Looks like someone forgot to pay their electric bill.

[Nick looks only mildly amused. He's actually had that happen, and it's not so fun, but someone's already said that they're working on it, so....]

There's way too much crappy art on board this thing, and not enough crappy artists showing themselves. I'm getting a little bored of chasing ghosts.

['Unnerved' would probably be a better word, not that he'll admit it.]

So if anyone's got a deck of cards or some dice, let's get something going. We don't even have to gamble, not unless you're willing to take a silver filling for payment.

[ katniss has had a month of bored recovery after being seriously mutated by last month's illness. she's still embarrassed about the loss of most of her hair, and she isn't a big fan of texting, so this is voice, though she's just sitting on her bed, playing with the pearl she found in the pocket of her suit from home, rolling it between her fingers. it's late. she woke up screaming. she wonders if she should apologize to tyke, sometime, or if that's not something you bring up to your superior. ]

[ initially, she was going to ask someone to take the wedding dress out of her locker before the next jump, so she doesn't ever have to see it again, but instead all the frustration and restlessness and uselessness that's plagued her since her arrival on this ship coagulates into an angry ball. so when she presses play, she just asks one question, direct and simple and with a grit of fury to it that could be interpreted as either petulance or passion. ]

Why are we here?

[ because no matter what happens, no matter how many theories get floated, she still doesn't have an answer to that question. at least the Games had a clear end point, even if the goal was to kill every other person. ]

[ lydia looks like she's exhausted and if she's truthful about it she honestly is exhausted. for a moment it looks like she's not going to say anything, that she just wanted to broadcast her own face just to show how she appears before she ends up just exhaling. ]

I've been here two years. I know we don't measure things by months and years here but— it's been 25 jumps and where I come from that might as well mean two years. I've been home for months at a time and it felt like a blink of an eye. [ she pauses. ] I'm tired of being on this ship. You get people who are dead at home here and there's no guarantee they'll stay. If you're lucky they stay and you get to bond with them. If you're not, they just leave and you don't. You— who can totally go back home and be alive. They can't.

I get wanting to stay because of that. You all can enjoy being on a creepy horror ship that I'm honestly pretty sure wants us dead or something even worse. It's better than being dead at home, I'll give you that. But I want to go home already. I want to see my mom again and not find myself back here afterward.

[ lydia clears her throat. ] I want to find a way home. I don't want to make this place my home any more than I have. And to do that, I need to do a little research. Now, if you're the type that's getting a little tired of being here and would like to help, you should come talk to me. And maybe, with any luck and a lack of another plague happening, we might actually make some headway.

[Pepper's voice is surprisingly calm considering what she's saying. It's been long enough from the jump that there's no way Natasha is going to wake up and Tony's gone, he's not coming back.]

For those of you who don't know Tony Stark is no longer on the ship and Natasha hasn't woken up.

[There's a long pause before Pepper simply turns off the recording.]

Does anyone know of a way to contact Smiley?

Has anyone seen an ice dragon?

[ musing, seemingly to herself, atop her bed. nymeria's head and forepaws are pillowed on arya's thighs and belly. she brushes the sleeping direwolf's neck. ]

There’s a story of a girl who was born during winter. The cold was so terrible it stole into the house and past the great fire her father had built and it crept under the blankets piled high on the birthing bed. It killed her mother, but not her. She was born blue and cold but alive and winter was inside her.

[ children of winter. a fairy story. but arya is a northern girl — no, a woman, now — and though she has not seen winter yet, it lives in her bones. ]

She loved everything about winter. The cold and the grey skies. Making enormous snow castles that turned to hardest ice overnight and playing with the ice lizards that swarmed out of the snow, but she loved nothing half as much as she did the ice dragon.

It came to her when she was very young. She could pet it without burning her hands from the cold. And one day, she got to ride it.

She didn't tell anyone, though. No one had ever tamed an ice dragon, you see. Anyone who'd gone close would be found the next day a block of ice. And it was her secret anyway.

One day, when summer had come and winter was still a long ways away, other dragons, fire breathing ones, came with their riders. She hid and she thought she would die but her ice dragon came to her even though it was summer and ice dragons never come in summer. Even though she wanted to leave and be with her ice dragon in a place where it's always winter, she couldn't leave her family to die. And the ice dragon loved her so much it stayed and battled the other dragons and their riders and it froze them all and it won — but its wings were melted and it was felled.

