The meeting was more or less a wake up call for Ashleigh. The pictures were by no means anything that was frightening, or even new to her, but the gravity of the situation was finally pounding down on the poor girl. These high ranking military folk were talking about the crisis without a whole lot of inflection. Everything was fact; this was this; that was that. Nothing more to it. The aerial views of the city they were to start the investigation in were the real objects of that brought the whole ordeal closer to home. The streets were void of life. There weren't any shoppers looking in windows or families in the parks; all that existed were buildings becoming victims to the elements and creatures roaming between them looking for the next person to kill.<br/><br/>That last point may not even be the case, Ashleigh thought once the next picture was in place. That was the point of the whole mission in the first place, no? The meeting continued on with the higher-ups explaining again what she already knew, leaving her looking rather bored at the screen on the wall. She wasn't so arrogant enough to yawn, but was close to it by the time the meeting had finished. A number of the men left the room, while a few stayed to speak with the other woman in the room. This was when the scientist caught Derrick looking at her curiously, his teeth showing but only against the edge of his bottom lip.<br/><br/>"I'll wait..." Ashleigh said, standing up from her seat, "We're not leaving immediately, I don't think. I'm going to go to my room and try to register all of this." She lifts up the chair slightly in her relatively small, dainty hands to tuck it under the table silently. Not wanting to put Derrick off, considering his words were only out of concern (or so she thought), the young woman flashed him a smile before heading to the door.<br/><br/>"I'm sure someone here is bound to offer me a gun at some point. I'd really like to avoid that as much as I can." Ashleigh turned on her heel to face Derrick. Both of her hands held the frame of the door loosely as she spoke. "Maybe on the plane or something, huh?"<br/><br/>With that, Ashleigh left the room completely, walking down the halls rather aimlessly in hopes of finding someone that could lead her in the right direction to the quarters. She wanted to get at her laptop so she could start organizing herself for the investigation. Gathering 'live' samples was one thing, but if you don't even catalog it properly, you're bound to get a whole shitload of discrepancies. The way that Ashleigh does conduct her research is a strange one in the first place. Her work since putting her degree on hold is filled with little quirks and messages; things that only she could truly understand like sayings and obvious curses in place of real discoveries. It was her own sort of way of encoding, though she wasn't really conscious of it.<br/><br/>Getting to do that, however, depended on a few of things. First, if she actually finds where the hell the living quarters were. Second, if she finds it before being called up to some military plane just to jump off of it. And third, if none of the members of the team decide to follow her lead. Not that the latest of those was really an awful thing.<br/><br/><em>Maybe a change of clothes would be a good idea,</em>Ashleigh looked down at her shirt and skirt. A little shimmer on her waist reminded her that she had sunglasses tucked into the fringe of her bottoms, just in time to put them on before she walked right into the sun's rays pounding through one of the windows.<em>I wonder if I get to have one of those skin tight, armoured cat suits that are always in the movies...</em>