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

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."

thirty-fifth jump;

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