literature

TMD R2: Hospitality

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  It was pretty apparent the boat they were in was old. Every time one of them shifted, the weathered seats and hull-boards of the vessel creaked as they bent and warped to accommodate the weight. Andrea sat, pensive, at the prow of the boat, desiring solitude. Andrew and Kelrin were glad to give it to him. Having laid out his notebook, most-likely ruined electronics, shirt, socks and shoes out to dry on Kel's now aerating armor chassis, Andrew watched the horizon from the starboard side of their little dinghy for any sign of land. Kel had taken off his armor to allow it to conduct some minor repairs and dry-out the inside. It was a necessary risk, considering the danger they'd just faced. If the suit wasn't allowed to clean itself and repair minor leaks it might suffer an even greater degree of impaired functionality. That was something Kel couldn't allow.

  His back to the other two, Kel rowed steadily, feeling, for the first time since he'd made planetfall, exactly how difficult it was to do a physical task without the help of his suit. He felt strong and weak at the same time. The suit was like a second skin to him. With it, he could do amazing things. Without it, he felt… naked. A little agoraphobic, even. Shrugging it off, he turned back to his toil. They had a long way to go.

~  ~  ~  ~  ~

  About seven hours later, Andrew's personal effects had long since dried, but Kel's armor was still conducting diagnostics. Andrea was now sitting almost off the starboard side of the dinghy, looking down into the slightly murky water as the sun cast its final orange-red tendrils of light across the port side of the boat. Kel was preening his feathers with his slightly clawed hands, making sure they dried properly, while discreetly watching Andy. Andrew was rowing as best as he could, taking long strokes and doing a fairly good job for his build. The atmosphere on the boat had only grown tenser as the energy from the battle had worn away. Soon, Andrew and Kel would have to decide what to do with their opponent turned prisoner… but, for the time being, all any of them had to worry about was getting back to shore safely. Andrew rowed, Kel preened and Andy skulked.

  Suddenly, for a brief moment, just as the sun set below the horizon, there was a green flash of light. The three looked up, wondering at the strange, bright phenomenon.

Then they heard a thud from beneath the boat…

… and everyone stopped what they were doing.

Kel looked to Andrew.

Andrew looked to Kel.

Andy watched the depths intently.

Nothing happened for several more moments. Kel retracted his slightly extended wings, reaching for the sidearm located in his suit. Andrew stopped rowing, listening intently for something- anything -to indicate that whatever had just done that was not a sea monster.

That's when the boat almost capsized.

Andrew and Kel had it relatively easy, only having been dislodged from their seats by the impact. Andy, on the other hand, went flying into the frothy waters below

"Sweet Ceres!" Kel shouted, startled, taking to the air and looking at the water from an aerial point of view. His armor had rolled into the depths of the ocean along with Andrew's backpack. There was nothing he could do about that. Andrew, however, could still be saved if he stayed in the boat. Kel reasoned that he could probably carry Andrew far enough away from the thing assaulting their boat to give him a fighting chance.

All that was rendered moot by the next occurrence.

Something large and suction-tipped emerged from the depths and grabbed ahold of the side of the boat, tearing it sideways with enough force to rip Andrew from his seat.

"Oh! Shi-" was all Andrew could manage before he went plopping, upside down, into the water. The boat followed soon after.

"Shit," Kel muttered as the boat resurfaced, listing to the side.

The damn thing had been cleaned out. Even the oars were gone. Andrea and Andrew had both disappeared beneath the depths, their shapes barely visible as they sank. At this point, Kel couldn't have cared less at what happened to their unnamed prisoner. While he certainly didn't want their once opponent to die, if Andrew drowned Kel would hardly be in a position to save anyone.

Against his better judgment, Kel lowered his altitude then went into a dive for the water, bracing his head with his arms against the inevitable impact.

If he was going to be an idiot, he might as well be smart about it.

… and with a modest sploosh, Kel was below the waves.

~  ~  ~  ~  ~

Grayson touched the biometric scanner tentatively, marveling at its smooth, yet pliant, texture.

