~Wow! I'm amazed that people actually liked this! I appreciate the reviews, favs, etc. so far, and can only hope this chapter is up to scratch so as not to disappoint! :) ~
Roughly thirty-six hours have passed since last we saw Isaac, and nothing has come over the comms reciever, not even Nicole. So Isaac's sitting at the control panel (where he's been most of this time), debating whether or not to try to find some civilization. Twenty minutes later and he's (still) staring hard at the controls like as if they'll just up and decide for him. Needless to say, they don't, and another odd lapse of time goes by when-
CLANG!
Isaac jolts out of his stupor and whirls around, aiming his plasma cutter straight behind him with such intensity that it takes a moment before he realizes that...he's not armed. He's actually just holding his hands in the way of a gun and pointing at an empty booze bottle that -somehow- dropped to the floor. Well, at least there was nothing there. He'd really hate for those things living in the cargo hold to get the impression that he was losing his mind. Then again, though, they can sneak through the walls...what if one was watching him...right now...
"Heheh, gotcha, didn't I?" he says loudly, forcing a laugh that comes out only a little too dry. "You creatures just think I'm losing my mind, eh? I'll show you...I'll show all of you! I can resist your villainous Marker! -Ah hell where's Pi?" he adds irritably, hunting around for the ever-popular "Memoirs" notebook (that by now is just shy of being a novel) that he could've sworn he'd put in the co-pilot's seat. After all, somebody's got to sit there, and being as he's started reffering to the notebook as 'Pi' (pronounced as 'pea'), there you go. But Pi seems to have moved on, much to his owner's disapproval. "Dammit, Pi, this isn't funny! You know I don't like 'Hide and Seek'!"
Just as he's about to commence his search, however, Isaac goes rigid, sensing something just behind him. Slowly, he turns in his seat, only to come face-to-face with none other than...
"-I think I make a much better co-pilot, don't you?"
"YOU!" bellows Isaac.
And there they sit, Isaac and his now very-much deceased lover, er, former lover, facing each other. No words are spoken, but after a while-
"OW!" she cries, clapping a hand to her forehead.
"Get 'er, Marty!" Isaac then throws himself to the floor and army-crawls to the small table set more toward the back of the shuttle, taking refuge beneath it.
"What the-WHY did you throw your plasma cutter at me?"
"To conserve ammo!" he barks at her, brandishing a finger. "WHY were you sitting next to me?"
"Because you seemed lonely!"
"LIES!" he roars, still huddled under the table. "I know your ways! You wanted to attack me! Again!"
"Hey now," she says, her 'eyes' shifting in their sockets. "It's not exactly easy being a necromorph, you know. Sometimes I just get this...urge...and then next thing you know-"
"That's the same lame excuse you used when you were trying to explain that intern you were all over," Isaac growls. Nicole instantly gets defensive.
"Hey! Steve was shy, he just needed a little extra guidance and-!"
"Oh, and getting naked taught him what? Pretty sure he learned 'anatomy' long before he met you!"
"WHY are you being so disagreeable!" she shrieks. "Fine! Stay by yourself and wallow in your waning sanity! See if I care!"
Next thing you know, she scrambles into a vent and goes banging around through the walls, leaving Isaac to scold Marty (aka his plasma cutter) for being a hero. Back down in the cargo hold-
"Oh no, it's her," one of the necromorphs in the cargo hold breathes, listening to the sudden racket in the walls.
"Damn, and I was just starting to enjoy the peace and quiet too..." pouts another, hanging it's head sadly.
Sure enough, she comes lunging out of one of the many vents, only to go storming off to her podium. "Meeting!" she shrieks, and the horde at large groan in unison and 'converge' on the small meeting place. Now what?
"As you may well know," she starts, her tone one of ill-supressed frustration. "it's been almost eight days since the destruction of both the Hive Mind and the Marker, and-"
"-And you STILL haven't coughed up with those bibs you promised!" interrupts an 'enhanced' slasher, pointing a blade at her. At this, a murmur goes up through the crowd at large as they recall the promise that has yet to be kept. Nicole just stares blankly, completely at a loss.
"What the...when did I-?" she starts, but the slasher talks over her.
"You said when we first piled into this dump that you'd find us some bibs! I mean look at me!" To emphasize his point, he freezes, so that they can all clearly see the copious amounts of drool oozing from his mandible. The others seem to become a little self-concious after this, and more than one necromorph is to be seen hiding it's face a little. Nicole is still trying to figure out when the hell she said anything about bibs, but then it comes to her...
"Oh yeah..."
FLASHBACK
"-so follow me and I shall lead you all into glorious convergence!" Nicole cries to the room at large. There's a pause that should (at least in her opinion) have been filled with the cheers of her necromorph following, but instead there's only silence. Confused, she looks down into the small mass, to see them all just staring back at her. Missed cue?
"Um...that's it." she finishes lamely. The others still just look on. Eventually in all the silence, a lone clinking sound is to be heard, from way in the back: one slasher is 'clapping' it's blades together, but stops quickly when it realizes it's the only one doing so.
"Don't any of you understand what I'm telling you?" Nicole asks.
"What do we get out of all this?" someone yells up.
"What do you want?" Now she's really confused. They're not interested in convergence? Since when?
"Bibs!" another voice pipes up from the group. At this there's a mass of commotion. Nicole, at her podium, grins wickedly.
"Just do as I say and you can have all the bibs you want!" She says to a wealth of cheers. "I'll even go so far as to get patterned ones!" The raucous celebratring gets so bad after those words that poor Isaac upstairs is about to have a stroke (you know how loud a divider can be normally...probably sounds to him like there's a pod of whales taken refuge down there, among other things).
