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

[googledox]

Fortunately, Brainy got the engineering team out of the damaged section and they successfully turned off the plasma flow to the plasma conduits. Then he managed to manually trigger the fire suppression systems.

"Get Nikels to Medbay, I can handle the damage on level 433 on my own!" he directed the technicians.

Fortunately, they'd had no fatalities but he didn't want to take any chances when Nikels looked like they possibly had a concussion.

"Mr. Five, you should go to the Medbay, too; you're bleeding all over --" said a technician, Mr'tik. Brainy reached his hand up to his face and looked down at his uniform and realized that his streaming nose was still dripping all over his front.

"It's fine. A minor case of epistaxis -- it doesn't even feel broken." He was totally lying through said possibly-broken nose. "Now move!"

"Yessir."

With that squared away, he turned and flew to the nearest hatch to get in the service tunnels to get down to level he needed to. Now was no time to trust the service lifts.

[leverageintceo]

Parker blinked in surprise on the other side of the hatch.

"Oh good, I was concerned that I was going to get there and end up just looking at a bunch of electronic junk I didn't understand," she said, recognizing the green skin and messy hair of Brainiac 5. "Come on, come on, come on, and try not to hit your face on anything else, El-- my hitter says that you can get bone shards into the brain that way."

She couldn't set it for him, and anyway, they had important life-preserving things to do besides deal with Brainy's face and his cool alien blood.

[googledox]

"I'm heading to level 433," Brainy said, starting to fly through the vent shafts. Much faster than crawling. "There's damage there that indicates that a saboteur may still be present."

Try to keep up, Parker, because he's zooming along fast.

[leverageintceo]

Parker didn't have Brainiac 5's years of practice with the flight ring, but her feet had barely touched the ground since she'd put her's on -- and being the kind of woman who jumped off of buildings for fun, she hadn't just been floating around with it. As such, she kept up better than one might expect of someone new to the flight rings, but still trailed behind Brainiac 5 as he zoomed through the ventilation shafts.

"You're going to have to mastermind this one, because I don't know enough about any of this stuff to fix it," she called out to him.

[googledox]

It wasn't a long flight there but it helped that Brainy had the schematics of Legion World memorized and therefore knew all the shortcuts.

They exited through another maintenance hatch and found themselves on the level they needed to be. A choom noise sounded in the distance and the area they were in vibrated. Their telepathic earplugs briefly rang with a high-pitched ringing sound in their ears before they stopped working. Brainy was still flying when his ring cut out and plummeted to the floor like stone, tumbling end over end, only barely managing to turn it into a controlled roll, eventually landing on his butt.

"[What now?]" he huffed in untranslated Interlac.

[leverageintceo]

Parker had flinched back when her earplugs started ringing, which meant that she was going slower than Brainiac 5 when her flight ring failed to keep her flying. As she was also the kind of person who thought that a twenty-foot fall was something to "walk off", her landing was much more graceful than his: she rolled up to her feet and raced to catch up with him where he'd landed.

"/You're gibbering,/" she said in English, offering him a hand up. "/Why aren't our rings working?/"

[googledox]

"Ah, it has arisen that one of the entoteric pulses caused damage to our equipment," Brainy said in English. "Fortunately, I learned standard American English by cause of immersion when my team was trapped in the 21st century."

His accent was strange -- even unearthly. It was the kind of accent one had when they had a tongue trained for a language that even people with mandibles could speak. Interlac had very little in common with English and only barely anything in common with Earth languages with click consonants.

Fortunately, it was still understandable, even if some of his word choices were odd.

"Due to irregular usage and lack of habitual application my pronunciation and diction may be nonstandard and heteroclite. Do you still osmose?"

[leverageintceo]

"At least now you're gibbering in English," Parker answered. "Mostly English, I assume some of that is Geek."

If they could communicate even a little bit, they had more important things to focus on. Parker dropped Brainy's hand and took off down the hallway to investigate what was around the next corner, footsteps all but soundless against the floor.

[googledox]

"I will use simpler words."

His "immersion" had been more than television and listening to people speak. He'd also read several dictionaries and thesauruses. He opted to try to pick the simplest language he could, and talked more slowly, in the way people did when sometimes dealing with someone who couldn't speak a language well.

He pointed up the hallway and started jogging.

"We go that way. Towards a maintenance hub."

[leverageintceo]

Parker fell into step behind him, then speeded up to poke him in the cheek.

"Do your face plates help you control your powers?"

