ataraxionlogs | thirty-fifth jump;

Entry tags:

thirty-fifth jump;

CHARACTERS: Any and all.
LOCATION: Gravity Couches and beyond.
WARNINGS: Maybe some swearing, or even some violence, and more than likely some implied (and possibly explicit) nakedness.
SUMMARY: Another month, another jump, another round of new faces.
NOTES: You wake feeling cold and alone. There is a strange sense of emptiness, and the jump holds no surprises for you. There is nothing buffering the jump sickness and disorientation for you this month, and those still suffering the lingering effects of August's plot may find it more difficult than usual to get through the post-jump routine.

New arrivals will find messages spraypainted across their lockers telling them not to follow their tattoo numbers, and instead to find a room on Floors 001-010.

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You wake up in darkness.

There's a breathing tube jammed down your trachea, and you're suspended in a tube of clear blue fluid. Upon registering your level of consciousness, the gravity couch drains the fluid surrounding you and retracts the breathing apparatus; the doors in front of you open, and you're deposited on the floor of a stark, sterile medical bay.

You are not alone.
There are others who have come before you, others who are awakening beside you. Some may be familiar to you, perhaps even friends. Others have much less amiable plans. Some are merely alien and inexplicable, but there are always those who might mean you harm.

After you catch your breath and your vision returns, you notice a number on the inside of your forearm. Maybe it's a familiar number. Maybe it means something. Maybe it's just a number. But the number—completely unique to you—is a tattoo, and it does not come off.

If you enter the room adjacent to the medbay, you will find a small locker with your number on it, surrounded by rows upon rows of identical lockers. Inside, you will find a few of your personal items, a communications device, and a ship's uniform in your exact size. The comms device is fully powered and connects directly to the ship's network; it's your only means of communication beyond physical conversation. Upon turning the device on, a neutral, automated voice will say, "Please take the blue lift to the passenger quarters." Any other attempts at communicating with the rest of the network are met only with static.

This is your welcome party.

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Even with so many people moving sickly and slowly, Simon is one of the last to filter through to the locker room: he was slow to reach consciousness, slow to emerge from the disorienting haze, and then slow to move from the space in front of his pod, peering at the numbers on his arm. Waiting for someone to come tell him what to do, maybe, if only so he could refuse to do it. But nobody came to collect him.

Nobody seems to be in charge at all.

When nearly everyone else has gone he picks himself up and follows a few other stragglers through the showers. He's thorough: there's pod fluid in his hair, his ears, the nooks of the surgical staples and the crannies of the open wound on his back. He can't feel well enough to know for sure when he's gone, so he washes twice, fingers scrubbing over the exposed nubs of his spine as easily as his skin.

At his locker he takes his time rifling through his belongings—neurotriptyline weighed in his hand, injector inspected, photograph tucked into the pages of the Bible for safer keeping, the comms device switched on long enough for it to give its instructions—before he trades his towel for underwear. The jumpsuit he holds out in front of himself for a moment with a critical eye, then drops on the ground. He'll leave it there, probably.

He puts on the trousers he recognizes, instead, and turns his back on his locker to button his shirt, with his tie hung around his shoulders and jacket over one arm, and watches anyone who passes by for as long as they're in his line of sight—not with a scowl or any overt suspicion, but he could probably stand to blink more often.

Edited 2014-09-10 07:00 (UTC)

Lily is usually one of the last stragglers as late, lingering and searching. It's become habit and she probably shouldn't, but she does it anyway—it's how she's still around when Simon is, hair finally some semblance of dry.

She doesn't see him until he's dressed, or she'd probably be more concerned; this isn't to say she doesn't notice the off aspect of him at all but that open wounds would ping her harder than the rest. It's his stillness that begs her attention when she pauses on her way out, long enough to call out to him, straight-backed and unworried but asking after him anyway.

"All right?" There's a pause and then, "first time here?"

Edited (put where your character is traci, jeez) 2014-09-10 07:10 (UTC)

He almost doesn't answer. The friendly ones are worse than the people who don't pretend. But after everything else—the jumble of voices and faces even stranger than his, the fog of his own memories, the lack of windows and distant hum of machinery—the question's grounding. Her accent, maybe. Maybe he isn't so far from Roarton as he thought. He's lost time and come to in unfamiliar places before.