BACK TO THE PRESENT
"Okay, okay, fine," Nicole snaps impatiently, waving off the memory. "But that brings me back to the point I was trying to make: It's been eight days and we're still floating around in space!" that last part she says in a hiss.
"...I can live with that." someone pipes up nonchalantly.
"That's you. What about the rest?" the more human of their number narrows her otherwise-empty eyes.
"The Master seems fine with it." a voice calls out. An oddly familiar one...
"Wait a minute...Steve?" Nicole gasps. Hearing it's name, a pregnant in the middle of the congregation perks up. "Yes?"
"Oh my..." She blushes furiously and lowers her head to look at the floor. "What're you doing here?" she mutters. Talk about embarrasing...
"NYAH! W-Where the hell did you come from? URGH-hairball!" chokes a highly amused exploder, which immediately has everyone edging away. "Haha-nyaaaaaah! What's the deal?"
"Huh...not too sure." The pregnant Steve says, glancing down at his swollen gut. "I suppose I always was a family man..."
Back upstairs, Isaac's still on his 'search and rescue' mission for the elusive Pi, when something suddenly occurs to him. "Wait a minute..." he says to himself. His thoughts (whatever they might be) are to be interrupted as-
BOOM!
The whole shuttle is rocked by some large-scale impact, sending it (and everything in it) pitching to one side. That being said...
"AH!" roar some of our decaying stow-aways as, as one, they all go toppling into the side wall. Above the result is similar, with Isaac being thrown into a storage compartment that, on impact, bursts open and showers the room (and the engineer) with all manner of papers, audio and data logs. The moment a disoriented Isaac gets up, the comms reciever comes alive with a transmission, in the form of:
"AGH! Dammit would you watch how the hell you're driving?" an angry male voice booms over the reciever.
"My apologies, sir. Continue with docking proceedure?" a second male voice replies.
"Yeah, yeah..." growls the first voice irritably.
"Proceeding with docking protocol." the second says, and the sounds of random goings-on can be heard in the background. Isaac's eyes are about to pop out of their sockets. There's someone here to rescue him!
"Attention thrid party!" yells the first guy into the reciever. "If there is anyone on board this ship, you have five minutes to respond before we-!"
At this, Isaac bolts over to the reciever and responds hurriedly. As he converses with this new person...
Onboard the second ship...
"They still don't pay me enough for this shit," the captain of the 'new' ship sighs, shaking his head as over the transmission, Isaac's on a tirade about how he's been trying to contact someone other than his dead girlfriend and that there's monsters living in the cargo hold and that he's been out here for oh, so long and blah, blah, blah-
"Alright!" the captain interrupts. "We're coming over to get you now. Make sure your suit is on properly and, uh, that type of thing." He cuts transmission and buries his face in his hands. "GOD this is going to be a loooooooong day...curse Tiedemann and his crazy schemes..."
On the shuttle, however, a shot of dread goes through Isaac. They're coming to get me...now? he thinks. But I haven't found Pi! "Blast it, Pi, where are you?" he cries, taking to the search as he also preps his suit. Just as his helmet comes together, a banging is heard at the shuttle doors, and without Mr. Clarke's consent it's wrenched open by some outside party, plunging the room into a vacuum as two men in some really creepy-looking suits step in. Isaac can only stare as a strange voice is (somehow) heard.
"You the only one?" the voice says. It must be one of the new guys.
"No!" Isaac barks, causing the other two to exchange glances. One of them shrugs.
"That's not what we heard, but ok," he says. "We'll get them. Just follow-"
"I'm not leaving without Pi!" snaps the lone engineer, marching off into the one adjacent room on the shuttle and leaving the two rescuers in total confusion.
"Does he not realize you can't do that in a vacuum?" the one says. The other just shakes his head. Now they know what the captain said about there being a 'loon' in this shuttle. This guy's nuts...
"Look, buddy, you can just as well do that on our ship," the first man says patiently, taking a few steps after Isaac. "But right now, if you haven't noticed, we're in a vacuum and we've only got so much air in our RIGs. So if you would be so kind as to-"
"Not yet dammit!" yells Isaac, still rooting around distractedly. A minute of this later and the two men in the doorway are getting a little tired of the charade, and so opt to grab Isaac and steer him out of the shuttle, despite his insistant protests. Just as they get to the threshold, though, something catches Isaac's eye, and he wreches himself free for a minute in favor of-
"PI!" he cries, snagging the floating notebook from where it was hovering. Clutching said notebook close like it's his first-born son, he turns back to the other two, both of whom seem to have frozen in place (as you can imagine). "Ok, we can go now." he says brightly, and follows them onto the second ship. Once onboard...
"Right, wonderful," says the irritable captain, waving off the newcomer's arrival. "You!" he barks at one of the men that came in with Isaac. "Go put him in stasis until further notice." The man addressed then steers Isaac deeper into the vessel. Isaac, of course, is practically oblivious to this, mainly because he's just glad to be out of that cramped up shuttle. "Guess we're gonna be taking a nap," he says, flipping Pi open and scribbling in it. The guy with him just stares.
"You gave your notebook a name?" he asks quizically.
"Of course!" Isaac replies, still scratching away. "It's a helluva lot more endearing than calling it "the Memoirs of my Sanity!" he starts to laugh at the very thought, leaving the other guy to try and hide the sudden feeling that just crept up in his gut.
Praise Altman for stasis, he thinks to himself as they turn into the stasis room, he really is insane!
Such nice people on this ship, Isaac jots into his trusty pal Pi. Note to self however: be on the lookout for Unitologists. They're everywhere...just like my girlfriend...
~Just as a side note, this is my first time writing sci-fi so I'm hoping that that last part is -somewhat- believable. If not, eh, I tried.~