[hr][center][h1][color=f49ac2]Owen Childs[/color][/h1][/center][hr]

Owen tightened his lips as Echo laughed. Yeah, he could see the hilarity in all of it, maybe, if he wasn’t one of the poor bastards that was currently in the rather surreal situation. His mind went back to the earlier thought that, perhaps, all of this had been a test by Cryonautics to see how people would actually react to being the thawing remnants of human society, the scientists and board members huddled around monitor screens and scratching down notes about the rapidly deteriorating crew. It was too farfetched of an idea now. He knew Cryonautics had a rather healthy budget, but he doubted they would’ve greenlit an entire alien prison scenario, especially since they were already doing a great job of falling apart when stuck in their own version of a real-life bottle episode. 

He tensed as the door opened, and almost lunged at the alien that pulled Tahlia away before better sensibilities and pure cowardice held him back. What could he have done to stop the Skullman? Even if he had Doc’s laser sword, he had seen how that little moment of heroism had played out. He was already shocked, frightened, and befuddled; he didn’t need to add beaten and bruised to the list. He kept telling himself that if they wanted to kill them they already would’ve, and they hadn’t. However, that didn’t mean that they didn’t want to experiment on them with all sorts of sharp, alien instruments that would pretty much be equivalent to torture by human standards. Owen relaxed, if only slightly, as Tahlia was ushered back through the door, weird bread and waterskin in hand. 

[i]Great. Even aliens have crappy prison food.[/i]

There was something that Owen had been ignoring for quite sometime, although he couldn’t say if it had been consciously or subconsciously, and that had been Yaz’s quiet crying. He felt a twist in his stomach as he realized that he had been avoiding acknowledging it completely for selfish reasons: simply put, he didn’t want to play the role that Echo had been so enthusiastically forcing upon him. Although, maybe that wasn’t the whole thing. He should’ve been talking to her and trying to, in someway, make her feel better, he should’ve kept his cool in the first place, and surely he should’ve said something when she uttered that she wasn’t ready to die. 

But, considering the situation, he just had nothing helpful to say. Sometimes, saying nothing was better than saying the wrong thing. This time, though, as he turned his eyes away from Yaz so that he didn’t have to see her face, he knew it was one of those situations where saying nothing at all was the worst of options. Tahlia was the one to speak up for him and to reassure Yaz, rescuing him from the task that he either didn’t want or didn’t have it in him to do. A dozen bleak scenarios, like the possibility of experimentation from earlier, popped up into his head for reason why they wouldn’t want them dead yet, but he kept them to himself. He didn’t know if Tahlia’s words actually put Yaz at ease, but he knew for certain that his ones wouldn’t.

[color=f49ac2]“You seriously ate that?”[/color] he asked, looking at Tahlia incredulously in hopes of distracting the others from any conversation about their safety.