Turn 2.0: "Someone Forgot to Pay the Power Bill!"
Dimitrio hardly gave anyone time to answer; his face grave with concern
as he mumbled to himself, "This is strange. I swear everything was fine
when I handed over my shift." His face turned to a mischievious smile as
he states out loud, "If any of you bump your head too hard, the name of the
engineer in charge is Jonah, so you go deal with him."
His boxers hung loose on his skinny frame and with a calmness of
someone who was not new in zero G environments, he pushed himself off the
wall towards his bunk. He quickly tied his belongings up in a neat bundle
using his bed sheets. He put on his utility harness over his deathly white
torso and clipped on his tool kit. He then pushed off the floor again,
swirling on his way back to the door. He chuckled as some of his companions
wandered about aimlessly throughout the room. "You may as well enjoy it;
it's quite fun once you get the hang of it."
Lugwig secured his few possessions while reaching for his floating pack
and glided across the room halting short of where Nola and Jake seemed to be
tangled together. "Why you two ssstuck to each other?" he asked, his muzzle
only inches from their faces in the darkness.
"Yesss yesss, iss thiss ssome ssort of human way of greeting? Mr. Haldig
why do you lookie sssso happy? Ms. T'ssharn you sshould come by Ssick Bay
ssoon sso I can take a lookie, peepy, gander at thossse teeth," he said all in
one rush, pausing only momentairily for a quick reaction from Jake or Nola.
'Dig' ignored the T'sa doctor and decided to let the curvaceous woman go,
saying, "Oh boy, look’s like it’s time for us to go to work, Nola...We can
resume this, ah, conversation later. If that wasn’t an explosion..."
Nola wrenched her arm free from Jake's grip and consequently flailed a bit
across the room as she hurriedly made the attempt to rectify her awkward
position. She nearly collided with Lugwig, but the agile reptile slithered
somehow to avoid her.
As he listed around weightlessly, Zach had also heard the dull boom. "What
was that?" he thought. He had never cared that much for zero-g training. He
liked having his feet under him, and that extra little bit of control. He
tried to maneuver around the various pieces of equipment. His goal was the
comm panel. No sense in guessing about things. Getting there wasn't easy. He
had to find something to push off of. Some of the larger pieces of equipment
gave him a little bit of bearing and he got to the wall and pushed off of that
and when he did, he said, "Coming through!"
Nola, having relaxed a bit after avoiding Lugwig (or was it that he had
avoided her?), heard Zach's warning and saw him headed straight for her. She
panicked and held her hands up in front of her, but it was too late.
"Look out..." Nola said.
"No...wait! I...unnnnhhhh..." Zach answered, flailing his arms and legs.
Neither the technician nor the security officer could alter their direction
once they had launched themselves and so he barreled into her, immediately
becoming tangled up with prettiest girl he'd ever seen...and no computer manual
was nearby to take his attention away from that fact at the moment.
They both spun out of control, drifting toward Alex's bed. After steadying
herself against the bed side, Nola gave Zach a look of frustration...but it
quickly dissolved into one of humor as they began laughing at their predicament.
Alex lay back on his bed, listening to them. He hadn't been sleeping well
anyway and the large boom did nothing to make him want to go back to sleep. The
top brass had sent him down here to float messages back and forth, dragging him
from his Escort Duty flying REAL ships. The monotony was boring the hell out of
him. If it wasn't for the thought of getting behind the bridge again, he would
have gone ballistic long ago.
As the activity rose around him, he pulled himself up and out of the bunk.
With the grace of a spacer, he floated past Nola, Zach, and the bunks in complete
darkness with only the murmur of his AI guiding his hands. Even blind, he made
better progress than either of the tangled people he left behind.
Exasperated, Nola watched Alex glide past. She began to disentangle herself
from Zach, and finally made her way across to the intercom. Pressing the button
for Communications/Command she called out, "Hello this is Nola. The power just
went out. What's happening over there?"
