((PLOT POST! READ IT!))

Stacy's voice rang out through the corridors of the ship, announcing that a message had been received and would be played on the Obs Deck momentarily.

The message was patched through a few minutes later, shown on a holographic screen. It was shot in very poor video, from a very old communicator frequency.

( A plea for help. )

At four different points throughout the ship is one of those sights that is more regular than any would probably like. Suddenly, GLaDOS drops a handful of women who had been shuffled off for tests back out, deeming them capable of being among the others, again.

Claire Redfield stood up after being expelled and quickly spun around, kicking the wall in frustration.

"Should've blown up your goddamn AI core when I had the chance!" she screamed at the wall. She spun away and stalked off down the hall before Stacy could issue any warnings for her attempting to damage the walls, and she was irritated enough that she might just try to claw her way back in to break the AI for good.


Scarlet Levy had a somewhat less violent response to the tests, because as uncomfortable as it had been, she understood and accepted it was something that was apparently needed. She straightened herself out, and started back towards Contagion. She wasn't sure how much work she'd missed, but she needed to get on it.


Yve Cousland was mostly just confused, and annoyed that she didn't have any cake, and with that in mind, started back towards the castle.


Zoë Shepard stood and checked herself over after the experiment, frowning a little. Unbeknownst to her her time was a little messed with at the moment, and the tests just made everything else all the more confusing. With a bit of a careful surveying of the area, she started back towards the Hangar.


[ooc: herp derp, i'm back. feel free to tag any of my ladies, just let me know who you're tagging and where you've caught up with them! ♥]

When Luis was 9, he'd collected a small terrarium of insects in a jam jar and successfully kept his miniature ecosystem alive for several months. One day, he found the bugs lying dead at the bottom of the jar and it was nearly impossible to console him.

"Lucho, no puedes controlar la vida," his grandfather had told him. "Sólo Dios puede hacer eso." Humans could never hope to overpower God, and those who tried it usually got what they deserved in the end.

Those words were an uncomfortable cadence in his head as he headed out of contagion for the first time in what felt like a month. Luis had been exhausted before, but rarely did he get like this, feeling more like the walking dead than even he usually did. Having the lives of other people in your hands grew very tiring very quickly, and he longed for the days when all he had to worry about at work were the petri dishes full of paramecium. If they died, things went on as normal. They didn't cause guilt.

But how dare he think like that? He didn't deserve to be spared the guilt of his actions. The past was in the past, but no matter how many times he told himself that, memories were not so easy to lose. Since he'd woken up on this ship, it was all he could do to throw himself at project after project in the hopes he'd eventually find atonement, but now that this particular project was coming down to the wire, he feared the weight of more lives on his shoulders.

Everything was quiet, the kid was peacefully sleeping for the first time in weeks, the computer was chugging along in its simulation to calculate dosage and voltage, and Luis figured it'd be best for everyone (and his own sanity) if he got out of there and tried to get his mind off things.

So he sat on the obs deck, doing shots of Jack Daniels and staring into the Bleed. Luis was determined to continue this activity until he realized the existential absurdity of angsting over his insignificant life, or until he was too plastered to do so at all.

It was official, come down from the ship herself; there was an outbreak aboard the Transmigration 9.

Naturally, the Contagion Containment Laboratory was unusually crowded-- patients in quarantine bubbles, panicked crew members asking questions, medics and scientists hard at work in desperation to find a cure.

[ooc: If you've got business in the CC lab, this is the thread for you. Pick an appropriate subthread and mingle, or start your own!]

It was one exhausted, tired, alien puke-covered, acid blood-burnt group of people that trundled out of the hangar and into the ship proper. Their mission? Had sucked. Their intel had been wrong. Their lives had nearly been forfeit.

But they had survived, mainly by watching each other's backs and shooting or slashed or flamethrowing at every damn thing that moved.

Now it was off to Medbay to tend to their injuries, but after that, maybe they'd finally catch a break.

They had no idea of what had just conspired, other than what they'd learned from Stacy's messages--there had been a traitor, and that traitor had been taken care of.

They had sneaked into the facility and out of the nest. They had gathered whatever equipment they could use as weapons. Now it was time for the rescuers to fight their way in, and the rescuees to fight their way free.

