video-

[sweetmotherofgod]

[The feed clicks on and there's a beat or two of Heather just sitting cross-legged on her bed before she starts to speak. The pause isn't nearly as dramatic as some others this jump, though; more like she's decided she needs to say something without quite deciding what it is she wants to say. Sure, by now there must be more people on board who never knew Hotspur than people who did, but he should be more than a cautionary tale about what happens if you don't get into a grav couch in time. He died trying to help everyone out of this mess, and that should be remembered.

When she does speak it's calm enough, although in a way that people who know her well will probably realize takes a little effort.]

Are we going to talk about what we heard before the jump? I know there's a lot to take in right now, but... something takes that much effort to say and it gets said anyway? We ought to be listening.

Comments

[yardbird]

[Hell, Murphy didn't even know Hotspur, but he remembers the screams on the network, and was around to witness that cautionary tale firsthand. Hooray.]

Well, it'd be a lot easier to talk about if I knew what to make of it. Unless you got any ideas in mind...

["Do you believe in ghosts?" springs in his head, but Murphy has a feeling that saying something along those lines would only be in poor taste, especially to Heather. He can't really settle on anything else, though. Other than maybe they have a dead guy on board, or it was just an ominous recording -- or something else completely.

[...This is a weird jump.]

[sweetmotherofgod]

[As it turns out, she does. She believes in this one a little, anyway - thought she saw him way back when she'd been lost in hallways. A hallucination, she'd reasoned. After all, she'd been through something terrifying and then followed it up with sustained lack of sleep, no food, and mild hypothermia. She saw a lot of things that weren't real.

After this, though? Just about the only thing keeping her from genuinely thinking Hotspur is haunting the ship is a stubborn refusal to accept that a man so good would be refused whatever version of Heaven he believed in.]

Got a couple. Don't like any of them. I don't know how much we can really figure out without knowing what it was he'd been trying to tell us.

video;

[chromosomes]

Do we know what happened to his communicator?

video;

[sweetmotherofgod]

The people who went for him picked it up, I think. Don't know about after that. Thing is, it doesn't look like that message came from it. But I'm not great with this stuff, I could just be fucking it up.

voice;

[handelaar]

No.

[And yet here you are, Nederland. Getting grump and skepticism all over in just one syllable.]

video; (your cat emote here)

[sweetmotherofgod]

[Decision to go on the network instead of just showing up at his door and asking his opinion: validated.]

Thanks. I appreciate you taking the time out of your day to tell me that.

voice + recording

[cargojet]

[ Nathan doesn't reply, but it's sent from his device, the quality of recorded sound, the background noise trimmed out of it. Hotspur had been screaming, and there was a mechanical noise, a screech of distortion, enough to put your teeth on edge and make your head feel like it might explode. There hadn't been time before they jumped, but he'd gone straight back to Comms still covered with goo to produce this, using instinct and experience drawn from the communications problems they'd had just before the genetics lab had been discovered.

Hotspur's voice, then, strained and frightened: ]

They said he went mad - Gallagher, the old captain. They said he killed the civilian command staff and it was all because of the jumps but--

[ One message blurs into another, but it's the same message, really. Hotspur is dead, Nathan is sure about that, though there will be theories about ghosts, about him somehow surviving. In Nathan's reading, Hotspur only recorded one message, it just hasn't stopped echoing yet, and this is the only reading of it that makes sense. That doesn't mean that he's right, but he will defend it to the end. ]

But it's just the beginning.

[ The audio clicks off, then there's Nathan's voice. ]

What's there to discuss? "In space, nobody can hear you scream."

[sweetmotherofgod]

How about the middle and the end? Somehow I don't think he planned that to be a cliffhanger. And we did. We heard it. You telling me you're comfortable leaving it at that?

voice;

[20mentholkools]

Nothing to listen to.

video >:c

[sweetmotherofgod]

[Seriously? Fuck all these voice-only motherfuckers and also their horses. But: yelling at people has not yielded the results she's after any time before now, so she just sighs.]

