taxonomites | 001 ━ [ holo ] / [ location: the sanctuary ].

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001 ━ [ holo ] / [ location: the sanctuary ].

Ten o'clock sharp. Perfect. Today was the day Liz would be meeting with Congresswoman Whitaker for the first time. She'd contacted her office while still in Florida at her aunt's, wanting to actively take part in her community in a way that wasn't alien-related. It had been something of a long shot, being that Liz was just a junior in high school and not a college student who surely had more qualifying credentials than her, but to her amazement, the congresswoman had expressed near immediate interest in her filling the position. Something about a lack of applications. Never the less, Liz was grateful for the opportunity and nothing, not Max Evans or any of his alien drama, was going to stop her from getting her life back on track. She didn't need Max. She'd forgotten about Max.

Okay, she was still in the process of forgetting about Max, but she'd come a long way from walking way from him at the crash sight back in May. The new school year was starting and Liz was restarting herself. Back to being Liz Parker. Back to being--

...not in the backroom of the Crashdown. Last she checked, the stairs from her family's apartment did not lead down into some creepy, metallic room.

And here she thought she was alien fiasco free. Of course.

"Hello?" She ventured, seemingly unphased. If anything, she was more annoyed than she was afraid. There was fear-- there was always fear in these types of situations-- but Liz had seen them do worse. (Them, of course, being those she assumed were to blame for this.) She continued on, despite the lack of an answer. She hadn't really been expecting one right away. "I want to speak to Agent Pierce."

Still nothing. Alright. Liz moved off the platform to the floor, closer to the tablet that she had no idea was recording her right now.

"I know why you've brought me here. I'm not going to fight you. I'm willing to talk, but only to Agent Pierce. I'll tell you everything you want to know, but just him or I'm not saying a word about what I know."

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The first voice that answers sounds tired but business-like.

"Not Agent Pierce, don't know him. I'm Agent Smecker, and I'm almost 99% certain that whatever situation you think this is, you are wrong, miss."

Edited 2011-03-02 10:13 (UTC)

I said, I wanted to talk to Agent Pierce.

[ only, it's not really pierce she wants to talk to. pierce is dead, michael killed him. not many know that, though, thanks to nasedo wearing pierce's face right now. she doesn't care for the shapeshifter at all, but she can play the max card and get herself out of this. as much as she hates this alien drama and wants to forget about max, there's no denying that max will give nasedo hell on earth if he lets anything happen to her on his watch. ]

"Heard what you said," says the man in that same flat tone. "Unfortunately what you want is not of particular interest to the entities who've brought us here, miss. There is no Agent Pierce here. I can try to answer your questions, or you can exercise your prerogative to talk to nobody but Agent Pierce and, eventually, expire of boredom. Your call."

Entities.

[ now that had liz's attention. she allowed some of the fear that she quite honestly felt to seep into her tone. ]

What kind of entities?

Not that Liz could see it, but Paul sat down heavily on his couch, closing his eyes a moment at the fear in the young woman's tone. Trying to work civilians (or at least, people he thought were civilians) through uncomfortable and frightening situations was Part of the Job, but even after three months in Taxon he hadn't figured out a good way to break the news of something this fucked-up.

"Popular consensus is that they are aliens. They... seem, and this is just a hypothesis, to be able to look like whatever they want. The most common form they've chosen to use is giant hamsters, and no, I'm not fu-- screwing with you, miss, and no, there is no candid camera unless they're the ones running it."

He paused as if something had just occurred to him. "They do have a pretty frickin' screwy sense of humor, so maybe we shouldn't rule out entirely that this is, perhaps, the intergalactic version of Punk'd. Abduct humans! Mess with their heads! Film it for shits and giggles!"

Paul took a deep breath then said in a more even tone of voice. "Sorry. It's been a hell of a week here, and I'm likely not explaining this in the most orderly fashion."

Punk'd. [ she echos, verbally focusing on that, yet absorbing all the rest. ] Is that what this is? 'Cause you know, usually when you pull out the 'okay, I'll talk to the FBI' card, the guilty parties step out from behind the curtains in the suits left over from the spring formal and bad Halloween costumes.