But not this place, no.

So Simon only stares at her for a second or two too long before he nods once, sharply, finishing the last button on his shirt and sliding his tie under the fold of the collar with both hands.

"What's the date?"

Part of her might be offended if she knew he thought she was pretending, but the rest of her would probably understand. Well, try to understand. While she isn't as painfully kind as she appears, she does try.

If she's unsettled by his stare it doesn't show outwardly—she shrugs finally, not helplessly but because she really doesn't know. "I don't know. It's the 35th jump but time is a bit unreliable here." That's an understatement. "Have you talked to anyone else yet? Has anyone explained where we are?"

His eyes narrow at time is a bit unreliable and stay that way, but it's confusion, at least, and not hostility. Not more hostility.

"No," he says.

He's made assumptions, ranging from mostly to entirely incorrect: that he's in an underground bunker (again), that someone's conducting experiments (again), that he must have missed his dose or—something. Something must have gone wrong. He can't remember.

He looks at his wrist, where his tattoo is barely peeking out of his loose cuff.

"Was there another Rising?"

Lily shakes her head. She isn't sure what that means but she can guess easily enough from the looks of him, and she knows it isn't that.

"This is the Tranquility." She pauses, letting the irony settle in, "in space. Jumps are approximately a month long, and each jump some people leave and new ones arrive. We've all been pulled from our homes, and no one's sure why."

A beat.

"I know it sounds ridiculous, but it's what we've got to work with."

Johanna is bleeding, as she leaves her locker--but she's only bleeding a little. The wounds are more like the result of emergency surgery, two quick slices with her knife, her teeth set together against the pain--but now her shoulders are clear of the two nubs that had been regrowing there, right on the places where collarbone meets shoulderbones. Now that she's dressed, the only evidence of her handiwork is in the twin patches of blood on the shoulders of her jumpsuit. They'd told her the lumps would fall off on their own, but they hadn't, and Johanna's not one for patience or for trusting in cures administered by a bunch of clueless strangers.

The lingering pain of the cuts pisses her off. The lumps were small, more like nubs of tissue, barely the size of her thumb--but they'd regrown themselves after she'd cut them off the first time. Would they regrow again? Absently, as she walks, Johanna presses her right hand against the left wound, as if checking for a new growth.

And there's someone watching her. She feels the force of a gaze, and she looks around, her expression sharpening with furious immediacy. You don't come out from the Arena oblivious to things like someone watching you. That's an instinct that sticks around.

It doesn't take much to find the source of the look. And all of Simon's straightforward freakishness isn't enough to rattle Johanna at all. She's seen the Capitol fashions, people going around with willing mutilations, all in the name of style. Greyish skin, white eyes, that's nothing. It's that steady gaze that really gets under her skin, and she stops walking, abruptly, to stare right back.

"What."

What is that he's been captured or kidnapped—again—and if he's the only one of his kind here, he isn't the only freak. He's been watching. Missing appendages, twisted limbs, translucent skin. Everyone tagged with numbers like wild animals under observation. At least the first time he woke up in a bunker and found himself a part of someone's mad science experiment, they called him by his name.

—anyway, he assumes it's a rhetorical question. He doesn't answer and doesn't look away, but he does look her over, a swift up-and-down that only catches for a moment on the damp crimson-black patches on her shoulders. He's tucking in his shirt, now. He raises his eyebrows.

"Who's in charge here?" he asks.

Refusing to avert his eyes was making a statement, at home. It meant something. He's yet to sort out that no one here cares, or that the aggression simmering under his impassively curious head tilt might be misdirected.

"Not you."

No, but those eyes are creepy, and Johanna has seen the everyday creepy. Capitol fashions are sometimes gauche and regularly disgusting, all in the name of weird and tasteless beauty. Body modification, it's so much whatever, temporary or permanent--and even the permanent isn't so permanent. A quick surgery and you're back on your feet.

And still, those eyes are fucking creepy. Or maybe it's more that Johanna does not like being studied, or weighed, or measured. Her teeth go a little more on edge; her fingers wrap around nothing, a flex and a release.

