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.

----------------

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.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

( once the laptop is arranged, and the right files brought up--

The video starts in the midst of a pleasant kind of chaos - the Christmas decorations put up are tasteful, if perhaps a bit more plentiful than is entirely necessary, and the room they begin in is dominated by a tree that reaches higher into its vaulted ceiling than it has any right to do. Three men, roughly of an age and all easily far taller than Ilde, are sat barefoot and drinking underneath it, bickering amiably over the placement of gifts and periodically rearranging them.

"My family," Ilde's voice says, from presumably behind the digital camera, very dry.

"Gentlemen, look sober," Decimus says, immediately, to answering laughter.

It's not easy to put a finger on just why Emery and Ilde so obviously favour one another; she arguably looks a bit more like her mother, absent from proceedings. Still-- there's no question which of these men is her father. "Collecting blackmail material, princess?"

"Looking for the twins," she says, "and starting a book on whether you or Uncle Dess is going to try and climb the tree first. It's very tight odds."

"You're prejudicing the outcome," he informs her, batting the camera out of the way and leaning past it; unseen, he kisses her cheek. "What an awful child you are. Where are your awful children?"

"Following Guilfoyle wherever he goes, at the moment. He's as solemn as a Buckingham guard, Guy's convinced he's up to something."

"He probably is," Emery says, complacently. "I'll tell the boy he shouldn't worry. He'd never assassinate anyone we like." Then, leaning in to fill the camera screen with a close-up of his unfairly charming countenance, "Merry Christmas!" very brightly.

"My awful father," Ilde says, as if she's filming a nature documentary of the drunk upper-class in the wild.

It cuts from there to one of the parlors, where Ilde has eventually located her children using a sleeping (possibly hungover, it's Christmas and he is her brother) Marcus Rothschild as the boundary line in a complex game that appears to involve trying to get past him to beat the other one without waking him up. Ilde allows this to continue for some time without interruption, until very mildly, in a pretty good impression of Decima Rothschild, "Marcus."

He jerks awake just as Guy moves--

--and the children roll away shrieking with laughter as their uncle rolls forward, clutching his balls.

"Oh, shit--" but Ilde is laughing, too, even as the camera gets set down on the mantel piece. Yvonne picks it up and stares into it - she's a pretty child, intelligent eyes and a solemn expression, and she says, "You all saw, Mum did it." )

( elizabeth is fascinated by the recording, watching it in rapt silence while noting privately that ilde's father reminds her a little of her own somehow. she can't quite put her finger on just how, but it warms her, and she is smiling for a time at his interaction with her friend upon the screen before the scenery shifts, and—all right. elizabeth has needed this laugh, and it is bright and loud, as she watches marcus clutch at himself in the background while yvonne uses a quiet sort of humour to render it all the more amusing.

all in all, they are a beautiful if highly unusual family. and part of her wishes she might meet them. she turns to ilde then, her look much calmer than before, though still solemn. )

Is that how Yuletide is celebrated in the future? I find the concept of having a tree within one's home rather interesting.

( instead of the log to burn in the fire. she sighs, leaning her chin upon her elbow and voices what she'd been thinking earlier. )

Somehow, your father reminds me of mine a little.

( ilde is grinning in spite of herself, by the end. jesus, marcus. )

We always used to have it at home - there, I mean, Daddy's estate, just the entire extended family descending on Tuscany for the better part of December. I think there were maybe... two? years we didn't do it that way.

( but she's talking in the past tense as if she's used to it being so; whatever the cause, that stopped being the case long before she arrived on the tranquility. )

His own winter court over which to preside. I think he'd burst if you told him he reminded you of an anointed King of England. ( ilde has no particular feelings about england, besides not really caring for london - emery is another story. ) --Guilfoyle's his valet, too, hang on, this is fantastic...

