legionworld | Whistling in the Dark

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Whistling in the Dark - Mod Plot [Log Post]

Who| Everyone who signed up!
What| Whistling in the Dark Plot. The gang has to deal with threats around Legion World and the possessed
Where| Everywhere!
When| After Ferro's post on the network
Warnings/Notes| N/A

Everywhere around the ship things start to fall apart. Aside from the juddering as it shakes, lights start turning off, life support starts failing, the artificial gravity starts malfunctioning, and strange bursts of energy from the ship's engine causes electronics to stop working. And that's not all: it seems like every possible system that could be acting up is acting up.

In short, Legion World is a mess. And all they know so far is that some of the support staff may be responsible and that they're also possibly possessed by some kind of alien infestation that occasionally makes their eyes flash black.

It's time to get answers -- something that will be difficult with all the threats they're facing on the ship. Not only do the Legionnaires have to survive, the support staff will occasionally need rescue, too.

With the rate that systems are failing, the odds are not in their favor, especially since these malfunctions caused the escape pods to automatically launch without any crew in them. They'll have to work fast to stop the threat before everyone on Legion World dies.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

"...and that means heat."

Low gravity? Annoying to work with, but not unbearable. No lights? Sure, who cared, he was a ninja. Working in the dark was just part of the package.

Heat? Bit of a problem for the cold-blooded folks in the room.

He managed to float slowly, a little awkwardly, to the closest handhold, which he immediately used to give himself a good hard push in the right direction.

"Aaah, you're coldblooded, aren't you?" That was bad. He was right that there was a huge risk of losing heat. "If the heat kicks out anywhere, I'll get you somewhere with life support. You're tiny. Even with my ribs busted, I can carry you."

Even without super strength and while injured, Donnie didn't look all that heavy. If the gravity was out when it happened, even better. He could just tow him along.

That was when even the dim emergency lighting kicked out. Everything suddenly went pitch black.

"No lights now. That's great. Wasn't like we needed those."

He amped up the brightness on his false arm to try to give them more light but it only created a little circle of it around them that only went so far.

"Normally I'd beg to differ, but..."

Finding his way down a hallway in the dark was no big deal. Even figuring out the control panel once they got there wasn't something he needed much light to deal with. No, the real problem he saw with the dark was that -

"Those things are going to be a lot harder to spot coming."

"We should be able to still hear them, at least. And they'll be hampered by the zero G, too. It looks like they prefer bodies, right? That means we'll be more likely to come across them inside other people than floating around by themselves, and there's only so quiet they can move. So as long as we stay pretty quiet ourselves we'll --"

Several things suddenly happened in incredibly quick succession. First, a small explosion rocked another place in the section they were in. The sudden explosive decompression sucked them through a hallway junction up ahead so fast that if they'd hit the walls on the way through it, they would've been bashed to a pulp. It was only through sheer luck that they didn't knock into anything as they were sucked through the junction. The air got sucked clean out of their lungs before they could even think about making the mistake of holding it, their glitched out transuits failing to protect them.

Because the sudden pressure sucking them through lessened after the initial decompression, the zero G left them still floating in the air as they were dragged towards the hole. Then, mercifully, the hull breach emergency shielding dropped into place.

In that short moment between the shield sealing the hole and the area getting repressurized they were exposed to near-total vacuum. Pretty fortunate that people could survive vacuum if it was for a very short time, right? Fortunate but highly unpleasant. Rich felt his skin swell and his vision went black. Right as he was about to lose consciousness, air rushed into the room again as it repressurized, and he started gulping it down.

He heard the doors to the section locking down -- the computers couldn't read correctly that the breach had been fixed and started locking down the section. The gravity randomly turned on again as part of the botched self-repair process, tossing them both to the floor. Even though the section was repressurizing, they weren't in the clear. Sure, they were getting air, and they got gravity back, but because life support was so messed up, the air being pumped in wasn't heated. It was ice-cold.

Worse than ice cold. Ice was only 0 degrees Celsius. The air that was kicked out by the ship's oxygenators was usually -30 degrees Celsius before it was heated. It poured into the section unheated and the water vapor in it immediately started condensing, fogging up the air, and then flash freezing on every surface.

As soon as Rich could breathe enough to, he croaked out, "Donnie!"

His vision was still blurry -- probably from being exposed to vacuum. He'd learned about what happened to people when they were exposed to explosive decompression -- it'd come up sometimes when rescuing people. Sometimes blurry vision or blindness was a thing -- had to do with dissolved gases or something. Rich knew the blurring would go away and that he'd be able to see clearly soon enough, but right now blurry vision was yet another complication he didn't need.

"You better still be alive, kid, or I swear to God, I'm gonna murder you!" It was still dark and even forming his glowing, false arm as he knelt there wasn't enough to chase the darkness away when it was partly due to his eyes being messed up. "And, yes, I'm aware that's counterintuitive!"

