The Temple of Small Gods was a sizable gathering place -- but more importantly, it was in one of the dead spots on the ship, into which Stacy was apparently unable to spy. It was there that Tarrant waited to address the new crew members.

[This is a briefing meeting for new crew to find out what's goin' on on the ship. Anyone can make subthreads if they want; Tarrant and Ildraniath will be explaining some Rebelliony things. Otherwise feel free to mingle, ask questions, etc etc.]

The rest of the crew assembled on the Observation Deck to meet the latest editions to their numbers.

Several people are set up near the doors to provide the new people with omnicomms and comm rings. They are also told they must read information about their current situation and a survival guide with their new omnicomm. New crewmates 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!]

Of course, the task entrusted to our beloved heroes of the Meatcrew won't be easily accomplished. They're being watched. Small, robotic Arctic foxes, a product of Macrohard, studies the crew as they come through the portal. They watch the set up; they see them go into the realm of the Holiday Spirit, and leave in their flying cars to spread joy in the world. The portal is left open--this is their chance to strike.

This joy, this happiness, this plan? Unacceptable. These creatures are the surveillance for Macrohard. The crew's plan is out, and this corporation is not pleased. The crew's efforts are threatening Macrohard's dominance of the season, but the most effective tactic isn't fighting the crew--oh no. What they'll do instead is go after the Holiday Spirit itself. There is no other option: the threat must be eliminated, once and for all.

Luckily, Macrohard happens to have access to the most technologically advanced weaponry available. The most dangerous mercenaries are on their payroll. Troops of mecha nutcrackers, cybernetic polar bears, and candy cane-wielding arctic ninjas are on route to the North Pole to finish up the job.

[OOC: These are small teams, so try to keep Infiltration Team in one thread, and try to do a LOT of group threads in the others.]

There is a resounding mental alarum that sounds through the ship. Nearly "deafening." Lights flash from places for extra emphasis, making it impossible to ignore.

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

It's entirely likely that she won't stop repeating the announcement until, well, everyone reports to Obs Deck. Outside the windows, a very Earth-like planet is visible, hanging in space. The mouth in the huge statue opens, revealing a screen. On it, the dossier for the mission flickers into display, understandable to every person there. Smaller copies of the dossier appear in holographic form in front of everyone.

The planet's stats, right next to a rotating holographic picture of it, marbled blue and green, are as follows:

Planet Designation: Earth-78734XM45
Status: Terrestrial, H-class.
Non-sentient life: Extensive flora and fauna.
Semi-Sentient Life: Yes.
Sentient Life: Homo Sapiens. [Various translations of "human" appear here so everyone understands it]
Water: 69.5% of the planet's surface.

Climate: Earth-like, in the throes of a mild nuclear winter [Click here for cultural equivalents for non-Earth cultures.]
Landscape: Varied.
Air: Normoxic concentration. Slightly elevated levels of carbon dioxide.

Air Pressure: 101.3 kPa (kilopascals) = 14.7 psi (pounds per square inch)
Sky: Blue. Often overcast.
Sun: A class G2V, yellow star.

Warnings: Wildlife and plant-life can be hazardous. Humans can be hazardous. A human cultural and legal database is available. [click here]

Mission: Revive the spiritual entity at the North Pole.

--

Following that, there are various maps and things visible. The version of Earth this world is may be very recognizable to some, but vast cities dot its surface.

||Attention, podmates. Attention.||

Apparently Stacy wants their attention.

||It is critical that you pay attention at this time.||

A few people will be able to avoid the call by being in the right place at the right time, but most will be gathered up on Obs Deck.

[ooc: Organization Post | You can post into the gathering thread. I'll add more subthreads with explanations of aspects of the mission as we go. Note: If you don't have time to post to this mission briefing but still want to have your character in the plot, that's fine. You can just pretend they were there the whole time. If you DON'T want your characters to be in this plot altogether, however, don't have them in the briefing--Stacy could have missed snagging them.]

Shawn had been stuck under the forcefield for who knows how long. He hadn't eaten in hours, and he was almost at his breaking point.

