Jaime Reyes voice sounds over the comm-rings--all of them--and it sounds very urgent.

« Everyone on the ship, listen up! This is Jaime Reyes, your local 'Blowing this pop stand' coordinator and escape facilitation engineer. I need everyone on the ship to come to the City, in front of the Precinct, immediately. Grab people who don't have their comm rings with them--and tell them to grab their comm rings, people who are sleeping, whoever you find, and try to make sure everyone on the ship knows to come. This is very important. This is "getting the heck out of here" important. »

When they arrive, they arrive to find the Command Staff waiting, and a tiny, tiny young man standing on stone ledge from a fountain, waiting for them.

Here goes nothing.

Sitting on one of the rooftops, looking out over the city, was none other than Jason Todd. Clad in his plant suit, leather jacket, and red domino mask. His gun was stashed in his coat pocket and his knife, well his knife was hidden. He didn't exactly know what to do in this place. He could go and locate Tim and mess with him some more, but that would get old fast. He didn't want to grow tired of messing with the kid.

He could get out and be social, but that went against everything he was. He didn't go out and make friends. There was no point, and no one here seemed to be of any interest to him anyways. Plus if one of them pissed him off and he was forced too... The tentacles from his first day here sprang to mind and he shivered. He hated tentacles. So getting pissed and beating anyone up was out of the question. At least in a place where the bitch would see him.

He growls a bit and kicked a piece of stone off of the rooftop and watched it fall to the ground. This was stupid. Why the hell would this ship bring him here, if he couldn't do anything? He'd rather be fucking dead! Well.. not dead. But at least back home he could have had a chance of..

He shook his head. He wasn't going to think about home right now. Too much had happened, he wanted to forget it all. The plan to take back Gotham as the Batman had failed, badly. It was time to move on. Make a new plan. He just had to figure out what the hell that plan was going to be, then how he was going to go about it.

It was going to be a long night... day... whatever.

Today, the sensoriums are decked out like a baseball field, enshrouded in conifers. A storm rumbles overhead and while there may not be any vampires hanging around, Supermassive Black Hole could quite possibly be playing in the background. And Peter Parker, decked out in a Meatship Mets jersey, could quite possibly be dancing his way up to the plate.

"... and now Parker steps up to bat," he commentates peppily to himself, "It's been a tough start to the season for the young Forest Hills leadoff. The coaches are attributing his bad form to an unfortunate case of abduction but at only twenty one, he's certainly got pluck."

From the mound a pitching machine groans into life and spits out its first ball. There's a resounding crack as he drives the ball squarely down centerfield, his spider-strength powering the ball way off into the trees.

"We caught up with Parker after the game for a few words on his magnificent opening punt post-game." he continues, "'Well, what can I say Kent? After the last few misfires we decided to keep play simple this time around. I just play to my strengths, Kent. I've got a good arm and as my uncle taught me, with great power comes great responsibility...'"

So, anyone up for a game of metabaseball? Somebody has to shut him up.

Paco is right. Then again, Paco is right far more often than a lot of people give him credit for. He really needs to talk to Mia and--and explain things. Not that his explanation is any good, in his opinion, but he'd started off flirting with her, and kinda dropped off the map, and not said a word to her and it's really unfair because she's a nice girl.

As it stands, Jaime is searching the ship for a certain blond-haired archer (the crimefighting one, not the gold medalist, although he doesn't know that the gold medalist WAS a crimefighter).

"Just my luck, she'll ambush me naked again," he mutters to himself.

A pause.

"That would be kinda good luck, I guess."

Another pause, as he facepalms.

"I need to stop having these kinda thoughts..."

[tiny!ooc: If you have someone that needs to talk to Jaime, for plot purposes, lemme know. I can do other convos, but I really need to do it one at a time, atm, due to foggy-headedness, so I'd want to do them consecutively, and just let each person know when I'm ready for a new one.]

    Cassie hasn’t gone swimming (voluntarily) for a while.

    The Sensoriums have given her some coast of Themyscira, from when it was an island and not a floating world. It’s familiar; many trips and visits have ingrained the place in Cassie’s mind.