Turning his head back to his creator, he asked "Sarah, I don't suppose you know what… this is, do you?"

"A… door-opener thing?" Sarah responded, hesitating as she did so. "… I don't really know, but it looks like that's what it does. Kind-of like Star Trek, I guess."

Grayson inspected the surface of the biometric scanner by placing the left side of his head up against the wall and peering at the thing from the side with his right eye.

The surface seemed to be many layered and, every time he touched the rectangular surface with his finger, a violet-ish light that hurt his eyes bathed the entire grid and seemed to wipe any trace of his fingerprints away.

Testing the wall-panel one last time, Grayson turned back, dusting his hands off on one-another, and shrugged to Sarah. It seemed they were trapped in this strange room for the foreseeable future.

He might as well explore it a little.

Taking a look around, Grayson finally got a good, comprehensive look at the room. Fairly small, the room resembled a prison-cell save for a few interesting decoration choices, the most prominent of which were the giant tubes of regenerative liquid that were brightly illuminated by lights located beneath the tanks themselves. Grayson faintly remembered climbing out of one them, half-naked, then moving to pull a distressed Sarah in a similar state of disrobement from the slightly slimy depths of the other. Their clothing, neatly cleansed and pressed, had been located at the far side of the room on some sort of metallic wheeled cart. By the time they'd reached it at their shambling walk, they and their undergarments had dried almost completely. It was only after they'd pulled their clothes on that they'd started to actually think about where they were and why they'd had to climb out of… whatever it was that those things were.

The whole ordeal had been rather strange.

So strange, in fact, that Grayson was under the very distinct impression that they had been drugged somehow. Drugged and brought… here. Wherever "here" was.

"Sarah?" He asked, voice tinted with a twinge of fear, trying to catch his young author's attention. "… do you remember how we got here?"

Sarah had been holding her head, almost like she had a headache, but perked up at Grayson's calling of her name and responded. "Yeah. I think we… um… well, I remember crossing a ford that the merman pointed out, but… uh… oh. Oh no. Oh no oh no! Don't you remember?"

Panic set in, clicking firmly into their already stressed mindsets.

"No," Grayson responded, concerned more for his author than for his own well-being. "It's all… fuzzy."

"Fuzzy?" Sarah replied, almost in hysterics. "I can't remember anything after we talked to that merman!"

Grayson had to sit down. His breathing was measured and deep, like that of a skilled combatant engaged with foe his equal. They weren't just in some room with weird tanks in the middle. They were trapped like animals…

… and Grayson was going to do everything in his power to escape.

~  ~  ~  ~  ~

Kel's arm burst forth from the top of the tank as he finally unlocked the release hatch.

Emerging, his other arm followed, finally allowing him to haul himself from the depths of the viscous liquid.

Tearing the life-support harness from his face and gingerly removing the intravenous injection tube from his arm, he wiped the slimy osmotically neutral fluid from his eyes and breathed the relatively fresh-air of the reconstruction chamber.

Plopping himself on the roof of the tank, Kel continued his breather. It'd taken a lot of his energy to resist the powerful multi-species sedative-cocktail that the life-support system had been pumping into his system. He just needed a moment-… mome-…

"Aaaagh!" Kel roared, hollering himself out of the chemical stupor before resorting to Cerecian swears to keep his brain chugging away. "K'frath te se'ta ush framek!"

Half crawling, half stumbling, Kel made his way to the ladder at the back of the tank, plodding his way down laboriously. To keep his mind as far away from the dark abyss of sedation, he thought of how he'd come to this place… and found he had no clue as to how, but was quite certain as to when he'd come.

Ceres-forsaken krakens.

When Kel had reached the bottom, he paused for a moment, stooping, to take another breather. When he looked up, he saw precisely what he had hoped he wouldn't. There, floating in a tank identical to the one Kel had been in, Andrew hibernated in his underwear and an undershirt, eyes closed and a life-support harness clamped about his neck, jaw and upper-torso.

