Whistling in the Dark - Mod Plot [Log Post]

[letsgolegion]

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.

Comments

[wherenoonegoes]

"Okay...just-could you-just stop dragging me." Hiccup said, yanking his hand out of Saralegui's grip.

"Look, I've been exploring in my downtime. That hallway," the viking pointed down the way he and Toothless had been heading, "leads to one of the main hover-platform shafts. We can get to most of the floors in this part of the ship that way."

"And, lucky for us, we have a very fast way of using it," he added, looking over at his dragon. "Toothless, you up for taking a second passenger?"

The dragon nodded, just a bit reluctantly, and knelt down to let the pair on.

[enthraller]

For a moment, Saralegui looked almost irritated. People usually followed him without complaint, literally and in the broader sense. But he quickly settled on a more neutral expression, pausing with only the illusion of patience so that Hiccup could say his piece.

...And, irritatingly enough, it was a better plan for the moment. Saralegui frowned, but he could squash his pride down for the time being for the sake of efficiency.

"Alright, then," he said simply.

But if he'd seemed at all briefly annoyed to be questioned, it was very quickly overshadowed as Saralegui glances between Hiccup and his dragon, realizing the implication there. And dang, that was certainly a delightful implication.

"We can ride it?" Holy shit.

[wherenoonegoes]

"Yes, we can ride him." Hiccup answered, mounting Toothless and buckling himself in. A moment of concentration with his powers had the riding foot of his prosthetic leg rotating out, and he locked it into position.

"Alright, get on behind me. I haven't had a chance to get a spare harness together, so you're going to have to hang onto me as tight as you can."

[enthraller]

Saralegui had never ridden a dragon before, but he'd been riding horses all his life. How different could it be?

He slid on behind Hiccup, wrapping his arms around the older boy's waist tightly. "Ready," he said lightly, shifting slightly to settle in, all urgency forgotten for the moment.

[wherenoonegoes]

The charge through the corridor, made necessary by the fact that the hallway was too small for Toothless' full wingspan, wasn't entirely unlike riding a horse. Things changed a bit when they hit the entryway. Toothless leapt and took flight, Hiccup working the tailfin in tandem. The dragon's wings flapped once, twice, and-

-suddenly a noise echoed through the shaft, and gravity cut out. The trio, with Toothless' coordination thrown off by the sudden lack of weight, went tumbling through the air on downbeat of his wings.

"What the- Oh Thor." Hiccup swore, "WALL! WALL!"

Toothless let out a panicked roar, but, whether by instinct or sheer luck, flapped his wings just enough at the right time to slow them down. They hit the wall with a soft thud. Toothless dug his claws into a gap in the panels, and held on for dear life.

"What the Hel was that?!"

[enthraller]

Saralegui had no idea what flying was supposed to be like. Nor did he have any concept of the potential loss of gravity. So really, as far as he could tell, Hiccup's flying skills were just extremely questionable.

It was an exciting ride at first, until they took flight and suddenly lurched. With nothingn to secure him in place beyond his arms around Hiccup, the impact with the wall was particularly ungrateful with him sliding with their forward momentum right into the hard surface of the wall.

"Ugh..." The wind knocked out of him for the second time in five minutes, Saralegui just groaned for a moment, slumping forward against Hiccup's back. When he finally caught his breath again and glanced up, it was with a severely unimpressed expression being aimed at the back of Hiccup's head.

"How would I know? You're the one who supposedly knows how to fly this thing."

No worries. Even if his expression couldn't be seen from his position seated behind Hiccup, his tone more than got the idea of it across.

[wherenoonegoes]

"That wasn't us," Hiccup defended, "Something else happened."

Mentally going over what happened, Hiccup realized he felt a little odd. Weightless, like there wasn't any force exerting itself on him. Even in flight, free as it was, there was always something pulling him and Toothless back towards the ground. He pulled a pencil out of his suit, and let it go.

It didn't drop, but stayed floating in the air.

"Call me crazy, but I don't think you can blame us for this when Toothless and I are used to flying with whatever force pulls us down towards the ground still working."

[enthraller]

"What--"

The rest of the question wasn't really necessary anymore when Hiccup pulled out his pencil and left it floating there in midair as if by magic. Suddenly, it dawned on him that the weightless feeling he's gotten when Toothless first took off hadn't faded. The ends of his cloths and hair drifted gently like they were underwater instead of hanging down as they should, and he found he was barely even in his seat without anything to press him down against it.

