welcome to the jungle [garrit + katgrim]

[Garrit]

They knew there were the odd chances - those 1 percents that everyone ignored as much as they dismissed the possible humiliation of choking to death at dinner.
 
They had come from desperate times. 

Her pod was a chrysalis of nanowoven metals, which was otherwise opaque except for the singular window that faced her head.  From her perspective this might seem like a window out to the world, but she knew that it was really just a window in.  Stasis pods were apt to fail and what reason was there in open something that contained a putrified body within?

The process was clear to her even if she had never experienced it before.  Few people have in fact been in stasis and their experiences had been reported to be rather bleak to say the least.  After all, the science behind freezing time had more than just a whiff of blasphemy.

There was a head, or at least the shape of one, silhouetted in the harsh light of a focused source.  It was alarmingly large, which might startle anyone who had ample experience with psuedohuman creatures.  A wild medusoid mane encircled the creature's crown like the distended teeth to some deep ocean beast.  The proportions of the head appeared mutable through the glass like heated wax as it oozed to and fro across the view of her window.  Occasionally, she would be afforded senses of color, but those elucidated nothing but a horrible melt of primal reds and bone whites.  Club like features rose up to fall against her window and it might take her some effort to subdue the reflex to shield herself.  Outside of the thick steel she could hear a grunting growl of cursing or the roaring, shouting for her to respond.  The club like things beat down harder and harder till she could finally see from the deformation of them against the glass that they were made of skin and that they were in fact fists. 

Then suddenly it was gone.  Gone was the fists and gone was the dark face.  The movement was so sudden that she wouldn't be prepared for the blinding light, which the head had been blocking from her eyes.  It would take her a long while for her eyes to acclimate themselves to the intensity of light.  When the pain and the overwhelming brightness subsided, she would instead find nothing but a small fixture set several feet from her window.  The fixture was blurry through the thick glass and the shape of the light was odd and ameboid as the creature's face before.

Outside her pod, there wasn't even a rattle from the creature.  The figure had disappeared entirely, which might make her think that it had never appeared at all - that she had imagined it perhaps?  The pod began to open in a very normal sequence.  Whatever lay outside of it was not a concern of the machine and nothing at her disposal could delay the machine.  The machine would not understand and did not care that she might wish to remain within its protective steel, shell.

But, there was just black outside of the parting door.  No creature, no threat...

Normally there would be a flock of 'medical professionals' to bring her out of the pod.  However, the pod's beetle-like wings opened to release her into a startlingly alien place of ashen grey and melted shapes of metal.  She could come to recognize this place, this hold, to be part of her old ship, but to do so was a severe stretch of imagination.  It would appear like her ship had been subjected to acid and that the metal had dissolved off the bones of its superstructure.  Like an eaten fish, the titanium beams curved cavernously around her and reached pathetically up at an ultramarine, midnight sky. 

Beyond the broken walls of her craft she could barely perceive the landscape.  It was irregular in the moonlight and could not be resolved from her vantage.  It wasn't clear that she was on a hill or on a meadow, but she was also looking out at it through odd fissures and holes of the ship.  However, there was no doubting the abundance of flora, which swayed with a naive innocence to the night time breeze.  Her eyes might trace the creep of the greenery up over the craft itself.  Leaves and jungle epiphytes crawling around the steel like it was no different than the trunk of a tree.

Around her she might consider the other pods, which held her crew.  There were some still bracketed to their walls, but their windows were cobbled by a miasmatic black that warned one away.  Before she might forget that strange visitor at her window, her inspection of the ground would reveal several foot prints disturbing the sandy dirt before her pod.  Yet, if she were to search out in the night and amid the shadows of the broken ship, she would not find any other sign of the creature.  Or… much less a person - any person at all.

----------

Monkey had followed the vague depression in the ground for most of that day.  It was a furrow in the dirt that was often times narrower than a shoulder's width but sometimes spanned far wider than Monkey's arms outstretched.  In fact, it sometimes broadened at least five times the width of his arms outstretched.  He had in fact measured it so with patient scrawls into the damp earth with his big toe while a peering eye gauged the plumb of his outreached forefinger and the ground.