Even though only seconds had passed, most of his body had already gone numb and he felt like his lungs were freezing more and more from the inside out with each breath. The only thing that felt warm was the stubby stump of his right arm, at the point of contact where Nova Force energy poured out of his body to create his false arm.

Donnie was used to things happening fast. A ninja lived or died by speed and the ability to react.

But this was just too fast, even for him, and he couldn't keep up with what's happening. They were working their way forward and then suddenly he was flying forward, and his vision blacked out, and he hit the floor -

It was freezing.

There was a pause, a second or two that felt much longer, before he tried to lever himself up with his arm and get out of the heap he'd landed in.

And failed.

The thing about decompression incidents was most people weren't fast enough to properly cope. That was why they were so deadly. The time of "useful consciousness" was usually mere seconds, and that was only if you weren't banged around into something and if you actually had gravity.

And now that it was after the fact, the cold set in so fast it was almost like being hit in the face with a wall of ice at fifty miles an hour.

Space sucked. It really was pretty goddamn unforgiving.

Rich heard the noise of Donnie trying to move because of his shell clicking slightly against the floor and his vision was already clearing. He finally managed to find him in by the light of his false arm, and was horrified to see him so still, unable to even get up.

If he was coldblooded, how long did he even have in temperatures like this? Rich could at least produce his own body heat. Hell, with the Nova Force he could possibly figure out a way to warm himself up with it, if he concentrated hard enough. He could last minutes -- maybe longer. An hour or two? More? He'd never needed to keep himself warm with his powers.

But if Donnie couldn't produce much of his own heat, how quick would it take the cold to shut things down?

"I've got you," he said, draping Donnie's arm over his shoulders with his good arm. When he stood, he was so tall that he simply lifted Donnie right off the floor. "I've got you, kiddo. Hang on."

Donnie was heavier than Rich thought he'd be (probably all that shell?) and it hurt his ribs like crazy to carry him like this, but his relatively small size helped make it manageable. Without his powers, Rich couldn't exactly punch a moon but he could have probably still benched-pressed the kid.

Being fueled by a jolt of adrenaline from sheer terror over the possibility of Donnie dying made the load even easier. Nova barrelled along, running down the corridor like his butt was on fire. When he reached the locked down door at the other end -- that wouldn't respond to the buttons -- he checked through the little window to make sure no one was on the other side, and blasted his way through with his glowing Nova Force arm, knocking it right off the hinges.

This section was freezing, too, unfortunately, so he kept moving, until he reached another door -- this one actually responded to hitting the button -- and on the other side was a section with air that was only cool instead of freezing. There were even functioning emergency lights. After a quick danger assessment, Rich parked them down right on the other side of the door and focused on what was most important: warming Donnie up.

Okay, okay, biology. Did he even remember any of it from school? Cold-blooded animals didn't produce much natural heat, right? Finding blankets and whatnot to prevent heat loss wouldn't do much when he was producing barely any heat to begin with. If something was cold-blooded it relied on the ambient temperatures around it, sunning itself or finding shade. That's why there weren't many reptiles that lived in really cold climates. Plenty of ways to cool themselves but not enough external sources of heat.

So he needed to provide an external source of heat, right? Except none of the life support controls were working well enough for him to crank up a heater or heat up some water. What else did he have?

Yourself, dummy.

If he could probably apply the Nova Force to keep himself warm, he could use that and his own normal body heat to warm Donnie up.

Rich sat next to him and pulled the kid in close, draping his flesh and blood arm around Donnie's shoulders and trying to make sure as much of his arm was touching Donnie's arm as possible. It was fairly easy to scoop him up, given their size difference.

"I've got you. I'm gonna try to warm you up, okay?"

Okay, what else, what else? People lost a lot of heat through the tops of their heads, right? He pulled his helmet off and threw it to the floor, then leaned Donnie's head against the crook of his neck and rested his cheek against the top of his head. There, that'd help with that.

Now this part was the tricky bit.

He was so used to just...burning. Sure, he could use the gravimetric side of the Nova Force without setting everything alight, but when it came to the hot, fiery part of the Nova Force it was usually on or off. It burned or it didn't because it was purely gravimetric. He didn't usually need to use it to just warm things.

But his body was barely human anymore. It was just a little matrix to hold energy in it. That meant, technically, that he could exert a ton of control in how he released that energy. Hell, that's why he'd been able to do little starbusts out from his whole body instead of just shooting it out from his arms and legs. And he wasn't even at full power -- that meant less Nova Force to have to try to control.

All he had to do was just...just let a little bit of that fire slip out through the edges of himself.

He drew in a few deep breaths and let them out and focused on just letting out a tiny bit of the warmth of the wild inferno of the Nova Force. Just a teeny tiny bit. He felt his skin start to warm up -- warmer than he usually ran, enough for it to be considered a fever. Then he held up the false arm in front of Donnie and made that burn warm and bright -- without actually burning.

It radiated heat like a little space heater.