Dead silence greeted her.
Zach, having followed closely behind, reached past her and tapped another
button, saying, "Engineering control, what's going on?"
Again, no answer.
* * * * *
Meanwhile...
Reaching into his hip pouch, Jake pulled out his D30 flashlight (carefully
so nothing else floated away) and turned it on to get a good look at the
situation. Cursing the Marine Corps for not putting him through zero-G
training yet, he grasped the nearest non-floating object, Nola's bed, and
pulled himself over to his belongings where he looked for his pack and dug into
it for his thermal goggles. He secured them over his head but didn't put them
over his eyes yet. Then he glided over the best he could toward the door and
Dimitrio.
Dimitrio tied himself down to the door while he quickly searched his toolkit.
A couple of items attempted to drift out of his reach but he deftly put them
away while coming up with a strange metal tool. "Don't worry, I'll have us out
of here in no time..."
"Hey Dimitrio, if I’m not mistaken, if we’d lost air somewhere on this
station, we’d all be floating corpses by now, right?" Jake asked, finally
drifting over to join him, "Why don’t you see if you can run a bypass and open
the door up so we can find out what’s going on? Ah good, you've got your tools
out already. Here, I’ll hold the light so you get a good look. Can anyone give
him a hand?" Jake wrapped his legs around something so he wasn’t a floating,
bobbing flashlight platform.
Seeing the marine move toward the door, Lugwig got a little shove off of
Nola's bunk and continued on toward Dimitrio as well, glad that he had had some
previous zero-g training, himself. He hurriedly asked, "Mr. Fontecelli, yesss
yesss, can you over-ride door and open? Musst get to Sssick Bay. Big boom...
probably ssomeone hurt yesss." Suddenly a distracted look comes across Lugwig's
face and he blurts out, "Ahhh, you have funny eye, yesss. Ssshiny, yess?
Doess it hurt? Why eye look ssso sstrange? Musst take lookie lookie sssometime."
The good doctor then started looking for some sort of emergency release on the
door or perhaps some sort of control to short out. No such device seemed evident
to him.
Jake, while floating around with the flashlight growled, "Doc, please! Let
Dimitrio concentrate, will ya? Stop with the chatter, huh?"
By the time Lugwig heard Jake bark out his name the quick little T'sa had
already moved on appearing to be searching for something else. He swished his
tail rapidly side to side in awknowledgement, his unending curiosity causing him
to momentairily forget the door. Across the room he could barely make out Alex
coming in their direction...and then beyond him, the concerned looks on the faces
of Nola and Zach, standing next to the intercom unit.
Alex floated by the T'sa and hauled himself to a stop next to Dimitrio and
Jake. "I can work in the dark if you need an extra set of hands," he told the
engineer. Alex pulled on the nylon cord at his waist and clipped himself to a
nearby bunk. "Cal," he whispered into his mic, "Guide me here..."
A soft, feminine voice echoed from a speaker mounted somewhere on the
spacer's chest. "The door is in front of you...and the control systems are at
three o'clock. There doesn't appear to be much room to maneuver, Alex," Cal
replied, "I think your friend has the best chance to fix the problem anyway. He
certainly has enough tools with him."
Taking several minutes to apply those tools to the situation, and some
juryrigging of the wiring that he had finally exposed next to the door's control
system, Dimitrio motioned for Alex and Jake to step back. He pressed a button on
an electronic device that he had attached to the door's controls. A few sparks
erupted from the wall, but then the door slid back, revealing a darkened hallway
and a long row of red emergency glow-lamps on each side.
Seeing that Dimitrio was successful, 'Dig' turned the flashlight out and
donned his thermal goggles. The glow-lamps appeared like tiny volcanoes of light
in front of him. He then attached the flashlight to the barrel of his charge
rifle, but didn’t turn it on yet. "No use warning anyone that we’re out," he
muttered. "Nola?" he called over his shoulder, "We ought to wander down to the
Master of Arm's quarters and get his status. He has a couple of zero-g weapons
that we’ll probably find useful..."
