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 Post Posted: Thu Mar 21, 2019 2:47 pm 
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Hunger. Darkness. Beeping. Hunger. Little green lights. Hunger.

Dr. Samantha Redgrave knew exactly why such things as food and water were so important to the human body. And she knew that she would awaken from cold sleep hungry - unless she got the approximately-one-in-ten odds of never waking up at all, of course. But it's one thing to know that you will wake up hungry, and a completely different thing to feel the hunger clawing at your insides.

You were expecting to wake up in a well-lit room, surrounded by other people recovering from coldsleep, with a good meal given to you almost at once. Unfortunately, something seems to have happened to the lights, to the meal, and to the other people. You awaken in darkness, surrounded by nothing more than hundreds, thousands, millions of other coldsleep capsules, all closed.

There should be a case under your coldsleep capsule containing some personal belongings of great sentimental value and strictly limited weight, a set of clothing, and an emergency hyperpreserved breakfast for just in case. Are you the first to wake up?

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 Post Posted: Fri Mar 22, 2019 3:45 pm 
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Samantha groaned and closed her eyes, quietly willing her stomach to shut up. No matter what was going on, it wasn’t going to get food faster if it escaped and clawed its way to the kitchen.

Carefully and slowly, she pulled herself up, giving her a second as her lack of blood sugar made her head spin. Sam pushed herself forward and lowered herself down, allowing herself a sigh of relief at the feeling of the cold floor. Say what you want about the floor, it was very hard to fall off of.

Reaching in blindly, Sam pulled out and then on her worn “post consumer human” shirt with her favorite jeans and shiny new steel toed boots, bought specially for the trip. After making sure she was wearing the proper attire for the first 15 minutes of a Sy-fy show (pleasepleaseplease no sharknados or zombies, not before either sugar or caffeine) she reached back in for the emergency breakfast and her personal item: a segmented cloth roll filled with seeds of some of her favorite plants.

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 Post Posted: Sat Mar 23, 2019 5:42 am 
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The clothes are there. Thank goodness for synthetic fabrics that can last a few thousand years in vacuum.

As for the emergency breakfast... well, the wrapper is there. The actual food content appears to be absent, however. Similarly with the seeds; anything organic that was stored in here is either gone or (at best) reduced to a funny-looking stain on whatever was nearby.

It was supposed to be able to last significantly longer than you were supposed to be in coldsleep for.

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 Post Posted: Sat Mar 23, 2019 7:41 am 
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The line of expletives that left her mouth was complex and specific about where and what the ship could do what it’s naugjty bits. Sam rolled onto her back and ground the heels into her eyes, trying not to waste precious water and oxegen on a panic attack.

What do you want from me, why don’t you run from me, what are you wondering...” There was something weird about her voice, but that really wasn’t her top priority at the moment. “...What do you know? Why aren't you scared of me, why do you care for me, when we all fall asleep, where do we go?

Tossing both now empty packets back in the general direction of her pod and pulled herself up, leaning heavily on the pods as she slowly walked in the direction she kind of remembered the exit being.


Last edited by faewinds on Sun Mar 24, 2019 2:45 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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 Post Posted: Sat Mar 23, 2019 12:25 pm 
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The ship appears singularly unimpressed at Samantha's outburst, perhaps because it doesn't actually have any naughty bits. The darkness is pretty complete, the constellation of little status lights doing less than nothing to relieve it, and worst of all, the floor seems to have a slight but constant slope to it. The coldsleep chamber is clearly far larger than it looked the last time Samantha saw it, though of course back then it was full of people and, most importantly, well-lit...

"Hello?"

The distant voice seems to come from Samantha's left, in the direction best described as downhill. When she looks over there, there's a distant patch of light, about the shape of a doorway, and a humanoid figure appears to be standing in it. Either it's a very small doorway occupied by a very small person, or it's a long way away...

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 Post Posted: Sat Mar 23, 2019 4:14 pm 
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Samantha blinked, and squinted down the hall at the shape. Feeling slightly silly, because there was every chance that was a starvation induced hallucinations, she leaned against a nearby pod.

Hello? Are you actually there?

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 Post Posted: Sun Mar 24, 2019 1:43 am 
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The beam of a torch seeks out the sound of your voice, looking intensely bright in the darkness.

"Ah, there you are. Just wait right there, I'm coming!" The voice sounds like a lady, and probably one who insists on being called 'mature' instead of 'elderly'.

The humanoid shape starts hurrying towards you.