There was only a whole horde of xenomorphs in the way, after all.

In the complex, deeper into it near the core, several of the away team were all strung up near each other, around a clutch of disgusting looking eggs. Two appeared to have already been hatched. The rest were waiting. They were bound to the walls by slime and ick, some sort of substance spit up by the creatures that may as well have been quick-dry cement.

Outside the complex, the rest of the away team had made it to the ship--only to find it damaged. Acid spit up by one of the creature had burned through part of the hull and into important inner workings. They would need someone mechanically inclined, that understood electrical work, to fix it like Jamie--uh oh.

Well, that was a problem wasn't it.

It was time for the one group to try to survive, and the other group to figure out what to do about their missing comrades.

They had all been Chosen. The usual story when it came to Stacy. They'd had no say over who went on the mission, but fortunately a group of competent individuals had been chosen, with Kang, an Away Team leader there to act as mission leader.

The mission: to repair some of the mining mechanisms that had run down in an abandoned terraforming colony, to gather some rare ore with minerals and other substances vital to Stacy's functions. One small chunk would last her for ages.

The planet: LV-428 was a very hostile world, a dead rock with a very weak atmosphere that was comprised largely of Nitrogen, Argon, and Neon. Terraforming efforts had introduced enough oxygen for it to support human life, but only just barely. Due to the violent nature of terraforming on the climate, raging electromagnetic storms often occurred, cutting off all communications.

The intel: Due to a war on Earth, the members of the colony had been recalled back home. The entire place was abandoned, but thought to be safe.

The Mission Personnel: Jamie Hemeros, Kang, Sokka, and Hiccup were on to handle the mechanics ends of the mission. Scarlet Levy was to be their medic, just in case of injuries. Reimi was their pilot. And on the security detail were Tobias, Hap Suriz, Rose Tyler, Setsuna, Kettch, and Stoick. Kang doubled as their away team leader.

Surely this group could handle anything thrown their way. For something as simple as an empty colony, they were almost over-equipped.

...Right?

[ooc: Don't post until I have subthreads set up]

Scarlet didn't leave the contagion lab often. She didn't have much of a reason to, beyond for sleep and meals (unlike Luis, she was still responsible enough about her health to go to sleep in her bunk) and she was content enough in that. Tonight was no real exception, and anyone who might actually be looking for her would find her tucked away in the corner where her desk is.

It's late enough that she doesn't expect to be bothered, though, and while she has a few files spread out in front of her, she's sitting for the moment, one elbow propped up against the desk supporting her head as she stares down at a picture held in her other hand.

_{[[ Aside from being shot for using that title...]]}

First things first. Grace was taking a look at the facilities she'd be using in the future. Neuropathy had been interesting and the Medbay had also intrigued her - the lab set-up here would probably be more conducive to some of the things she might end up doing - genetic analysis, studying samples from Stacy herself, the plantsuits. However, Contagion had proven the most invaluable (although she'd no idea why it was called that). A full genetics lab and analysis set-up. That would prove invaluable. It was as extensive (more, in fact) then the setup she'd had on Pandora. Quite a bit of the equipment looked completely unfamiliar to her, but she could learn. She'd learned before and she'd do it again. As she pressed further into the facility, she caught the glimpse of something floating in a tank. A murky, indistinct shape that solidified as she approached. She recognized it.

"...oh my God."

Her face slowly split into a tight-lipped smile. It made a certain degree of sense - if they'd snatched her up, why not her Avatar as well? And if the body were here, that meant the rest of the equipment was somewhere on the ship. She wasn't sure what she'd need it for at the moment - but it was good to know that they had elements of the Avatar program aboard. Maybe it would prove useful in the future.

Anyone who wandered deeper into Contagion would find her examining the tank curiously and trying to access data records - when had these got here?

(And hopefully not with mace, am I right?)

Luis seriously had his doubts that Scarlet was going to show up. After all, he was still kind of confused himself why she had agreed to actually go out with him. But it was Saturday (according to his watch, anyway) and she had tentatively given her approval to meet him in the sensoriums after work (as if Scarlet and Luis would take a day off work on Saturday), so she should theoretically be around any time now.