Kel exhaled in exasperation. These were, primarily, human reconstruction tanks. He'd been able to extract himself without much chance of lasting damage due to most of the more important functions performed by the specially tailored cocktail of nanobots in the tank being incompatible with his biochemistry. The tank had just pumped him full of sedatives and accelerated his tissue regeneration.

For Andrew, however, extraction would be a little more… difficult.

The nanites were most likely programmed to seek out damage and repair it as best they could. At least… that was the way it was outside the simulation. While Kel had seen that the simulation stayed, for the most part, true to what he had experienced to be real and true in life, one of the more important things about being in a simulation was reminding yourself that you were, indeed, in a simulation and to never lose track of that fact.

Either way, real or surreal, simply prying Andrew from a reconstruction tank would be foolhardy. His senses sharpened by an imminent threat to the wellbeing of his… "ward", he supposed, and, through that, an imminent threat to his personal wellbeing, Kel kneeled down and began to look at the readouts display located behind the ladder located at the back of Andrew's tank.

The readout "display" wasn't really much of a display at all. It was more of an access point: Just a place to put one's hands so that a physical connection could be made to a personalized display device and relevant information from the base mainframe requested and displayed. Mercifully, the layout was the Council Standard for such devices, leading Kel to the largely unsupported conclusion that he was detained in a Council facility. Unwilling to look a gift horse in the mouth, no matter how unlikely its arrival, Kel slowly touched his three fingered and two thumbed hands to the two unlocking biometric-scanners located to the left and right of the line of symmetry on the small glossy-black square of plastic, twisting his three-fingered two-thumbed hands counter clockwise and clockwise, respectively.

Pausing, just before he finished the sliding of his hands needed to unlock the display login, Kel wondered if his Council override codes would work as a one-shot bypass to the passwords needed to release Andrew. Figuring it probably wouldn't hurt, he tried it.

Enunciating the code clearly in Cerecian, Kel spoke to the readout access-point. "Kelrin Digen te arrav. Krenash-Urak te arrav. Krah te, Anash-Sevim-Krenash ush arrav."

"Identification: Kelrin Digen, Magnitude Three Councilmember. Vocal patterns verified by base Overmind AI. Override code Five-Eight-Three accepted," the display responded, its universal translator emitting in both Cerecian and Terran Standard. "Readouts on unnamed subject being transmitted to corneal implants in realtime. Please use hologram keyboard to request extrapolation and advice from base mainframe."

No longer constrained by the verbal medium, Kel could use a direct mind-machine interface to request information from the base Overmind AI. With the quickness of the electrochemical reaction, Kel discovered that there were only two other living sentients in the whole base outside of cryosleep, that life-support blackouts still occurred for months at a time with the Overmind AI able to give warning of only a few hours at best, that Andrew couldn't be extracted from his reconstruction tank without the approval of Research Lead Dr. Ashava vKnall, an insectoid sentient, and that no powered combat armor of a model suitable for Cerecian usage was present inside the whole base.

He'd flapped his, now dry, wings in frustration at that last one.

Finally, he requested a map of the facility.

Downloaded into the minimal storage-space present in his corneal HUD, the map provided a comprehensive overlay that, if he so desired, could lead him step by step to any destination in the base he was authorized to travel to.

"Find the office of Dr. Ashava vKnall," Kel told the computer through the interface. "I need to speak with him."

"Office waypoint marked," the automated voice responded. "Note: Overmind AI has recorded Dr. vKnall's suspended animation pod had a significant containment breach seven years ago. Likelihood that Dr. vKnall is physically impossible to revive has increased to sixty-three percent. Initialize thaw process?""

Kel took a moment to look at Dr. vKnall's location on his map overlay and was surprised to find that Dr. vKnall had decided to have his cryosleep pod located in his office.

"Huh," Kel thought. "Well. That saves me time."

"Computer, initialize thaw process when I've reached the office door. I'll be there in a few minutes."

