing if she was easily disturbed. Instead, she just found them interesting and was quite happy to study them. Then there was this one.

A statue that was always shifting. If first caught her attention because it had changed to a shape she had seen in one of the dreams. It wasn't anyone on the crew, at least as far as she knew, but it had been a rather unique scenario, some wearing what looked like boxers on their head and attacking with a huge sword to what looked like a humanoid cat. She only saw it in one dream, upon the ship, and that's what caught her attention.

So she came back when she was awake again, watching it with interest. "I wonder if it shows things from the minds of the people on board, or if that was just a fluke?" She muttered.

Leni still wasn't quite sure how she felt about this place.

On the one hand, she still didn't appreciate being brought here against her will, pretty much everything here was well outside her comfort zone, getting bitten by a goddamn vampire had not been the best possible introduction to things, and she could really use a drink to help her cope with everything.

On the other hand, the rest of the people on board seemed decent enough, by and large, there was no Confederation around to hassle her (she assumed), and everything was... new. She'd lived for so long within her struggle that being plucked bodily from that context was forcing her to revise her mindset; her conversation with the Doctor had made that abundantly clear to her early on.

And then, too, sometimes she'd find places like this: places of unearthly beauty and grotesquerie. There was art that, while clearly the product of some foreign sense of aesthetics, was still unmistakably art. There was art that originated from a more human-like mindset, but that was defamiliarized, made strange by its new context. The art hall she stood in now was yet another instance of both, with its chilling murals and shifting statues, all bathed in a light like nothing she'd seen before. It made her shiver, but that didn't keep her from appreciating it.

The statues, she had to admit, puzzled her. They were interesting to look at, but what was their point? It wasn't as if they'd been created by an artist with something to communicate, like normal art was; were they simply meant to be commemorative? Were they computer-controlled, or was there some kind of intelligence guiding them--perhaps Stacy? Was it really art if there were no motives, or even an artist behind it, to examine?

She sighed and rubbed her temples. She was starting to feel like she was back in college again--the last time she'd come up with something that pretentious, she'd been writing her thesis. She'd wanted to clear her mind, not clutter it further, and so she contented herself for now with watching the statues change.

Last time she saw artwork was down on the city levels. Now Kate was jogging around where she could in between being schlooped to different locations by the ship. This time she was around one of the top levels, and found herself in the art hall after jogging along the lit up pusticles leading the way to it.

She came to a stop, and stared around. These paintings were seriously creepy, and what's with the sculpture?

OOC: ATTENTION: For Kate, Nathan and Xander's EPs, if it's on the first page, or even if it isn't, it's OPEN to any and all tags. Time doesn't matter. They all need to meet more people.)

First day out of the pod, and already problems. Just like being back home she guessed. But in the meantime, what to do. She debated on going to check to see if her friends and family were locked up. But if that was the case, what could she do? Break them open? It would just mean punishment for her and them. And maybe others, and she wouldn't dare risk so many.

Then again, Stacy wouldn't do that, she obviously needs them, and what they can do. Everybody has a purpose and a function. In the meantime, she could check out the Sensoriums again, and get some practice in. Kate figured being cooped up for six months meant she was extremely overdue. So she headed for the room with her bow and arrow, hoping there would be simulated targets available.

Even though it meant the ship was getting her soldiers, whether they liked it or not.

Like stretched rubber-band snapping back, Sam twisted around and started back the way they had come almost the instant the police officer had 'dismissed' them.  While he'd tried to ignore it at the time, throughout the entire 'tour,' as it was called, he'd felt a near-overwhelming compulsion to ditch the rest of the group and start hunting for his brother.  He had to be here.  The artificial intelligence, the one Harper had called 'Rommie,' had all but confirmed that this...thing...this ship, 'Stacy'...was holding people hostage in the pods as collateral in order to get everyone else to cooperate.  Meanwhile, Starbuck's question echoed in his head:  were the hostages just random people, complete strangers?  or people they knew, that they loved?    The fact that some of the others knew each other was enough of an answer for him. 

There weren't just random people down in those pods, of that Sam was convinced.  'Stacy' had pulled people that each of them cared about and was dangling them over the proverbial acid pit in order to coerce those that she'd awakened to do her bidding.  Bullshit. 

Sam's brow creased and his eyes narrowed with determination as he trod down the corridor.  His knuckles began to turn white as his grip tightened on the pistol-gripped shot-gun he'd recovered from weapons storage.  He didn't have to run off a list of possible loved ones for 'Stacy' to hold prisoner.  His mother died twenty-four years ago.  Jessica, his fiance, was dead.  Dad was dead.  That left only one person:  Dean.

By the time he'd reached the pod caverns, Sam's chest was heaving as both his breathing and his heart rate accelerated, anticipation building up inside of him.  He looked around at the all too familiar surroundings.  Despite how little time had actually passed, it already seemed like an eternity since he'd left this room...or at least one like it.  He scanned the chamber, looking at the rows upon rows upon rows of pods that hung suspended from the ceiling.  'Rommie' was right, there had to thousands, hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions of pods on this ship.  But none of that mattered to Sam right now.  His focus narrowed on one goal and one goal only:  finding his brother.   He didn't care how long it would take, as far as Sam was concerned, he wasn't going to stop looking until he found Dean.

"All right, you bitch," Sam said, glancing up at the ceiling as he spoke to 'Stacy,' "Where'd you put my brother?"