"Talk to me, Donnie. Soon as that big brain of yours starts working again, I need to hear it."

One, so he knew the kid was okay just because he needed to know, Goddammit. Two, because if he was really hurt, he had to give up on heating him up and just rush him to Medbay.

The shock had been enough to - well, send him into shock, and so it wasn't until they were well out of the breach zone, into the un-breach zone, and Rich had gotten the heat turned on, in however makeshift a fashion, that Donnie started moving again.

And then not much, but there was a small twitch of movement, then another - obvious attempts to stay close to the heat, not to get up and risk moving away from it.

His mind was trying to catch up, predictably. Everything moving around and the freezing...that had to be a hull breach, and he was pretty sure he remembered (at least kind of?) hitting the floor, but everything between point A and point B wasn't registering.

Which probably wasn't actually important, as much as that kind of thing annoyed him, because what was important was the fact that they were alive and at point B to begin with. That had to be Rich's doing, but the first thought that found its way out of his mouth, rather than thank you (he'd get there!) was:

"Let's...never do that again."

Rich fretted over Donnie not answering him at first but the twitches were promising. They seemed instinctual, like he was trying to curl into the warmth and that meant his body was starting to wake up again. He figured maybe it'd take a little while for his brain to start chugging along and catch up.

Fortunately, he was right. Donnie finally spoke and Rich let out a sigh of relief.

"You can say that again. I like to keep my daily dose of decompression accidents to a minimum," he agreed. "You okay? Anything feel broken?"

There'd been risk in moving him like that but he'd had to do it or he might have frozen to death.

"I don't think anything's too busted up. It was just...the cold, mostly."

Fugitoid had assured him that the new shell was stronger than his original one, and the gravity problems, awkward as they were, weren't as bad as what it had taken to break the old one.

Rich tilted his head so he could actually face him a little bit.

"Think you can get moving again or do you need more time to warm up?"

If he had to sit there and be a human space heater a little longer, he'd do it.

"I can -"

Okay, actually.

As much as his ego didn't particularly appreciate the idea of being outdone by the common freezer, Donnie wasn't the type to be recklessly overconfident. He'd leave the macho feats of proving one's own toughness to his brothers, thank you.

"...maybe one more minute." He didn't want to allow himself anything more than necessary, though, not when there was no telling how much hell was still breaking loose while they took the time to regroup.

"Don't push yourself. If you need a few minutes, take it. This being a human heater thing is even easier than it looks." He gave him a little smile. "Besides, you need to get your reflexes back to normal in case I need you to save my sorry as--butt again."

He really was trying not to curse in front of Donnie. Really. Ninja or not.

In situations like this, superhero situations, he was always in a different frame of mind anyway. He stopped being wartime Rich who could -- and did -- curse like a merchant spaceman, and went back to that comfortable place where he was cornball and called out "blue blazes" like a stupid catchphrase. (Not that it was really a catchphrase, but he'd always avoided cursing growing up because of how strict about language his dad had been. Habit.)

"Point taken."

Not that they were going to be trying to fly up any more maintenance shafts, that was for sure.

"We're not going to be able to get at the controls for this section like this, though. Next best thing, I guess, would be to find the closest console outside of the affected area, see if I can remotely grab access from there?" He hadn't tried that kind of thing yet. Most of the systems he'd tried his powers on seemed to fall open and work for him fairly easily, but that was for things he knew they were already designed to do. If remote access hadn't been coded in already...that was iffier.

"You're the gear-head, not me. If you think that's our best chance, let's do it. My job's just helping you get there."

Without Worldmind's guidance he was damn near useless at figuring out tech stuff. He could figure out some basics and remembered a few things he'd learned but nothing really technical.

The ball was mostly in Donnie's court.

"Okay. So..." He'd gotten understandably turned around in being hauled out while his own ass was in too much shock to do anything with the situation, so he frowned at the door for a moment.

"That's the one we just came through, right?"

Rich picked his helmet up off the floor and put it on again.

"Yep. So we need to go thataway," he said, pointing at the other doors.

It was right then that their omnicoms went back online and started beeping. After a short conversation with the others they had a working plan.

And only seconds later, they had the gear they needed to follow through.

Gates appeared in through a disc of green light.

"Think fast, comrades!" he said, tossing them both vacuum flasks, and then disappearing again.

Rich caught it and smirked as he looked at it.

"Who knew their secret weakness was thermoses?" he said. "This is starting to feel a little 'who you gonna call?' now."

Of course Donnie caught it one-handed like it wasn't even a thing. Ninja.

"So I'm thinking if I can override to get some heat back in the section we just came from, we can leave the lights out and hunt from there. No sense in expanding the field any more than we need to."

"Sounds like a plan," said Rich with a grin. "Let's get to it."

As they ran into action, Rich couldn't help but mutter under his breath, "I ain't afraid of no ghosts."

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Whistling in the Dark - Mod Plot [Log Post]

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how's this for catastrophe!

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