… and just like that, Kel slapped his hand on the biometric scanner allowing for passage between the reconstruction chamber and the base at large, escaping into the hive-like complex of Orbital Research Hospital H-VRAS-32 in nothing but his skivvies.

~  ~  ~  ~  ~

What got Grayson through the door of the reconstruction chamber he and Sarah had been trapped in for the last twenty minutes was neither his blade nor his wit. It was not Sarah's suggestion of using his fire spell to try and activate some sort of fire failsafe, nor was it the brute force that he had, as a last resort, used to try and bash the reinforced ally doors down.

It was, instead, a case of pure dumb luck.

Tired, Grayson cared little for where his hand landed, so, when his hand landed in the slightly squishy biometric scanning door-lock, he hadn't even cared to remove it.

… and that's when the door opened.

Looking up, Grayson's surprise was quickly replaced with giddiness.

Beaming, he turned to Sarah. "Look! It opened! I did it Sarah! Oh man, I'm a wizard with locks!"

"Grayson, shhhhh!" Sarah warned, wincing as she stood-up. "We don't know who's out there! It could be the people who stuck us in here!"

"You have to be-… ow," she tried to continue before scrunching her face up in pain.

Grayson's almost childishly giddiness departed immediately and was replaced with a very mature concern for Sarah's wellbeing. "What's wrong, Sarah? You look like you're in pain."

"It's nothing," Sarah lied, slight remnants of the pain racing up and down her side making it difficult to take full breaths. "… just a stitch, I think. Nothing serious."

Grayson's concerned look softened, but only just a little. "If you say so, Sarah. Anyway, we should get going. Someone out there probably wants us dead, and standing still only makes their job easier."

"Right," Sarah said, a slight knot of fear working its way into her gut. "… it's not like we have any idea where we're going anyway."

That's when a simulated voice piped up.

"Attention unrecognized individual," it began, most likely speaking towards Grayson. "Please proceed to Research Lead Dr. vKnall's office for identification and clearance assignment. To accommodate your lack of compatible display device, blue lights have illuminated the path to his office. Dr. vKnall will instruct you further based on his assessment."
~  ~  ~  ~  ~

"Ceres te sh'ka ush fssh'ta," Kel swore under his breath as he reached Dr. vKnall's office door.

While he'd taken the disappearance of his suit in stride, it hadn't stopped him from being just a little pissed at the untimely lack of body protection and weapons that its departure had left him with. If the good doctor had decided that he needed a little personal security turret to protect himself and his personal files, then Kel would be dead within moments if he so-much as tried to get anywhere near Dr. vKnall or anything else of interest.

Sighing, he supposed he'd have to use a decoy of some sort.

Standing close to the door with his back to the wall, Kel readied himself. Touching his hand to the biometric scanner that allowed for entry, he waited for the door to open before flicking his right wing out in front of the door and quickly retracting it.

No laser or gunfire followed.

Breathing a sigh of relief, Kel peeked around the corner and into the doctor's office.

~  ~  ~  ~  ~

"Sarah," Grayson asked in a harsh whisper. "Did you hear that?"

Grayson had decided to follow the lights to the office of this… "research lead". Sarah had hardly been in a position to talk him out of it, having come down with a nasty case of unguided nanite saturation. Besides. Where else was there to go?

Sarah looked up, the slightest touch of fever present on her cheeks. "Mmhmm. I think it came from in front of us."

Grayson drew Shavain, her quicksilver like appearance making her look much more intimidating than a normal steel blade.

As they neared the doctor's office, Grayson caught wind of more and more rustling noises.

Somebody was in there…

… and the door was open.

Motioning for Sarah to stand back and take cover, Grayson moved as quietly and silently as he could, creeping up to the side of the door.

The rustling noises continued, with the occasional slam of what sounded like steel on steel on hinges.

What's going on in there? Grayson thought to himself as he readied his fireball spell.