    She spends a bit out in the water, seeing how deep she can get before she has to turn back up to the surface for air, kicking around on her own. She ducks under, opens her eyes and watches little fish go around. It’s relaxing.

    But it doesn’t take long to get tired. When treading water has her muscles and back sore, she surfaces for the last time and bobs there for a second, brushing her hair out of her face when it covers her eyes. She should go in, she realizes. She’s been out here far too long as it is.

    The beach is a long way off and she doesn’t really feel like swimming back.

    “Hey,” she says, aloud. It feels ridiculous to be talking out loud when no one’s around for miles. “How about that underground spring?”

    Everything shifts. The sunny skies are gone, replaced by a rocky ceiling, and the water is colder. It’s mostly silent without the tides, other than the drip of water somewhere, echoing off the walls.

    Her feet can touch the bottom as the ground changes, and she gives her arms a break by standing, waiting for her eyes to adjust. When they do, she grabs the rocky edge of the pool and hoists herself up.

    Sort of, anyway. It’s a bit of high ledge, she’s not exactly tall, and she’s getting tired. After a second of hanging off the edge, she sucks it up and tries again.

    Heave ho, up she goes.

    “Jeez,” she breathes, “don’t overdo it, Cassie, you're only human.”

This was overdue, and maybe still avoiding the issue yet, but Mia told herself she was entitled to go about this a little subtly at first. She'd managed to corner Paco and ask him for some private talk in the Sensorium. She'd set it up like a small living room with some comfy chairs.

As they entered, she plopped herself down on a recliner and stretched out, looking at the ceiling, before looking at him. "So... care to guess what I wanted to talk about?"

Tock, tock, tock, thud.

Danny stood in front of the wooden dummy, striking its arms with his own arms. Scarred, calloused, and hardened. He and the dummy were in a recreation of his work out room. The fake morning sun shined through the large windows, and outside was the New York City skyline.

Tock, thud, thud, tock-tock-thud.

Danny was going through one of the many Wing Chun sets he had learned, at a fairly quick speed. He did his best to keep his mind clear of thoughts, to keep himself in a state of focus without distraction.

Thud, tock, thud, tock, thud, thud, tock.

This is what it took to achieve great skill. To flow naturally with the universe and let each movement happen without force. Danny did not strike the dummy; his arms struck all by themselves.

( Tock, thud, thud, tock...tock...thud... )

After being released from stasis, having the slime removed from their bodies and clothed in the creepy, pulsing leaf-suit that everyone wore, and being taken to the Weapons & Possessions lockers to collect their belongings, the new arrivals would find themselves standing in the Observation Deck. Round windows lined the fleshy walls, revealing the bright display of lights that was inter-dimensional travel. They would also discover that there were people--members of the command staff and crew that had woken earlier--waiting for them.

Mia hummed to herself as she nocked up another arrow, sighting the target fifty yards away. Not a massive distance, but she wasn't shooting for that today. Right now she was more concerned with the three arrows stuck end to end, snaking out from the bullseye.  That was her record, before she ended up splitting one too far and they fell apart. Well, records were meant to be broken, weren't they?

She pulled back on the bow, letting everything around her disappear, including the extra sets of archery gear she'd had the sensorium whip up in case anyone wanted to join her.

At least Kate's certainly wasn't. The Yeerk would be sullen, and occasionally yell to be let go from confines in the Medbay. After a day, Kate was joining in the Yeerk's cries, but for entirely different reasons as the Yeerk took delight in finding her hidden weaknesses. And dark secrets.

"Let me go! Stop it!"

Sometimes she would mention Eli's name, sometimes Paco's as she struggled, wavering in and out of consciousness. Occasionally there would be screams.

When they blast down the door to the Medical Wing--and they'll have to, to get in--the group of newly podpopped crew-mates will bear witness to an interesting sight. Several individuals are strapped to med-beds, restrained by insect-looking legs pinning them down. One of those individuals has a cape and domino mask that may be familiar to one of the new crew-members--even if he's older than that crew member last remembers. Medical scans and monitors blip away. There are test tubes and other medical equipment around, including a flask with some sort of nasty gray slug curled at the bottom.

A few individuals are standing around, standing guard, including a girl with a bow and arrows. In the back of the Medical Wing is a woman with a scared-looking little girl.