Nola and Zach began to wander over in the direction of the marine and everyone
else. As they peeked through the door, a flicker of shadowy movement could be
seen at the far end of the hall...as if something might be moving just around
the corner. Nola's pistol appeared once more in hand. "What's that?" she asked,
pointing past Jake. The marine turned and looked, but his thermal goggles
revealed nothing at all...not even the moving shadow.
"What are we gonna do?" Zach asked, "There's gotta be trouble in engineering...
but we didn't get any answer from the Command Deck either. What's it gonna be?
Up or down?"
"We need to deal with what's in front of us, first," Jake suggested.
Nola nodded her head in agreement, "Something's not right about all this..."
"Did everyone brusssh their teeth already?" Lugwig chimed in. Everyone else
turned to look at him as if he'd gone crazy, and the T'sa sheepishly bowed his
head, "Perhapsss we'll ssspeak of that later. What about the sssick bay? It'sss
jussst down the hall and around the corner. Ssshall we check there firssst?
Sssomeone might have been hurt."
Dimitrio shook his head and looked back to Jake. "Look, I don't what's got
him all messed up in the head," he said, "But the sooner I get gravity and power
restored, the sooner we can find out all the answers to the rest of these
mysteries. And as soon as I get my hands on that Jonah, I'm gonna have a long
talk with him on the proper way to run diagnostics on the station's systems.
Obviously, he's slipped up big, this time around..."
"We might do best to check out the security station first," Nola suggested,
"This doesn't seem like an accident to me. Perhaps we should find the others
that are supposed to be on duty?"
--------------------------------------
---------- Turn 02 Comments ----------
--------------------------------------
1. [Hai:]
Have we magnetic soles on our shoes? Can I just clamp down?
And yes, I must agree. Impressive start...
No...no magnetic soles on anyone's feet. An e-suit comes with that sort
of option, but they are currently stowed in the hangar bay area, two levels down.
2. [Fabian:]
Alright Neil, let me have comments as to the style of the post.
Do we add on 'at the end' of your turn (like I just did)? Can we add
comments and actions 'in between' your turn? Will you wrap up our
actions in the next turn?
You're welcome to add comments in the middle of my turn summaries, though that
particular material probably won't make the next summary. Instead, I'm more
interested in how you respond to the new stuff that I provide you. Make sense?
How do we handle the 'attempted actions'? Do you want us to
describe as if the action succeeded or will you take care of that
description after you roll the corresponding die?
As I explained in my introduction to everyone, 'attempted actions' should not
assume automatic success. If you have additional actions that are contingent upon
success, you may provide me with your 'strategy' and some in-character description
of it, but you need to realize that it could very easily fail, in which case I
won't use your description. Die rolling will all be in my hands...
Good start.
Thanks. Let's keep it going. :)
3. Dimitrio is currently dressed in his boxers, a utility harness (a mere
criss-cross of straps with universal hooks on it), and a number of tools dangling
from his body. Just letting you know the picture you're presenting. To quote a
line from a recent movie, "Perhaps you should put some clothes on...if you want to
keep fighting evil today?" ;)
4. Besides Jake and Nola, no one has fully armed themselves yet. Since everyone
was pretty much retiring for the night (after all, it's 2am!), your stuff was not
so readily at hand. Dimitrio did throw some of his belongings into his bedsheets
and tie them into a bundle, but that definitely means they won't be readily at
hand. Also, Lugwig implied that his pack was ready-to-go. Most of you have
settled in on the station, and none of your gear is readily packed up. Understood?
5. Obviously, each one of you have a particular place you'd like to check out.
But will you split up to do it? Or stay together? And what will you do about the
movement down the hall and around the corner? Lights, Camera, Actions everyone...
-- Neil
(
geocities.com/hainphan/rpgs) (
geocities.com/hainphan)