Saralegui's lips pressed together into a thin line, and he tightened his grip on Hiccup a little, clasping his hands together in the front. "Can you do anything without it, or are we stuck here?"

[wherenoonegoes]

"Well, there's still air to push against, and we're floating. I think we can get moving if we treat it more like swimming instead of flying. Think you can handle that bud?" he asked, patting Toothless's hide reassuringly.

Toothless shook off the panic that the sudden lack of gravity had caused, and nodded. Hiccup, and just about everyone else here needed him. This wasn't any way for an alpha dragon to act. He lightly pushed off the wall, and experimentally flicked his tail. Rewarded with slight movement forward, he flicked it again, and swum through the air. His wings took up the lion's share of steering and braking.

"Okay, I think we've got it figured out. Environmental control is three floors up from here. I think if we're going to find anyone it'll probably be there."

[enthraller]

"Then hurry," Saralegui said, a little curt now. The flying was fascinating and the beast carrying them was beautiful, but the gravity scare had shaken him and he couldn't quite lose the unease of not knowing what was going on, of having nothing to do but trust in a complete stranger. "I can't even imagine what else might go wrong at this point."

[wherenoonegoes]

"Please tell me you didn't just say that," Hiccup winced.

That was right about when gravity decided to reassert itself. Another grinding noise, and they were suddenly falling downwards. Thankfully, Toothless and Hiccup had tons of experience with freefall, so it was only a few floors before they were able to pull out of it.

"Okay, now we go to Enviromental Control. No more delays, full speed ahead, bud." Toothless flew, not the awkward swimming of before, but the full speed of a mature Night Fury that didn't particularly care about its passengers' comfort levels at this point.

[enthraller]

Hiccup and Toothless were rewarded with a yelp of surprise from Saralegui as they suddenly dropped, and a bruising grip around Hiccup's waist as the dragon put on speed and darted upward.

As lovely as that whole experience had been, the young king wasted no time in sliding off Toothless's back the moment they landed on their target floor.

"Well," he said with a frown just bordering on a pout, running fingers through his hair to put himself back together. "That was...something."

He did love things interesting, and he certainly didn't mind things dangerous and risky. But if it involved putting his life so entirely in the hands of strangers, even the most novel thrills lost their charm.

[wherenoonegoes]

"Try doing it with a mountain-sized dragon chasing you." Hiccup unbuckled himself, rotated his foot back into position, and dismounted.

"So, someone has to be in this general area. Main control room's probably our best bet, but they could be anywhere. If what little I've learned about how things work here meshes with what I already knew about electricity, it'd be like attacking an aqueduct. You can damage the reservoir, or you can attack the conduits leading from it," he said, gesturing to the various wires and ducts, "only instead of water, it's electricity and information."

It was...mostly wild speculation, but speculation Hiccup felt good about.

[enthraller]

"Whatever you say," Saralegui said with an airy gesture, already peering ahead down the hall. "I'm sure you know better than I do."

He honestly didn't mean to sound dismissive. On any other occasion, he'd have been happy to listen and try to understand all this new technology. But he was distracted at the moment, alert for any signs of movement or distant sounds. Learning could come later, when they weren't in danger of horrible space death.

As if prompted by that thought, there was a sparking sound like something short-circuiting, and one after another the lights down the hallway went out in a wave, pitching them into darkness.

"Ah," was Saralegui's only response, mild surprise from somewhere beside Hiccupt.

[wherenoonegoes]

"Wonderful." Hiccup sighed.

"Toothless, bud? You mind shedding a little light on the situation?"

In a way that was somewhat more literal than the usual use of the phrase, Toothless did as requested. Mouth and spine lit up, casting everything nearby in an unearthly blue light.

[enthraller]

Toothless' glow cast just enough light to illuminate Saralegui's faintly irritated expression, slipping his glasses off with a frown. He fumbled for a moment finding somewhere safe on his person to tuck them, and his frown only deepened with the inconvenience.

"Where to, then?" He spared Hiccup and the dragon only a brief glance to see if they were still coming before starting off down the hall, that blue glow apparently more than enough for him to move confidently forward.

Random Threat -- Life Support Failure/Lockdown! (Does this work for you guys?)

[letsgolegion]

The sound of massive bulkhead doors closing echoes around them in the dark as all the doors slam shut and seal in an unplanned lockdown. Then there's a sudden ominous whoooosh sound and in the space of mere seconds, the air starts losing heat, chilling down to below freezing.

