Welcome to Gaia! ::

"Oh," someone said. "An adventurous one."

It was a short sentence, and from it a great deal could be derived: the speaker was softspoken, was prone to sarcasm, and was extraordinarily light of foot: no steps had preceded it, and this was made more impressive by the fact that they had been made by a pair of extraordinarily-worn engineer boots, heavy and businesslike and unsuited to stealth. The rest of the view jarred just as badly with the voice: it was a thin, young, intelligent voice, smoke-rough around the edges but quiet, and it should have been emerging from some svelte, metrosexual intellectual reeking of coffee and good taste. Instead what Wyatt got was Taym: who looked older than his years, who needed a shave and, to judge from his eyes, several days of really good sleep, and who reeked of cigarette smoke and, oddly, bleach. And "svelte" was less an apt descriptor than a number of other options: skeletal, alarming, perhaps anorexic.

He was wearing a white coat trimmed in gold that looked, despite its informal cut, vaguely military: an officer's uniform viewed through a distorted lens. Paired with the clipboard in his bony hands, the immediate impression was one of some professional organization. This would, as Wyatt would soon learn, as untrue for Taym specifically as it was for Deus as a whole. The effect was surreally and ideally cemented by his shoulder: where an insignia or the bars of office might have gone his coat sported instead a neatly-sewn patch of a frowning face.

"Steady," he added, surveying the clipboard and then Wyatt and eyeing the man's sideburns with an unreadable expression. "Name?"

At the meth comment Taym slowly closed his eyes, with the unmistakeable air of someone counting silently to ten before letting his temper run away. It gave him time to at least somewhat organize his thoughts. Last time he'd done this it had been Leslie, and if there was any benevolence in the universe (ha, he thought) this one would at least not come to an actual fistfight.*

"If that's true, the kidney thing," is what he finally said as he opened his eyes again and took them back to the clipboard, checking off a series of boxes, "it's about to be a thing of the past, you'll be glad to hear. Luckily for you harvesting your organs isn't on my agenda anyway although," he added, with a grim baring of his teeth (look Ma, all intact and straight if admittedly yellow, so take your meth comments and shove it, a*****e), "you will find that I am in surprisingly small company in that regard. My name is Thompson. Well, McCoy--" OK, so apparently asking for his name had been a formality, or possibly a test "--welcome to Deus Ex Machina. I don't know how much you remember, but you signed up for this. It'll come back."

"Deus Ex Machina," he repeated, slowly, as if Wyatt were perhaps a bit slow on the uptake. "More specifically you're in the Bermuda Triangle. The weather's great but the constant threat of giant squid monsters not so much." He said this in the most blase way possible. It was suspiciously as though he wasn't joking.

Having finished whatever mysterious business he had with the clipboard, Taym tucked it under his arm and gave Wyatt an unimpressed once-over. "As for your hat, I'm assuming it's with the rest of your personal effects in your room, which will be your next stop after a couple of detours. You'll be in the basement, he added, tipping the clipboard a bit to confirm what he'd just read. "Great real estate but there's occasionally centipedes in the shower heads. If you meet a really hot redhead with a great rack and an obnoxious tattoo down there, salute her. It will make your stay much easier. Maybe call her 'sir' and 'drill sergeant' a bit, she likes that." She probably didn't, he had no idea, but the idea of Wyatt snapping to attention and calling America sit brightened up his morning considerably. "That is, assuming you brought your hat. Everything'll come back," he repeated.

Relaxing a little, he added: "Getting information around here is a little like trying to get blood out of a turnip, but some are more helpful than others. Luckily for you, I am one of the some. Unluckily for you, I only know what I myself have managed to wring out of people. It's just that there's no real point trying to soak up too much until you can remember past the last twenty minutes without trying too hard. About that detour: you need a minute? The first one's a ******** of a doozy."

"It might be," he returned with a sort of vicious pleasure that was the closest Taym ever got to being cheery. "It was a dead deer, in my case." He pointed down the row of pods. "We'll be taking you to a place called the Cove. That's where you'll get armed. Don't panic, this part's easy--you'll know what to do and if you don't your weapon will. You wouldn't have woken up, otherwise." On that particularly optimistic note, he scanned the clipboard one more time, tucked it back under his arm, and set off in the direction of the Cove fully expecting Wyatt to follow.

There was a bit of self-importance here, it was obvious, and it seemed ill-suited to the way he moved, with a constant tension reminiscent--perhaps appropriately--of a deer ready to spring away from some lurking danger. "Once you're out on the other side there'll be more information for you, and you'll pick up your uniform and, let's hope for you, your hat. And there will be," he added, with a note of satisfaction, "work. Let's hope you're ready for a lot of that."

"Me," he answered, "or someone, in any case. You'll be picking up your phone, too--it's hooked up to the island intranet, so no outside internet but we have a Twitter clone and some other things. I'll text you some information to go over, once you're remembering a little more. Like signing up for this," he added grimly. "Some of it probably won't be great to recall, but hold in there, you get used to it."

(He took a deep breath after that, and maybe it was from all the talking and maybe it wasn't.)

He paused at the door, and stuck out a bony hand for a surprisingly-strong handshake that was half-welcome, half-farewell. What Wyatt did not know that Taym did was that Wyatt as a civilian, as a human, would not exist within a few minutes: Wyatt would be a Hunter, and there'd be some voice camped in his head, either giving or taking orders, and he'd have a body that was no longer truly his own. "Welcome to a career, hopefully long and prosperous, of saving the world. Don't freak out over what's about to happen. You aren't crazy, or at least you aren't any more crazy than everyone else here, which is admittedly a low bar, and you'll come out better when it's over--not just the kidneys, either. Better in every way." A lie, but Taym was accustomed to delivering big lies. "Good luck."