You actually think that, or are you just being cryptic?

text »

[starked]

[ For a while Tony considers just not saying anything, because why should he. Hotspur's been dead for a year ( a year in official jumps, because Tony won't deal with the ideas of how long the jumps last or anything along those lines ) and it still stings when anyone mentions him. When even he mentions him. Still, he can offer one really not even remotely productive comment because he is an adult and deals with things in adult ways. ]

No. We're not going to. Because he's been dead for a long time and that— was just his anniversary. There's nothing to talk about.

voice;

[sweetmotherofgod]

So that's it, huh? The ship's giving us an anniversary present? Calling time on a long wake?

[Tony

she is not fucking buying it]

voice »

[surrogates]

Just the beginning. If he said that a year ago— you really want to think about the particular implications of that one?

[ Ric doesn't want to be the guy with his head in the sand, he hates it really, but the implications that surround just the beginning ( and he remembers how there were issues but they weren't— that bad ) being a year ago and the warning being released now when things have happened doesn't exactly put him at any sort of ease. ]

voice;

[sweetmotherofgod]

Okay, because I'm nuts about Jenna, I am not going to tell you to go fuck yourself. Instead, I'm going to ask you if you think we can afford not to think about it.

video »

[suit]

Assuming he said it at the same time as he said— when he said the rest of what he had said. [ Peter wasn't there, never knew Hotspur, but he's got to admit that had shaken even him a little bit. Made his brow furrow and made him file it away for looking over some time soon. ]

It should have been heard with everything else he said. Not suddenly transmitted a year in jumps after he said it.

video;

[sweetmotherofgod]

[just

so incredibly relieved over here]

Buddy, I don't know who you are but I could just kiss you. You're the first person to get the fuckin' point. I'm not upset because I miss him, I'm upset because this is dead wrong. Something he wanted to say was important enough that "somebody" [and really, with all the dry emphasis she puts on that she might as well just say "Ward and Resnik"] didn't want us to hear it. So why are we hearing it now?

voice.

[unsoldiered]

I'm all ears, but all I hear is 'more bad crap coming your way'.

Which is a step in knowing something, but waiting for something to pop up and try to kill us still sucks.

[He's pretty damn calm about it, all things considered, though he's obviously worried; voice is tinged with it. Because Alex knows very well what discombobulated voices and awful broadcasts can be. Lord have mercy on the new-comers.]

ALEX WHY YOU GOTTA JOIN ALL THESE GUYS ON VOICE? VIDEO!!!

[sweetmotherofgod]

Yeah, and that's a real fuckin' shock for us, right? Out of everyone here I'd expect you to know worse is the only way it goes. Doesn't mean we have to just roll over and wait for it.

[She sighs, drags a hand through his hair because no she hasn't turned it off video just because he's being a butt.]

I wouldn't be here if I hadn't taken the clues that people [she means her father, but lol when doesn't she] left for me and run with them. Neither would you or Murphy or Anne, because that messed up thing they called a God would have razed the whole damn place. You heard how much it must have hurt him to say that. Why wait instead of acting on it?

voice

[livingforce]

For those of us who've only arrived in the latest jump, can you shed some more light on that transmission?

voice;

[sweetmotherofgod]

Gimme a sec.

[She plays it back for him like Petrelli did for her, except that without access to the fancy Comms department gear the transition isn't so smooth. The first transmission followed by the second.]

The first was a year ago. To the day, I think. A man called Max Southey - Hotspur, to most of us, just like outta Shakespeare - sent a message to six people about ten minutes beforehand saying he had intel and needed advice, and not to engage the captain or the chief engineer until we'd spoken to him. Then the lock on his door failed before the jump, and - well, you can listen for yourself. But he was - this was a guy who could rebuild a shuttle from the ground up with nothing but scrap. I don't believe for a second that door jammed on its own.

Second one was just before the last jump. Or what we thought was the last one, anyway. After he'd been dead for a year, if you only count the time we're awake. Hell of a delay.

voice, TOP GUN ENCRYPTIONS 95%

[leaps]

How was that looped in? That transmission wasn't part of the original.