~  ~  ~  ~  ~

Kel had found more than he could have hoped for in the late doctor's desk. There was a sidearm (of old projectile-based make, but that hardly mattered now that Kel was armed) and a small, unarmored personnel sized Adaptive Shielding emitter. Kel quickly checked the readouts to see how much energy it could take before burning out… and he was hardly pleased.

Apparently, Dr. vKnall had no idea what the words 'equipment maintenance' meant.

The shield could, at best, diffuse a single weak energy sidearm shot.

Almost useless, Kel thought. … but certainly better than nothing.

Turning around, he looked briefly at the doorway.

There hadn't been blue light there last time.

Wait, Kel thought. Blue light?

Grayson lobbed his fireball just as Kel ducked for cover, leaving the two of them more than a little peeved.

~  ~  ~  ~  ~

Grayson gripped Shavain tightly as he bounded towards the desk in the center of the room.

… and was met by a spray of bullet fire from the individual hiding behind it.

His wards protected him from the single, glancing slug that had managed to get anywhere near him. What his wards hadn't protected him from was the mixture of surprise and disbelief he felt as what appeared to be a giant, grey-winged buzzard-man jumped from behind the desk, screeched loudly, then kicked him in the side of the face as he ran for the door.

Grayson barely had time to register the pain before the bird-man-creature had bounded through the door and down the hallway.

Rushing outside, he found that the birdman had a decent head start, but not nearly enough of one to make catching him infeasible. Dashing after him, Grayson made sure Shavain was ready to cleave downwards at a moment's notice.

… that's when he heard Sarah scream.

~  ~  ~  ~  ~

Kel checked his clip as he ran.

Ceres damn him, Kel swore at the late doctor. Nine bullets left. Then I'm cooked.

Looking behind him, he saw that his opponent was giving chase. He had a great silversteel bastard sword drawn and ready to cleave Kel open.

Unwilling to be turned into mincemeat, Kel ran faster, silently wishing his wings were an advantage rather than a curse in these confined space-station hallways. He was going so fast and was so focused on the task at hand that he barely noticed a young human female, feverish in both appearance and fear, crouching in a corner.

She screamed, decreasing Kel's chances of losing the swordsman down to nothing.

Annoyed, Kel looked as intimidating as possible and motioned for her to be quiet.

She obliged, and Kel continued running.

~  ~  ~  ~  ~

Grayson's urgency and body language were what asked Sarah for Kel's direction. Not his voice.

She pointed in the direction the birdman had gone, still cringing at the image of the thing's face and talon-like hands and feet.

Grayson dashed towards the location he believed Kel to be in, the occasional wayward down or flight feather leading him on.

Kel, on the other hand, had seeded a false path with his feathers, leading his pursuer right into a trap. Specifically, a storage closet with a lock the ranking officer could seal.

That would suit his purposes quite nicely.

~  ~  ~  ~  ~

Grayson ran as fast as he could, believing himself to be on the right track.

When he reached the open door of the storage closet, he reacted with caution. The bird-thing had used some sort of low-visibility projectile magic to try and kill him before. He doubted he'd hold back now.

Reading his fireball spell, Grayson took a deep breath.

… and charged, screaming into the room, ready to hit whoever or whatever was inside with a deadly one-two fire and sword combo as fast as he could manage it.

What he found, instead, was a room full of steel drums and plastic containers.

By the time he'd realized it was a trap, the door had been sealed and locked behind him.

He was trapped.

Again.

~  ~  ~  ~  ~

Kel overrode the standard lock-disengagement protocol and sealed Grayson into the storage room with a touch of his hand and a thought order.

His opponent was disabled for the foreseeable future. Now it was time to get Andrew out of that reconstruction tank.

Marking Andrew's location as a waypoint, Kel took off at a jog towards his imprisoned ward.

All in all, this was going far better than expected.

~  ~  ~  ~  ~

Grayson fumed in the storage closet.

He'd been tricked, and now Sarah was out there with that… thing.

Alone.

I need to get out of here!

