Podpop

[cityship]

[ooc: Newbie Helpers List | Instructions: Post your character with one post establishing them as being podpopped. Tag each other in groups of 2's, 3's, and 4's, to get some interaction to start with. If a thread doesn't already have 2 or 3 people tagged in, tag it with your character's podpop popping near the other people, rather

Comments

[mulder_trustno1]

Most people's first thought upon being expelled from a slime covered pod with no memory or context of how they arrived in it in the first place, would not be that they'd obviously been abducted onto an alien spacecraft and cocooned.

Fox Mulder was not most people.

Not only did he have a tendency to accept the 'impossible' as a rational explanation in bizarre circumstances, but this was hardly his first tango with alien vessels. Or pod-like cocoons, for that matter.

After all, it hadn't been very long ago now that he had rescued Scully out of one, from the crashed ship buried below the ice at the Pole. But that ship had been built out of metal, even if that metal was of some kind of alien origin. This ship...

Well, he hadn't even heard of anything like this. And he'd heard a lot of wild stories in his day.

What Stacy told him didn't seem that far-fetched to him at all, although there was simply a surrealism to his being here. Marita had warned them: that colonization was about to begin, that all hell would break loose, but

[facepunching]

"You!" Soren, equally slimy and probably almost as disoriented, rounded on the strange man. "Where are we? Where is the Tower of Guidance? What happened to the Disciples of Ashera?"

[mulder_trustno1]

It was obvious that the other man was in the same sort of boat as he was, except, of course, that nothing he said really made any sense at all. Unless he was some kind of crazy LARPer, like those guys Langly hung out with sometimes. Dealing with someone's whose lines of fantasy and reality had snapped long before they ended up on a spaceship wasn't exactly the first thing he wanted to waste his time on, but the guy was obviously angry enough that ignoring him wasn't going to be an option.

Mulder held up both hands in front of himself, in a gesture both conciliatory and cautionary.

"I don't know what that is," he admitted. "We're on some kind of craft. An alien vessel."

[facepunching]

"Alien?" Soren tasted the word in his mouth. They didn't have aliens on Tellius. So of course he misunderstood.

"You mean foreign? What sort of foreign vessel would be crafted like..." he motioned to the slime, the pods, the light-pustules. "Like this?"

[mulder_trustno1]

Mulder just figured the guy was trying to deny to himself what he was actually talking about. He'd dealt with enough people like that in his day.

"I mean extraterrestrial . Beings from another planet, maybe another galaxy." He had to admit though, foreign was a good word for this ship either way. The way the walls pulsed, it almost seemed to be...

Breathing.

[facepunching]

"Extraterr -- what? From another planet?" Now he was giving Mulder The Look. The one that said maybe he was regretting ever having asked the madman in front of him anything in the first place.

"I've no time for this. I need to get back. I can't leave the... the others to fight Ashera on their own." He looked around, glaring at the organic walls, as if trying to find a convenient door to exit out of. "The world is at stake here!"

[mulder_trustno1]

Mulder was pretty much immune to the Look, since most people tended to make it their default expression when dealing with him. Still, he was working up a pretty good approximation of the Look himself in reaction to this guy's insistence that he had to go save the world pronto, from what sounded like video game bad guys.

"I don't think we've really got a choice in the matter," he tried to explain, as if the fact that they were naked and covered in goo on a spaceship wasn't self-explanatory enough about their odds of expedient escape. "The world's going to have to wait until we find out what they want with us."

[facepunching]

What a spectacular first meeting!

Soren's shoulders slumped briefly before he straightened again. "If they think that kidnapping me is going to make me cooperate, it was a grave miscalculation." Then he seemed to remember something. "...You're not turned to stone. Were you spared the judgment?"

[mulder_trustno1]

Indeed it was.

"Cooperate with what is the question we should probably be concerning ourselves with right now." Experimentation? Enslavement? Why had they been released and was anyone going to herd them in the right direction?

And what was this ... intelligence calling itself Stacy? Was it really the ship itself?

He realized the guy had said something else, but it wasn't much saner than anything else he'd said.

"Doesn't look like any of us were," he replied cynically.

[facepunching]

Soren had no real idea what aliens were or how much they (apparently) liked to shove metal implements in people. What he did know was that he was slimy and gross and he would like his clothes back now.

So he merely snorted at Mulder's concern. "I don't much care if it's goddesses or 'aliens' I have to contend with. I'm going to get some answers."

And with that he strode off in the direction of those bizarre lights. Yep. He was going to go towards the light.

[mulder_trustno1]

Mulder really couldn't argue. He was all about running blindly towards mysterious lights. It had sort of defined his entire career. So he simply followed the other man up that one, taking everything in silently, trying to contend with the growing feeling of dread in his chest.

[facepunching]

When in doubt, run to danger, not away from it!

Soren glanced over his shoulder at Mulder; while this situation was in no way familiar to him, well. His entire conception of how the world worked had just been shattered a scant few days ago (to him). Besides, he wanted his clothes. And his books. "My name is Soren. I serve as tactician to the Greil Mercenaries."

[mulder_trustno1]

It's at least more interesting that way.

"Never heard of 'em," Mulder admitted, but at least the guy seemed to have taken the anger down a notch. "Fox Mulder, Federal Bureau of Investigation." Somehow, he figured just saying 'FBI' was going to be lost on this guy.

[facepunching]

What an odd name. Soren digested that for a minute. "...what is the Federal Bureau of Investigation? What do you investigate?"

Because amusingly, that was the only part of the name he really understood, coming from a world where most countries were monarchies and all.

[mulder_trustno1]

"A government agency," he explained, glad he'd been right in that call about this guy's knowledge base. "We're a criminal investigatory body, but sometimes our jurisdiction's a little wider than that."

Or a lot wider, when Mulder's allowed to define it for himself.

[facepunching]

Soren raised an eyebrow. "Ah. And you enforce edicts, I presume? Under what government do you operate?"

Mulder's jurisdiction is THE TRUTH.