Sitting on a stool, leaning over a shaggy-haired young man (who appears to have suffered a horrible head wound), is that green-skinned, blonde-haired individual shown by the AIs earlier. Some freaky looking goggles are over his eyes, and a strange and sinister-looking surgical glove, attached to an apparatus on the ceiling and full of rotating micro-lasers and mini-scalpels among other things, is on his hand.

It is, unfortunately, not an image that lends itself to easy interpretation.

Cybil is currently talking with Jaime Reyes about the possibility of hacking the ship's systems. Just a normal day on the meatship, a normal conversation in one of the cold zones, where there are no working sensors, about getting the hell OFF the ship, or turning the big bitch around.

"Do you think we could have our resident tech nerds build something to bridge the gap from technological to the more organic parts of her systems?"

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?

The rescue team stopped just inside the doors of the Vatican for a quick last-second pow-wow, and to make sure that everyone knew their jobs and places on this team. A note was also made that if anyone was going to be f*$%#ing stupid, they should let everyone else know so they could be tied up and left behind as bug-bait. This was not the time to be pulling shit, not with over a half-dozen people captured and (hopefully just) one dead.

The general plan was that they'd all follow Jaime, since his scarab could track down Paco and Robin, and hope like hell the others were with them and that they didn't run into too many bugs on the way. There was wiggle room in the plan for as much running and screaming and shooting as necessary, but the end result was dead bugs and rescued crew members so they could all go back to trying to figure out how to get home.

Last chance to stay behind and fight the good fight in an enclosed space.

It took some running and some fighting, but they made it to the Vatican without losing anyone, or even any limbs. The Vatican itself seemed deserted, although it was unlikely that they'd take that at face value at this point. Roaches were good at getting in where they weren't wanted, why should seven-foot ones be any different?

At least it would stall them, let everyone catch their breath and recover. Regroup, take a headcount. Come up with a plan.

Because they really, really needed one.

It was time to get a little more organized, share some information with each other. She had a talk with that bigface kid, Jaime, to see if he could do anything to shield them from Stacy's prying eyes and he said he had a few ideas, so a meeting place was chosen, and it was time to gather.

Cybil had a good authoritative, shouting voice.

"Everyone, listen up! We're meeting down in the city near that big tree. Grab whoever you see and get down there."

Indeed they were. People were starting to gather there.

[ooc: Instead of little subthreads, everyone post in one thread as people arrive. Try to keep the convo general, like everyone talking to each other, instead of devolving into private conversations.]

He was kind of...in a tizzy, was a good expression for it. Not entirely unapproachable by anyone else, but something seemed to be on Jaime Reyes' mind as he stalked the halls, looking for a specific someone, before it was too late.

He only hoped he could convince her to not say anything and potentially mess up time and doom their world, but the problem was that she actually knew Superboy better than he did, had been a Titan before it all went to hell, and might not be willing to DO that...

"Thank you, Stacy. Thank you so much for your stupid time travel..."

Following the glowy zits had lead Mia to the item lockers, just as Voice In Head had told her. She was happy to find her bow, arrows, and short sword all just as she needed them. Her costume was elsewhere, but that could wait. If she was going to be stalking around an alien vessel, she was going to be armed, no matter how nice the Voice In Head had been so far.

Quiver on her back, bow at her side, and sheathed sword belted to her hip, she was off down another row of lights, deeming it now time for clothes.

After the most recent pod-pop had been completed, Stacy began encouraging the crew towards the Obs Deck. They would be most effective if they were familiar with each other, and as the Jaime Reyes Incident had proved, leaving them to meet whenever they happened to cross paths was not effective.

Anyone who stepped into the Hub would be transported to the Obs Deck, no matter where they had intended to go. Those who had been exploring the City were verbally herded towards the Hub, although the energy tentacles did not make an appearance.

||Please report to the Obs Deck for Crew Introductions.||

The Obs Deck hadn't changed very much since they'd last been there. The creepy sculpture was still present, as were the fleshy couches. However, the couches were arranged in a more obvious circle this time.

Come and meet the new -- and in some cases, weirder -- members of your crew.