The Southern Air Temple was pretty beautiful, architecturally speaking. With twisting spires and trees threaded into the framework of the temple itself, it looked half as if it'd grown out of the ground or been carved into it rather than that it had been built there.

The best part about it, though, was the sense of peace the place had. It was very easily the kind of thing that could draw people in and help them find calm, even if they weren't the religious type.

Hiccup was overjoyed by the presence of his special visitor and that was why he'd left her to go to his forge. Quickly gathering up all his plans and drawings, he made his way out.

He wanted to show her everything he'd thought of, every idea he had, wanted to share absolutely everything he could about himself in the day he had.

This was the first he'd get to know his mother, and the first she'd really get to know him, and he wasn't going to waste a minute of it.

In the aftermath of the battle at Lirath, Stacy had been severely damaged. Though she still eventually managed to build up enough power to resume course, she was obviously struggling, her pace far slower than normal. She could barely even manage to directly address those who needed to speak with her, instead allowing the more monotone voice of the Warden to speak up wherever she couldn't.

Several days after the battle, however, she once again stopped course suddenly and without warning, and let out a message throughout the ship.

||Notice to all crew members, Daligig Vessel Horizon is approaching. Archon Yavek is requesting to board so repairs can begin on this vessel. Please report to the Obs deck to recieve Daligig personnel and begin briefing. I repeat, notice to all crew members...||

Those going to the Obs Deck to check out the commotion would see the Horizon just out the observation window. It was massive, nearly half as long as Stacy, and likely had enough room for over a million crew members. The ship was colored a brilliantly bright white, with sleek, smooth lines, making the ships the GIA had that the crew had seen in the battle at Lirath seem like ancient relics.

Not long after the crew had arrived at the Obs Deck, bright, crackling lights began to appear towards the far end of the room as figures began teleporting in.

The first to appear were...not the Daligig. Instead, the first figures to arrive were massive, 9-ft tall reptilian soldiers, each decked in thick armor carrying equally massive battle rifles. At their fore stood one of them wearing lighter armor, carrying a tall metallic staff. He appeared older than the other reptillians, and wore a red sash that seemed to mark him of higher rank than the others. He raised the comm unit on his wrist to speak into it.

"Situation green, Archon. It is safe come over."

At that point, more figures began teleporting over, much smaller than the reptilian soldiers that came before. In fact, they were even somewhat shorter than normal humans, the tallest among them barely six feet tall. These were the Daligig, strange looking and varied in appearance. Each of them had devices on their arms, apparently small but powerful micro computers, each with different colors denoting the rank of the wearer. At their side were numerous tiny beings, each barely 4 feet tall, who almost immediately fanned out, obsessively observing and picking at Stacy's techno-organic structure.

Suddenly, one of the Daligig, wearing a dark blue arm unit, stepped forward with a rather grim, serious expression on his face. This, apparently was Archon Yavek.

"Who is in charge here?" he demanded bluntly.

[ooc: Meant to get this up a week ago, but school got the better of me, so sorry, guys! First thread that I put up will be the main expositionary thread, but feel free to make more threads for you characters to react, talk to each other, or try and talk to the Daligig and their companions. Basic info on the Daligig can be found over here.]

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.]

It had taken him so long to find it, but then he hadn't really been looking. There were no mountains in the city, no places that rose high above the rest, other than the Garibah Tree. And without mountains, he hadn't expected any Air temples.

But here it was, the place where he'd grown up under Monk Gyatso's gentle guidance.

The Southern Air Temple.

It was set into its own hill, like it'd been at atop the mountain, only no rivers flowed here, no trees grew. What trees that were there were dead, but woven into the structure of the place, as they had been when they still lived. There was no smell of mountain blossoms in hanging gently in the air. It was as dead as when he'd first set foot there with Katara and Sokka, when he'd found Monk Gyatso's body.

But it was home. He felt it in the stones under his feet, in the way his voice echoed in the halls when he called out "Hellooo" ("Hello, hello ello ello lo," went his echo) exactly the same as it once did. This was his home. The exact temple, ripped from the world of the Four Nations. The only difference was that the hall of the Avatars was carved out of it, but he knew that was in the Statuary. Why they would tear the place apart he didn't know, but Aang knew by now not to question the actions of a people that didn't make sense, that he'd long since learned not to fully trust.

