Less than an hour after the ship leaves Agrestic's orbit, an announcement is broadcast throughout Stacy.

|| Attention, crew. Your crewmates, Howard Bassem and Charles Merriman, have been apprehended attempting to desert. They will now be given Punishment. According to established guidelines, you are all requested to report to the Observation to witness the Punishment. Attendance is not mandatory, but highly suggested. This will serve as a reminder of the consequences of treason and desertion. ||

On the observation deck, Archon Yavek, Archite Rekkti, two other Daligig and a handful of Kessek soldiers stand outside a spherical force field. Inside the bubble, Orc and Howard are suspended by tentacles looping around their wrists. Orc's ceased thrashing around and struggling against his restraints; rust-colored fissures have developed around his shoulders and forearms from the strain, but now he simply hangs there, looking defeated. Howard's nose is bleeding, and every time a drop falls to the bottom of the forcefield there's a small sizzle. He's weeping and begging the Daligig with every plea possible, but they act as if they aren't listening. Instead, they wait for an audience.

Howard's nervous. It's not as if this is a new feeling for him, or even one that's unusual, but he's more nervous than he typically is. He sits in a far-off section of the Medical Bay with Sakura, away from prying eyes, and chews on his pen. He's currently on his second pot of coffee.

"Worst thing about Stacy time is that I can't even bitch that they're late."

Behind them, on a giant lab table, rests the thawing body of their dissected Ohm. It's clearly spent a little too long in the freezer, because one of its toes actually broke off during the transportation, and true to his nature Howard's wondering if said digit is edible. The corpse also stinks up this section of the Medical Bay a little like dead fish.

If the damn thing weren't so hard to move around, and if they weren't guaranteed a relative amount of privacy here, Howard would suggest they do this somewhere else (somewhere with a big windshield he could hide behind while everyone else does the dangerous stuff and possibly deals with crazy Ohmed up Jaime), but there really isn't another place that would work for it.

So they sit and wait for Kon and Jaime.

[Tag order is Sakura, Jaime, Kon, then we go from there.]

Ever since the medical briefing on the comms, the medical bay staff has been preparing for an influx of appointments for physical evaluations, as well as a few walk-ins. After that, the hunt will be on for those who've been skipping such appointments.

A few of the staff members are going about their regular duties, expecting patients or simply biding time at the coffee machine until they're called on.

[OOC: please state the name of which med character(s) you want to administer the evaluation in the header to your comment. If you're fine with anyone tagging in, please indicate so. Available characters are Sakura, Howard, Dr. Faiza Hussain, Soren and Dr. Carson Beckett.]

The recent discussion on the comms had reignited Jaime's boundless curiosity and a desire to learn more about the ship that he and so many others found themselves riding across the multiverse. And what better way to find out more about the ship than to look at the hallowed command deck? There had to be something useful here, right?

Jaime seated himself at one of the various stations and peered intently at the panel. The chirruping buzz of Khaji's voice vibrated against the back of his mind.

Suggestio|\|: Frie|\|d Jaime: press butto|\|s.

"Yeah. Right. Good idea. Let's just push buttons on the bridge of the super powerful meatship." Despite his sarcastic rejoinder, the young man reached out and slowly pressed a switch.

Nothing happened.

"Not that one, then." He pressed another. Toggled a switch. This might go on for a while.

Somehow, he'd gotten himself into a bet. He didn't even really remember how it had happened or how they had gotten on the subject. But then suddenly the bet had been accepted and it was too late to back down, and now he was sitting at the very same Mess Hall table Sakura and the others had been sitting at the other day while they'd been discussing the source of the ship's mystery meat food supply.

To be fair to Sakura, he'd picked a shade of pink to match her own, natural hair color. But the results were... jarring. Also, hopefully no one would recognize either of them.

The two women had waited until a good number of people had gathered in the sensorium next to where the Tapestry was kept. Sakura glanced toward Howard, wanting a visual reassurance that he was there with a recording device. He was someone she could count on for the paranoid sensibilities that she sometimes put aside in favor of other practicalities. With everyone gathered, they turned toward each other, and the sensorium came alive.
( Such a sight as we have seen... )... leaving everyone standing in the sensorium's blank interface as the mental replay shut down.

[ ooc: Feel free to make your own threads and discuss as your characters are want to do! You are absolutely not required to respond to either Barbara or Sakura's question threads. That is optional! ]

The Teahouse. Sakura had "officially" moved out a while back, and had maintained that outward appearance. Her personal belongings, such as most were aware, sat in a room in the crew quarters proper. What she kept here these days were necessities and strategic supplies, along with the journal she didn't want people reading casually. If they could slog through the code, it said more about what she did and thought about this place than she was comfortable having people know.

