Somewhere else…
She had stared at the monitor in front of her for a long time, even after she had seen Jack operate on and finally leave with the tall woman. Why had Jack asked her to help someone who he hadn’t registered as Security Personnel? She could have helped her but she wasn’t going to register her as Bridge Personnel, that didn’t seem wise to do that with an unknown entity. The other thing she had done was difficult for her to emotionally... emotionally process. Regardless, she tried to until her eye started to furiously twitch and distracted her. She unplugged her finger from the Terminal input and blood dripped from the tip of it. That port was now compromised. She hadn’t lied about that, many of the things here were scavenged and jury-rigged.
“Why? Why did I do that to him? It was unnecessar… it was illogical.”
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The process of walking, inserting the AI disk, the AI giving the next direction to go, Jack electrocuting himself through the HandPad, and the door opening repeated itself near endlessly as they moved through the BioPrison. A surprisingly large amount of what they traveled through seemed to be administrative space. Of course, there were other places they found where horrors were sure to have taken place. They kept unnecessary exploration to a minimum but still saw things. Found cells that were attached rooms full of vicious and profane medical equipment. They found little of note that would be deemed 'useful'.
“Do you remember the energy that made up that dome at the end of the Run?”
Jack turned to Jonah, he was sick, not stupid. “You’re talking about the one I threw a crab through and then who’s skin I wore into the Core? I can sort of picture it.”
Jonah lifted his goggles and gave Jack a mild-stare.
“I do think I have figured out what type of energy the light-blue dome was.”
Jack had thought about that too, plenty of time for reflection on this walk and everything else that didn’t involve his fragile soul., “Yeah I remember the dusting that crab got. It was like all of the water got expelled out of it. Hydrophobic energy?”
“Close, but I think it should be…”
Jack came up short. They were here. It was a small door, clean and easy to read. The sign etched into the metal above the undersized portal read, “Waste Disposal.” The door slid upwards as it opened. Tule pulled on a handle and pulled out. There was a small chute.
Leanne was the first to give her opinion, “Ship that. There has to be another way out of here.”
He looked at Leanne. Oof.
Jack placed his hand against the HandPad for the final time. This time the AI pumped Jack full of every available scrap of electricity in the BioPrison. The lights as far as they could see dimmed, flickered, and died. Even the HandPad’s familiar steady light had faded.
Jack breathed in relief, that last influx was needed as it regenerated the lingering damage in his body as well as providing more support for his Soul Core’s protective electric-cocoon. The electricity flowed in tight arcs over his body before fading into him. The fight in his soul was constantly costing him charge. He banished the desire for a full charge he had constantly been seeking, that would be beyond him for the foreseeable future. That said, Jack knew that it was definitely an unsustainable situation in the long term.
Jonah looked around them at the darkness of everything around them, even the ever present light of the HandPads were dark, “I don’t think we have the possibility to head in another direction now.” Small points from his goggles lit up their immediate surroundings.
Even though Leanne was the only one to verbally complain, no one stepped forward to be first into the narrow pipe or seemed particularly excited to squeeze their way into a trash chute.
Tule finally moved to be first in the tube but Jonah stopped him with a hand on his shoulder, “My frame is smaller.”
“What if there’s a threat inside there?” Tule hefted his Toothpick.
At Tule’s question, Jonah flashed the light down the chute, “What good is that going to do with mushrooms.” At this, the three joined Jonah to look. It weren’t a lot of mushrooms but if Jonah was eager to be first, none of the three were going to argue with him. Jonah flicked out some of the aquamarine energy from a finger.
The order they settled on was Jonah, Jack, Leanne, and then Tule.
Jack moved to follow Jonah but saw the bags hanging off of his belt. Damn. He unbuckled his belts and took off the bags. That’s when he noticed that the rear bags, the ones containing his Magno-Tube. They were shredded open.
“What?? Where are they?!” Jack fumbled around. Just in case some of the Magno-Tubes had miraculously found their way into his pockets.
“Most of them were shattered after you broke the containment field for the Shard.”
Leanne’s words brought up the memory, he had been lost in the pain of his back’s destruction and rejuvenation. Jack had taken pride in being able to deal damage, take damage, and heal from damage. The new and uncomfortable fragile feeling he had been trying to not wallow in since learning of the state of his Soul. Now, his precious Magno-Tube's were gone.
“Are… are you crying?”
Thankfully Leanne’s words broke the little pity party he had just been throwing for himself.
“No, and you’re supposed to support your Squad Leader Leanne, how about giving me some good news.”
Leanne picked up the strange attitude, whatever else Jack was, destabilizing his mental condition really didn’t seem like the best call. She pulled out one of the scavenged Magno-Tubes.
“There were only 6 that were undamaged. I grabbed them… for you… I guess.”
Jack’s hands wrapped around her shoulders fast enough that she dropped the Magno-Tube in shock. She stopped her hand halfway to her pistol.
