Cassandra: New beginnings

Cassandra emerged into the cold musty air from her stasis pod with an apprehensive frown as she took in the millennia’s of filth, neglect and decay around her
Many of the lights had but there was sufficient illumination for her to make out the dozens of empty stasis pods around her that seemed to have been smashed open from the outside, glass and metal strewn across the corridor
There was rust (or was it dried blood?) everywhere
“Huh” she murmured, trying to suppress an involuntary shiver “I don’t think we’re in Kansas anymore”
Several other crewmembers were beginning to emerge from their own pods around her, and were gazing around in similar bemusement
One of them, a man, caught her eye
“Any idea what’s happened?” he asked, gesturing helplessly around the place
“Dunno” she replied “Unless we’re all absorbing lethal doses of radiation at the moment, it’ll have taken somewhere in the region of a million or more years for the cadmium to have decayed to background levels, but...”
Distant screaming and then gunshots filled the air
“What the smeg was that?” Cass snapped, nervously backing away from the direction the sounds had come from “Holly?”
“Oh, what now!?” Holly’s voice crackled tiredly from a couple of dusty speakers either side of a cracked, dead monitor set on the wall nearby “Always with the questions!”
“You’re still functioning!?” Cass smiled moving over towards the monitor, trying to see if she could switch it on or somehow resurrect it “I’m pleased to see my handiwork wasn’t all so bad”
“Huh” Holly sneered “And to think I’d forgotten about you all, hiding down here; I might have done something a little more ‘proactive’ about it, had I remembered”
“What? - You mean it wasn’t you who brought us out of stasis?”
“Nah - I was quite happy with the way things were without you lot interfering; although I did wonder where all those dead humans were coming from – it must have been here...”
Cass let this slide, although it was worryingly obvious that there was something very wrong with both Holly, and whatever it was that had been going on
“Uh... What was with that screaming and shooting?” she asked, changing the subject
“Oh, that was just one of you humans taking pot shots at a couple of the life forms that have evolved recently”
“Huh” Cass grunted, pulling a handheld terminal out of her pocket and using it to try to access the local net “Are they dangerous?”
“Yeah, totally” Holly’s head, crown and all swam up on the little screen “The lizards have taken to sacrificing humans recently - and they’re the nice ones”
“What!?” the guy Cass had just been talking to exploded; she hadn’t realised he was listening in
“What the hell for!?” he demanded
“Well, their holy war against the squid isn’t going so well, and they’re trying to curry favour with me, in the hope I’ll intervene...”
“You’re joking!?” Cass asked, her attention divided between the conversation and the shipboard diagnostics she was running; the readings didn’t look so good: Dives dead, dodgy hull integrity, some areas depressurised, others filled with exotic atmospheres
“Nope. I’m their God-King” Holly smirked “And you’re trespassing”
“What the...” Cass started, startled at some of the results she had seen on her terminal before it suddenly sparked and fused in her hands
“Ow” she hissed, dropping it to suck her fingers “What the smeg? Hol?”
The speakers stayed silent
“Holly?”
Still no response
“Oh, smegging smeg” Cass muttered worriedly before turning to the other crewmembers nearby
“C’mon guys” she said brightly “let’s go find the others; I want to make friends with someone with a lot of very big guns...”

<tag / tbc>

<ooc> Holly may well be running a little below par, but it doesn’t look like he’s friendly any more</ooc>