"I've got a lovely bunch of pineapples. Here they are a-standing in a row. Big ones, small ones, some as big as your head..."

Correction. He had already reached it.

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."

Between the medical staff among the crew and Stacy’s highly-advanced technology, it wasn’t very long before Paco was well enough to cut back on his meds. That meant that it wasn’t very long before Paco could actually hold a coherent conversation with someone without accusing them of wearing a variety of live animals as hats as he slipped in and out of unconsciousness. Finally, he reached a point where he could actually get a message out requesting that someone come visit him.

That was what he was waiting on at the moment. He hoped that someone would see his message on the comms and swing by soon, he could use the distraction. He was currently engaged in a staring contest with his stump in an attempt to convince his brain that his right forearm did not itch.

Why the hell did “mind over matter” only work when it wasn’t helpful?

 Between nearly killing himself trying to help people and his talk with Nathan, Peter was exhausted. Even with his upbeat demeanor, it was hard to not say he felt stressed. His flight-breaks no longer helping, he decided he needed to take a few hours. He found himself at the sensoriums, a place he had heard talked about like the holodeck from Star Trek. As he walked in, it was a blank room. He closed his eyes and thought to himself. 

I just need a way to relax.

He suddenly heard music, and opened his eyes to what appeared to be a high class nightclub, but filled with the strangest creatures he had ever seen, even since arriving on the ship. Behind the bar, a green-skinned redhead with horns, more conspicuous for his paisley shirt and purple ascot, was trying to get his attention.  

"Hey, kiddo, didn't you hear them call your name?" The demon said, smiling. "You're up, bubbulah. Don't worry, I picked a good song for you." Peter eyed him warily. Wherever this place had come from, it was not his head. But decided not to question it, and went to stand in front of a karaoke machine on stage. He picked up the mike and saw the song, and smiled. He loved this song. EVERYONE loved this song. Luckily, a few years in boy's choir had given him a sense of tune, and puberty had left him with a decent tenor. So, he began to sing. 

o/` I can't fight this feeling any longer,
      And yet I'm still afraid to let it flow... o/` 

That was all it took. As if suddenly injected with 100 ccs of pure rock ballad awesome, Peter closed his eyes and began letting the music take him, eventually rocking out. He had forgotten what it was like, honestly. Forgotten the fun of just letting go and having fun. And as he finished up the REO Speedwagon classic, breathing heavily and feeling alive, he wished he hadn't. 

But then he opened his eyes to notice more than just his holographic audience had filtered into the "club". 

"Uh... Next?" He said as he hastily replaced the mike and went to get a holo-beer. 

That was embarrassing.  He could only hope someone would follow him up and make it slightly less so.

[ooc: Start a subthread with your character approaching the stage and singing a song. Characters can react to other's performances even if they aren't singing themselves. And any song you'd like, Lorne has the entire mutliverse on karaoke. I'm not asking, and neither should you.]

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!]]

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.”

Brainiac 5 hasn't been outside of his area of the labs much of late, preferring to keep working if at all possible and finding it easier than most others since he doesn't need to break for food or rest nearly as often as organic crew members do. Not to mention that the last few times he'd ventured outside, he'd gotten caught up in an altercation and, earlier, run into a particularly irritating girl who'd compared him to a vegetable of all things.

Therefore he's determined to stay in here where the company is infinitely better and continue working on his experiments in power sources. He's not, despite what others might think, sulking. He's simply working on something that requires a lot of concentration and--

His sensors beep faintly. Apparently his work requires slightly more attention than he's been giving it, because it's about to overload.

"Oh," he says. He has just enough time to throw up a forcefield around the device, his work station, and, by proxy, himself, so that nothing else in the area is going to get damaged. And then it explodes.

He thinks that the forcefield contained the worst of it before it gave out, but he's not entirely sure because he's busy describing a near perfect arc through the area before colliding heavily with the door. Which promptly opens and dumps him out in the hallway.

"Ow," he mutters. This really isn't turning out to be his day. Or week.