“Leanne! You’re amazing.” She uncomfortably met his somewhat too close eyes.
“Uhh, yeah. No problem I guess.”
Jack nodded solemnly, “Can I trust you with them for now? Until I get another bag?”
She returned the solemn nod back, half in jest. Jack seemed to have missed that aspect of it and took it at face value.
He let out a deep sigh.
“Jack, I don’t believe we should let Jonah get too far ahead of us.”
“Yeah you’re right Tule.”
He looped his surviving bags, three of them, two full of Medjel and the last one with the assorted medications from the Security Locker. He looped the belt containing all of them perpendicular through his other two belts so that they hung between his legs. He pulled out the clawblade and decided it was worth bringing even if he would have to awkwardly carry it in his hands. He kept his arms outstretched and squeezed into the space and disappeared.. Leanne sighed in the darkness then saw a soft red glow from Tule’s eyes and reluctantly angled herself into the chute after Jack.
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Tule paused, then followed.
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“Tule! Stop pushing!” Leanne’s face plastered against Jack’s feet. Her arms were tangled around his legs. She hadn’t expected the thinning pipe to widen and increase its downward slope at the same time. It had though, quickly turning Tule’s helpful shoves into him pushing her face against Jack’s bare feet.
“Jonah, are we almost there?”
Jack kept pestering Jonah as he worriedly checked his bags. At several points he had nearly insisted on turning back until Leanne promised that she would grab anything that he dropped. Even so, he constantly stopped and checked every few minutes. They had been crawling through it for longer than a few minutes.
“Jack! As. I. Said. We. Will. Get. There. When we get there!”
“Dammit Jack! Why are you barefoot?”
Jack tried to shrug but realized that was physically impossible as well as unlikely to be seen by Leanne.
“I don’t know, it just feels more natural at this point.” He had been in varying degrees of shoelessness for a while now. Since his suit was already nearly scrapped he had just abandoned the shoes ahead of time. His electricity healed any damage and this way he didn’t have to deal with shoes that might fall apart at a bad time.
Although now he considered they were heading down a chute to ‘Waste Disposal’ it probably hadn’t been his best idea to leave them behind. Was it from some influence of the mushroom catalyst still inside him?
It did feel better though. Jack rolled his ankles and wiggled his toes then froze. There was something wet and slimy on one of them. It moved. There was something in here with them.
“Shit Jack! Get your fecking toes out of my mouth!” Her voice sounded impeded.
Jack relaxed again and directed his voice behind him, “whoops, well that's a relief.”
“What’s a relief??” Her cramped and twisted arms started pushing against him.
“Leanne you’re getting a little too friendly with your hands…”
A ‘yeep’ sounded from behind as she flailed in an effort to disentangle herself.
“Jack! If you scrape me with that ship-damned clawblade one more time I’m going bathe your corpse in anti-life!”
Ironically enough, Jack’s accidental swipes at Jonah’s legs and the blood that easily flowed thanks to the blade’s anticoagulant properties had helped lubricate their journey.
“Sorry Jonah!” He swiped some Medjel over the most recent wound on Jonah’s leg. The first time had been accidental but Jack couldn’t help but notice the lubricating advantages that Jonah’s blood had. After that, some of the scratches were still accidental but others… in tighter sections they've had to squeeze through... were not.
To be fair he would have cut himself but he didn’t think that there would be anything positive about drenching Leanne and Tule in his very likely to be highly-toxic blood. Maybe she’d melt in a puddle of goo for all he knew. Wouldn’t want to explain that one to the Clan Head.
“There! An exit up ahead. In the near pitch blackness of the chute only Jonah, with the light coming from his goggles, had total vision. Jack kept the soft red and green glow that he thought was emanating from his eyes to himself.
Suddenly the chute made a sharp turn downward. Each plummeted headfirst after one another out of the generally sterile, whether by age or lack of use, tube into active filth.
Jonah managed to scramble out of the way but Jack plummeted down and protecting his bags meant that Leanne came down on top of him in a tangle of limbs. Tule flipped in the air and brought himself down. It wasn’t elegant but he was only forced to take a knee in the seemingly organized trash.
Jack took in a deep breath. That seemed to remind Jonah of something, well that and the mushroom he spit out of his mouth. He opened his mouth and swept a slithering beam of aquamarine anti-life followed by a sea-blue cord of energy. He followed that up with a light-blue energy.
Jonah then took a deep breath through his nose and blew out chunks of mushrooms and a huge cloud of spores.
“What the feck.” “What the fuck.”
Jack and Leanne both spoke over each other and turned toward each other for a moment. Leanne wanted to ask about him saying ‘fuck’, Jack wanted to know what she meant by ‘feck’. They both turned back to Jonah.
“Had to clear out some mycelial growth. Couldn’t clear all the spores in the chute so I had to inhale some.”