"You're right," she drawls, so slowly it hardly betrays the anger fizzling beneath the surface. "Not me. Because I'd never let anyone try and make me responsible for the brainless bunch of idiots this place collects. Present company included--gosh, I'm just so glad we've found one more."

That's you, paleface. And in case there was any possible warmth misinterpreted in her tone, Johanna adds, baldly: "Did you get all that--" And she points, draws a circle around Simon's face-- "as a gift from the ship, or do you always look that way? The odds are fifty-fifty shot these days, for stuff like that."

Edited (tags late and edits more, human garbage rper ) 2014-09-25 20:23 (UTC)

Simon's expression is slow to change, save a brief moment when his eyebrows pinch inwards at brainless. There's a joke to be made there—but by someone else, someone who isn't busy trying to mask confusion and fear and resentment of anyone with a pulse behind, or else to someone else. By the time she's finished, he's glaring.

"It's a gift from God."

Chin up, defiant. He should ask what she means by ship, probably, or any number of other clarifying questions, but his jaw is set and his hands are jerking at both ends of his tie, straightening it out, pulling it against the open wound on the back of his neck with a roughness that can't really hurt him.

She laughs, outright, both at the response itself and at the very real sincerity behind it. God and Panem, they don't go together--but she gets the sentiment well enough.

"Yeah. Well, I hope God gave you a receipt," she says, and her sneer keeps a touch of her amusement to it, pleased with her own cleverness, "because that's a gift you need to return. You look like shit."

And she is so pleased to be the one to tell him that.

"Who fed you that line, and why did you believe them?"

The Prophet fed it to him, obviously. Even if she's an American, she should know that, so he doesn't grace the first half with an answer. The second half--

"Who else could raise the dead?"

He might have been better not saying anything at all. On a better and less confusing day he might only have stared. But Simon is off balance already, and her sneer slides right through the cracks in his indifference. His first attempt at knotting his tie ends in a tangle that he jerks loose with a downward swipe of his wrist.

"Really. If you know, I have some questions for them." He averts his eyes, finally, but only to look down at his fingers and try to make the second attempt more successful. "If you don't--"

God.

Graceful as the next nauseated passenger down the hall, Helena stumps toward the man on a beeline. Her hair is still plastered in inconsistently-colored squiggles down her big coat, her roots growing out in small but distinct fractions of inches, but being poorly dried after her shower doesn't seem to bother her much. He does merit a brief look as she approaches, but her attention pretty soon drops to the jumpsuit he left on the floor.

She drops down to pick it up. Hold it out from herself. It's considerably too long and broad for her skinny little frame, but apparently warrants a fair duration of study. Her critique is absorbing enough she probably would have ignored him from this point forward entirely, except that a glance across the front of the garment gets her a peripheral glimpse of the Bible. She pauses, folding the coarse black fabric up in her hands.

"You're a man of God."

Watching her his eyes narrow, his head has tilts—blank-faced aggression softened by bemusement that he needs a moment to shake off, when she speaks, before he looks back at his belongings and realizes what she means.

"I try."

It's the sort of polite religious humility that doesn't mean anything genuinely humble, once it's overlaid on the confidence of redemption. He's flawed, God is forgiving, trying is enough.

"You can have that if you like." The jumpsuit. For what purpose, he has no idea—she'd drown in it—but he doesn't care. He finishes the last two buttons on his shirt, then takes both black boots out of his locker by their toplines and drops them on the changing bench behind him, from a high enough distance to get a disdainfully careless thunk but a low enough one that they stay neatly upright. "And those."

"Do you have food?" is a reasonable question she thinks. She drops herself on the bench, twisting the heavy black fabric of his jumpsuit until it compacts down small enough to fit in her lap. She puts one arm into the nearest boot then, as one would initiate work with a hand puppet, a bulge showing in the crook of the foot where she folds her wrist to bunch her hands into the compartment that would typically house a man's heel. She lifts the boot then, turning it over to look at the sole.

There is some pretty good rubber. Why not. It's not as good as food, is all, and to that effect she raises her eyes again, blinking blearily at him. Is it just her or is there something funny going on with the texture of the nape of his neck. She doesn't narrow her eyes, her stare merely blank in their steadfast and expectant regard.

"I don't eat."

