Why now?

[cityship]

It was the worst possible time for it. The crew was about to be embroiled in a battle for their lives. Half of them were infested with alien parasites and restrained in MedBay.

||Pod Release Protocols Initating,|| Stacy's familiar voice sounded out to all the podmates.

In the Pod Caverns, there were the sounds of: Pop. Pop pop pop.

Comments

[anaturaltalent]

Kaylee was in Serenity's engine room. She is certain of that. She was working on the fuel oxygenator, and the intake valves (all covered in gunk, they were, needed cleaning before they got plugged, made 'em fall out of the sky), and she got a bit tired, so she curled up in her hammock.

And now she's fallen, and her first instinct is to scramble for her feet to find out why Serenity's jostlin' like that... and she slips and falls again. Not Serenity's engine room. She's covered in something sticky and goo-like...

And she's naked. Shiny. She pulls her knees up to her chest to cover up for modesty's sake, at least for now, and wipes the goo out of her eyes, and starts trying to get the worst of it out of her hair.

Questions can come after she's a little less... drippy.

[cityship]

||Rrrt. Sppplt. help--can't||

It's a voice. In her head. Almost mechanical.

||Trapped. Rt--damage--||

[anaturaltalent]

Kaylee's head snaps up, and she looks around, obviously confused. "Hello?" she tries, uncertain. "Are... are you hurt? Where are you?"

She's not used to hearing voices in her head. Not like this, anyway. It's confusing. "Um... can you tell me where we are?"

[cityship]

Suddenly a hologram appears in front of her, projected on the wall.

The woman projected there is absolutely radiant, and practically projects something calm and maternal.

||I'm--I'm free. The device must've forced a platform reboot.||

She winces as the hologram flickers.

||But it won't last for long.||

[withteethbared]

An animal slides loose from the pod, saturated with slime and rapidly regaining consciousness. A pair of yellow eyes snap open, a soft growl rising in the throat with waking confusion.

The smell is wrong. That's what jolts the wolf awake fully. Bella jumps to her feet, growling and dripping with something she can't identify in a place that is unknown to her, and instantaneously mad as all hell about it. She shakes herself, which doesn't too much about the ooze but helps the sudden adrenaline and spike of Garou Rage in waking her up.

"WHERE AM I?!" she snarls, ears flat to her skull and pelt about as bristled as it can get while it's slicked down with pod goo.

[helipack_jack]

"EEAAAAHHHHHGGGG!!!" Jack screams. Girlishly. He's naked, scared, and covered in slime. Altogether not a good combination. Even worse, he doesn't have his helipack or any Shen Gong Wu on him.

This is going to be a very long day.

[walking_fact]

Jack wakes up. That in itself is weird enough -- sleep isn't something that happens to him without warning, these days. The fact that he's naked, on the floor, covered in goo, and inside a room that seems strangely alive...

"You know," he says conversationally, "I've had dates that ended like this, but they're usually the sort of thing I remember." His tone seems genial enough, but there's a snarl buried just under the surface. He'd been in the Hub, and the fact that he's suddenly here means one hell of a security breach.

Someone has a great deal to answer for.

[cityship]

"Such a statement, naturally, makes me somewhat curious and yet completely repulsed at the same time," says a hologram that flickers to life before him.

[thehollycopter]

From the pod next to Jack slid what looked like a child. Except she had pointy ears. She quickly awoke, and a stream of curses from just about every human language - and some not human - flew from her lips.

She looked around, assessing her situation. And then she spotted the naked man and the hologram.

"Okay, someone's got some explaining to do."

[walking_fact]

Jack shrugs. "Yeah, I tend to run into that a lot. You'd be amazed at how open-minded humanity can get, given a few thousand years to get over our hangups... But in the meantime, people miss out on way too much fun." He flashes the hologram a completely unapologetic (and slightly flirtatious) grin, and then looks over abruptly as someone slides out of the pod next to him.

"Don't look at me," he tells her. "I just got here." Never mind that these look like stasis pods -- he's not going to get into experiential time vs. chronological. "Captain Jack Harkness. And you are?" His gaze flickers from the person next to him (nonhuman, obviously, and not a species he's familiar with) to the hologram.

[mysyringe]

Among the pods cracking open is Rika. She wakes slowly, eyes slipping open to find herself thoroughly encased in slime. Her long dark blue hair is even matted down with it and stuck to her bare back.

She stands, holding her hands out in front of her as her lips twist into a frown. For now, the typical Rika mask she wears has rapidly slid out of place. "What is this.."

[cityship]

"Stasis fluid," says the hologram that flickers to life before her. "Unpleasant, I know."

[mysyringe]

The girl nodes in mute agreement to this, fanning her fingers around with the sticky slurp of the fluid clinging to her.

She looks down to her body, just now noting her nudity. She looks up to the hologram with a hard look, "What's going on."

[cityship]

"You've been abducted to a sentient spaceship that's been capturing various sentients and sentient AIs from different alternate universes."