If she hadn't skipped out on him. And if she had, he was going to make sad puppy faces at her at work for the foreseeable future. He hadn't expected Scarlet to ever even consider going out with him. And the more he thought about it the more he realized he was going to be quite disappointed if it didn't work out.

So, on the corner of a street in the business district of Madrid, in one of his milder suits and actually wearing his glasses for once, he really hoped he wasn't about to be stood up.

Something...odd is happening on the ship. Plant-like protrusions are occasionally sprouting in places throughout the ship.

They look like mistletoe, but this is purely coincidental. It's not like it's the holidays on the ship, right? It might be for some people, back home (if they still had a home), but others were grabbed from different times. No, it's just coincidence that these little devices look vaguely like mistletoe, and coincidence what they're being used for.

For you see, when this "mistletoe" is overhead, a crew member will be trapped in an invisible forcefield, and won't be able to escape until someone has kissed them or otherwise showed them some equivalent of affection. (Cheek kisses and sloppy puppy kisses from the canine crew members count). The "mistletoe" spring itself is shielded itself and can't be destroyed, the only way out is a kiss.

Why is this all happening? GLaDoS is performing whacky behavioral experiments, that's why. Each time, it happens, she intones messages like the following.

"Please express affection for your fellow crewmate to free them."

"This is of the utmost importance, and part of ongoing Crew Coherency and Cooperation Studies."

"Please do not attempt to leave the vicinity until you have participated."

"Participation is required. Why wouldn't you want to participate?"

"The Transmigration9 AI Complex thanks you for your participation in important research. Unless you don't want to participate, but not participating would make me disappointed. I suppose you just want to disappoint me."

And of course, sometimes she even outright lies.

"There will be cake."

...cake? Where was that cake? Wait... that wasn't right. There was no cake. It was a dream. Yeah, a dream. That works. Indiana slipped out of his sleeping pod; he noted that the rest of these were strangely empty. How long was he asleep? He got the feeling that he'd missed something big.

However, Indy didn't care too much about the matters of the ship. He shrugged off any odd suspicions and headed to his might-as-well-be-home on the ship, the media library. He settled in with a datapad containing some ancient texts good thing he practiced his Latin subjunctives

The undead were pounding at the doors -- all of them, and the windows, and the walls in general for that matter.

The front doors were going to be a problem, though. They zombies were actually breaking through there.

Battle stations everyone!

...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!!!

Stacy jerks and shudders to a sudden stop, likely upsetting more than a few things already upset because the comms have stopped working. And deep down inside Stacy, on the first level, a little section thoughtfully titled "Contagion Containment and Quarantine" spilled open.

Hal 9000 had opened it up. And the things that had been kept there were still alive.

Or at least, they were moving...

Their groans echoed through the lower level as they spilled out of Quarantine 1, shambling and shuffling toward the Hub. The Hub would take them where they wanted to go. And what they wanted to do first was make some new friends.

So they went to the Pod Caverns. Then, after that, the zombies started heading up to the City...

[[OOC: Holy $#%&, Team Left Behind, ZOMBIES. Going to set up some subthreads, please wait until I do! INFO HERE, FIRST SUB-THREAD GO GO GO!]]

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!]

Another day, another podpop. The crew and command crew has gathered on Obs Deck to greet the newbs, but right now the atmosphere is tense. People are taking turns on rotations to alternately hunt for Sam--who'd been kept in prison during the trial to present his assassinating the Yeerk-- and guard said parasite so it can have a fair trial. The Jury is in recess, for the moment, but will be deciding the Yeerk's fate very soon. A bunch of new people thrown into the mix is tremendous complication.

Meanwhile, the newbies are waking up to a strange, new world, one unlike anything they may have ever seen before. In the Obs Deck, the light of stars--and parallel universes--streaks past in a sleek, transcendent sheet of multi-colored lights in the large, eye-like windows. (They're inside the eyes, looking out, it seems). The statue in the center of the room, going up the domed ceiling is intimidating--and seems to be looking at them.

The tension is palpable, though a few individuals are trying to cut through it with friendliness for the benefit of the scared and bewildered new people now waking up from their gooey slumber.