Searching, frantically, Grayson inspected the storage containers located in the small closet he found himself inside. Steel drums and plastic containers dotted the floor and walls, each marked with various pictographs most-likely related to what they contained.

Grayson hadn't the first idea about the laws of chemistry, but he'd once seen an alchemist melt through plate-steel with a bottle of what he'd called "acid" and explain that it wasn't really good for much else.

Maybe…

… Grayson began to look for something that depicted a facsimile of what he'd seen that day.

After a few minutes, he had something to show for his efforts.

In his hands was a container made of some sort of strange, rigid yet pliable white material. While he was curious about what the stuff was, he had more pressing issues at hand. Unscrewing the cap, he poured the aqueous, highly concentrated solution of hydrochloric acid on to the alloy metal door and watched as it burned through the once-strong material in minutes.

Sarah. I'm coming.

~  ~  ~  ~  ~

Interfacing with Andrew's tank, Kel initiated the release protocol. He watched, pleased, as the viscous liquid drained from the tank as Andrew was slowly lowered to the bottom by the current generated by the draining. As soon as it was done, the glass tube, which had been the container in which the fluid was stored, retracted into the floor.

Unhooking the life-support harness from Andrew's face, Kel gently slapped him awake.

"Andrew," Kel called. " Get up."

~  ~  ~  ~  ~

Now it was Grayson's turn to get the drop on the birdman.

Rushing as silently as he could, he raised Shavain and prepared to cleave right in-between the wings of his opponent.

Somehow, some way, the birdman had a brief second of warning.

Awkwardly rolling to the side, he wound up on his back and fired a three-round burst at Grayson's center of mass.

Backpedaling as quickly as possible, so as to put the thick metal spine of the tube in-between him and the weapon in Kel's hand, Grayson's warding deflected two of the bullets before failing and letting the third graze his side.

The two deflected bullets promptly cracked the glass of Kel's full reconstruction tank, allowing the viscous liquid to leak like blood from a wound.

Grayson's fire spell was in his hand, ready to be thrown at his assailant.

Andrew had already detached himself from the tank and was out the door as soon as the bullets had stopped flying.

As it was, Grayson and Kel were at an impasse.

The fireball would, more likely than not, rip what was left of Kel's adaptive shielding to shreds and burn him to death. Magical fire had a tendency to do that.

Grayson had no more protection against bullets, so any shot that hit him would have the full brunt of a futuristic weapon behind it.

Both were ready to take the other's life.

The stalemate progressed for a millisecond more…

… then Kel decided it was time for a change in the game.

Firing one more shot into the glass of the tank, the tube shattered, allowing shards of glass and viscous liquid to pour forth and drench both them and the room.

Apparently, it was enough to startle Grayson into losing his spell.

Working furiously to reform the lost concentration and magical energy, he was unready to counter Kel's lightning fast pumping of hot lead into his lungs.

Shavain rang out as she deflected one futile bullet from her wielder's center of mass.

The rest of bullets punctured his chest and abdomen, the hydrostatic shock from the small-caliber high-velocity rounds rushing into his brain and causing massive hemorrhage.

He was dead by the time he hit the ground.
BLEH. 4.5k

... I hope I got Grayson and Sarah right. Dunno. Felt like Grayson was a little more vicious and goal-oriented than he should have been. >_>

Prompt was "Hospital".

In this case, floating space research hospital for nanotriage and stuff. c:

Kel und Andrew -> ~Writer-on-the-Wall

Grayson und Sarah -> ~saramanalou

TMD -> ~MariaShade
© 2011 - 2024 Writer-on-the-Wall
Comments6
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mippins's avatar
Wow, intense ending. I commented a bit to you in the chat as I was reading so I don't have a lot to say here, but yikes.

I like the ending but it feels a little rushed. Perhaps because everything happens to face and then concludes with a sort of cliff-hanger, because we don't really get much of a conclusion. I think it works here for the most part, but it does give the entry a speedy finish that is a touch unsettling.

Overall, though, nice job. :D Good luck with the judging and all that. Here's to round three!