There's sharpness there, out of reflex—he doesn't pretend, he won't play make-believe to set anyone at ease—but it doesn't last, without any guile or judgment he can say he was rising to meet. She's possibly as strange as he is. And even without understanding where he is at all, thinking he's still in his own world and caught in someone new's experiment, he'd believe she doesn't know what he is or why it matters.

He's quiet for a few second, slipping his tie through his fingers to smooth out the places where it's twisted on itself. When he talks again he's a little more gentle, and what isn't gentle isn't meant for her. "Do they not feed you?"

The last time someone asked her this question, Helena had more or less ignored it. Circumstances are different, however. Minimal coercion was required to achieve these gifts of material substance, and even though he clearly valued none of it.

Also, she's hurtling through the void at an inconceivable pace within the belly of an alloy Leviathan. "I don't know." They could.

The sleep is long and absolute. Anything could happen during it. She doesn't explain this train of thought. Instead, Helena turns up the corners of her mouth, plastic and mirthless. Rises, straightening. "But I have hungry work ahead of me. I am cut from my other half again and this is a sin punishable by death." She is very factual, very diplomatic about this explanation; punctuates it with a shrug. Reaches her free hand over her own shoulder, touches the nape of her own neck through her stringy hair, by way of illustration. Mirroring the mess of his own long dorsal stripe.

"You know of cutting," she says. Friendly sympathies.

Simon touches the back of his neck. Not the long strip of missing skin; he isn't that flexible. Just the round hole where his thoracic vertebrae begin, and he's looking at her while he does it, trying to make sense of what she's said about halves and sins and death.

He doesn't do the best job of it—because it's confusing, largely, but also because he isn't looking outside the edges of his own frame of reference. He knows of being cut into, and he knows of sins being forgiven. He doesn't know who's brought him here or why. So he thinks he's got it right:

"Who's punishing you?"

He realizes he's towering—looming, maybe—and sits down next to her on the changing bench, with less jerky stiffness than one might expect, if one knew what he was. He leaves his tie untied around his neck.

What an exhausting question. It reminds Helena, all at once, that Sarah is gone; she'd stood for a few long minutes staring at the empty glass where her sister had gone in, watched it drain of residual fluid and then close again with a hollow, slippery sliding sound of wet glass.

It has been a strange day.

Not even more ludicrously large clothes can improve it much, or the familiar tingle of adrenal caution about sitting down within arm's reach of a stranger who has a hundred pounds on her and a history of violence scarred into his body. She lets her eyes drift off him anyway. "I don't know anymore," she says after a long moment. "They shed their mortal bodies and changed their names to numbers. It is problem." Helena forces herself to smile, in a moment, tips her head up, her wet hair stringing against her neck instead of flipping, not really very flirtatious.

Maybe she really truly thinks he understands what she's getting at. "The ship does not have White Pages."

He doesn't understand, but he is trying, twisted sideways to frown at her with a narrow-eyed focus that's the genuine (as opposed to the rhetorically exasperated) equivalent of what in Christ's name are you talking about. Shedding mortal bodies he can get on board with. Numbers and White Pages less so.

In the vast sea of things she's said that he doesn't understand how to make sense of, ship flies under his radar. He opens his mouth and shuts it again, at a loss, and offers her one of his cold, gray hands.

"I'm Simon."

"Helena."

She shakes his hand. The coldness of his flesh is striking, but Helena interprets it differently now than she would have a few months ago. Her fingers close over the heel of his hand, thumb in the gap between his and his index finger, and her grip is tight for that moment and too still, as if testing the reality of his person.

He really is that cold.

Helena eyes refocus on his face; it's hard to notice they'd ever gone out of focus, until she does. A beat. Maybe she takes pity on him. "I hope you find someone you want to see," she offers, releasing his hand. "And that you will know them by their face and name."

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thirty-fifth jump;

simon monroe | showers or lockers or wherever! | open

TOUCHES A ZOMBIE AT THE LOCKERS

mwah

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mashes tags on your face take that

lockers!!!

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oops tags this a whole week late SORRy

how DAAAARE you.............. hahaha ha ha h :(

sadly makes us matching late awards

I will cherish it always, and also sadly

lockerings

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