The white things on his face didn't look like something his species just grew, and the whatever had shorted out their rings. If he was expecting his powers to work and they didn't, it was going to suck.

[googledox]

"Not powers. Thoughts. Personality," he said, still running, craning his neck so she'd stop poking his face.

He reached a hand up to his face, grateful the shielding was working and ruing that he hadn't had time to work on the rest of their technology to shield it similarly.

"My intelligence renders my mind incapable of function without outside help."

He could only barely keep it together when his inhibitors were malfunctioning.

"Therefore, my implants have extra shielding. They are still functional. I have been meaning to add this to the other equipment but no time. Too much. Too much of --" Of everything. "--everything."

He barely had time to even think.

[leverageintceo]

Parker tucked those facts away to turn over later and turned her attention back to running, and to listen to the sounds coming from up ahead around the sounds of their (well, mostly Brainy's, apparently his training didn't include lessons on running quietly) feet hitting the floor.'

Until, very suddenly, they weren't anymore.

"Whoa!" Parker yipped, throwing her arms out as she found herself flying through the air again. "The rings--?!"

[googledox]

"Negative. Failure of synthetic gravity."

The word he was looking for wasn't "synthetic," it was "artificial" but his meaning was at least still clear.

Brainy extended a shield construct to one of the many bars through the ship that were meant to be used in case of a gravity failure, and pulled himself to it. He extended another shield construct and used it to guide Parker over to one of the bars as well. There were at least one of these horizontal ladders in every hallway, just a solid kick away from anyone facing Zero G.

He started pulling himself along using it.

"Follow. Maintenance hub can allow fixing or untouched area ahead will still have gravity function."

[leverageintceo]

The invisible force field thing was...weird, but Parker adapted, letting it push her to the ladder. First she just followed behind Brainiac 5, but traveling this way was less than optimal. She pushed off the ladder and forward at an angle, spinning in midair to hit the opposite 'wall' with her hands and feet, then repeating the move again and again to carry herself down the passage at a faster rate -- and, also, making herself harder to hit should there be an attack.

[googledox]

Before long they reached another section of the ship -- this appeared to have gravity still functioning because the moment they passed through a junction they found themselves yanked back to the ground.

"Gravity functions here. Still must find maintenance hub to fix rest of hall functions. We may still also find lifeforms in proximity."

Red lights were on here, indicating that there were problems with the basic life support.

"Maintain vigilance. There may be life support damages. Subtle fallouts. C02 leakage. If you notice changing physical signs, say so. Shortness of breathing. Dizziness. This may be sign of life support problems."

[leverageintceo]

"Whuff!"

Parker sprang back up to her feet, wondering irritably why gravity worked again, but her ring and her earplugs didn't.

"All right," she said, enunciating her words to be sure that Brainiac 5 could understand her. "I'll keep an eye out, because I definitely don't know how to fix any of this."

[googledox]

They were able to travel through a long hall without much incident, reaching an area where support staff were trying to fix some of the damage to the ship. As they moved along, Brainy kept checking his omnicom to see if he'd gotten function back.

That was when things started to go wrong.

Red lights started to flash and klaxons started to blare as this section of the ship locked down. Massive, heavy, nearly unbreakable doors started to block off rooms. Fortunately, everyone was still in the hallway.

He yelled something at the staff in Interlac and turned back to Parker.

"Lockdown. Bad. It may be false alert but may be a possible life support deterioration. We must move ourselves and the staff out swiftly. There is risk of entrapment in failing conditions."

[leverageintceo]

Sounded like it was time to draw on her experience as a flight attendant that one time they'd had to crash-land a plane.

Parker fixed a brilliant smile on her face and clapped her hands three times.

"All right everybody, you heard the man! Let's go go go go!"

One of the members of the support staff had injured his (her?) leg. Parker ducked under the arm of their injured side and hauled them to their feet.

"Come on, time's a-wasting!"

[googledox]

They managed to usher people out the closing doors. The problem? Being the two people doing so meant they didn't manage to slip out.

As they ushered two of the last evacuees out under the rapidly closing doors they found themselves locked in.

"This way. Secondary doors."

They were going to need to book it. They didn't have time before all the doors to the second entrance closed as well.

[leverageintceo]

"You're wearing your transuit, right?" Parker asked, booking it as prescribed. "How much of the life support problems in here will those protect us from?"

They were like space suits, right? If they could survive the vacuum of space, they could take whatever Legion World could throw at them, right?