[ sulu speaks quietly. he's more shaken by it than he wants to let on, because he came so close to that being him. ]

voice, piggybacking on them fancy encryptions

[sweetmotherofgod]

[ugh Sulu why are you always the best? Despite her actual words her tone isn't snappish - it's a tired attempt at a joke when nothing seems very funny.]

If I knew that I'd declare myself Empress of the ship and demand a crown and a fancy-ass chair. 's pretty high on the top of my to-do. Finding out why we didn't hear that part the first time around, why we're hearing it now.

[and, thanks to one Murphy "everything is more horrible than you imagine" Pendleton, whether it was something Hotspur even said or whether it's something else using his voice to screw with them.]

voice;

[romanticism]

Nothing to talk about. [ He sounds tired. ] Nothing but warnings that still would have been too late from the day any of us turned up here.

voice;

[sweetmotherofgod]

And yet here you are. Which makes me think maybe you think there's a little more to it than that, too.

[ video ]

[tailcrook]

I heard it. [For somebody like him it's impossible not to.] But...

[There's not a lot he can say beyond "It scared me", and that's just not something he can admit in public. Not with his words and not right away.]

video; private

[sweetmotherofgod]

[Heather doesn't know yet what being somebody like him entails, but she does know that Konoe's intelligent in what seems to be a uniquely cat sort of way, something she just puts down to perception and intuition. She flicks the feed over, hoping it'll make him more comfortable even though by know it's pretty common knowledge that offers... limited protection.]

But what? I want to know what you think.

voice;

[astrogate]

There's no point, the ships just frakken with us. It's not him.

[sweetmotherofgod]

[Frakken? That's... cute.]

You mean it's not him like you don't think he said it, or like he didn't say it when we heard it?

[Because if it's the second one, no shit. The ship can do a lot of weird shit but she's pretty sure un-cremating someone isn't part of it. If it's the first... that makes her sad and angry and worried all at once.]

text;

[purrfectlycute]

:33 < what, you mean the dying guy??
:33 < i suppaws its sad and pretty cr33py but
:33 < is it really out of the ordinary?
:33 < death doesnt happen as much on the tranquility as it does elsewhere but i know people still die on board
:33 < rather violently, at that

:33 < ...was he a furiend of yours?

voice;

[sweetmotherofgod]

[She spends enough time trying not to pitch a fit about the way that message looks that it distracts her from pitching a fit over "the dying guy". GJ, Nepeta?]

You're right. The number of people we have here, everything that's going on, It's surprising more people haven't died. But it's always in horrible ways, seems like. But it wasn't the death bit that spooked me so much as the bit where we're hearing it now.

...and yeah. He was.

[thatsaflaregun]

The problem, sistah, is whether or not it's something we wanna know.

[sweetmotherofgod]

I don't think we get the luxury of that choice. There's a hell of a lot of stuff in my life I wish I never found out, but if I hadn't I'd've been dead five years ago.

[Or mother to an evil god. To-may-to, to-mah-to.]

locked.

[coffeeking]

I added it to the guide. Adding this to the guide.

I'm not sure what else to do with it other than have a stiff drink. None of the implications of this are comforting.

[sweetmotherofgod]

Hell, if you need company for that drink, just let me know.

You know, I don't think I ever said, but thank you for that. The guide thing. It's... good. A good thing to have.

voice; i was going to stay away but then i couldnt >:c

[za_rodina]

Depends on what you want to talk about, I guess. [There's a huff and the quick snick of a lighter, the metal sound of it flicking open and closed. Once, twice.] Wouldn't change much, would it?

voice; oh god not you again

[sweetmotherofgod]

Jeez, I dunno. Our favourite poets and what month gives the prettiest sunsets?

[Russia pls]

It changes a lot. Although I'm starting to get the impression I'm the only person who didn't expect this damn boat to start talking to us in dead people's voices. Don't get me wrong, it's not like I'm surprised, but I didn't exactly have it on a checklist.

/sob sorry I'm so so late

[countermand]

[Mike frowns lightly but nods,] You mean that guy?