( a picture, not a video. felix guilfoyle, a tall, gaunt man, stately and reserved and dressed neatly in black and grey, hands clasped behind his back, overseeing the christmas arrangements. nearby him, prowling as if about to pounce, yvonne and guy, the latter just behind the former, the both of them kittenish and determined.

second picture: guilfoyle holding two small terrors off the ground by their collars, one to a hand, otherwise undisturbed. )

Does your family have a Lord of Misrule, or a Fool to entertain the children? ( aside from marcus, apparently! she smiles a little. )

He seems a kind man from what I have been shown. And my father was always thus with us. Very informal! He would tease me, and I would tease back in jest.

I should very much like to meet your father, if I was able.

( oh no, the rest is too funny. elizabeth smothers a laugh and clasps a hand over her mouth, her eyes dancing a bit. )

Well done! He has apprehended the little scamps.

( her tone is affectionate though, as clearly this, too reminds her of her own family. )

( with an amused shake of her head -- ) Those have mostly fallen out of style. We usually plant them in front of the home theatre and put on whichever Christmas movies have actually been acquired this year. It was all terrible action-films that happened to take place on Christmas one year.

( whatever, ilde, die hard is the actual best christmas movie ever. )

--my father's a very sweet man, for all his faults, but he would probably flirt with you.

Christmas movies and action films? Pray, what are those? ( she can feel her mouth curve upward a little. ) A tree in one's home. How strange. But it does look lovely, by the same token.

( elizabeth has never seen a movie! but she would be hooked on them if she could. )

He.. ah. ( if ilde can't see her surprised flush, then that's great. because her father must surely be, well. old. ) Well, then he would surely remind me of my father.

( emery was on the young side when ilde was born - young enough that he routinely dated women closer to her age than his when she was in her teens and twenties and it didn't seem that odd, at least comparatively...but he's got older and his girlfriends have, largely, not. granted, at this point, he and his daughter look roughly ten years apart, and that cheerful indifference to the aging process plays greatly into how much he can still get away with.

fairies, man. )

He's a very intelligent, accomplished man. He just makes it very difficult to remember that.

( very, very difficult. )

Anyway. They're - you've seen videos. A film is a video of a story.

( she smiles quietly, thinking of her own father. he himself had always had a great love of learning and the written word. it is why she and her sisters have been given the same quality of education as their brother richard. edward, as prince of wales, obviously differs in that case. but not by much. she'd learned governance and to perfect her latin whilst she sat upon his knee during their progress each year as a girl. though he was a born warrior, few knew just how intelligent he was. and often, both were (perhaps not unjustly) overshadowed by his love of the ladies.

and theirs for him. he could have charmed the skirt off of any woman, young or old. still, it seems to be what he is best known for. )

I believe my mother would say the same of my father. Though, with me, somehow it was never difficult to see how intelligent and kind he was.

( so perhaps their fathers differ some, after all. )

Like a play! I see. ( she tries to sound perhaps more enthused than she is at this moment. but she does try. ) I understand a little.

( ilde laughs, quiet-- ) I'm not saying it because I'm annoyed with him or-- I mean he's just happy to do as he pleases and couldn't give a damn what people end up thinking of him as a result. You see enough tabloid photographs of a man falling out of a bar with someone else's wife after getting into a brawl with the husband and it becomes difficult, if you don't know him personally, to reconcile that with his charity work and his career.

My mother was much more succinct on the topic: his greatest accomplishment, bar myself, was shutting up and looking pretty and he wasn't very good at the former. Fair play to her, he can't keep an opinion to himself for the life of him.

( ilde, both her father's daughter by temperament and by emery's doting attention, had a difficult and complex relationship with annegret sauvageon-- the fondness in her tone is real enough, but lacks intimacy, as if she were discussing an acquaintance she liked well enough but knew only passingly. )

My stepmother - sort of, they annulled it - actually had a film career, though. They met when she was on location in Italy, and she stayed with us instead of at a hotel - he gave me her engagement ring when they separated, I used to wear it to all of her premieres. ( --whereas hasibe is spoken of with immediate pride. )

Edited 2014-09-22 23:53 (UTC)

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

thirty-fifth jump;

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject

no subject