There is also a pungent smell that fills the hall as the cold causes an important gas piping system to go brittle and snap, and run-off gas from the oxygen recyclers -- mostly carbon dioxide -- starts to fill the twisting hallway. Before long, they'll all start to feel their lungs struggling for air, the sensation even worse because of the biting cold.

Most of the bulkhead doors are massive and unbearably strong, meant to resist incredible forces breaking through them -- something that even a metallokinetic and a plasma-spitting dragon might find impossible to bust through. But there is one that didn't seal properly, that's visibly thinner and clearly meant to be a simple door rather than an important seal for the section. That one can potentially be broken to allow them to escape the rapidly worsening conditions.

If they can find it in the dark.

Between the cold and the carbon dioxide, there are only minutes on the clock. Tick-tock.

Re: Random Threat -- Life Support Failure/Lockdown! (Does this work for you guys?)

[wherenoonegoes]

The cold wasn't really a problem. Hiccup and Toothless were both used to it, and Hiccup's suit was fairly well insulated. The lack of air, however, was an issue. It was only magnified by the fact that Hiccup was straining to get the bulkhead doors to move. The only reward for his efforts was an audible grinding noise, and no movement.

"They're not gonna budge. We," Hiccup tried to take a breath, getting less air than he really needed, "need to *gasp* find another way out."

[enthraller]

The cold wasn't too harsh through all his layers, but the sudden onset of it had Saralegui drawing a deep breath, and the thinness of the air was all too noticeable, like trying to breathe high up on a mountain. With a shudder, he pulled his cloak around his and frowned deeply as Hiccup tried to do something -- open the bulkhead, probably, but it didn't seem to be working.

"Shouldn't this be what you're good for?" he snapped, sweetness vanished for the moment in his panic. And immediately he regretted wasting the breath on it, gasping shallowly with the air seeming even thinner than moment before. Leaving Hiccup with Toothless straining at one of the bulkheads, Saralegui ran ahead, picking out the doors in the dark and trying one after the other. All were thick and heavy and without any mechanism he could figure out to open them.

One, however, looked different even as he approached it. Still nothing like a handle to open it with, but it looked less imposingly sturdy, and when he smacked at it it rang through the hall with the sort of hollow gonging of a thinner metal.

"Leave that! T-try this one!" he called back, hitting it again for emphasis.

[wherenoonegoes]

Numbness was already settling into the extremities, but Hiccup and Toothless moved as fast as they could.

"That...that should work."

Normally, he'd give Toothless the honors, and have the dragon blow the door apart with a plasma blast. But he felt like he needed to do this for himself, especially after his failure with the blast doors.

He reached out with his mind, and focused. The metal started to twist, bend, and with a grunt of effort he finally rent the doors apart. Air rushed into the room, and Hiccup took a deep breath of relief.

"Well, that was fun. Let's never do it again. ever."

[enthraller]

"It's a nice trick when it works," Saralegui commented dryly with a pointed look at the twisted metal remains of the door, and then unceremoniously ducked through the gap Hiccup had created. At least the air and heat seemed to be working beyond this point, even if the lights were still out.

"Wait," he said, pausing just inside the doorway, voice suddenly low. "Do you hear that?"

It might have been some other piece of machinery malfunctioning or something. But he could swear it had sounded like distant footsteps up ahead.

[wherenoonegoes]

"Might be nothing," Hiccup whispered back, "but...Toothless, you smell anything?"

The Night Fury sniffed at the air, and made soft low growl.

"Guess that answers that question. There's definitely somebody up there."

[enthraller]

"Someone not bothering with a light," Saralegui noted, inclining his head towards the unbroken darkness ahead. Of course, he wasn't using a light himself either, but it was probably safer to be suspicious.

He frowned, but glanced back to Hiccup and his hound of a dragon. "Well? No use in staying here," he said, and forged onward down the dark hall.

[wherenoonegoes]

"Neither are we," Hiccup pointed out, "unless bio-luminescent lizards count."

He and Toothless followed after, keeping alert for any sudden noises.

[enthraller]

"You're using it to see, aren't you?" Saralegui shot back over his shoulder, the edge of a slight smirk visible in Toothless' glow. "I'd say it counts."

Moving forward, they could just see the shape of a person stumbling about, just a shadow in the darkness. The movements certainly seemed unnatural, but more like a person still learning to use their own legs than someone blind in the dark. As they came closer, soft muttering became just barely audible.