He would have to tell Nima. Not that she'd have the fondness of the place as him, but it was still one of the temples, and she might still want to walk the halls of this place.

It was terrible and painful and wonderful and beautiful at the same time. It left all kinds of feelings roiling in Aang's gut as he walked through from section to section of the temples, from meditation room to classroom, with Appa and Momo.

Somehow, even though the place wasn't as high up, even though the weather in the city was usually calm, the breeze was perfect here. It didn't smell right, but it felt like it should have felt.

Comforted by it, Aang sat and meditated in the place where he grew up for the first time in a long time. Momo chirped at him and Aang politely shushed him.

"Meditation time is quiet time, Momo."

For the first time in a while, he found true calm, so much so that he was able to get in touch with a part of himself he'd been struggling to get in touch with.

If anyone happened to explore the many splendored halls of his youth, the mountainside spires, the winding passageways of the temple, they would find a giant furry flying bison laying comfortably on a balcony, with a flying lemur sitting on his head, picking through his fur. Next to them both, there was a bald monk seated with his eyes closed, his tattoos glowing a gentle blue glow, robes buffeted by winds that shouldn't have even existed.

Despite Superman's suddenly odd penchant for sporting mullets, it was time to have a heart-to-heart chat... between the Council and the rest of the crew. If there was some sort of bond between them and the crew that needed to be made, it needed to be done without hiding behind Omnicomms and other decisions.

Thus, the Council was gathered within La Prefecture and everyone was welcome to come in and make their concerns, questions, complaints and what have you known. Care to join us?

(OoC: This is open to everybody and everyone! Also, don't wait for the Council to address you guys! If your characters have concerns, start up a subthread and we'll gladly tag it!)

Neither Rachel nor Marco had any real trust in the medical situation they'd both been forced into. It seemed like they had been tricked and betrayed; and it meant that there were instantly a few more people crossed off their list of who they should trust when they escaped. In fact-- it left them at each other, it seemed, when they did escape from medical, two cockroaches slipping out of sight while medical was distracted from them.

Of course, this was compounded by the fact that several communications posts went up shortly after-- one announcing a Quarantine (thankfully they'd gotten out in time for that) and one announcing their abilities to the crew to warn them. And then things got worse-- Marco's morphing began to get weird, and Rachel... literally split into two.

This wasn't going well.

((ooc: As Blue's OOC post said, we need to make sure that only the people signed up for taking the two 'groups' (Nice Rachel and Marco in one corner, just Mean Rachel in the other) to Quarantine are the ones who actually do that. Other than that, feel free to try and do it! Tag under the header for whoever you want to thread with and feel free set the scene, and ours will enter in. :) ))

After briefly being a hostage, Nima is feeling a little shaken. But the herd of glowsloths are even more shaken, huddling together on the scorchmarked rocks that are serving as their temporary habitat.

Nima returns to the herd as quickly as she can, once the firebender has let her go, checking the animals for burns and calming them as best she can. Zuko scared them pretty badly, but he didn't actually burn any of them. Still, the glowsloths are bioluminescing in jagged, angry patterns, and jumping from rock to rock.

When the animals, and Nima, are calm, she stays with the herd. The littlest of the creatures is splayed over her lap, and Nima pets it while the herd's largest female picks through her hair. Nima allows it, sniffling occasionally, while the other glowsloths huddle nearby, twitchy and wary.

Cassie lay back on one of the beds in medbay. She tried holding up her left hand so she could look at it but the arm wouldn't rise far enough. The shoulder was practically welded to her body. Cringing, she sat up.

Her hand looked exactly the same as it did yesterday. All the fingers were gone unless you counted the mangled stubs as fingers. The entire hand itself was a mass of scar tissue. Completely useless.

They said that they could fix it. Clone new fingers and reattach them, then replace the scar tissue so she could actually move her arm. It was something she never thought of while the Helmacrons held her hostage. And she didn't know why but the thought of the surgery frightened her. Being unconscious, unaware, helpless...

She wished her dad was here but he was gone- again.

But not dead. He was alive.