At one point Monkey knew that the depression must have been fierce, for the man saw the way the earth was turned up around the fissure, and he could sense how much that clay settled with time.  Now, however, the depression was shallower than a creek bed and was throughly filled in with grasses and bushes.  Great rooted trees broke the embankments of the fissure and nature otherwise sought to smoothen it back into its fold. 

Monkey might have missed it himself if he hadn't decided to relieve himself right over it in the morning.  Why, he'd stared a little puzzled with the way his urine ran a perfectly straight path away from him.  Immediately he knew this was not a natural occurrence and being in the business of making trouble for himself, he decided to trace this phenomenon into the jungle.  The phenomenon was of course the trail of her ship's crash, which would have plowed a great amount of earth all around it before settling where it did.  To Monkey, these oddities did not necessarily have to make sense in so far as they were recognized as 'artifacts'.

He followed that trail through the afternoon till it ended with the very alien shape of her spaceship held within the bosom of the jungle.

He unearthed her from the wreck of metal and the reek of decay and time.  He triggered the machinations to release her without knowing he had done so.  In the fogged glass, which perturbed her visage into a frightening creature, Monkey had beat the pod with his fists as if to prepare himself to send it… her back to the pit she should have remained in.

When the pod began to open, Monkey fled.  He ran back into the jungle and clambered up a tree with his silent blue eyes watching out into the darkness.  Seeking movement in the dead hull of the ship.




           









   

[katgrimm]

“Are you positive that you want to go through this?”

“Of course I am. What other options remain for us here if I don’t go through with this?” The red head replied as she crossed her arms in front of her chest as she fought to control her short temper. It wasn’t as if they hadn’t gone over the information twelve times before. “I’ll just be frozen. Think of it as a nice long nap.. I’ll wake up.. Plant the virus and kablowie all the Asian Robots are gone.” She explained as she leaned to the side half expecting the man infront of her to move out of her way.

“Kathryn.. What if it doesn’t go according to plan?” He questioned his expression shifting from annoyance at her behavior to genuine concern.

“It’s a risk that I am willing to take so we regain our freedom.” Kathryn said as she uncrossed her arms and cupped the man’s face in her hands. “I’ll be perfectly fine Derek. The sooner I finish this assignment.. The better off we will be. We can finally have that family you keep dreaming about and we won’t have to constantly be on the alert.” She leaned forward placing a soft kiss on the tip of his nose before she pulled away.

Derek brushed a few of her stray hairs from her eyes and smiled. “I’ll see you when you get back then..”

“You will..” She replied as she walked away from him. Kathryn walked in silence as she made her way down the empty halls of the storage facility. Her hand curled into a fist as she knocked on the steel door in code for entry.  The sounds of metal opening filled the air before revealing another woman inside.

“Come.. Come.. Let’s get you ready for stasis.” The woman said as she lead Kathryn through the facility. Gathering supplies and forcing her to change out of her civilian wear into a uniform. “That bag you have will be sent into stasis with you..” The woman informed as she led her to the line of pods. “As you are already aware.. You will be placed into stasis and transported as ship cargo. This will be to get you out of orbit and safe to one of the ships.” The woman was about to go on when Kathryn released a heavy sigh stunning her into silence.

“Yes, I know that.. Freeze me so we get started..” Kathryn hissed before being lead to the empty pod. Kathryn slid into the pod shivering at the feel of cool metal against the bare skin on her arms. She placed the bag down at her feet adjusting it before lying down. She took in a deep breath followed by another as she watched the metal door close over her. Her heart racing as if panic was beginning to claim the steel composure she worked so hard at creating away. She closed her eyes taking a deep breath the computer within the pod began to speak.

