Uncharted Worlds

Amdarh

Amdarh

Active Member
@Bark @lil_kreen @Widowmaker @Summers Mori

2359. Humanity has made contact with the Free Planets Alliance 159 years ago, and the aliens have generously given mankind the technology for Jump travel, and thus started the great human space adventure. Of course, for most other races, it was old news, and they looked down on these newcomers with a mix of condescension and amused curiosity.

In the last 159 years, the humans have nonetheless taken an ever greater role in the galaxy, pushing other races aside and threatening old established order. Human population in the Hason Empire are particularly rebellious, and the humans in the Free Planets Alliance always want more representativity for themselves, weirdly talking about some tea thrown in the sea during a party. Humans in the Zerg controlled territory have never caused any problem, surprisingly.

This has caused a lot of social unrest in these two well-established factions, and let the Zerg threat grow too large to be quickly squashed like it had been in the past. Smaller factions such as the Bvetin Matriarchy have taken this opportunity to take a more important role in the Galaxy, while megacorporations such as Astral Bio Technologies use their influence to always increase their profit and dominance.

In this time of strife, war is on every lip, but no one dares speak the word. Every faction that has the means - or wants to show it has the means - hires mercenaries and pirates to weaken and test their opponents.
The Black Gryffin is a renowned mercenary crew of outlaws ready to do anything for the right price. As such, it is usually tolerated by the authorities but kept under close watch.
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Warning. Warning. Impact in 15 minutes. Warning. Warning.

A metallic voice booms in the loudspeakers throughout the Black Gryffin as red lights flash in the hallways. The crew slowly and painfully wakes up from its stasis, their mind completely erased. They have no idea who they are, where they are, and what is going on.

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The android eyes blinked open and focused on her surroundings. She was attached to a charger - hers, presumably? - in a small vertical room filled with bluish transparent wires pulsating with energy. Warpium, whispered her metal mind. Her data banks didn't much more, which she felt was not normal. She was supposed to know what she was doing, right? Her hand remembered what it was supposed to do though, and removed the charger from her neck.

Feeling her whole body activating, ATAX stepped off the tube she was standing in and opened the door of the small room. Outside was a simple corridor with red lights flashing and the voice continuing its unpleasant screeching. The scanner in her eye didn't detect any anomaly in the walls or in the air, and she couldn't compute what the problem was. She needed to investigate, and quickly.
 
"Ugh... What happened?" Stukov exclaimed as he awoke to find that the ship had crashed. "The last thing I remember hearing was the warning alarm going off but just assumed that was our ship AI bleeping some kind of warning alarm or something." He rubbed the top of his head as he unhooked himself from his seat and began to walk around the ship.

"Let's just hope we didn't land on a Zerg controlled Planet. They are highly territorial. And also hope we didn't land on their home-world either."
 
Wang knew that the feeling of crashing was familiar, but couldn't for the life of her know why. Looking around her at the maintenance dock she had been in, she pushed to her feet, instantly favoring her left leg, though she didn't realize why until she had already taken a step and nearly fell over. The mess around her was less of a concern than finding someone else to see if they knew what happened, so she looked out into the hall of the ship and wandered out into it.
 
Soldiers of the Gardeners were stubborn creatures. This one bonded to the mind of the Matriarch of war, Nemesis, especially unwilling to fall to stasis. Fluorocarbon blood resisted freezing to the last though it took heavy tanks and nitrogen compressors that now wound planning a gentle release of the mottled green spider from containment. As stasis neuro suppressors gave ground the mind recovered and immunopsionics flail at the weakest link in the suppressors. Sparks surge as one emitter is crushed with feedback. Half-frozen limbs creak to life with blue irises that adjust to light. Some of its back legs still sport heavy frost even as the front were just thawed enough to move again. Two front legs pound upward with the knuckles of its front joints that shed frost with every impact.