Which, you can go ahead and do. You got me. Nice scene-change trick, guys. Not sure how much my mother's going to love the kitchen being turned into some b-movie autopsy set that didn't even come with one of those probing tables.

Paul thumbs the 'visual' function on his tablet into life, although he doubts she'll be any more convinced by his face than his words. But it seems marginally more polite. Or honest. Something.

He takes a breath. "It's not any of that. Look, everything you're going through right now, miss, the room, the realizing about the bracelet, the certainty this is all a joke and at any minute someone's going to leap out and go gotcha-- I went through it too. Everyone else who's going to talk to you went through it.

"I realize that probably doesn't make it any more believable, but..."

Paul sighs. "Look, I can keep calling you miss all day, but I'm already old enough to be your dad and I'll pass on sounding old enough to be your grandfather. What's your name?"

It doesn't take long for Liz to spot the tablet, the bright screen as it switched to the visual function catching her eye. She wanders over to it, not yet touching it, but hovering near enough to see the man talking to her.

"Liz," she answers. "Liz Parker."

"Hi Liz," says Paul in the voice he thinks of his 'patient' voice. "Like I said, I'm Agent Smecker, and yeah, I'm FBI, not that it means a hell of a lot here. Ex-FBI, whatever. ...Paul, if you prefer.

"The thing I'm talking to you on? It's called a tablet. It's your key out of the room if nobody else has explained that yet. When you go through the door you're going to be in a building; outside the building is an entire city.

"If you can still make yourself believe it's all a prank once you've seen the city... then you've got greater control over your mind than I do."

I'm not a he nor an agent, but I am a Pierce. Katherine Pierce, to be exact. You can always talk to me, if you'd like.

[ there's a smile in her tone. protip, liz; don't talk to her. ]

[ unfamiliar voice isn't usually good, and a possible relation to a man whose murder you helped cover up isn't any better. ]

Do you know him?

Can't say that I do. Sorry.

[ because, really, all her immediate relations are long since dead. ]

So, you're taking this whole alien abduction onto a foreign planet gig pretty calmly.

[ liz used to hate lying, but now it's so second nature to her it almost makes her wince. it's amazing how valuable you find something you once found so loathsome when you've been through the things she has, seen the things she has, and knew the things she does. ]

I'm from Roswell. People pull these kinds of pranks all the time.

[ and going for the 'i was making this all up to get a rise' angle. ]

Indeed? Our abductors do have a sense of humor, after all. Well, you should feel right at home in Taxon, then.

[ liz is still acting just a bit too calmly about this and it's raising katherine's suspicions - and curiosity. could be that the girl just hasn't yet comprehended that this is no joke, but no ordinary person with an everyday, ordinary life could be that unruffled at suddenly ending up in that arrival chamber. and just who was this agent pierce she was asking for, anyway? ]

Have you got a name, Miss Roswell?

Edited 2011-03-02 14:24 (UTC)

Abductors.

[ so, it was alien drama, just not the FBI end of things. just alien. she wasn't sure if that was better or worse. ]

Liz. [ she debates, for a moment, on not giving her last name. ...yet, if she's rolling with just being a high school student who thinks she's being punked x-files style, she might as well. hell, they probably already know her name, anyway. topolsky said all their names were on that list. ] Liz Parker.

Abductors, kidnappers, zoo keepers, aliens, hamsters... take your pick.

[ vague sense of amusement is starting to creep in for katherine. this girl is curiously calm - no apparent disbelief, shock, hysteria, anger - and the vampire is waiting to see if she can get some kind of reaction out of the newcomer. ]

Nice to meet you, Liz Parker. I hope you weren't in the middle of anything pressing, it might be a while before you're sent back to Roswell.

[ aliens. zoo keepers; like some sort of human on display. not in roswell. no max. no max. it's what she wanted, but... not like this. ]

This really isn't funny. Whatever's going on here, it needs to stop.