"Thank you for letting me see him." She mumbled quietly.

The medical care available on Stacy is far beyond anything that the Four Nations had, better even than the powers of skilled waterbenders to heal. Which is why Zuko is lying in discomfort now, not raging agony, as the burn on his back heals.

Because of the location of the injury, he's lying on his stomach on a specialized cot, with his arms supported by low rests below his body. The open welts on his back are not entirely healed, and have been left exposed to the open air to allow the heat to keep fading. Occasionally Zuko breathes out as he uses his own firebending to try to expel some of the burn's excess heat.

He could ask to be put to sleep while the healing process continues, but he hasn't. He has too much to think about.

Ever since he'd talked to Aang and watched the guy swimming around with an imaginary dolphin, Marco had been kinda missing his dolphin morph. The dolphin morph was, without fail, always fun. And hey, Marco was definitely a fan of fun.

So he'd called up the pier over the ocean again, jumped into the water, and morphed dolphin. Marco clicked happily as the dolphin's bubbly personality rose up. He needed to play a game!

Angling his fins, Marco started swimming around underneath the pier, swerving inbetween the poles. He needed to go faster!

It was just for practice, and also something to distract himself and pass the time. It was almost meditative, after all.

Not that he was feeling as sad anymore. Life happened, there were hurts that were just part of it all. He was human so he could feel them and understand them, so he could know heartbreak just as well as love, calm just as well as anger, sadness just as well as happiness. He was human so he'd make choices he wasn't sure were right that he had to live with, so he could be hurt and wonder if it was right to feel that way.

Aang had come to accept that, so now he was just distracting himself. He'd managed to find paper--real paper--from Weapons and Possessions. It was rice paper, in a wide variety of colors, and he sitting against Appa in his Sensorium and folding it into a wide variety of animals.

Some were pretty good, depending on how long he'd actually bothered to practice doing that kind of animals. Others...well they were almost recognizably animals.

"What do you think, Appa? What does it look like to you?"

Appa grunted a long groaning sound, and Aang scratched his head.

"Actually, it's supposed to be a bison like you, not a boarcupine. But I guess it's a boarcupine now!"

He smiled and placed it down with the others and picked up his birds (most of them cranes) and started making them dance in the air over his head, which was the real point of all this. Airbending practice. Fine control was something he could always use work on and making the little paper birds fly overheard was fun.

Sofia didn't want to venture outside of her room. She'd stayed inside and cried on and off for days but she had more than just herself to worry about. Spot, the dog she and Laurie had adopted, needed exercise so Sofia brought him to Hydroponics. After wandering aimlessly for a bit she sat down under a tree and watched as the purple and green dog ran around.

You didn't have to be an expert to see that Sofia's normal cheer was gone.

[[OOC: This is closed to Aang but if you really want your character to run into a depressed Sofia you can poke me then comment.]]

Whatever the mission had been, it seemed to be over, and Katara had understood well enough where she had to go: it was the first place she'd started to realize Aang was on the ship: the Statuary.

There was a lot to think about, especially after seeing Matt how he was. When she talked to Sokka, she could tell that Aang was pretty upset too. So at the moment, she had two guys who were feeling pretty rotten right now, and she was responsible. She could only imagine what the other GAang thought of her, and the rest of the trip, even with her friends around, felt fairly miserable. Once she got home, she had gone to her room in the Outsiders suite and had a long, restless sleep. What was Aang thinking, how was Matt dealing with things?

So now she was in the place where she had first laid eyes on the statue of older Aang. She was here with Zhin, who had felt her emotions and was staying by her for awhile. She sat by Aang's statue, quietly wondering what would happen when he found her.

Stacy's voice came over the comm, blaring across the entire ship.

||Attention, Attention. All personnel please report to the Observation Deck. Attention, Attention. All personnel please report to the Observation Deck. Attention, Attention, all personnel...||

The mouth in the main sculpture on Obs Deck opened, revealing a screen with the image of a mottled blue and purple planet, rotating slowly.
( Read more... )

Time for another mission, then.

Welcome to Nanda Parbat, the hidden city. Squirreled away in the mountains of Tibet, an ancient temple preserving spiritual teachings that would otherwise have been lost centuries ago, takes refuge from the world under a wing of cliff face and blizzard. There are flowers here that grow nowhere else on Earth, flowers that can only grow here. Few know of its existence, fewer still of its location.