The electronics impassively complained all the while, "Warning, equipment failure: attempting to compensate. Increasing suppressive gain. Node H exceeding gain maximum. Deflection detected. Warning: possible lid damage. Emergency stasis exit."

Back legs thaw against the failing cold as lid creaking from strength forcing hydraulics to to ascend quicker than they'd like. The leathery eight legged spider squirmed from the pod as radio blasts of Quietus full of confused question marks are no longer contained by metal. Leathery skin smokes from sublimating ice his movements still stiff and jagged much like his thoughts where Monk could hear the Matriarch somewhere but couldn't reach to her.

The half-thawed brain in stasis shock leapt him in place to the nearest source of frustration. After a howl of incoherent noise over radio a loud metal banging of his two front legs came from beating the stasis pod.
 
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The room was filled with screeching sirens and flashing red lights, and Aren didn't know why. This was strange, because he was usually quite good at keeping track of how things went to hell. It helped prevent similar situations from occurring in the future. This time though, his mind was drawing a blank. He had no clue what was going on.

Lifting himself out of the cryo chamber, Aren coughed up the remaining freezing liquid in his lungs, forming a small puddle of purple liquid on the floor. He didn't remember going into cryosleep either. Amnesia? Now wasn't that a common trope. Thankfully, he could remember that much at the very least.

Giving his body a quick once over, he decided that he was healthy enough and walked out the door. Time to find out what was going on.
 
Warning. Warning. Impact in 12 minutes. Warning. Warning.

The countdown continued, foreboding, and echoed in every reaches of the ship.

Stukov: As you exit your room, you enter a curved metallic corridor plunged in darkness. The intermittent light is more aggressive here, sending red flashes that momentarily illuminate your surroundings. As you try to wrap your mind around what is happening, you hear a door opening nearby. Despite the noise, you're pretty sure you can assess where the noise is coming from, and choose whether to go away from it or towards it.

Wang: The maintenance desk is in a chaotic order. Your brain can see that there is some mad logic to everything, but you can piece it together right now. From an outside view, it looks like a child pulled a tantrum and threw all the tools and junk he could find in any random direction. The only difference is a sleek, elegant ship that sits prettily in the middle of the room, thick tubes linked to its underbelly. As you get out of the stasis pod lying in a corner, you see three doors: one left, one right, and one leading to the launch pad. A spacesuit lies abandoned next to the latter door in case you want to use it.

Monk: The stasis pod is like an egg; made to resist pressure from the outside but also to be easily broken from the inside. As you thrash and bang the innocent object, one of your punches cracks the glass lid of the pod, giving you pause for just a second. Looking around you, you are in a small room filled with practical objects. The colours and patterns somehow seem both unknown and familiar, and soothe your mind. There's a single small door leading out.

Aren: As you exit your room, you enter a curved metallic corridor plunged in darkness. The intermittent light is more aggressive here, sending red flashes that momentarily illuminate your surroundings. As you try to wrap your mind around what is happening, you hear a door opening nearby. Despite the noise, you're pretty sure you can assess where the noise is coming from, and choose whether to go away from it or towards it.

Feel free to describe the ship as you discover it: what's in your room, what's in the maintenance chamber, and if you enter a room. Be creative, it could be anything: a garden, a beehive, the toilets, the command centre.

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The android's boots clanged on the metallic floor as she walked down the corridor, her artificial retinas not bothered by the darkness. She soon arrived to a locked door with the mention Authorised Personnel Only. Something in her made her smile and she tried to open the door. It didn't budge. Scanning the surroundings, she spotted a bio-matic handprint door lock.

Ah. Most unfortunate.

ATAX hesitantly put her hand on the screen. To her surprise the screen turned green and the door opened effortlessly. On the other side, a large room was lined with electornic equipment and tubes, with a large engine in the middle purring like a happy great cat. Blue liquid pooled and coalesced under the meshed floor, feeding into the engine.