“Kathryn Tavin. Age: 26. Gender: Female. Computer and Robotics Specialist. Stasis has been initiated. Stasis complete in Ten. Nine. Eight. Seven. Six. Five. Four. Three. Two. One.”

~~~
The loud sound of a club bashing against the long forgotten stasis pod filled the evening air. A metal keyboard cracked by an unknown assailant triggered the stasis pod. The pod itself began to stir back into life as the woman within began to stir. Her eyes fluttering as if REM sleep was in process only to open and reveal dark emerald eyes. Whoever it was or what it was had woken her from her sleep. Kathryn shifted slowly within the pod taking in breaths of air as if she had been holding her breath during a swim. “Where am I?” She managed to utter under her breath as she swung her legs from out of the pod.

Kathryn pulled herself out of the pod. Where were all the damn doctors she was promised? Where was everyone? What the hell happened? Kathryn was dazed for a moment leaning against the pod silent as if trying to give her brain a moment or two to decipher what had happened.  The metal was cool under her touch, something familiar. Slowly she turned her head to take the surroundings.  “Oh god..” Kathryn whispered as she reached into the pod for her bag stumbling back from the pod.

[Garrit]

{The loud sound of a club* bashing against the long forgotten stasis…}

When he got to that wreckage, he hadn't spent much time over turning fallen beams or seeking out supply boxes.  It was hard to overlook the rows of stasis pods facing out at the huge gash in the ship's hull like the lot of them were dozing at some idyllic resort… Not that Monkey had any idea what a 'resort' was. 

The other pods were blackened and when Monkey tried to pry one open, it emitted the briefest of odors that made the man gasp with revulsion.  He wiped his hands on his pants.

Her's was the last one in the row and Monkey brushed away the dirt over the window.  There was a faint glow within the recesses of the pod, operating on some mysterious current that still permeated the wreckage.  Monkey's eyes widened at the sight of the woman's face.  It was hard to make out fine details through the glass, but he could not mistake her for being dead.  Simply sleeping. 

"Hey!" he shouted, rapping his knuckles on the glass.  Monkey wasn't particularly patient, not even with someone waking from slumber after countless, hundreds of years.  He started slapping his palm on the glass to make more noise as if that was all, which was needed to break someone out of stasis.  "You dead in there or what?"

Well, he hadn't exactly struck the dusty control panel.  He stood on it so that he could get a better handhold over the various cords and wires and other critical hardware, which was keeping her from drying out like an unwrapped piece of meat in the freezer.  It was fortunate that his toes managed to punch in the correct sequence of commands, which initiated her recovery before he'd dismantled her life support.

"Whoa, Hey!  Wake up!"  He shouted, now furious with anxiety at the sound of the activated machines.  He curled back his lips as he considered the thickness of the glass, but he brought his fists down at it as if he expected to shatter it.  "You gotta get up!"

When the pod cracked at its seams, with a pneumatic hiss - Monkey, startled, began to favor the flight over fight of his instinct and scampered off.
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Up the tree.  The place was dark except for the single, bright light over her pod and the indistinct glow of other, weaker lights around the ship.  Beyond the membrane of the ship however, it was black and mirky.  The air was quite thick and humid and even with the whirling of the pod behind her, she could hear the loud… shouting almost of countless things talking, singing, hissing, living, dying… all around her.  She could see the sky clearly around her, and to one side there was a clear opening that fell into an undulating river valley.  To her other side, the jungle rose up immediately like the sheer face of a cliff.

She would have no idea where Monkey was.  The man had hidden himself in a tree not far from her and he was looking down at her, while she picked her bag out of the pod.  He felt kind of silly having run away, especially now that he knew that the only thing he was afraid of was a woman half his size.  Upon seeing her step out of the pod, fear had quickly turned to curiosity - after the lingering drop of humiliation at least.  Monkey released a low grunt beneath his breath and wiped his hand over his eyes.  "Idiot." he muttered to himself. 





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*actually fists, but could have been mistook for club. the window's glass is thick and concave so it deforms what you see through it