Batman could find it for you.

Of course, when your canvas is the sensoriums, the only place that he need look for it is inside his own head. A little paradoxically, the very purpose of Nanda Parbat is to aid those who traverse the depths of the mind. Of the soul, if you're the type who believes in that sort of thing.

One wall of the great stone temple fortress is built into the mountainside itself, and into the wall, passages to the many ice caverns - nature's halls of mirrors - within the rock. One of these caverns harbours a demon, black as the enshrouding darkness of the mountain tunnels, black as pitch. He's not expecting company.

Bruce doesn't remember when he had extinguished the sole candle that lit his passage into the cavern or what how his visage had seemed when refracted through the misty looking glasses of ice that covers the innermost chamber, but neither are important.

Who's curious enough to find out what is?

And this was the part of the job that Leon knew would eventually grate on him. Meetings. They were necessary, and usually productive, but they were not his thing. Still, it was part of the job now, so as per his post on the comms, he made himself available at the Precinct. His old office belonged to Samus now, so for the time being he made himself comfortable in the fifth floor conference room.

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.

The last thing she'd expected was to see him show up. Katara had been expecting a meeting with Sokka and Zuko and Toph and maybe Mai. She hadn't expected to see Aang, to have all of her family back again all in one swoop, and seeing him had made everything she'd been fearing take a quiet step back. It had taken all the strength she could muster to not hug him, and hold him close then and there, not when the Ohm had shown up and Aang had a job to do. THOSE memories came flooding back and she realized that Aang would always be looking out for the crew, much like she worried about them. So she trained quietly, remembering the intensity of the Ohm in every movement: the acid spit, the massive height, the sheer force behind the. These were the the things she needed to keep in mind, and because of that she concentrated, keeping all she'd been learning in her mind: Kang and Ronan's instruction, the teaching of Nanashi's sword fighting, the steady, deadly skill of the Bene Gesserit. For that reason Katara had come to the Sensorium, calming her mind. she had to remember that night without prejudice, keeping in mind the things she saw then. Always came that question of killing, of losing oneself to the feelings of anger that came when seeing what the Ohm could do: the decision of the Yeerk incident came in full vengeance, more so now that she knew there were Yeerk on the ship now. But she knew that those feelings were something to be dealt with, a trap that made people vicious, angry, fill with thoughts of retaliation.

Not that those feelings were lost on Katara, but she knew the path they led to. Rage always came with a price, and from what she'd seen, some people paid with their former selves. Darth Vader, for instance, was a vicious, cruel man not unlike the firelord, but his son was Luke, one of the wisest people she'd met on the ship, and his way of learning had made Arha want to learn about his path. Things like that made her wonder if maybe Arha had conflict about the sisterhood, if the way of the Jedi was somehow more peaceable, more matching to the type of person Arha was.

Which was the eternal crux of the ship: there were so many ways of learning, of knowing, of doubting what they knew. Katara had come to a grassy spot here, a homage to the world they had visited not too long ago. A breeze moved over her skin, calming her. She whispered into the wind, calling the name of the one she missed. She knew it fell on deaf ears.

But she hoped he would come anyway.

It was getting to be a little late at night, but the Obs deck was still occupied.

Seated on one of the meatcouches, looking out through the massive window into the Bleed, sat Cargn. He'd managed to calm himself from his frustration at their loss during the previous battle, and was now spending some time trying to relax himself further.

He had the right sleeve of his robe rolled up, since it kept catching in the joint of his new prosthetic arm. With his now steel and adamantium encased right hand he was writing down something in a fairly weathered looking tome using an old-fashioned feather quill.

In his other hand, he had a small glass tumbler with a thick, heady black liquor that he occasionally took sips from. It was a small pleasure he indulged in very rarely, one he picked up several centuries ago when he worked beside a rather eccentric Ordo Xenos Inquisitor in a several year long joint-operation. Even then, it wasn't as if he could get intoxicated with his enhanced physique.

He seemed to be enjoying the peace and quiet. Still, he seemed like he wouldn't mind some company.