Jack had seen how dangerous that aquamarine energy was, “You cleared your lungs with anti-life?”
“Yes.”
Leanne followed it up, “And how exactly did you avoid killing yourself?”
“Mechanical lungs, I will probably have to replace the filters soon though.”
Jack and Leanne stared at him. Leanne, “Why, why wouldn’t you mention that before?”
“Is there some point that having mechanical lungs needs to be known by you?”
Leanne couldn’t help but laugh. Its usual gruff characteristic was gone, replaced by a light, tinkling. Dammit, that was unlike her. She checked her pain limiter, it was running and well within capacity. She had pain tolerance to spare.
“Jonah, the sea-blue energy… that was from the Lady. The shimmering-dark blue that followed though…”
“That’s what I was going to say before we went into the chute. It was from the Cryo-SI. I finally figured out the energy’s composition.”
Jack remembered that it completely dried out the crab that he had thrown through it. Of course he had remembered, he wore that crab’s shell-flesh into the Cryo-Core. Lot of good that had done him. “Hydrophobic energy?”
“Hydrophilic actually. It doesn’t repel water molecules, it absorbs them.”
Jonah raised his middle finger and a several foot long whip of light navy shimmering blue lazed out of it. Jack raised an eyebrow with a skeptical look, “Then where do they go?”
Jonah shrugged, “the next thing to figure out.” He swept the energy through the trash around their feet as if to highlight its capabilities. The wet filth turned into dry filth.
Jonah finally saw the condition of his legs, “Dammit Jack, if you were going to keep slicing my legs the least you could have done was swipe Medjel over them.”
“Yeah, I tried but this should help,” Jack took a few moments reattaching his belt and mini duffels. He handed the third one to Jonah. A skeptical eye looked over the proffered bag before snatching it.
“Where’d you get all of this?” He rooted through the bag and dumped it into an interior pocket of his mishmashed clothing. Jonah then produced a vial and a syringe that had been in the bag, and after cleansing the needle with anti-life, he swept it over the tip. He pulled a clear liquid into the syringe and injected it into a spot just above an unsealed cut on his leg he had cleared with the blue cleansing energy from a finger.
He took Jack’s proffered Medjel packet and swiped the wound. The rest of the packet disappeared into his robes. After a moment of thinking Jonah handed back the empty mini-duffel. Jack held it open in front of Leanne. It took a few moments for her to figure it out but she did figure it out as she dumped the Magno-Tubes she had scavenged into it.
Jack raised a skeptical eye back towards Jonah, “How’d you know which medication to use? Did you just guess?”
“What? You thought we were just monkeys scratching in the dirt? We had science in the Labs, we had culture!”
“You’re sounding a bit defensive about a crab-filled shithole.”
“The Labs aren’t a shithole, this,” he frantically waved his arms around the space.
Jonah lowered his voice, “This place is a ShitHole. Literally wading through shit at the bottom of a hole.”
Jack looked down and noticed that they were standing in what actually did look like shit. He wiggled his bare toes and felt wet squishiness. Jonah did have a point.
Jack laughed at that, “Do you think that each section of the ship is just a deeper shithole than the last? I was surprised that we actually landed in ‘wa - ter’ before, I was half expecting it to be a sea of acid.”
Leanne proffered, “The mushroom BioPrison was definitely worse than ‘Wa-ter’.”
Jonah paused, “Fascinating specimens were there though. Based on the estimated size of the Cryo-Labs alone, but a secret Biological Testing Prison of that size as well? This ship is truly massive.”
Now Jack was thinking of what was ahead, “What else do you think we’re going to run into? Based on the adjacent-Humans we saw in Wa - ter I’m expecting more of that as we go through. We need to find our way to Arcology through this.”
Jonah was paying attention again, the bizarre things they had encountered had resparked the deep desire for knowledge he possessed, “I agree there, that’s almost assuredly in the cards. Otherwise I could definitely see, either a machine-based religious cult or some sort of techno-barbarian society like Mad Max. Have you seen Mad Max?”
“Never heard of it.”
“And you imply I’m some sort of uncultured barbarian! It’s a quite exciting old-Earth film with some fascinating parallels to our life in the Labs.” Jonah pulled out his portable to show Jack then silently raged as he sent a hydrophilic energy blast through an unsealed port on the side.
Jack wanted less excitement, not more, “No thanks Jonah.”
Jonah powered through this setback in both his portable and Jack’s general interest level, diving into the general plot and character development while he fiddled with his portable.
Leanne groaned audibly and Jack and Jonah turned back towards her.
“What?”
“Can’t either of you finish a conversation before starting a new one? What was the point of the hydrophilic energy? Just for fun? Or was it all pointless chatter?!”
Jonah leaned back, chin raised, “I certainly do have a point!”
“Quiet.” Tule’s tone didn’t brook discussion.