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Amdarh said:
Stukov: As you exit your room, you enter a curved metallic corridor plunged in darkness. The intermittent light is more aggressive here, sending red flashes that momentarily illuminate your surroundings. As you try to wrap your mind around what is happening, you hear a door opening nearby. Despite the noise, you're pretty sure you can assess where the noise is coming from, and choose whether to go away from it or towards it.
Click to expand...

"What was that noise..." Stukov exclaimed as he's pretty sure he heard the sound of a door opening. As he was in a completely dark corridor, he didn't exactly have the best sight, even if part of his Zerg DNA allowed him to have better spacial awareness. "I better check it out. Could be nice to explore the ship while I can before it crashes wherever it is going to crash." He muttered to himself as he began to approach the source of the new noise.
 
Randomly open door, making strange noises? Now that wasn't creepy at all. If this was a horror vid, then there would probably be some sort of zerg monstrosity past that door, waiting to eat him. Not really having anything better to do, Aren shrugged his shoulders and started walking towards the noise. Hopefully, he wouldn't be eaten.
 
As one strike cracked the glass parts of its cognition realigned astride a gaping void in that now existed in Monk's thought process. Quietus relied on communicating a memory if not a creative space and for a long moment after waking his mind had trouble expressing sapient thought so vacant of memories as it now was. Faint layers of forked patterns embossed in the structures as well the pod itself trigger in the Gardener's mind enough concepts to stand up and shake off the stasis shock. His eyes dilated then reset for the light level in unison. Where was he? Why did he feel so alone? He didn't know what a twitching body strained to discern from pressure waves over his skin but he knew something was missing.

Racks and racks of objects he didn't recognize adorned this room but they were well sorted and organized and some with outlines. Sharp cylinder things that look like they cut and machines of some kind that look familiar next to the bins. They didn't strike him as weapons. All surfaces even with the tools were reasonably clean but a recessed space on the ceiling gained attion by bright red at the bottom. It looked as a safe place to sleep he thought. That must be what it was for. Sleep occurred to him as bad when cold hit his awareness hard clacking the floor with shivering limbs. A slight pivot of his body found milky blood leaking from scrapes along the reinforced knuckles of his legs some of the mandible arms. Frost still clung to his back legs but that shook off. Were things supposed to walk around in here with the floor so empty? The tables seem high. At the end of one of the asiles drew his eyes to a heavy vault door in the side of the room marked "Armory". The word had meaning that escaped him like anything else but intuition said it wasn't a way out.

A quietus transponder chirped from the ceiling as his carrier RF wave stabilized. It filled his mind with a new but hollow mindspace. He chirped back at it instinctively with a question mark aggrieved by exclamation points. The empty space was like the holes in his own but frozen in time at least until the transceiver added time to the small bit of mental reality. Tapping around in place physically representing the mental motion concepts of the scene seem to inform to their purpose: a point source adding color to a wireframe room, a central gap of some kind with a notion of heat and cold arising from two holes in a wall, and one other gathered his notice as a shape of himself pointing to a disembodied Id of mind. He thought for a moment to see if it would say anything that felt alive but found nothing came and his memory dry when he tried to remember a self-concept not his to contact. Not that he had his own anyway. Though after seeing the second with heat he was quite cold, so very cold.

One of his small segmented mandible-arms replied to the mental space with a fingerpoint of intent with the mental effort toward the place in that cognitive volume in the area that hot was in. The life support system loudly engaged at maximum trying to raise the temperature of the room and warbled as the spider darted to one wall with a bang of metal. Fixed in place gesticulating frantically he replied Quietus in size then position before figuring out closeness to the vent was less forceful. A gentler blast of hot air near the door of the green and lime-patterned room was perhaps to keep the cold out. It must get cold in here. He wanted to know where here was, in any case, so the door seemed like a good place to sit warming up.

Approaching the door the Quietus transceiver broadcast appended new interface volume he easily understood. With a point upward the door opened into hallway air with heat blasting. Monk slightly moved his head left and right having little need to rotate given a wide field of view.
 
