Lt Alex Storm - Aftershocks

[Karen Morris]

((Corridor near engineering, Deck 4, USS Karnack))

The corridor outside of Engineering was a study in contrasts. Bright light flooded in from the world outside, yet areas of half shadow clung to and slunk along the recesses and nooks not usually apparent in the corridor of a ship when the interior lights were working. Normally, the ubiquitous hum of the power conduits and nearby warp core would have lulled the occupants into complacency, but instead, a loud pop was followed by a hiss, and a faint smell of singed electronics slipped into the air. Alex wasn't sure if that was a sign of progress or not.

Jovenan: So, any ideas how we do this?

Vitor smiled and winked at Alex and Roy

Silveira: Carefully…

Rolling her eyes, she thought. oO Leave it to Sil to be the court jester. Oo

Storm: Cute, Sil.

Alex paused to see if there would be a follow-up joke. Maybe he was out of ammunition. Even Alex, from time to time, felt the difficulty as she reached for everyday words that now might slip through her mental fingers. All those months ago, when she met Roy, he had warned her not to stress herself out on purpose - that her adrenals were already taxed. Not that she did this on purpose, but she felt its physical and mental effects - a little more each day they were here

Storm: We’ve been cataloging and marking the damaged areas for a few days before you all got here. We found some old non-electronic welding equipment. But,

Alex put two fists on her hips.

Storm: It feels like welding pieces on a hull with this much damage is just about as effective as trying to tape the holes in a mesh fabric and trusting it to turn out watertight.

Bancroft: Response

Jovenan: We might not have much usable material around here unless we start ripping the bulkheads apart. There shouldn’t be any shuttlecraft here, and we have already scattered many of the escape pods around the planet.

Silveira: We won’t have enough bulkheads to do it anyway.

Storm: Is there any way that we can just focus our attention on the smallest part of the ship possible and keep everyone in that area? It would give us less space to cover.

Bancroft: Response

Nan glanced through the rupture again. 

Jovenan: We discovered that the, um, Dark Things don’t like cold water, but I’m not sure how that would be useful against them here. Did anyone else happen to figure out how to keep them away or fight them?

Vitor shook his head.

Silveira: Not really, we basically avoided them.

Storm: Our group discovered two things. They are attracted to heat, and they disrupt telepathy. 

Alex focused on Jovenan, and refused to look at Roy. After their brief reunion, she realized why she might not have been able to touch his mind that second time she tried. There had been two Dark Things outside the monastery trying to get in. 

Storm: They also - at least during the night - can cause telepaths a lot of pain. Brexis and I are your early warning systems, which is probably one of the reasons that I was assigned to this task.

Bancroft: Response

Now it was Vitor’s turn to look through the torso-sized hole in the hull.

Silveira: If we had some way to find a hose or something to drench them that would solve that problem.

As Sil mentioned the hose, it brought to mind the stream they were near when they came upon a Dark Thing during the day. 

Storm: Oh, we also discovered that they only seemed to hunt at night. We even saw one during the day, and it surprisingly didn’t charge us.

Jovenan/Bancroft: Response

Silveira: And for the next problem ::He pointed to the breach.:: Do we haul the bulkheads around to each breach?

Alex stepped back, surveying the one hole, and then walked down the corridor, counting how many larger tears there were just in this one section.  

Storm: We’ve got four large gashes in this small area, but there are dozens of smaller holes. For the larger ones, we may need to use bulkheads or portions of them, but for the smaller ones, if we could find something more fitting to the size or easily welded into place, that might be better.  

Jovenan/Bancroft: Response

Vitor winced and took a step to the side. Alex’s eyes followed him.

Silveira: Sorry… You were saying…

She started to reach a hand out to him when she realized that both his doctor and his girlfriend were there, Alex stepped back to make room for them both, saying…

Storm: Sorry. Habit.

The palm of Alex's hand made contact with the hilt of her ever-present machete. Its presence brought her a sense of control over her situation in much the same way a phaser used to. She hadn't drawn it once, but it had become an extension of her, as much as her arm was.

Jovenan/Bancroft: Response

Seeing him in his element, pushed her thoughts in a medical direction. A smile played at her lips, and, for the first time since they were both assigned to this detail, she turned to look at Roy. A bit of wind chose that moment to penetrate the large hole near which they were standing, and she blinked several times, though whether because of any debris stirred up or something else, no one could tell. Finally, her eyes met his, not with the same force as the previous day, but she could feel the quiet reverberations of aftershocks when they did.

Storm: If you were a surgeon operating on a person in a similar state to this ship, how would you go about saving them? 

Bancroft/Jovenan/Silveira: response

Storm: So, how would we best replicate that here? 

Bancroft/Jovenan/Silveira: response

Turning to Jovenan, Alex gestured to Roy.  

Storm: Feasible? Or, no?

~*~

Tags / TBC!

~*~

Lt Alex Storm

Tactical Officer

USS Artemis

O240103SK2