Not that it mattered. She frowned, staring off at no particular point of the house, feeling Sta'c as a suffocating presence all around her. The sensation hadn't been this bad for weeks, but in the wake of Marco's repodding, and the events happening right before it (the events leading into it), it'd been coming back strongly in waves.

She wanted to tear something down to work the frustration out. Instead she systematically familiarized herself with the aresonal available to the crew. Anything as distraction. Anything in addition to the rest of what she did.

Showing the rest of the crew what she and Barbara had seen felt like progress, if she didn't know exactly to where. It made her think, and thinking had both upsides and downsides. Right now she was exploring an avenue that might be both. Talking to Jake, who admittedly, she mostly knew through Marco and a handful of casual direct conversations of their own, was a step outside her ordinary.

Sakura breathed in deeply, eyes closing for a brief moment. The door was unlocked, the room lit by the soft artificial light of whatever time of day the city was generating. Her eyes opened. She expected he'd be here any time now.

Sakura sat in one of the chairs at the table in the Atori Teahouse, holding her own mug of tea between her hands and leeching the warmth out of it. She really didn't need to, not with how generally warm and humid the atmosphere was, but it held some sort of simple comfort that the rest of the environment lacked.

The place was looking tidy, tidier than it ever did with Phillip and Ren both in residence. (Not for a lack of Ren trying.)

A pot of tea stood in the middle, next to a journal and hardcover book. The book was an older volume on medicine from out of some Earth-like culture around the turn of a century, far from relevant or up to date with most all medical issues. She had a certain wicked fondness for it nonetheless, if she never got a chance to tell the one who'd given it to her why it was amusing.

She probably never would, now. Yet those weren't the thoughts she wanted to linger in, so they were brushed aside, sitting with her worries about teammates she hadn't seen for so long, for her sleeping shishou, and all the rest that she couldn't directly help. Sakura blew on the surface of her tea, focusing her mind back to what she wanted to communicate to Setsuna and his comrade. Lockon? Yes, Lockon.

She was expecting them any time now.

It was possible to get to Kang's quarters from the store room, but he preferred to use a separate entrance on the other side of the building for guests, rare as they were. The door was unlocked for Sakura, and he sat at a simple wooden table in what served as his common room, waiting. The only other furniture was a bookshelf, nearly full, with a few simple wooden figurines and framed photos decorating it; the windows had plain grey curtains over them, drawn shut. The doors to both bedrooms were open, one showing a human-sized bed and the other a much larger one.

After the 'bitching about Stacy' session finally reached a head, Sakura and Howard decided to actually do something about all the questions they had about their spacefaring fleshy home. Granted, they couldn't really find anything out about the Ohm on their own, and the Daligig were Right Out, so that left exploring the ship itself.

Time for them to find out what it is that they're putting in their bodies.

They drew on a few people they trust, or at least have figured out well enough to not distrust (more than they usually do), and now they're gathered at the mess hall at some awkward hour when no one is there to eat. They've brought Kanoe Zouichi (specialties: stuff going boom and wrangling Howard into being cooperative) and Ian Chesterton (specialties: hot cocoa, also science). And Ian's brought Barbara Wright (specialties: ??? and pissing Howard off).

Howard's tucking away at a tray of slop, figuring that if they're going to find anything that puts them off eating food forever, he might as well enjoy sweet, delicious ignorance now.

Setsuna, for once, was looking relaxed. Or, rather, as about as relaxed as someone as Setsuna could get, which still wasn't very. But at least he was relaxing in the Drunken Dragon, so maybe he was starting to behave like a normal human being!

Or not.

He clearly didn't come to the tavern to drink. Or talk. Or even to relax, or otherwise be social. Or, y'know, do things that normal people do in a bar.

He came there so Lockon Stratos could cut his hair.

The bar stools were the best height for that sort of thing, and while Setsuna may have been 'raised by wolves,' even wolves kept themselves clean and well groomed. Besides, if anyone was going to be holding a sharp object near his head without him flipping out, it had to be Lockon. They promised to clean up once they were done, though, even if only to pacify any potential complaints from ownership.

Still, despite it being only a haircut, Setsuna did seem more at ease than he been at any other time, at least in public. And Lockon was certainly a friendly enough sort. Perhaps now might be a good time approach them.


((ooc: Feel free to talk to Setsuna, or to Lockon ( neraiutsu ), who may be willing to cut your character's hair too.))

