Session started at 6:50 pm on 05/15/2007
Attending players: Sarah, Michael, Ben, and Eva
Presiding GM: Aaron
(We're trying to convince Michael that he's a robot.)
I'm yelling the others awake. Something very bad has happened to the doctor and all I got out of her was something about people who had eaten something becoming not themselves. That and the screaming and gurgling...
I yell the gist of what I heard from the doctor to the others, grab my armor and weapons, quickly convey that I'm going to help the doctor, and then sprint out the door to get to the medical bay as quickly as possible.
The layout of the domes.(Meanwhile, the doctor is struggling with the creature that has attacked her. She manages to hit him with a huge stun spell, knocking him over. She gets a good look at his elongated claw-like fingers, huge fangs, and hollow red glowing eyes before he scrabbles back to his feet. Her next spell fizzles and the creature hits her with a savage blow. She almost goes down, but manages to hang on long enough to hit him with a second spell spell and kill him. Just to be sure she throws her microscope at his head and then slaps a tranq patch on him. She's pretty sure he's dead.)
As I'm running an AR announcement comes on in Ajax's voice, warning people that there is an emergency. He's telling them to find a securable area and secure it. He also says something vague about clawing and snarling. Somewhere in the back of my mind I hope the hippies who work here don't think it's a practical joke. Most of my mind however is taken up with breathing, running, and putting on my gun holsters without falling on my face. I'm so glad I made sure this jacket had pockets I could pre-stuff with ammo.
(Ajax has also tripped all the pressure gauges except for the ones in dome C and the Hub. Consequently, all the heavy double pressure doors between the other domes have closed.)
I'm about halfway across the tube walkway to the hub when I'm plunged into pitch blackness. I can't see lights from any of the other domes either.
(The node goes down and Ajax is ejected back into his own system.)
I stop long enough to fish a light stick out of my pocket and crack it on. Now that I'm not in any immediate danger of hitting a wall I take off at a sprint again. I manage to make it to the medbay door. It's closed.
After some knocking and a quick electronic query the doctor opens the door. She's pretty badly banged up but still standing. There's the dark form of a fallen humanoid on the floor in the middle of the medbay. It's not moving.
The doctor asks me to watch the door while she heals herself, so I shut the door down most of the way, leaving just enough room to look out. I crack a second light stick and toss it out a few feet so I'll be able to see anyone approaching.
Once the doctor is in better shape, she explains that the goo that we put in the kelp is what caused the problem. She fed it to her pet fish, but it didn't affect them because the viral strain was meant to induce some sort of UGE in humans.
Now that I get a better look at him, the guy who attacked her looks pretty horrific. Claws, teeth, red eyes, the whole works. She says he mentioned something about a lot of folks who had just had midnight dinner getting sick. This has the potential to go very badly if half the crew were down there eating.
(Yorick and Ajax are running through the clear tube walkway. They can see some of the creatures working on opening security doors in the adjacent walkways.)
Apparently the creatures can get through the doors. Ajax has brought some people he found from dome C. Ajax takes them to the medbay and marks the four explosive bolts we have to set off to separate the hub on our AR maps. It's only a matter of time before the creatures can get through the doors and into the hub. I streak off towards one of the bolts while Yorick heads for a second.
As I pass the doors to the A dome walkway I can see the creatures trying to get through the first of the two pressure doors. I let Ajax know what they're doing, but don't stop, since the faster I get those bolts blown the fewer creatures I'm going to have to deal with.
"I can handle goons with shotguns because I can hack their cyberware. I don't think fish people rely very heavily on technology."
~ Ajax(Ajax gets a call via the wired communication line that runs up the elevator cable. It's the Johnson, identifying herself as a GamaTech executive. He reports the emergency and asked for help as if he was really a corp security officer. Some how I don't think she'll help us.)
When Yorick reaches the last bolt, he reports that it won't blow because one or many of the doors are open. Shit.
I reverse direction to head back towards him. As I pass the door to dome A again I can see that it's open to nearly knee height and the creatures are starting to slide through. I report that to the team and start trying to fill them full of ammo.
("Your curvature suggests a very small dome."
~ Ben, about the map the GM is drawing
"Not to fucking scale bitch."