It was a dark and stormy night. Really, it was. Shawn had gone all out for his Victorian-era mystery. He needed some way of keeping his skills sharp, and where better to do that than in the seat of someone who had apparently mastered the same skills he had been honing for years.

Or he would be if he had someone to play along with. The Watson facsimile was really creeping him out.

Shawn had actually become interested in something aside from complaining about his current predicament. Name the first actual case of what could be called crime on the ship. True, it had already been solved, without any help from himself, which was kind of annoying. But it was still in his general area of expertise. And so, he had may the trek down to the precinct to talk to Sam.

"You're retarded, you know that?"

Did we say talk? We meant bother.

Part of the crew might be gone, but life on the ship goes on. In fact, new people have woken up and, eventually, they've been spat out into the mess hall.

Maybe it's better to introduce them to some of the worst aspects of ship life first, right?

Anyway, the word is out that there's new people, and someone should probably go say hello. Before the n00bs mistake the glop for crew.


[ooc: read before tagging, plz]

It's big meeting time! Word of mouth gets everyone gathered in the Obs Deck--everyone. New, old, the entire crew is there and that makes it clear that there's close to a hundred of them, if not more.

When they've all arrived, a blue bubble pops up around them, courtesy of Blue Beetle, to block them all from Stacy's sensors. Most of the new people were given the basic rundown by Cybil or Chief when they were first released. Some of them have already joined a discussion with a the Commanding Officers and department heads. Some have had a chance to explore a bit. Some were only just recently released.

[ooc: READ THIS BEFORE TAGGING.]

||All crew-mates. Please report to the Obs Deck to meet your new crew-mates.||

It's time for all the newbies to get a chance to have a formal meeting with the crew. Given the confusion of their arrival, that's probably a good thing.

Word gets out among the crew mates, spreading in a game of whisper down the meat-alley, that an informal crew meeting is what's happening, free from Stacy's prying ears, and sure enough, as soon as everyone's in the room, they're gestured to move in close, and a wall of blue energy goes up around them all.

((ooc note))

More new arrivals but her business was elsewhere, and she figured she would be meeting them soon enough anyway.

The Sensoriums were set to look like Central Park as a pleasant spring day. Gentle breeze blowing while Kate lined up her shots toward the targets 50 feet away. It was very nice and pretty. A nice contrast from the ugliness of late. She had been feeling so mixed lately. Between being angry at Paco, nervous about Brenda's arrival, and then that whole last moment as the Yeerk died, it's been a very confusing time mentally and emotionally. She took her shots.

Still off. She went to go fetch her arrows, but then paused before find a place near a tree to slump down. She drew her knees up to her chin, and set her bow on the ground by her. She then lowered her head face down, and drew in slow shuddering breaths. She wasn't crying at the moment, but only because she wasn't sure how to feel at the moment.

Shawn? was screaming his head off. Though those screams were in fact coming from the Yeerk. Shawn's general approach to life had managed to deflect every attempt to use his memories against him, and he was currently doing everything in his power to annoy the Yeerk.

"...I've got a lovely bunch of coconuts, here they are a-standing in a row...Big ones, small ones, some as big as your head, just give 'em a twist, a flick of the wrist, that's what the showman said..."

There are three major things happening. One of them is that the crew is sweeping through the ship, scanning whoever they find, and shipping the restrained Controllers back to the MedBay with some crew members.

Another is Paco--or his Yeerk, at least--is leading Scorpius, who appears to have betrayed the crew, towards the machine, hidden away in an alcove in the city, attached to one of the fleshy walls near one of Stacy's nerve clusters. It took them quite a while to find it.

The Yeerks do so love collaborators.

The last thing happening is the Doctor, Master, and Bumblebee, with the last one carrying an unconscious West, are hunting for that same machine and closing in.

With all these thing happening at once, the shit is, as they say, about to hit the fan.

Ax had escaped the Controllers on board. Brainy had not been so lucky. Neither had Sam and Tim. And who knew how many others on board had Yeerks wrapped around their brains, controlling their every movement, pretending that everything was normal until the time came to strike.

Who do you trust, podlings?