(a.)
[Something is wrong. It's in the quality of the air—unrecycled—, or the packing of the mattress under her—springs—, or to do with the sudden absence of the fine noises—the faint murmuring of the Jupiter's electrical systems, the filtration network, the engine itself. She knows it before she is even fully conscious.

And then she is conscious, and everything is wrong.

The suddenness with which Maureen jerks upright into a sitting position is so abrupt as to rattle the bed's headboard against the wall, producing a dull thunk and threatening to wake her partner in bed. And if that doesn't do the trick, she's already grasping at the shoulder of the person beside her, saying,]

John— [before turning her head far enough to recognize that the person beside her is definitively not her husband. Her hand recoils back from the unfamiliar.]

(b.)
[Okay.

So there's no whiteboard, but there is a pad of paper and a pen (ballpoint, and everything) to be scrounged from a drawer in the kitchen. Later, she will regret beginning writing directly instead of examining the top sheet for ghost marks of previous notes. But in the moment:]

Let's work through it.

[She is talking to her companions. They've all at least made it as far as the kitchen with all its bright formica and check curtains across the window over the sink. Mental and physical well being? Debatable. But no one's catatonic with panic or running screaming through the neighborhood, so they could be doing worse. Maureen herself, leaning over the writing pad and already beginning to make a series of rapid notes, seems to be—

Not calm. There is a barely contained quality of momentum to her, a sort of humming beneath the skin quality very like the rapid oscillation of a well tuned, but stressed machine. But she is upright, and moving, and thinking, and has rid herself of the menagerie of pins and rollers she woke up in. So, yeah. She could be doing a lot worse too.]

We'll start by listing where we all came from, and the last things we remember before we woke up here. Let's go broad. But if there's a detail that jumps out at you as being strange or particular, then we can make a note of it.

[Go quickly and calmly, the radio had said.

The reality on the stairwell down to the shelter under the fire station doesn't line up very well with Chapman's advice. It's turned into a river of hurrying bodies, a series of faces gone chalk white with fear; men and women dressed in their work suits and uniforms, or in their day dresses, some clutching parcels and some without coats despite the weather.

And suddenly: the awkward pile-up of foot traffic from which struggles to emerge a woman in her late forties, wearing a heavy corduroy coat likely snatched from her husband's side of the closet, who seems to have made it as far as half way down the stairs and is now trying to move back in the wrong direction.]

[ooc; Feel free to throw something my way, or reach out to this journal via PM to plot something. More than happy to write prose or brackets; I'll match your prefs. If you're not familiar with Maureen, you kind find a comically extensive wiki entry here.]