driftfleet | (no subject)

Who: Natasha Romanoff & You
Broadcast: Fleetwide
Action: Marsiva
When: 6/24

Video

[Transmission starts at the same moment the woman laying in fram shifts from unconsciousness to tense stillness—her eyes open, darting, and she goes tense, but otherwise there's no movement from her for the first four or five seconds. That seems to be how long it takes her to process that she's in an unfamiliar space with no memory of how she came to be lying there. Then one hand balls consciously into a fist. Her eyes flutter. Jaw tightens.

Natasha takes a deep breath and forces her body to relax muscle by muscle.

Seems like spies don't make for great entertainment when they first wake up. Not unless you find tension and veiled suspicious looks riveting. The first minute or two isn't much more than that. She wakes up. She sits up. She swings her legs over the edge of her cot and stretches her back, trying to flex the adrenaline out of her muscles.

She looks directly into the camera at one point, her expression flat, lips tightening in a frown. She taps the edge of the lens experimentally.]

You know, if you're gonna kidnap a girl you could at least buy her dinner first.

[Her voice is just a touch to defiant to be neutral as she speaks.

Then she hauls herself to her feet. The last thing caught on camera before the broadcast ends is a shot of her catsuited figure walking away.]

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

... Um. Okay, what is the right question?

How about whether I was here before?

[She has to take a second to digest that information, and then:]

Just to check, this isn't a prank, right? I did not understand your sense of humor at all, so...

Sorry. Nothing funny about it.

Edited 2016-06-28 04:55 (UTC)

... Yeah, definitely not funny.

Okay, um. This must be creepy. Let's start over. Hi, I'm Nightingale, and I write a guide for the new people here if you want to take a look.

Nightingale. Nice to meet you. [Only a little irony in that.] Not creepy, but it's certainly something.

What kind of a guide?

Basic information, running history, that sort of thing. One second.

[The camera shakes as she picks up the communicator to send a link to a document.]

This could be useful. Thanks.

[She's already got some of this from the people who got to her before, but some of it's still new. Natasha skims over it quickly as she comments, not taking it all in but getting a few details here and there.]

So does it happen a lot, people showing up who you've seen before but who don't remember being here?

I hear it does. I usually just run into people I knew in my last interdimensional shithole who don't remember that one.

There's more than one of these?

[This is a lot. Maybe too much.]

Yeah, there's...

[She starts to count off on her fingers.]

The castle I was at- "Kyriakos", the hell library, Aather, the other castle "Paradisa", the "Drabwurld", the weird Earth future "Exsilium", Asgard, "the Court"... And these are just the ones I know about. I've been avoiding prying, because a lot of them are hell.

That's kind of you.

So what about this one? Is it hell, or did I just get lucky?

You got lucky, unless your idea of hell is 'incredible boredom'. Because there's a lot of that.

Boredom would definitely be a change of pace. I'm not sure I'd call it hell, but it's not ideal.

You got lucky and showed up while we were on a good planet. The rest were... Well, you can see in the guide.

Poison planet. That one stood out.

Yeah. There's not much in the guide on that one because I spent the entire stay there avoiding the hell out of that planet.

I can't imagine why. Who doesn't want to wear a gas mask. Stylish and comfortable.

[When faced with adversity, there's always deadpan sarcasm to fall back on.]