Alanna had decided that it would be best to at least scout out her new surroundings. After all, she'd rather not find out the hard way that there were dangers out there just waiting for them all to drop their guard and if she was really fortunate then she might even discover a way out of here. She wouldn't hold her breath, but she also held on to a certain amount of hope that the solution to their captivity would be found soon. It wouldn't be found through inaction though.

That wasn't what she found though as she entered a new area and found herself face to face with something very familiar. Her breath caught in her throat and her hands clenched at her sides as she stared hard at the stone chamber within the room. To someone unfamiliar with it, it didn't look terribly intimidating. It was a plain stone chamber, rectangular in shape. Alanna was far from unfamiliar with it though and she knew that it was far more than it appeared.

The Chamber of the Ordeal... why had it been brought here? Did it function the same as it had in Tortall? Given that the Chamber could not be manipulated by outside forces, at least as far as she knew, she assumed that it had to function as it had. She was in no hurry to test it, in truth. She'd managed to pass the Chamber's test, but she didn't think that there was anything in the world that would convince her to walk willingly back into that room again.

Not totally trusting her eyes, she took a step closer to further investigate, biting down hard on her lip. It was forbidden to make a sound in the Chamber of the Ordeal.

Barbara left Marco with the omnicoms to see if she could find some other way to be useful. Something that didn't involve an advanced knowledge of technology created hundreds of years after she had been born. Clearly she'd have to pick up some new skills, which did not worry her but in the situation, locked in some unknown part of the ship, those skills would have come in handy.

As she walked down a corridor, her mind drifted to the various things she could learn about. The unfortunate thing was, Barbara hadn't found a role on the ship that even remotely related to that of an historian, so no matter what she decided to learn, it'd be from square one. But maybe she hadn't been looking hard enough, or she hadn't met the right people.

She stopped walking and looked around her. Just a moment ago, Barbara could have sworn she heard someone talking to her but she hadn't been listening. It could have been her imagination, she was alone in the corridor after all. Maybe there was someone in one of the crew's quarters just up ahead.



((OOC: This is time displacement/ghosts plot I was talking about here.))

This was so not turning out to be a good day.

Okay, so they were stuck. In some random part of the ship that he'd never seen before, and they couldn't go back. And just to make it all better, none of their omnicomms or communication rings were working.

Which was why Marco was now sitting at the tables in the new mess hall, fiddling around with his omnicomm in an attempt to get the stupid thing to actually work. He was guessing it was some kind of hardware thing, which sucked, because Marco was better at messing with software than hardware.

Why the hell wasn't Ax here? He at least would know how to fix the damn thing. Ax could fix anything.

And as if to prove Marco's point, while he was poking at one of the wires the omnicomm sparked, causing Marco to let loose a flurry of curses.

Sakura leaned against the railing at the top of one of the tanks in the new aquarium area, still mystified by the sheer size of what she was seeing. As far as she was concerned, this tank alone was larger than some lakes she'd grown up around, and filled all with saltwater? Not to mention the boat she watched floating by, apparently unmanned and running on goodness knew what.

It was almost peaceful, staring downward into the rippling surface of the water, lights keeping the tank inhabitants in shifting, silvery view. Unlike some other thanks, the creatures in this one weren't largely bright in their coloration, if some of the sea-life on the sides showed promising flashes of oranges, reds, and some blues. Not a tropical tank, if the concept itself was new, but one meant to harbor a larger animal out of a different Earth sea.

The white whale came up now and again to breathe, expelling carbon dioxide and water in a spray that came close to hitting the lighting fixtures dangling far above her head. There was a thrill in seeing that, in watching this somewhat intelligent creature surface, breathe, then dive again, coming closer to the boat that seemed to be floating on the false horizon.

Only the whale seemed to be shifting pattern, diving down as low as it could in the tank and then abruptly angling upward. It was hard to determine what she was seeing, with the refraction of the water, and the lack of clarity provided by the choppy waters of the surface, but Sakura was fairly certain the whale was taking aim at something. Peering out across the surface of the tank, she heard the great white whale break surface and come slamming down on the boat just as a much smaller, daintier "plish" of water reached her ears.

She looked down, catching sight of her omnicomm as it started to sink beneath the choppy surface of the water, and said something not meant for polite company.

Then with a white whale rampaging at a boat on the far end, Sakura pulled herself up to the top of the railing and dived down into the cold water, intent on rescuing her omnicomm before it dropped down out of reach.

[ ooc: Set in the Aquarium area, Sakura's going diving for her own property in the Moby Dick tank. Point and laugh? Watch whale shenanigans? Threadjacking welcomed with open arms. ]

They might have been trying to get to the City, or another level, or anywhere else in the explored parts of Stacy. But when some crewmembers stepped into the transport tubes, they were going to find that where they ended up was not where they were trying to go.