[ arya takes her time running her fingers through her wolf's long warm fur. nymeria continues to nap, and arya finishes her story. ]

She ran inside the house and freed her family, but when she went back outside, where her ice dragon had been was only a pond of always cold water. She saved her family, but no one believed her. No one had ever tamed an ice dragon, after all.

It's only a story, [ she continues, her tone as even as it had been through the narrative, ] but I always hear of weird animals in other places. Mayhaps someone knows of one like it. The only true ice dragon we have is a bunch of stars: follow the tail and you'll go south but if you chase its blue eye, you'll find north.

[ find home, she means. but there is no ice dragon here either. perhaps it is only meant to live inside the stories old nan spoke in winterfell. ]

I'm not sure who thought putting me on a spaceship was a good idea. A remarkably large and by all means physically impossible spaceship, but that's beside the point.

[ The man in front of the camera doesn't seem like much at first glance. He has dark, curly hair that's making its way to gray, wears a well-worn tweet jacket over a button-down, and has a pair of glasses with scratches and bumps on its side. Most people would take him for an average, possibly even homeless, man. Most people would be wrong.

He takes off his glasses and cleans them, taking a moment to look at his surroundings. ] Every inch of this ship must be completely air-locked. [ He muses aloud more than he speaks directly to the camera, and although his brows are furrowed, but for a brief moment, there's also something akin to interest in his eyes as he looks.

He puts back on his glasses and crosses his arms, looking back into the camera. The curiosity is gone, his expression closed off again. ] Here are the important questions: who brought me here? Why?

[ He looks down, and when he looks up again, there's a glimmer of excitement shining through his walls. ] ...and is there a laboratory on this ship?

[ Peter almost wished this was the first time he had ended up snatched onto a strange spaceship and woken up in a pod. Hell, he wished this was the first time it had happened in the last six months, but that wasn't the way his life worked. At least this time it wasn't members of his father's army that had been sent to snatch him up.

Today, Peter's face was going to grace the Tranquility with a touch of amusement. Sure, this wasn't the best of situations, but it wasn't the worst, either. ]

First thing's first, everyone- I'm gonna get the basics out of the way and introduce myself: the name's Peter Quill and in some parts I'm known as Star-Lord. No, I didn't pick the name for myself. [ A beat. ]

I would have gone with "James," to be honest. [ Were people laughing? ]

Anyway, what do you all remember before waking up here? Anything like cracks in the fabric of reality? Seriously, if you saw tentacles, we might have a problem that we shouldn't be having. [ As opposed to problems they should be having, but hey- he went to a lot of trouble to make sure the tentacled horrors of creation didn't come creeping through. ]

And on a final note, if you're with the Spartoi, the Shi'ar, the Kree, or the Badoon: make sure to keep your flarking keesters out of trouble, okay? I don't wanna have to keep on playing cleanup after you guys while we're all stuck here.

I'm sure you've all seen him by now, but Tony returned to the ship this past jump. He doesn't remember his time here. I wanted to give you all fair warning before you talked to him.

Also, he's probably already reading this.

[ peter looks vaguely more interested in being on screen this time than compared to the last time he was. maybe it’s because he’s had a little more practice, who knows. but he’s standing in front of a mish mosh of scrap metal, a rather perfect descriptor for what they're about to say. ]

So. For all you guys out there looking to join a department, I want to offer engineering as an option. If there’s something we need it’s extra hands around the place, and there’s more than a few things we could think of to do to keep you occupied if you can't think of them yourselves. Plus, the place is a lifesize erector set.

Arya and I are the heads of the department--

[ arya is worn in a way that goes beyond physical exhaustion and would rather be anywhere else than showing her face on the network, but no one could tell from the smile she donned for this occasion. ]

— and ours is an important duty. [ focus, peter. ] We are charged with the well-being of the ship. If it is neglected, we would all die.

[ welcome to psa: westeros style. ]

We need everyone. Even if you are not knowledgeable about technology [ cough her a year ago ] there are tasks that don’t need such. And we can teach those who wish to learn.

[ peter’s focused, he swears! he’s just trying to appeal to the masses. ] We want you to keep in mind that the place is bigger than you might expect and we can’t keep track of anyone who might decide to go wandering off, so maybe join with a buddy of yours so you can keep track of each other.

The main goal is that we need more people, like Arya said. There’s just too much for the few people we’ve got to take care of all on our own. Feel free to talk to either of us if you’ve got any questions or concerns or, I don’t know- if you just want to know more.

[ peter glances back over to arya for a second before looking back. ]

It’s a department we all need to think of, and not just as one where we get to build things in our spare time—

[ and here arya chimes in with a, ] But we do that too! [ actual best part tbh we’re all kids or kids at heart here. ]

We take care of the ship, and without your help, the place’ll fall apart.