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 Post Posted: Sun Mar 24, 2019 1:34 pm 
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Samantha watched the figure move forward, trying to focus through the growing starvation/dehydration migraine, and swayed under the sudden shock of the bright light.

And suddenly the world shifted.

Hey! The floor is coming towards me very fast. Very very fast. I wonder if it will be friends with me? Hello, ground!

~

She was laying on something that was, in theory, softer than the ground, but was entirely too bright for her to be just waking up. She was never just waking up when the sun was this bright, there was something quite wrong with this.

Samantha shifted, and immediately whimpered at the pain radiating warmth from the side of her head. The memories came back with the pain, and she was slightly reassured by the fact that the figure wasn't an hallucination of her mother.

What was mom doing?

Being particularly productive compost, probably. It seemed like the kind of the thing Mom would be doing.

She knew, she just fluffin' knew, that hiding from responsibility was Frowned Upon, but fluff it .

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 Post Posted: Mon Mar 25, 2019 12:04 am 
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"Oh good, you're awake. Here, drink this."

The voice is the voice of the shadow from the door, but now there's a face to go with the shadow; an elderly lady, with concern in both her face and her voice. There's also a needle in Samantha's arm, linked via tubing to a bag at her bedside.

"My name's Dr. Vanderbilt," continues the elderly lady. "And might I ask yours?"

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 Post Posted: Mon Mar 25, 2019 12:13 am 
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Samantha squinted at the world, suspicious of its attempts to threaten her poor retenas, but took the water.

I am-” No, that was not the same sounds that had come out of Dr Vanderbilt. Concussion, maybe? She cleared her throat before continuing, clearly enunciating to make sure the right noises happened. “I am Dr Samantha Redgrave, Agricultural Sciences. What went horrifically wrong that I got woken up early? I was supposed to be woken later for fine tuning and fixing things the people in charge did wrong because farming doesn’t work the way it does in movies. Is it really that bad?”

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 Post Posted: Mon Mar 25, 2019 12:53 am 
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"Well, Dr. Redgrave, I have good news and bad news. You must be terribly hungry, though; here, eat this while I bring you up to speed."

'This' turns out to be a place full of fresh greens (hydroponically grown) with some meat on the side, accompanied by a large glass of water.

"First of all, we didn't land where we were supposed to, and wherever we did land... took us a lot longer to get here. Secondly, we didn't land on an empty, uninhabited world at all. There's more than just plants and animals here; there's a full medieval civilisation. And thirdly, every now and then someone apparently wakes up for no particular reason, somehow fluent in the local language, which about half of us are quietly accepting and at least one of us is tearing his hair out trying to figure out how it could possibly work."

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 Post Posted: Mon Mar 25, 2019 1:30 am 
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Samantha paused, staring between the doctor, the vaguely recognizable greens, the less recognizable meat, and back again.

Oh, fluff this. This had better be some fluffed up cryo dream or else I’m going to be unamused.”

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 Post Posted: Mon Mar 25, 2019 2:55 pm 
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"I'm afraid I'm not one of the people who mysteriously woke up for no reason," says Dr. Vanderbilt. "I don't speak Elene. But if you're asking what the meat is, it's cockatrice. Yes, we can eat the native creatures, and doesn't that open up a whole entire can of biochemical worms? Fortunately, we seem to have at least some immunity to the local diseases, and no, I still can't explain why."

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 Post Posted: Mon Mar 25, 2019 5:21 pm 
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Samantha moodily finished her food before requesting a tablet with which to peruse the ships logs to find out what had been accomplished before her waking up, as she very much understood and echoed the underlying annoyance in Dr Vanderbilt's tone of voice and wanted to be sure she was well informed before she started inflicting her own post-nap annoyance on others.

A few hours of speed reading later, Sam flagged down Vanderbilt again.

"So, lemme see if I got this straight; we were dropped in the middle of weirdly cohesive high-fantasy, you weren't joking when you said cockatrice, we have a magical 6 year old who may or may not be a god following us around cause she thinks we're interesting, actual fluffin demons, and the captain's PA keeps making passive aggressive comments in official documents about how hard his life because his sustainability plans keep getting fluffed when we know there are egg and milk producing animals someone tamed for us? Is that about right?"

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 Post Posted: Tue Mar 26, 2019 1:13 am 
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Dr. Vanderbilt smiles. "I would love to see the expression on David's face when you call him 'fluffed'," she says. "He's competent - which is more than I can say for the Captain - but he gets grumpy when things don't go according to plan. You're about right; a good night's sleep and regular meals, and you shouldn't keep fainting like that any more. Would you like to meet some of the people you've been reading about?"

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