[ well, finally. excuse katherine, liz, while she just kind of... chuckles at that. :| ]

Yeah, truth hurts sometimes, doesn't it? You can try tapping your heels together, but I'm pretty sure that won't work.

There's not an Agent Pierce here. [ there is a pierce, but elena's hoping she's gotten to the tablet before katherine has. (you're too late, elena, and you'd better hope she doesn't question why you two sound so much alike.) ] I can tell you some of what's going on, though.

Edited 2011-03-02 18:22 (UTC)

[ wait. that voice... didn't it just speak to her a moment ago? not that liz is any stranger to one person in two places at once. (thanks, nasedo.) ]

Katherine? I don't know what kind of prank this is, but it's not very funny.

[ ...well, shit. ]

No, I'm not Katherine. I'm her sister, Elena.

[ there might be a slight grimace evident in elena's voice as she calls herself katherine's sister. she really hates this part of the cover story. ]

What did she tell you?

Edited 2011-03-02 18:48 (UTC)

Oh. Twins. Sorry. [ even she's surprised by how genuine her laugh sounds. she hates that this whole thing with max has turned her into such a good actress, and for all the wrong (well right, moralistically) reasons. ] Logic usually doesn't factor in with a prank.

That I've been abducted by aliens. Because no-one's ever used that one before.

[ she manages a polite chuckle herself, though hers sounds less sincere. ] Don't worry about it. You're not the first to mistake us for each other. [ elena, you might want to try a little harder to keep the bitterness out of your tone, there. ]

She's...actually not lying about that. You see that band on your wrist?

[ liz lifts up her wrist and discovers, for the first time, the bracelet that all lucky abductees get upon being kidnapped to taxon. she pulls at it, yelping a bit when the tug pulls on her flesh in turn, sending a sharp pain up her arm and down into her fingers. she shakes her hand out. this... this was starting to scare her more than the usual alien uneasiness that she'd somehow grown accustomed to. ]

What is this, superglue? Doesn't anyone read the tube; it's not supposed to go on skin.

It's not glued, it's more like...fused onto our skin. You can't remove it, but it keeps track of your budget and what you hatch. Something like that. It's how you can tell who was abducted and who's an Extra.

[ pause. ]

Extras are like the natives here, but they're more like robots than actual people.

I need to sit down.

[ and she does, crossing her legs and resting her elbows on her thighs as she drops her head into her hands. this is getting to be a little too much. ]

Whoever you guys are, you're taking this prank way too far.

"There's no Agent Pierce here," Martha promised, gently. She didn't recognise Liz, but there was something about her words - about the idea of a person being taken away from her home to be questioned by 'agents' - that was unpleasantly familiar. It sounded like the darker aspects of UNIT. It sounded like the sort of thing she'd joined the organisation to stop.

"I'm Martha. Doctor Martha Jones. You're in a city called Taxon."

Doctor still sent a shiver up her spine that she did her best to ignore. She'd seen flashes of what the FBI had done to Max while he was trapped in the white room and suddenly, she began to fear that the same would happen to her-- No. Nasedo would learn she was there and he would get her out; claim that she was just a human being and that her knowledge of the aliens had already been investigated and she knew nothing. Something would be done. Wouldn't it?

"Taxon. Is that in New Mexico?"

"Definitely not. From what we've seen, it isn't even on Earth."

Martha gave Liz a sympathetic smile. She was used to giving bad news - it wasn't officially part of her medical training, but it was something that the students had to pick up quickly - but she'd never enjoy it. She wished she had better news.

"I'm really sorry, but ... you've been kidnapped by aliens. I know that sounds mad, but it's the truth."

"Not Earth?"

Okay, this was getting a little too weird, even for her. While the notion of leaving the planet had occurred to her a few times, she'd never seriously considered it. They'd been pieces of brief, fleeting fantasies of the much more innocent teenage girl she'd been at the start of all this, where she dreamed of following Max to the edge of the universe if she had to. Actually being off the planet was madness.