The first sign that something was wrong was the strange electric jolt they get just after stepping into the tubes. The second sign was the unusually long time it took for them to get to their destination. And the third and final sign was the fact that when they arrived, it was in a place they would have never seen before.

To all appearances, it looked like a smaller replica of the crew quarters. If they ventured out a little further, they would find smaller versions of the mess hall, sleeping halls, and bathrooms as well. But there was one important difference.

They were completely and utterly empty.

And with any attempt to go back into the transport tubes failing, they appeared to be stuck here. What were they going to do?

[ooc: ICly this post happens over the course of a day, so not everyone arrives at the same time. If you tag into the post later, you can just assume that your character arrived later in the day. Also, your characters will not find that their omnicomms and communication rings don't work!

If you have a question about anything, you can ask on this ooc post.

Oh, and for this post threadjacking is welcome :P]

The rest of the crew assembled on the Observation Deck to meet the latest editions to their numbers. After the battle with SHODAN the place looks a little worst for wear, but the crew and even Stacy are trying to be in good spirits. After the revelation that their worlds are gone, and the little stunt in trying to kill off the people in the pods, many 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. They are also told they must read information about their current situation and a survival guide with their new omnicom. New crew-mates might see a tall dragonish guy with wings (but don't call him that), a large afro attached to a smaller girl, and talking ponies 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. But thankfully this time, there's a system that was set up to aid the new crew members with a few more experienced ones.

[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. Big brother/sister, there will be a thread for you as well!]

"I never thought I'd be glad to see one of these." The words were wry, one hand tugging a bit on the plant suit as he got used to it against his skin. "Last time, it was easier to focus on being naked."

This time had been a mass of chaos and trusting that Sakura knew who he should be shooting at. He kept the gun in reach, not quiet able to trust that things were safe just yet. Wars weren't something that ended cleanly, and any of those little robots could be hiding around here.

"Are you alright?" He kept his back to her, arranging the plant suit and figuring out how to holster the weapon.

Unlike some on the ship, he didn't have any powers, but he was a good shot. Better to not let go of something that could save his life.

There was a lot of cleaning up to do after SHODAN and her robot armies had been defeated. Among the structural damage was parts of the Drunken Dragon Tavern: the store room and everything in it had been utterly destroyed, the pots that had rarely been used on-ship were strewn around the kitchen, and a couple of tables, one bench and a chair, and a portion of the stage needed repairs. The building next door that Kang used for half of his storage and called home had managed to escape relatively unscathed.

He had sustained some damage himself, with a few minor cuts and bruises, and a rough hole slightly larger than an orange missing from the membrane of his right wing. It hadn't healed completely yet, and the bandages didn't hide it very well at all.

He had personal matters to attend to before reconstruction could begin, though. Two draconians had been killed in the pod caverns, two that he'd known personally; they had served under him for over thirty years when he'd been Commander of the First Dragonarmy Engineering Regiment. Unlike the others that had been killed, there was nothing left of them. Vlemess, as a kapak, had melted into a pool of acid, and Urul the baaz had turned to stone, and then dust.

It was customary, because of the nature of draconian deaths, to simply place a headstone along with any personal possessions that could be salvaged. Sakura had helped Kang procure two suitable stones from the wreckage of the Great Wall, and he'd decided to place them in the little herb garden Kali had started before she'd gotten repodded (said garden hadn't been cared for since). It was visible from the tavern, and he felt that it was appropriate to have them near a piece of home.

He knelt down to clear a space on the north side of the garden, digging shallow holes for Urul's belt and one of Vlemess's bracers. He'd gotten lucky in finding their few possessions in the lockers.

[OOC: He invited/mentioned it to anyone that he counts as family or a friend, but it's cool for others to stop by too if they'd like. Threadjacking is also encouraged!]

Zouichi generally bathed at the Inn, where things were quiet and old men named Jiraiya were not kicking up fusses trying to check out the goods. Today, however, he thought it might be a good time to pay the bathhouse a visit, if only for a change of pace. Surely no one would be there at this hour.

Once he arrived, he shed his body armor, wrapped a towel around his waist, and set himself to finding a nice open bath. He sank into the water with a sigh, leaning against a marble wall and closing his eyes. SHODAN's attack was over, but its effect on the crew here would likely remain for quite some time. And who knew what other dangers lurked in waiting, ready for someone to press the wrong button or wander into the wrong area so they could be set loose on the ship?