Stopping to look at the ship, Wang felt a desire to go and admire it. However, she knew that there was more important things at the moment. Instead, she takes a moment to look around the rest of the room. She decided to go with the door closest to her, which was the one on the left. It felt wrong to leave the ship behind somehow, but if there was anyone else around, she needed to find them first.
 
@Summers Mori
Stukov would enter the room and discover that it was the engineering section of the ship. The noise being generated was merely the machines at work creating various parts for the ship as well as repairing equipment, weapons and armour for the team. "Hmm. This ship is definitely well developed..." He muttered to himself when he began to hear footsteps. He prepared himself for a fight if he had to, and called out. "Hey! Who's in here with me?"
 
Aren walked into the room, finding that it was filled with advanced machinery. Dozens of fabricators hummed with energy, their gears churning away at a mysterious task. On the other side of the dimly lit room, he saw a pair of glowing eyes floating in the darkness, just barely illuminating patches of red, pulsating flesh. Goddamnit. There really was a zerg here?

"Hey! Who's in here with me?"

Wait, it could talk? Zerg weren't supposed to do that.

The glowing form walked forward, revealing some sort of zerg/human hybrid. It was as if an infester gave up converting the man halfway through the process.
Slowly, Aren waved his hand in greeting.
"Uh...hi. You kind of have, like, something on your arm. Is that going to be ok?"
 
@Summers Mori
"Oh this?" Stukov exclaimed, raising his Zerg arm upwards a little. "Yeah, it's fine. Before it had a mind of it's own but I managed to keep control over it." He laughed lightheartedly as he looked around the room. "I assume you're a member of the ship or something? I'm not exactly sure what's going on. All I'm hearing is us, the ship and it's alarm system going off."
 
"Yeah, I don't know whats going on either. Though I did hear something about a crash when I woke up. We should probably find someplace with internal dampeners before we get splattered all over the wall."
 
"Agreed. Seeing as you're more... human, then I am, I'll follow your lead. You seem to know this ship better than I." Stukov exclaimed as he would follow Aren through the ship, wherever they went.
 
"Sure. Lets go." Walking out of the room, Aren picked a random directed and headed off. Hopefully, they would find a terminal or something, because he really had no idea where he was going.
 
As the thin hairs on his skin warmed up Monk's hearing returned and the reason for the blinking light became more apparent. Impulse wanted to reply to the voice, he knew the sound of the words to use, but couldn't remember how to actually make them. He'd have to figure out later when he wasn't crashing. A small turn left and right gave him a few of the entire room as he looked about for anything he should bring with him. What caught his eye was a small locker near the door at his height. Skittering sideways he opened it and found a bandolier that looked like it fit with a holder for some sort of square box chirping along radio frequencies like the room did. This room must be his he since didn't hear anything else in Quietus outside. The box was a good place to start so he put clamped the bandolier on around his cephalothorax and slotted the box underneath his head.

The green spider skittered out of the room and down a hallway as pairs of eyes darted to and fro looking about for some indication of safety, others, or some sort of controls. He tried interacting with the box like with the door but it just sent back negative feelings. He had to know what spaces to use to control this thing, great. The world rotated as he went diagonally up a wall for a multitude of eyes on mottled green carapace to look up and down the intersecting corridor.
 
@Summers Mori
As they were walking around the room looking for a terminal, Stukov spoke up. "So... I'm somewhat curious. What do you know about the Zerg? Is this your first time seeing an Infested?"
 
"In real life, yes. Though I have seen pictures and such on the news. The infested usually have a lot more tumours from what I know. As for the Zerg, well, they've always kind of been someone else's problem. Like a car crash, or back ally murders."
 
@Summers Mori
"Let's just hope that the one Zerg Swarm we encounter isn't the one that's actively on the move. The Queen of Blades is one to be feared, after all." Stukov exclaimed as he continued following Aren, keeping his guard up.
 
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