~ Aaron, jokingly)Three of the creatures slide under the opening door and charge me. I manage to fend them off with only a few scratches to my armor. I'm not going to get away from the guys who came after me so I just fire off a few shots under the door in the general direction of the left guy holding the door. I think I got him twice in the legs but he stays standing.
I can see Ajax and the doctor running down the corridor opposite me. I squeeze off another two shots as three more critters slide under the door. The one I hit before goes down. The door slides down a little, but one of the guys who was going to come through the door catches it. The other two charge Ajax. He manages to avoid most of their blows.
I hear a loud clang from above, but the creatures and door seem a bit more pressing.
One of the three on me manages to land a glancing blow off my shoulder but my armor stops the claws. I evade the other two.
Out of the corner of my eye I catch a flash as the doctor launches a huge spell into the mass of creatures behind the door. One of the fish people holding the door crumples and the door begins sliding down. The only remaining door-holder is crouched under the slowly closing door. She looks rather uncomfortable with this arrangement.
Ajax fills the remaining remaining guy full of lead and he falls in a huge spray of blood. The door falls, but his body is jamming it open a little. Ajax yells for me to get the dead guy.
I manage to disengage my three friends and yank the body out of the door. It slams with a loud clang.
(Yorick hears the clang and pulls the lever. This time the bolt blows and the hub detaches from the rest of the structure.)
Suddenly there's a sort of jerk and I can feel the hub begin to wobble and very slowly drift upwards.
(We all have a minus two to agility until we get used to the sea wobble.)
(The A dome is de-pressurizing because there are so many fish people filling the tube. So that should take a chunk of the creatures out.)
Now that the immediate danger is gone, I turn back on the three guys that were attacking me and manage to land a bullet in one of them. He looks pissed but not too daunted. The three of them charge me again. One of them misses me and slams into the door, falling over unconscious. I manage to dance out of the way of the other two.
Ajax is still scuffling with the three attacking him. He looks mostly okay. The doctor smacks one of them with a stunbolt. Ajax fires on several of the ones around him.
Ajax yelps, "Cordae! Help!"
I manage to kick one of my two remaining guys in the head. He goes down but scrabbles right back up. The other one continues to try to kill me, ineffectually.
Ajax has managed to dip and weave, tossing one of his attackers over his shoulder with her own momentum. The doctor smacks one of them with a spell and it falls.
I manage to knock the wounded one down again while I evade the other. I can hear his ribs crunch. He drops and does not get back up.
(The upwards drift stabilizes enough to negate the agility damage.)
Yorick comes sprinting around the corner and starts spraying bullets at the critter attacking Ajax. It goes down.
The doctor hits the remaining creature, who's still trying to kill me, with a stun bolt. Ajax hits him in the gut with a bullet. He looks none too happy, but it takes another shot from Yorick before he finally gives up and dies.
All the critters on the hub are now dead.
What the hub looks like
at the bottom of the sea.As we drift upwards away from the rest of the complex the hub begins to list to one side. As we move around the rim to see what's causing the listing, we find that the cable from the elevator is still attached to the top of the hub. Ajax thinks the cable must have fallen to the sea floor and be heavy enough to make the hub not be neutrally boyant.
The hub, totally screwed up
as it rises.By this point the hub has slowly turned itself almost entirely upside down. We inspect the connection of the cable to the hub and find that it is not detachable. Fucking engineering morons.
I head back to the medbay. Since we're now in upside down land I have to climb. The others are a little slower. The doctor stays down by the cable attachment.
(The doctor is waiting and watching the creatures swarming through the other parts of the domes, killing just about everyone.)
The folks in the medbay are a bit freaked out right now. I guess I can't blame them. Things are not looking at all good.
They don't have a single engineer among them to help us with the problem of the cable. The administrator suggests that the head engineer is probably in dome E.
Surprisingly the folks in dome E are still alive. They're struggling to keep the creatures out, but they have a few pressure suits so Ajax encourages them to start coming over here. Hopefully we can get a few batches of them across before the creatures break through.
(Out of character I predict that the enraged Merrow, who's eggs were destroyed when we blew the bolts on the hub will kill any engineers who try to swim across to us.)
End of Session
