ataraxionlogs | 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.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Gwen's expression relaxes, even changes to something like amusement.

Agreement and amusement.

"Yeah." She shrugs. "Still here. Feeling better at least, but ... I'm still here. And so are you."

He salutes, lazy. "Yeah."

He hasn't seen Nathan-- it might not mean anything. He might just be feeling lousy after what happened last month, but something about no Nathan and no coffee table just feels a little wrong. If Captain JFK Jawline really is gone, that's...why keep Harry and get rid of somebody who actually gives a shit about this ship and the people on it?

Disquieting thought. Maybe he's just overthinking the mechanics and motivations behind arrivals and disappearances.

"Takes more than terminal illness." ...ha ha ha.

"Right." There's a slight raise of an eyebrow, but otherwise Gwen's expression doesn't change.

"You know, this is the first time we've met. In person, I mean."

And it's in a locker room, on a horror spaceship, of all places.

"It's the first time you've met me in person," he corrects her, leaning against the lockers. "It's not the first time I've met you."

Presumably she already knows about the whole 'time disparity' thing-- if not, Harry is clearly the absolute best person to explain it in detail. Obviously.

She shakes her head, apologetic.

"Ah, yeah. That's right - you're from my future. Well, mine and Peter's future. He did mention that."

It's still kind of ... weird to think about.

"I hope the first time you met me I wasn't a total space-case."

"It was in an elevator," he says, a flicker of something like amusement and something like bitterness in his expression; he hasn't gone into details with Peter about what he remembers gently, intensely implying Gwen should somehow psychically manage to compel Peter to do for him while not even knowing what the fuck he was talking about. He's not about to tell her. He hadn't even told her when he sort of wanted her help.

He's not telling anyone, really. He's certainly not telling anyone what else he's considered doing.

"I mean," affably, "everybody's a little bit spacy in elevators."

"Yeah, that's true. Close, confined spaces ... the dread of inescapable small-talk ... it can make anyone a bit awkward, I guess."

Now that she knows that, though, would that change the way she acts if and when she ever goes home? How exactly does time travel work, really?

"And that's the only time we've ever spoken?"

Evidence points to: no one remembers a lick of this when they go home. Harry's not entirely sure how he feels about that, at the moment, but he's also not sure he'll live long enough for it to matter, so he's comfortable not devoting too much brain power to the conundrum. It's not exactly urgent.

"Yeah, I had a lot of ... CEO stuff. To do."

Harry.

"Oh."

Well, obviously. Gwen shakes her head, a bit flustered, a bit apologetic.

"Of course!"

There's the briefest of pauses.

"Wait. Does that mean your father -"

"Shuffled loose the mortal coil? Yeah."

...Harry.

"We can, uh, bypass the condolences."

No one actually misses Norman Osborn.

"Okay. Yeah, I mean - I'm sorry anyway, but I understand if it's totally something you'd rather not even go into," Gwen says, her words coming out in a bit of a hurry.

She'd never personally met Harry's father before, but she knows the things he'd done, the advancements in science that are attributed to him. Whatever he might have been like, he's still influential in the field - and for that alone, at least, he probably will be missed.

For all he'd, in his own, droll way, railed against the slimy, weasel-words methods the board had employed to cover up and downplay the consequences of Norman Osborn's ruthlessness in the pursuit of his cure-- Harry's in no hurry to point out that he's probably about as valuable to science as Nazism was.

Sure, he got results. You just don't really want to have to think about how many eggs he had to break to make the omelette in question.

Particularly not when Harry can't say in clear conscience he'd never do the same thing.

"The King is dead, long live the King," he drawls, with a lazy gesture like it's whatever. "I had other things on my mind."

Unfortunately, Gwen only gets one side of the story, and because of that story, she's ... well, actually, she's a bit surprised at the callousness in Harry's reaction.

Especially given her own feelings on her father's death.

Which is why it can't be helped when she blurts, frowning, "Things other than losing your own dad?"

So much for bypassing anything.

Harry observes that, for a moment.

Then, and with frankly more genuine sentiment than he'd shown for his own father, he says, "I was sorry to hear about Captain Stacy."

She doesn't know Norman and she doesn't know Harry - while it might be a little rude to bluntly imply that he thinks she's only having a strong reaction to his situation because of hers (and frankly, his attitude to his father's death would likely raise anybody's eyebrow), it's not a difficult conclusion to draw.

Well, he wouldn't entirely be incorrect in his assumption anyway.

Gwen keeps her emotions pretty tightly controlled at the best of times but her father's death really put them to the test. In the end, she's still a teenage girl who has just lost one of her favourite people in the world; it's hard not to slip up every now and then.

"Yeah." Her eyes automatically go back to the notebook in her locker, one corner of a photograph sticking out from the pages. "Thank you, Harry."

thirty-fifth jump;

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