[ ooc; peter is black, arya is green ]

The hors d'oeuvres and pirates are great and all, guys, but have you ever really considered the consequences of this multi-world space party?

If we're lucky, then we're not from different universes. We just share different addresses in the same infinite space. Maybe your neighbor is 10 to 20th to the 40th light years away from you, and whatever took us here was somehow able to cross that sheer distance of space-time to bring us all together.

And if we're unlucky?

Then each of our universes exist independently. Each universe is its own bubble, a false vacuum governed by its own laws. Laws like energy level, the particles that make up what we are, et cetera, et cetera. In other words, we shouldn't be able to interact.

One of the times where we might interact is if one of these universes were to subsume the other. In my world, we call it a false-vacuum decay. In an instant, the poor bastards of Universe A find themselves functioning under an entirely new set of laws, but wait--

They can't.

There are specific conditions that allow you and the physical world around you to exist. Change any of those conditions, and you're fucked. Either you're gone in an instant, or if you survive, it won't be long. Gravity is going to pull everything together until we've got one giant mass. And seriously, I don't like anyone that much to be that close to them.

I'm not saying that is what's going to happen to us. The fact that we can coexist within the same space implies that the laws of our universes aren't so far off. In fact, it explains the wonky powers issue. But think about it: if a bunch of people are being pulled from different universes, aren't we poking holes in each of these bubbles? Could we be compromising the integrity of each separate universe, until the borders weaken and ultimately everything collapses into each other?

Could it happen? I don't know. I'm not sure if anyone could really know for sure, and all of this? It's pretty damn humbling. Even the most powerful of us are just shitstains on the great toilet bowl of the multiverse. Cheers!

TL;DR: All our universes could collapse into each other. Discuss.

[ the distress signal is tapped out using her fingernail against a wall. it's one of the few signals jane knows in morse code, a trick taught to her by her father during their many late night stargazes. ]

· · · – – – · · ·
[ SOS

a few seconds pass, silently but only slightly disturbed by soft, hurried pants and then, ]

Hello. I'm Dr. Jane Foster of — of Earth. Or Midgard. [ jane feels the need to mention that, in case she tripped slapstick style into a gravitational anomaly and ended up god knows where again. she knows that by this point she shouldn't feel surprised waking up in a strange place, lost and confused, with a number tattooed on her arm. after all, safety and normalcy had pretty much been tossed out the window as soon as she hit the god of thunder with her van.

it still does, though. it's like a seizure by the throat, a fire shut up in her bones that makes her both restless and weary. it's the fear that never truly leaves the body, like malaria, and it's a fear clearly evident in her voice when she speaks again, ]

I — don't know where I am. Or how I got here. Or what any of this is. [ she won't exactly say it, but jane is completely clueless. it's an odd, sickening feeling and one she isn't used to. usually, she could grasp at straws, ultimately finding a conclusion through the little scraps of clues she was handed. in fact, her entire career has been built on that. here, however, there are no answers and no work for jane to use as a distraction. all there is the silence and the cold, harsh reality of the unknown.

jane lets out a sigh, heavy and tired as if the realisation just dawned on her, and she runs a shaky hand through her hair. ] If anyone can hear me, I need answers. Please.

[Pepper is going to pretend that she hasn't been avoiding doing this. That she hasn't done her best to put affairs in order before doing this while wanting to just hide in her room this whole jump and cling to an old t-shirt that she may have taken from Tony's room and just cry till she's numb inside. She's going to pretend these things aren't actually what she really wants to do and instead show the most dignified straight face in the galaxy.

Instead the video sees her from the shoulders up, straight faced and eyes downcast slightly. She's not actually sure she can get through this without written notes; so she's made some. Stick to the cards Potts, it helps. Her eyes flicker to the little camera in her device, then down to the 'cards' again, but even with her notes she's having trouble getting her mouth to move. She should have done this in text form. It would have been easier in text.

She swallows, her lips twitching inward slightly before she finally forces a start.]

For those of you who knew him, Tony Stark is no longer aboard the Tranquility. For those of you who didn't know him, Mr Stark was the head of engineering.

[There's a pause as if she wants to say more, but really she doesn't. She wants to stop thinking about it, she wants him to walk in or reply to this and say that it was all one of his tasteless jokes. She knows that won't happen though, so instead of saying anything else she simply turns the recorder off.]

I need to see you as soon as you get this.