"Alright, I've been kidnapped. I'll buy kidnapped, but really, aliens? I'm from Roswell. I've heard that one a dozen times. Can't you just call my parents and demand ransom money?"

"It's not Earth," Martha confirmed, "And I'm not the one keeping you here. I'm a prisoner, just like you." She held up her wrist, showing Liz the metal bracelet that marked out all of the prisoners and separated them from the Extras. "We all are."

She gave Liz a sad smile.

"We don't know what they're after, but it definitely isn't a ransom."

It wasn't that simple.

Not Earth. No Max. Not Earth. No Max. Suddenly, Liz felt like she couldn't breath and she backed up until her back hit one of the cool metal walls, letting her knees give out as she slowly slid down to the floor. As much as she wanted to keep pretending she was convinced this was a joke, the truth of the matter was that Liz Parker, after all that she'd been through, knew better than to assume this was a prank. Something was really happening to her and apparently that something meant she wasn't even on the right planet anymore.

She wasn't quite sure what to think about that.

"And I'm just...stuck here? In this room?"

"No, you can get out of the room," Martha assured her quickly, "You just need to pick up the tablet - that's the device you're using to talk to me - and the door will open. There's a whole city outside."

Taxon was undoubtedly a prison, but it was a very unusual sort of prison.

Liz had been standing in close proximity to the tablet this whole time and eyed it wearily. There was a part of herself that told her not to touch it, not to take the risk; but a large part demanded that she do so. Risks were something she had been attempting to avoid since she resolved to leave Max Evans and the chaos that was his life behind her, but she'd be lying to herself if she didn't say she missed the thrill she got from reaching out into the unknown.

She took the tablet in her hands, lifting it up, off the podium. Almost immediately the doors parted.

"And it's...safe to go out?"

"For now."

Taxon certainly wasn't a safe city, but, in Martha's world, London - or Cardiff, for that matter - could be just as dangerous. The prisoners made the best of it. They stuck together and they survived.

"Sometimes, the systems that are keeping us here - the systems that the aliens use to control us - malfunction. We call them glitches."

"That doesn't sound good," Liz commented, taking a step back from the door. She kept hoping she'd wake up and find herself asleep at her desk, or even that Tess was playing some sort of mind game on her.

Didn't seem to be the case, however. That frightened her.

"It's not," admitted Martha, frowning slightly when Liz pulled back from the door. "But we can survive them if we work together."

That was how they'd managed to get through the zombie invasion, after all. It hadn't been easy and it hadn't been without casualties, but Martha - who had seen her home planet reduced to ash by an alien tyrant and watched her race rounded up into slave camps - knew that it could have been much worse.

"Ah... afraid I don't know any Agent Pierce," Elisa said. "And the news just goes downhill from there."

Liz may be familiar with aliens, but she's never seen anything that looks quite as alien as this woman does to her now. Max, Michael, Isabel and Tess had humanoid bodies, and Nasedo never let any of them see-- not even Tess-- what his true form looked like. She wouldn't be able to tell an Antarian from an extra on Babylon 5. It takes her a moment to speak and look elsewhere. Staring is rude, after all.

"I've got a sinking feeling I don't want to know."

"Yeaaah," Elisa admits. "You've been abducted by aliens--which I am not a representative of--to a city called Taxon, along with all kinds and types of other people."

"Then, what are you?" She asks, aware of her rudeness, but not quite able to apologize for it just yet. It's a valid question and Liz is starting to suspect more and more that this isn't the situation she thought it was.

Elisa occasionally wonders if she should amend her "not an alien" explanation to include that part.

"I'm a Gargoyle. Kind of like the statues. My name's Elisa."

"Hi, Elisa. I'm Liz."

Gargoyle. Liz took art first semester, and although the class material had been largely a blur due to the chaos that had been her life at the time, she remembered touching upon that when they were working with clay and talking about architecture.

"You don't really look like a statue."

"Yeah, well, call my kind the inspiration for the real thing," Elisa said.

"Nice to meet you, Liz, though I wish it were under better circumstances."

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